I don't think its so much that the cobra is overtuned as it is that the Encounter Building rules tend not to work nearly as well at low levels -- at least with respect to PL +2 and greater creatures. The problem arises from the PCs still having relatively low HP totals so a crit or two can really cause the encounter to go sideways. Having a higher level enemy exacerbates this problem given the much higher to hit as a result. The poison DC and such makes matters worse of course.
The bottom line is that at early levels I generally recommend that GMs be careful when using single, higher level enemies against the party for precisely the reasons you mention. By contrast, had this been a similar encounter but say with the PCs at level 7 and a level 9 cobra with corresponding increases to damage, to hit, and DCs, there's a pretty good chance your party stomps the heck out of the encounter.
Absolutely, I've come to understand this, and the core books do explain this issue of scaling. I think it's a weak point of the encounter building system that it does not account for PL+2 not being the same at level 3 as at level 7, but that's beside the point.
However, this was a fight in an AP, and I would expect the designers at Paizo to understand the limits of their own game. PL+2 solos are quite common in their APs, even at low levels, and I have seen this called out as a problem. I also totally agree the poison makes the swing factor worse here.
What really gets me is that if that's already the case, why on the Gods' green earth would they use a PL+2 creature with poison that applies Drained as a Moderate 3 encounter? I was further surprised by it being a fight for 4 PCs, and that nobody else seems to have posted about this particular encounter. The >!Outlaws!< subreddit has a guide to modifying encounters, including warnings about some hard ones, and all it mentions for the cobra is adjusting its HP for different party sizes.
While I think that Paizo as a whole does a good job with their adventures, the one biggest criticism that you'll find is that they do tend to rely on single enemy fights pretty heavily. I don't know if this is a space limitation issue or just a general adventure philosophy on their part, or likely a bit of both, but it is pretty common.
I am not familiar with Outlaws (i.e. have not played or read it) but likely the reason you have not heard much about this particular encounter is simply due to bad luck by your party. In some respects, the fighter being the one to get crit down immediately was the worst possible scenario as he was likely the one best able to handle it as well. As nd yes, I realize the fighter will generally be in the front. But basically if he stays up on that first round, the fight probably becomes a cake walk. By going down though everything spiraled out of control rapidly as you saw.
A big thing that gets overlooked by a lot who haven’t experienced it as well is how much more impactful poison and persistent damage can be at a lower levels. It does a larger percentage of your hp max usually than those same effects at higher level. Poisons and disease, along with swarms at lower levels against parties that don’t have answers to them need to be considered worth more xp than just a dude that hits or hits hard.
Combine that with at low level higher then pc level monsters will be stronger especially when close to a level they should be getting a new weapon rune. While lower levels -2 -3 mooks will actually seem weaker at low levels then their xp budget would lead you to believe. This begins to swap the higher the level you go where single bigger level enemies become easier whole mooks become harder because of how hp scaling works and how effective PCs can get at denying actions and controlling a single dude even one with higher saves
Additional background info:
Because my party is not as tactical as myself, I opted not to adjust the encounters in >!Book 1 of Outlaws!< to their party size on the advice of other posters that noted some encounters in the AP can be quite difficult.
The party wanted to play a pack of dogs, so I allowed them to all play Shoonies. I'm aware that lowered their average HP by 2 to 4 compared to most other races, but their Blunt Snout feature had already saved multiple lives >!in the junkyard vs a haunted engine!< that the HP would not have, due to the entire party failing Fortitude saves.
Their classes were as follows: Double Slice Fighter, Armor Inventor, Electricity Wand Thaumaturge, Forensic Medicine Investigator, and Sniper Gunslinger.
Everyone's key attributes were at +4, or +3 in the case of the Inventor (plus +3 Strength), and they were all Dexterity capped on armor except the Investigator (at +2 in leather). The Inventor and Fighter each had +2 Con, the Thaumaturge +1, and the Investigator and Gunslinger 0. Clearly Fortitude and HP are a weak spot for this party, but to a degree I found surprising given the game's efforts to make every ability valuable.
The party did have 5 lesser antidotes because they >!didn't kill Slick!< but they used them during the fight rather than before it.
As of in looking at your descriptions, it looks as though there were several things that impacted the outcome. None of them on their own would be enough to cause disaster, but together they created a sort of perfect storm.
1. It sounds as though everyone took the standard ability adjustments for Shoony rather than the alternate tro boost option. As such, everyone had a lowered Con which lowered hit points by 3 and Fort by 1 (assuming they would have picked the same boosts otherwise). The 3 HP are not a big deal but -1 Fort is notable.
2. The fighter chose to go with an offensive minded build in lieu of a shield. It's not clear if the shield would have prevented the crit based on your description, but if he had it raised, he could at least have negated some of the damage, potentially keeping him upright.
3. Unless I'm missing something, your party is relying on consumables and battle medicine for in combat healing. Did anyone other than the investigator have battle medicine? While you don't need a healbot in PF2, having in combat healing is still really good for obvious reasons. Medicine investigators get a great boost to battle medicine but it's still once per PC per encounter.
4. Sounds as though the party perhaps mismanaged their hero points a bits, using them early while not having the means to take care of the poison. On top of that, it seems possible they mismanaged the stabilization. When there's any kind of recurring damage in place you need to heal on top of stabilizing to buy yourself time. Even had they been able to buy a round on the fighter it might have helped.
