Castle Ravenloft - Bats mechanic

vorphied

This thread mirrors the post I made in the Castle Ravenloft feedback thread, but I wanted to call attention to it here since it definitely isn't working the way it was described...

asterdahl said:

The bats appear simultaneously with the soak indicator (5 arrows pulsing and pointing to the primary target.) Mechanically this works identically to other soak mechanics, e.g. hypothermia (Drufi, Storvald) and uncontrollable turmoil (the atropal.)

Its damage, duration, and overall behavior often appear extremely random. Sometimes individual targets take little or no damage at all, while grouped targets are destroyed despite reasonable efforts at healing and mitigation, and vice versa.

Either the players are missing something here or the mechanic may not be working as intended.

manipulos

I have to agree, this attack makes no sense. Sometimes we are bunched up and take massive damage, and sometimes very little just as you said. Sometimes I'm dead and then I see the swarm, never saw the arrows. This happens during the sisters fight as well, no warning with arrows ahead of time the arrows show up as the swarm is already devouring your health.

The other rumor is you aren't supposed to use encounter powers while the batswarm is up.

vorphied

> @manipulos said:
> I have to agree, this attack makes no sense. Sometimes we are bunched up and take massive damage, and sometimes very little just as you said. Sometimes I'm dead and then I see the swarm, never saw the arrows. This happens during the sisters fight as well, no warning with arrows ahead of time the arrows show up as the swarm is already devouring your health.
>
> The other rumor is you aren't supposed to use encounter powers while the batswarm is up.


The no-encounter thing doesn’t seem to work for my parties. I’ve had everyone literally do nothing and been fine, but I’ve also had everyone blasted just the same. In other words, the usual behavior :P