Crystal Mines: Scaling

[Never-Again]

I would suggest the scaling of the crystal mine quest be reviewed. The number of crossbowmen that spawn at the end with a large party is a little extreme. Especially with the barrier in the way. I was recently with a larger party (not full of high levels), had 29 AC, Displacement, and good HP and was still cut down before I could even drink an invisibility potion at the end. Just a thought.

[EfUA_undercover]

I would second that. Though I have been in the same group and my oppinion might be biased.

I got shot dead within a single round, with a bit less AC than Never-Again, but still 25 and 10% concealment. No chance to invis at all in that time. I guess it went equally fast for Never-Again.

In this fashion the quest is not really made to resupply people (what I always thought it would be intended for). All that is caused by that is that people will only do it in small groups, because they oocly know what happens when they don't. And when done in small groups it seems to be a cake walk, where you are actually using next to no supplies.

[Never-Again]

That was the point I didnt want to raise. I dont like turning people away OOCly because I know the spawns will be insane. Especially on a quest like that where it has things that are useful to a wide range of players. I dont mind having a harder quest if you bring more people, that is part of the game. But I think this one scales up to much at the end with -that- many crossbowmen. Just my two cents.

[Nuclear Catastrophe]

Disagree completely.  Even the spawns I saw you guys left with were difficult, but hardly out of proportion to the extremely large and well equipped nature of your group.

[Never-Again]

I understand your point NC, but I think the lay out of the end causes the issue. You have a chasm with a narrow bridge spanning it. At the end of the bridge is a barricade that you have to break (not a huge issue, but it does take a bit of time). On the "safe" side of the chasm you have a stun trap you cant get around that goes off multiple times with a will save vs stun. On the "enemy side" you have somewhere around 10 to 15 crossbowmen with an attack of 11 or so doing around 10 - 12 points of damage a hit. People get stunned when they set off the trap and that breaks up any charge. The barricade slows you down and all those crossbowmen tend to target the same person. They can all attack because they have ranged weapons. With that many simultaneous attacks, the stun trap, and the barricade it can turn into a slaughter very quickly. Perhaps mix up some more battleragers with the crossbowmen? That way the numbers stay the same, but you dont have quite so many bolts all hitting the same person. Just a thought.

[Relinquish]

More spawns on that quest (especially near the barricade) means AoE mages shine. Recall many times obliterating about 90% of that last push by myself as an evoker.

[Never-Again]

I would agree with the AoE mage part, but that means not taking the quest unless you have one. There is not always one around, part of the fun is trying things with less than ideal parties. I understand that some times leads to a slaughter. However in this case I thought we had a pretty good party and a pretty good plan.

[cmenden]

I hope I'm not alone here in my thoughts that thinking of quests in terms of "a resupply" is not something we want to encourage on EFU!

Without spoiling anything, I can safely say that in addition to the use of AoE spells to clear out large groups, the engine provides wizards and clerics plenty of spells to strengthen players against the particular part you're referring to. And the existence of large groups can be verified safely and ICly by the use of well trained rogues, rangers and invisible people traveling ahead of the party!

If your group didn't have the means to defeat the challenge, the best solution is to turn back and admit defeat, or rush blindly into the problem for a heroic last stand! (And maybe there's a few options in the middle there somewhere...)

[Porkolt]

Are we talking about the purple crystal mines or those -other- crystal mines?

[Craig210]

Never had a problem with this quest, in fact i find it too easy for the reward it gives.

Learn to Work well as a team and use potions instead of hoarding them would be my advice.

[Never-Again]

I think my point was missed, it was more of a mechanical nature than anything. NwN is round based, so if you have say three PCs being targeted by multiple NPCs at the same time the engine works something like this.
- PC: Action
- NPC: Action
- NPC: Action
- NPC: Action
- ect..

Thats what makes large numbers of crossbowmen or archers so deadly. They can all attack at the same time. In other words the combat log can look something like this.

PC: Attack, damage whatever.
NPC: Attack, damage whatever
NPC: Attack, damage whatever
... and so on.

So if the PC gets hit and tries to react (drink potion, ect), he might be dead by the time his next action round comes again. All those archer NPC attacks happen between the PC clicking the potion / movement / whatever and the PC's next round coming up.

In any case. This might be turning into a bit of a debate. If the quest isnt going to be changed, then fair enough. I just thought I would put in my two cents. :)

[Ghost]

Just do the quest never again. (Bad pun).

Anyway, I've done this quest dozens of times, in groups large and small. There's certain difficulties but there's ways around them. The key is making it so that all those crossbowmen can't fire at the same place at once. The solutions to that (which I won't detail) should be somewhat obvious. With the right items, spells, etc. it's certainly doable.

[MrGrendel]

I know spells to bring that would make this very easy indeed, and so does Never-Again, but I think there are two seperate issues:
 
1. Ranged or mage attackers are not slowed down by space constraints/bottlenecks, so upping their numbers makes difficulty increase much faster than if you are increasing melee attackers. In fact, quite likely by multiples. Ideally, scripted scaling should take this into account, at least to some degree.
 
2. How to handle the situation. That is, through typical means without metagaming or without having to trek back to a resting spot to re-prepare each time you do that quest. I'm not saying the latter would be wrong, but it's not so much fun to be ready to dooo eeet and have a scout come back and the verdict is "let's go back out and wait the rest of the 30 minutes to rest again so we can do this properly."
 
Might as well also bring up "how much can my character learn from this and assume he knows, in general terms, the next time someone says 'let's go plunder X or rape Y type of (scripted quest) area.'"

[Never-Again]

Ha ... MrGrendel just put what I was trying to bring out much better than I was able to. 10 melee NPCs are much less deadly than 10 ranged NPCs assuming it is a bit difficult to chase down the ranged NPCs. In regards of how to handle it, you are quite right Ghost. There are things that would make it much easier, in this case my character doesnt have them or wouldnt know about them. I guess my real frustration was based on my character being unable to change the situation without going OOC (once the battle had started, could have allways left beforehand). That particular set up with that number of spawns creates a situation where certain spells / items are needed badly and we didnt have them. As I said before, if the quest isnt going to be changed then fair enough. Its just a game after all! :)

[Porkolt]

I think my point was missed, it was more of a mechanical nature than anything. NwN is round based, so if you have say three PCs being targeted by multiple NPCs at the same time the engine works something like this.
- PC: Action
- NPC: Action
- NPC: Action
- NPC: Action
- ect..
 
Thats what makes large numbers of crossbowmen or archers so deadly. They can all attack at the same time. In other words the combat log can look something like this.
 
PC: Attack, damage whatever.
NPC: Attack, damage whatever
NPC: Attack, damage whatever
... and so on.
 
So if the PC gets hit and tries to react (drink potion, ect), he might be dead by the time his next action round comes again. All those archer NPC attacks happen between the PC clicking the potion / movement / whatever and the PC's next round coming up.
 
In any case. This might be turning into a bit of a debate. If the quest isnt going to be changed, then fair enough. I just thought I would put in my two cents. :)

This is kind of the idea, though. In PnP, for example, you'd have to wait the entire round before you'd get that chance.