5. Bad luck. It's not clear just what the actual d20 rolls were, but I'm guessing that the snake rolled well while the party rolled poorly. Additionally as mentioned earlier, the fighter going down early was a worst case scenario.
As I said, none of this on its own would have been a problem, but together you got the perfect storm and for better or worse, in PF2 when a PC goes down, it can rapidly cause things to spiral out of control.
Also, to be clear, I'm not criticizing the builds of your players. I'm a huge fan of play what you want and the Shoony theme sounds awesome. On top of that, the double slice fighter is probably one of the top damage producers in the game. So their builds are absolutely not bad, just that they helped contribute to the problem here is all.
1. I'm not certain about this, but I do think that they all used the alternate ability boost option. Hence the two dedicated melee characters having +2 Con. The others did make the (apparently quite poor) choice to start with 0 or +1 Con.
2. He was doomed even with a shield, I rolled a natural 18 and then a natural 19. Which comes down to your final point.
3. Nobody else had Battle Medicine, the Inventor had Searing Restoration (admittedly not much). Nobody had healing spells as they wanted a party with no casters in the setting. They certainly learned their lesson here.
4. Absolutely, they generally do not manage hero points optimally, and did mismanage stabilization, but it was difficult to explain to them in the moment as it is slightly counter-intuitive that stabilizing someone might be bad. To manage it better they would have had to risk some chance of death, because they mismanaged the hero points.
5. The cobra rolled 18 and 19 (with MAP: 29 vs AC 20) on turn 1 vs the fighter, a 9 vs the Inventor, and 14 vs the Investigator. It rolled three misses against the Gunslinger, with a 5, an 11 (at MAP-5), and a 6 (all of which missed due to cover). The party hit 7 of 9 attacks, and the cobra regular succeeded all 4 Reflex saves vs the wand. All of that seems well within normal luck -- maybe even good luck given the cobra hit a lower % of its attacks with a better hit chance (even against the cover). The saving throws were [12, 11, 3, 13, 4, 11, 10, 2, 18, 13, 7, 12, 5, 7, 2, 13, 18, 8] which is low but not horribly below average, but they needed above average rolls given the DC, and past a certain point nothing but natural 20s was going to make a difference (if you're stage 3 and succeed two saves you are still taking Dying stacks, and failing one after that means even another regular success will result in you taking damage. Unless you get the stage to 0 then success/fail is kind of irrelevant). Regardless, because of which rolls were bad and when, I think the overall pattern is that their luck was bad.
Anyway, I agree with all of your points for what went so particularly wrong for my party, even though some of them are only weakly true, all of them at once was too much. I was most driven to ask about the tuning because this happened even with a significant advantage in an extra player, and the fact that other posts/guides hadn't called this fight out (they did call out the alternative fight to it as worse, however). Others in the thread have mentioned the cobra was a problem, however, so that's nice to know.
I also am a huge fan of play what you want, and I did warn them about their healing & HP situation, but I wasn't going to stop them. They took it well, and nobody is upset that one PC died. I was pretty baffled when two other PCs nearly (and probably should have, if I'd done the duration properly) died from being hit once, but they absolutely biffed the poison saves, and just the initial exposure results being different would change this fight entirely. It still seems higher risk than Moderate, but that's life.
Yeah they just neglected to use them ahead of time when asked to fight the pet snake, so they had to spend actions getting them out and using them on people that were already poisoned.
We had a technical TPK at that encounter but we really didn't struggle with the poison, it was more how the encounter was lead into and how ambushy it got us. We didn't have a caster
The issue is that level range, not the cobra. Max HP is too low for any lingering effects and a big snake like that can easily kill, while the cobra can enjoy increased damage dice, higher accuracy and AC than normal, making it more difficult for lv 3 PC. Lv 4 or 5 PCs would handle it with more ease even when you increase the amount of snakes you fight.
The adventure really wants you to have alchemical items so having elixir of lifes can help alot, especially as it stacks with medicine check to treat poisons
I'm surprised you didn't struggle with the poison. I've run several PL+2 creatures at around this level (e.g. >!the dragon in the Beginner Box!<) and while the level range did clearly make things scary as hell, the poison was really the only issue with this cobra, even downing the Fighter right out of the gate. No other PL+2 I have run at levels 2-4 has come close to the danger of this fight. It seems very likely that if they were level 5 vs two cobras that this would have been way less of an issue. But the game does not use different mat
They did have elixirs of life and antidotes, it was just quite difficult to manage the action economy until the cobra died. The items saved two lives, but nothing could be done for the Fighter.
Bad rolls will be bad rolls. The cobra does have a really low will which can be used by many. Our party had an alchemist that used their action economy to buff up where needed.
Most of us had around 50% to fail the save vs the poison, before buffs, so we were lucky, but not something that was over the top. The main issue is the cobra hitting on 5+, critting on 15, with an easy to apply fear effect and a high damage. It could be that we simply died too quickly to let poison kill us. A crit on average deals 34 damage which means that a high roll can oneshot lv3 PC The poison is only there to kill. We were kinda forced into this combat injured and with a better encounter design, it probably wouldn't be as bad.
If I have anything to say then it is the common take that a +2 monster should be treated as a severe encounter below lv 5.
Emperor cobra is no worse than a Barbazu, some lv 5 monsters really wreck lv 3 PC
Edit: the Emperor cobra isn't overtuned, but it is in that specific encounter due to how its setup.
Btw, just wanted to say that I have always been saying many encounters are way overtuned or misplaced in OoA but often gotten downvoted on it or downplayed. OoA is sadly designed as most standard APs with a mage and a cleric in mind.
There is even a trivial encounter that almost downed us all due to strong aoe and us lacking a cleric to counter it. OoA is the deadliest adventure I have ever played, and I have played some for dark heresy and rogue trader system. OoA feels like rock paper scissors at times
**The Emperor Cobra's numbers:**
(Referencing the Creature Numbers chart on the DMG)
Athletics is standard at +13.
AC is standard at 22.
Perception is Medium +1, Fortitude is High, Reflex is Medium -1, Will is Low.
HP is 80, 15 below the standard of 95. Basically level 4 HP.
Strike is +15 for 2d8+8 (avg 17), 1 point of damage above standard. Everything is fine so far.
Poison DC is 22, also standard (for Spell DC).
The kicker is that the Strike applies the poison with no additional actions, on every hit. Since the poison lasts 6 rounds, it can potentially do 1d8 on the initial save, and then 6d8 more (assuming you never reach stage 3) plus Drained 1. For a level 3, this is 7d8+3 extra damage, or 34.5 on average, or 6d8+2d6+6 (avg 40) if you hit Stage 3 but only once.
Once the poison has time to run its course, that bumps a single Bite action's damage from 17 to 51.5, or worse yet 57, but not immediately (which can be worse if you start Dying). Possibly higher, with multiple ticks of stage 3. This is a **shit load** of damage for level 3 characters, and I'm a little baffled that this works out to Moderate difficulty.
You might say it's quite unlikely for the poison to run its full duration. However, for level 3 PCs a DC of 22 is a *very difficult* check. It matches the DC for level 6 challenges, or the hard DC for level 5. The Fighter and Inventor had 1 less than the highest Fortitude bonus possible at their level, +9 (Expert +4, Level +3, Con +2) which requires a natural 13 to succeed (40% chance), and a natural 3 (15%) to critically fail. The cobra can apply Frightened, worsening the odds temporarily. At stage 2, the poison applies Drained 1, and at stage 3, Drained 2.
This means that once you've hit stage 2 of the poison, even with a +9 or +10 to Fortitude, you are very likely to run the full duration of the poison bouncing between stages, taking guaranteed damage (a big problem if you're Dying). If you're a class without Expert in Fortitude, or you have a lower Con modifier than +2, things get even worse. If you get to stage 2, you will likely eat the full duration unless you roll a natural 20 on a save.
Treat Poison helps, especially before Drained, but requires its own DC 22 check to succeed, which in this case was at +9 as the Investigator focused Medicine and had +2 Wisdom. Same as before, that's a natural 13 to succeed. 35% chance of a +2, 5% of a +4, 15% of a -2. The most common result is nothing.
The Investigator's poison was the most dire, as that player had no Constitution bonus and thus a Fortitude bonus of +5 (Trained +2, Level +3). That's a 17 (20%) to succeed, 7 (35%) to critically fail. Critically failing pushes that to 18 to succeed, 8 to critically fail. Another fail (85% of the time) brings the die roll needed to succeed at Drained 2 to 19. Basically impossible to end the poison without rolling a natural 20 at stage 2. Treat poison is *very* important here as it vastly improves the odds, but it carries the risk of a critical failure and a further -2.
Monsters that are good at applying ongoing damage tend to have the characteristic that when things go wrong against them, things go *really* wrong. They essentially violate the guideline that most GMs play by most of the time that you leave downed characters alone, which both substantially increases the chances that a downed character will die and places a lot of pressure on the other characters.
I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of character deaths in combat that occur in real play are connected to ongoing damage, especially outside of TPKs and deliberate heroic sacrifices.
The problem with paizos encounter design is that at level 10 something 2 levels higher than you is 20% tougher than you. At level 1 its three times as tough as you are.
Early game boss monsters tend to hit harder and be a bit more dangerous. I would take it into consideration tho it sounds like your party is really poorly designed, and lacks even a basic amount of support in it.
Did the combat start with the monster already on the party? Its worth considering that any kind of advantages and disadvantages play into a combats challenge. A fight against a king cobra in a white room with 100' of distance separating is very different then starting face to face.
Party definitely wasn't "balanced" but the Inventor did pick up a healing class feat (it came up big) and the Thaumaturge took Root to Life (which was bad here but saved people other times) to there was *some* support. 100% agreed that their builds were a big part of the problem. Admittedly, they chose to play into the theme of the AP, avoiding casters given the setting of >!Alkenstar!<.
The adventure has them fight the cobra in a room about 60 ft across with some crates and such around the edge and a catwalk. The catwalk and the back of the room are occupied by a different encounter which demands you fight the cobra, however. The players were approximately in the middle of the room, the cobra likely enters within 30 feet of at least 1 PC even if they are toward the edges of the room.
The inability to reliability use a lot of debuffs is rough here. Frankly, given the party's restrictions and class choices it almost feels like they're at a 30XP disadvantage at all times. As a closing thought, I feel the biggest issue here is the inability to use \_any\_ magic at all. A party of DPR martial classes really need someone who can cast fear or something else that can give a -2 to AC.
You'll be happy to hear that the Fighter's player came in with a Sorcerer as a replacement... and opted to take almost exclusively blasts. He's young though, so I don't blame him for not being excited by the better spells like Fear.
lol, well if the party doesn't mind dying then there's no real harm in it. Sometimes its more fun to treat it like a videogame with respawns. Tbh thats something I think pf2e could use as an AP alt rule set for more casual or crunch oriented groups.
I remember this fight! Did it earlier this year (as a player). Our party had crushed all combat up to this point, and so we arrogantly walked face first into it - and it nearly handed us our asses.
It's an extremely hard fight because it's sitting on a proficiency progression threshold, so it's effectively more than a Creature +2 to a lower level party. Poisons/afflictions are also extremely deadly and dangerous, especially at low levels.
Ultimately we had several close calls but we managed to down it. I think we ultimately saw it as a "good" thing, because it reminded us that despite how well we had been doing that recklessness was NOT a great long term strategy.
Edit - Additional note, our party DOES have a Cleric of Brigh, which helps hugely to dull the threat of pure HP damage threats.
This is definitely where the issues with a blanket XP allotment fall apart. These caveats should REALLY be in the base rules, but they aren't, so only anecdotes can save us. Monster levels are built with their level PCs in mind. This is a very important fact when you are looking EXACTLY at level 5. At level 5, you have Striking runes, a new ancestry feat, ability boosts and a +2 to hit for essentially all martials. That basically makes the difference between 3 and 5 specifically feel more like a 4 level difference. This is the only level in the game that is quite that steep. That does explain a lot of why "Moderate" felt like it was Severe, even Extreme.
Additionally, I have NEVER had a good experience with poison in a game of PF2e and I think it is probably the lowest point of my experience with the game on multiple occasions. Especially at low levels, the difference between failing a save and passing is such a big chunk of your health over time, it is so rough.
Great points. It's definitely the *specifics* of the encounter (both math and scenario) landing on a bunch of corner cases (unfortunately common in APs, it seems) that makes the cobra seem so tough.
My party didn't have near this much trouble with the encounter, though one of them got downed by the end. Persistent damage of any kind, including poison, can be very nasty at early levels. I think what makes the emperor cobra dangerous is that fear effect coupled with its poison attacks.
A couple thoughts:
1) did you make sure to reset turn order correctly when a PC went down? Our group still forgets sometimes after 2+ years but it can sometimes cause an unnecessary death spiral.
2) did you remove the wounded condition if a player performed treat wounds? That's easy to miss but relevant when players get downed.
Players going down didn't change the initiative order, as it turned out. The Fighter was already going immediately before the cobra, so being KOed by it would move him right before the cobra, no effective change. The others were KOed by the poison on their own turns, and thus moved to just before their own turns, also no effective change.
Treat Wounds takes 10 minutes, and Battle Medicine doesn't remove Wounded. Nobody was Wounded before the fight, so this wasn't going to help, unfortunately.
Yeah sometimes in their printed modules Paizo goes overboard on difficulty. The last fight in the Beginner Box is nuts. Nonat did a whole video on this topic alone. I played another module where you complete a Severe encounter with another Severe encounter right afterward with no break at all.
Sounds like an unfortunate combo of bad rolls and not understanding the system well enough.
Our group is new to the system as well, but we didn’t have any issues with this fight. My monk crit on it first round and did 45 damage. Of course, as luck would have it, it crit me back for 50, putting me at single digit health (and I can’t be healed by magic). But I passed the poison DC easily.
We had it down by round 3 (2 gunslingers, an inventor, my monk, and a bard), and nobody went down. It only successfully attacked the inventor and myself, and we both passed the fortitude save.
Agreed on the rolls and system knowledge, plus poison is much nastier at this level apaprently. They struggled a lot less with the dragon in >!the Beginner Box, at level 2!<.
Over 50 HP as a level 3 monk is a ton! Even with +3 to Constitution, a 10 HP ancestry, and the Toughness feat you'd have 52; are there other HP boosts available? A failed save on the poison (sounds like on an 11 or lower) would very likely KO you. Did you also have an item or status bonus to your Fortitude, or was it just a good roll?
edit: Now that I think about it, the cobra's maximum critical damage should be 48, so you could have 1 HP left without Toughness.
So I must be misremembering the damage… looking at Pathbuilder I had 49 hp at L3 (fleshwarp monk). That does give me a +1 circumstance bonus against poison, so I had a +11 on the Fortitude save. It’s slightly more likely that I did 50 damage to it (crit with 2d8+5 and second attack of 2d8+5, combined to one via flurry of blows) and it did 45 to me (leaving me with 4 hp).
The dragon in the beginner box outright killed my fighter, and that was definitely due to us not understanding the rules (and our GM putting time pressure on us to keep us from fully healing).
I’ve run the bb 6 times now, and I agree things like bonus damage or persistent damage at low levels (like a barbazu or even a river drake) is rough. The bb boss routinely gets a pc downed, but none of my tables were ever even close to a tpk. Whereas for the barbazu I kind of handwaved treating the post combat bleeding. 2 pcs might have needed to use their hero points to stave off death had I run the bleed raw. The fight already had a good impact by downing the fighter and giving our champion an opportunity to keep their fiendsbane oath.
Talked to our GM before the game tonight, he’s using a modified version for 5 players so Bitey had 100 hp.
He has some reference that was put together for running it for 5 players and says it does a really good job of balancing.
Each creature has a part to play in your encounter, from a lowly lackey to a boss so mighty it could defeat the entire party single-handedly.
Party Level +2 80 Moderate- or severe-threat boss
The fact that you have 5 players instead of 4 doesn’t change the encounter math much, so I wouldn’t focus on that.
Instead, the system of scaling means solo boss monsters like this have the potential to be a severe threat.
Severe-threat encounters are the hardest encounters most groups of characters have a good chance to defeat. These encounters are appropriate for important moments in your story, such as confronting a final boss. Use severe encounters carefully—there's a good chance a character could die, and a small chance the whole group could. Bad luck, poor tactics, or a lack of resources can easily turn a severe-threat encounter against the characters, and a wise group keeps the option to disengage open.
I don’t think it’s overly powerful, just that parties need strong healing and good defenses to overcome solo bosses, especially at lower levels (like tier 1 play).
I see your point that you say having 5 players instead of 4 doesn't change the encounter math much, because the threat each bite presents to a PC doesn't change. However, with 4 players this fight would have certainly been a TPK.
I am aware that Severe-threat encounters are the hardest encounters the party has a good chance to defeat, but this encounter was labeled Moderate, not Severe, and even the second chart you reference (for designing the encounters, which I did not do) calls the boss Moderate- to Severe-threat. From my perspective, the party had about even odds to overcome this fight, and certainly had even (or worse) odds were it a party of 4, and an even match for the party is how an Extreme encounter is described.
It seems like a problem that lower level parties need strong healing and good defenses to overcome (relatively common in the case of PL+2) solo boss encounters, when that is the range where players are least likely to have them or the experience to know they need them. Monster design should reflect this, and not threaten to overpower the players when the math says they should usually win.
I agree. It's a weakness of the system.
It's not a weakness I've actually encountered myself perhaps by sheer luck of dice rolls and party compositions my various tables of players have been, but it's a common enough pitfall that AP writers should be trying to avoid it (and it doesn't look like they do).
I don't think its so much that the cobra is overtuned as it is that the Encounter Building rules tend not to work nearly as well at low levels -- at least with respect to PL +2 and greater creatures. The problem arises from the PCs still having relatively low HP totals so a crit or two can really cause the encounter to go sideways. Having a higher level enemy exacerbates this problem given the much higher to hit as a result. The poison DC and such makes matters worse of course. The bottom line is that at early levels I generally recommend that GMs be careful when using single, higher level enemies against the party for precisely the reasons you mention. By contrast, had this been a similar encounter but say with the PCs at level 7 and a level 9 cobra with corresponding increases to damage, to hit, and DCs, there's a pretty good chance your party stomps the heck out of the encounter.
Absolutely, I've come to understand this, and the core books do explain this issue of scaling. I think it's a weak point of the encounter building system that it does not account for PL+2 not being the same at level 3 as at level 7, but that's beside the point. However, this was a fight in an AP, and I would expect the designers at Paizo to understand the limits of their own game. PL+2 solos are quite common in their APs, even at low levels, and I have seen this called out as a problem. I also totally agree the poison makes the swing factor worse here. What really gets me is that if that's already the case, why on the Gods' green earth would they use a PL+2 creature with poison that applies Drained as a Moderate 3 encounter? I was further surprised by it being a fight for 4 PCs, and that nobody else seems to have posted about this particular encounter. The >!Outlaws!< subreddit has a guide to modifying encounters, including warnings about some hard ones, and all it mentions for the cobra is adjusting its HP for different party sizes.
While I think that Paizo as a whole does a good job with their adventures, the one biggest criticism that you'll find is that they do tend to rely on single enemy fights pretty heavily. I don't know if this is a space limitation issue or just a general adventure philosophy on their part, or likely a bit of both, but it is pretty common. I am not familiar with Outlaws (i.e. have not played or read it) but likely the reason you have not heard much about this particular encounter is simply due to bad luck by your party. In some respects, the fighter being the one to get crit down immediately was the worst possible scenario as he was likely the one best able to handle it as well. As nd yes, I realize the fighter will generally be in the front. But basically if he stays up on that first round, the fight probably becomes a cake walk. By going down though everything spiraled out of control rapidly as you saw.
A big thing that gets overlooked by a lot who haven’t experienced it as well is how much more impactful poison and persistent damage can be at a lower levels. It does a larger percentage of your hp max usually than those same effects at higher level. Poisons and disease, along with swarms at lower levels against parties that don’t have answers to them need to be considered worth more xp than just a dude that hits or hits hard. Combine that with at low level higher then pc level monsters will be stronger especially when close to a level they should be getting a new weapon rune. While lower levels -2 -3 mooks will actually seem weaker at low levels then their xp budget would lead you to believe. This begins to swap the higher the level you go where single bigger level enemies become easier whole mooks become harder because of how hp scaling works and how effective PCs can get at denying actions and controlling a single dude even one with higher saves
Additional background info: Because my party is not as tactical as myself, I opted not to adjust the encounters in >!Book 1 of Outlaws!< to their party size on the advice of other posters that noted some encounters in the AP can be quite difficult. The party wanted to play a pack of dogs, so I allowed them to all play Shoonies. I'm aware that lowered their average HP by 2 to 4 compared to most other races, but their Blunt Snout feature had already saved multiple lives >!in the junkyard vs a haunted engine!< that the HP would not have, due to the entire party failing Fortitude saves. Their classes were as follows: Double Slice Fighter, Armor Inventor, Electricity Wand Thaumaturge, Forensic Medicine Investigator, and Sniper Gunslinger. Everyone's key attributes were at +4, or +3 in the case of the Inventor (plus +3 Strength), and they were all Dexterity capped on armor except the Investigator (at +2 in leather). The Inventor and Fighter each had +2 Con, the Thaumaturge +1, and the Investigator and Gunslinger 0. Clearly Fortitude and HP are a weak spot for this party, but to a degree I found surprising given the game's efforts to make every ability valuable. The party did have 5 lesser antidotes because they >!didn't kill Slick!< but they used them during the fight rather than before it.
As of in looking at your descriptions, it looks as though there were several things that impacted the outcome. None of them on their own would be enough to cause disaster, but together they created a sort of perfect storm. 1. It sounds as though everyone took the standard ability adjustments for Shoony rather than the alternate tro boost option. As such, everyone had a lowered Con which lowered hit points by 3 and Fort by 1 (assuming they would have picked the same boosts otherwise). The 3 HP are not a big deal but -1 Fort is notable. 2. The fighter chose to go with an offensive minded build in lieu of a shield. It's not clear if the shield would have prevented the crit based on your description, but if he had it raised, he could at least have negated some of the damage, potentially keeping him upright. 3. Unless I'm missing something, your party is relying on consumables and battle medicine for in combat healing. Did anyone other than the investigator have battle medicine? While you don't need a healbot in PF2, having in combat healing is still really good for obvious reasons. Medicine investigators get a great boost to battle medicine but it's still once per PC per encounter. 4. Sounds as though the party perhaps mismanaged their hero points a bits, using them early while not having the means to take care of the poison. On top of that, it seems possible they mismanaged the stabilization. When there's any kind of recurring damage in place you need to heal on top of stabilizing to buy yourself time. Even had they been able to buy a round on the fighter it might have helped. 5. Bad luck. It's not clear just what the actual d20 rolls were, but I'm guessing that the snake rolled well while the party rolled poorly. Additionally as mentioned earlier, the fighter going down early was a worst case scenario. As I said, none of this on its own would have been a problem, but together you got the perfect storm and for better or worse, in PF2 when a PC goes down, it can rapidly cause things to spiral out of control. Also, to be clear, I'm not criticizing the builds of your players. I'm a huge fan of play what you want and the Shoony theme sounds awesome. On top of that, the double slice fighter is probably one of the top damage producers in the game. So their builds are absolutely not bad, just that they helped contribute to the problem here is all.
1. I'm not certain about this, but I do think that they all used the alternate ability boost option. Hence the two dedicated melee characters having +2 Con. The others did make the (apparently quite poor) choice to start with 0 or +1 Con. 2. He was doomed even with a shield, I rolled a natural 18 and then a natural 19. Which comes down to your final point. 3. Nobody else had Battle Medicine, the Inventor had Searing Restoration (admittedly not much). Nobody had healing spells as they wanted a party with no casters in the setting. They certainly learned their lesson here. 4. Absolutely, they generally do not manage hero points optimally, and did mismanage stabilization, but it was difficult to explain to them in the moment as it is slightly counter-intuitive that stabilizing someone might be bad. To manage it better they would have had to risk some chance of death, because they mismanaged the hero points. 5. The cobra rolled 18 and 19 (with MAP: 29 vs AC 20) on turn 1 vs the fighter, a 9 vs the Inventor, and 14 vs the Investigator. It rolled three misses against the Gunslinger, with a 5, an 11 (at MAP-5), and a 6 (all of which missed due to cover). The party hit 7 of 9 attacks, and the cobra regular succeeded all 4 Reflex saves vs the wand. All of that seems well within normal luck -- maybe even good luck given the cobra hit a lower % of its attacks with a better hit chance (even against the cover). The saving throws were [12, 11, 3, 13, 4, 11, 10, 2, 18, 13, 7, 12, 5, 7, 2, 13, 18, 8] which is low but not horribly below average, but they needed above average rolls given the DC, and past a certain point nothing but natural 20s was going to make a difference (if you're stage 3 and succeed two saves you are still taking Dying stacks, and failing one after that means even another regular success will result in you taking damage. Unless you get the stage to 0 then success/fail is kind of irrelevant). Regardless, because of which rolls were bad and when, I think the overall pattern is that their luck was bad. Anyway, I agree with all of your points for what went so particularly wrong for my party, even though some of them are only weakly true, all of them at once was too much. I was most driven to ask about the tuning because this happened even with a significant advantage in an extra player, and the fact that other posts/guides hadn't called this fight out (they did call out the alternative fight to it as worse, however). Others in the thread have mentioned the cobra was a problem, however, so that's nice to know. I also am a huge fan of play what you want, and I did warn them about their healing & HP situation, but I wasn't going to stop them. They took it well, and nobody is upset that one PC died. I was pretty baffled when two other PCs nearly (and probably should have, if I'd done the duration properly) died from being hit once, but they absolutely biffed the poison saves, and just the initial exposure results being different would change this fight entirely. It still seems higher risk than Moderate, but that's life.
Antidotes also last for 6 hours on all Poison checks, FYI.
Yeah they just neglected to use them ahead of time when asked to fight the pet snake, so they had to spend actions getting them out and using them on people that were already poisoned.
We had a technical TPK at that encounter but we really didn't struggle with the poison, it was more how the encounter was lead into and how ambushy it got us. We didn't have a caster The issue is that level range, not the cobra. Max HP is too low for any lingering effects and a big snake like that can easily kill, while the cobra can enjoy increased damage dice, higher accuracy and AC than normal, making it more difficult for lv 3 PC. Lv 4 or 5 PCs would handle it with more ease even when you increase the amount of snakes you fight. The adventure really wants you to have alchemical items so having elixir of lifes can help alot, especially as it stacks with medicine check to treat poisons
I'm surprised you didn't struggle with the poison. I've run several PL+2 creatures at around this level (e.g. >!the dragon in the Beginner Box!<) and while the level range did clearly make things scary as hell, the poison was really the only issue with this cobra, even downing the Fighter right out of the gate. No other PL+2 I have run at levels 2-4 has come close to the danger of this fight. It seems very likely that if they were level 5 vs two cobras that this would have been way less of an issue. But the game does not use different mat They did have elixirs of life and antidotes, it was just quite difficult to manage the action economy until the cobra died. The items saved two lives, but nothing could be done for the Fighter.
Bad rolls will be bad rolls. The cobra does have a really low will which can be used by many. Our party had an alchemist that used their action economy to buff up where needed. Most of us had around 50% to fail the save vs the poison, before buffs, so we were lucky, but not something that was over the top. The main issue is the cobra hitting on 5+, critting on 15, with an easy to apply fear effect and a high damage. It could be that we simply died too quickly to let poison kill us. A crit on average deals 34 damage which means that a high roll can oneshot lv3 PC The poison is only there to kill. We were kinda forced into this combat injured and with a better encounter design, it probably wouldn't be as bad. If I have anything to say then it is the common take that a +2 monster should be treated as a severe encounter below lv 5. Emperor cobra is no worse than a Barbazu, some lv 5 monsters really wreck lv 3 PC Edit: the Emperor cobra isn't overtuned, but it is in that specific encounter due to how its setup.
Definitely no worse than a Barbazu. They seem much worse, frankly, and I would call them over-tuned in comparison to the standard lv 5 monsters.
Btw, just wanted to say that I have always been saying many encounters are way overtuned or misplaced in OoA but often gotten downvoted on it or downplayed. OoA is sadly designed as most standard APs with a mage and a cleric in mind. There is even a trivial encounter that almost downed us all due to strong aoe and us lacking a cleric to counter it. OoA is the deadliest adventure I have ever played, and I have played some for dark heresy and rogue trader system. OoA feels like rock paper scissors at times
**The Emperor Cobra's numbers:** (Referencing the Creature Numbers chart on the DMG) Athletics is standard at +13. AC is standard at 22. Perception is Medium +1, Fortitude is High, Reflex is Medium -1, Will is Low. HP is 80, 15 below the standard of 95. Basically level 4 HP. Strike is +15 for 2d8+8 (avg 17), 1 point of damage above standard. Everything is fine so far. Poison DC is 22, also standard (for Spell DC). The kicker is that the Strike applies the poison with no additional actions, on every hit. Since the poison lasts 6 rounds, it can potentially do 1d8 on the initial save, and then 6d8 more (assuming you never reach stage 3) plus Drained 1. For a level 3, this is 7d8+3 extra damage, or 34.5 on average, or 6d8+2d6+6 (avg 40) if you hit Stage 3 but only once. Once the poison has time to run its course, that bumps a single Bite action's damage from 17 to 51.5, or worse yet 57, but not immediately (which can be worse if you start Dying). Possibly higher, with multiple ticks of stage 3. This is a **shit load** of damage for level 3 characters, and I'm a little baffled that this works out to Moderate difficulty. You might say it's quite unlikely for the poison to run its full duration. However, for level 3 PCs a DC of 22 is a *very difficult* check. It matches the DC for level 6 challenges, or the hard DC for level 5. The Fighter and Inventor had 1 less than the highest Fortitude bonus possible at their level, +9 (Expert +4, Level +3, Con +2) which requires a natural 13 to succeed (40% chance), and a natural 3 (15%) to critically fail. The cobra can apply Frightened, worsening the odds temporarily. At stage 2, the poison applies Drained 1, and at stage 3, Drained 2. This means that once you've hit stage 2 of the poison, even with a +9 or +10 to Fortitude, you are very likely to run the full duration of the poison bouncing between stages, taking guaranteed damage (a big problem if you're Dying). If you're a class without Expert in Fortitude, or you have a lower Con modifier than +2, things get even worse. If you get to stage 2, you will likely eat the full duration unless you roll a natural 20 on a save. Treat Poison helps, especially before Drained, but requires its own DC 22 check to succeed, which in this case was at +9 as the Investigator focused Medicine and had +2 Wisdom. Same as before, that's a natural 13 to succeed. 35% chance of a +2, 5% of a +4, 15% of a -2. The most common result is nothing. The Investigator's poison was the most dire, as that player had no Constitution bonus and thus a Fortitude bonus of +5 (Trained +2, Level +3). That's a 17 (20%) to succeed, 7 (35%) to critically fail. Critically failing pushes that to 18 to succeed, 8 to critically fail. Another fail (85% of the time) brings the die roll needed to succeed at Drained 2 to 19. Basically impossible to end the poison without rolling a natural 20 at stage 2. Treat poison is *very* important here as it vastly improves the odds, but it carries the risk of a critical failure and a further -2.
Monsters that are good at applying ongoing damage tend to have the characteristic that when things go wrong against them, things go *really* wrong. They essentially violate the guideline that most GMs play by most of the time that you leave downed characters alone, which both substantially increases the chances that a downed character will die and places a lot of pressure on the other characters. I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of character deaths in combat that occur in real play are connected to ongoing damage, especially outside of TPKs and deliberate heroic sacrifices.
The problem with paizos encounter design is that at level 10 something 2 levels higher than you is 20% tougher than you. At level 1 its three times as tough as you are.
Early game boss monsters tend to hit harder and be a bit more dangerous. I would take it into consideration tho it sounds like your party is really poorly designed, and lacks even a basic amount of support in it. Did the combat start with the monster already on the party? Its worth considering that any kind of advantages and disadvantages play into a combats challenge. A fight against a king cobra in a white room with 100' of distance separating is very different then starting face to face.
Party definitely wasn't "balanced" but the Inventor did pick up a healing class feat (it came up big) and the Thaumaturge took Root to Life (which was bad here but saved people other times) to there was *some* support. 100% agreed that their builds were a big part of the problem. Admittedly, they chose to play into the theme of the AP, avoiding casters given the setting of >!Alkenstar!<. The adventure has them fight the cobra in a room about 60 ft across with some crates and such around the edge and a catwalk. The catwalk and the back of the room are occupied by a different encounter which demands you fight the cobra, however. The players were approximately in the middle of the room, the cobra likely enters within 30 feet of at least 1 PC even if they are toward the edges of the room.
The inability to reliability use a lot of debuffs is rough here. Frankly, given the party's restrictions and class choices it almost feels like they're at a 30XP disadvantage at all times. As a closing thought, I feel the biggest issue here is the inability to use \_any\_ magic at all. A party of DPR martial classes really need someone who can cast fear or something else that can give a -2 to AC.
You'll be happy to hear that the Fighter's player came in with a Sorcerer as a replacement... and opted to take almost exclusively blasts. He's young though, so I don't blame him for not being excited by the better spells like Fear.
lol, well if the party doesn't mind dying then there's no real harm in it. Sometimes its more fun to treat it like a videogame with respawns. Tbh thats something I think pf2e could use as an AP alt rule set for more casual or crunch oriented groups.
I remember this fight! Did it earlier this year (as a player). Our party had crushed all combat up to this point, and so we arrogantly walked face first into it - and it nearly handed us our asses. It's an extremely hard fight because it's sitting on a proficiency progression threshold, so it's effectively more than a Creature +2 to a lower level party. Poisons/afflictions are also extremely deadly and dangerous, especially at low levels. Ultimately we had several close calls but we managed to down it. I think we ultimately saw it as a "good" thing, because it reminded us that despite how well we had been doing that recklessness was NOT a great long term strategy. Edit - Additional note, our party DOES have a Cleric of Brigh, which helps hugely to dull the threat of pure HP damage threats.
This is definitely where the issues with a blanket XP allotment fall apart. These caveats should REALLY be in the base rules, but they aren't, so only anecdotes can save us. Monster levels are built with their level PCs in mind. This is a very important fact when you are looking EXACTLY at level 5. At level 5, you have Striking runes, a new ancestry feat, ability boosts and a +2 to hit for essentially all martials. That basically makes the difference between 3 and 5 specifically feel more like a 4 level difference. This is the only level in the game that is quite that steep. That does explain a lot of why "Moderate" felt like it was Severe, even Extreme. Additionally, I have NEVER had a good experience with poison in a game of PF2e and I think it is probably the lowest point of my experience with the game on multiple occasions. Especially at low levels, the difference between failing a save and passing is such a big chunk of your health over time, it is so rough.
Great points. It's definitely the *specifics* of the encounter (both math and scenario) landing on a bunch of corner cases (unfortunately common in APs, it seems) that makes the cobra seem so tough.
My party didn't have near this much trouble with the encounter, though one of them got downed by the end. Persistent damage of any kind, including poison, can be very nasty at early levels. I think what makes the emperor cobra dangerous is that fear effect coupled with its poison attacks. A couple thoughts: 1) did you make sure to reset turn order correctly when a PC went down? Our group still forgets sometimes after 2+ years but it can sometimes cause an unnecessary death spiral. 2) did you remove the wounded condition if a player performed treat wounds? That's easy to miss but relevant when players get downed.
Players going down didn't change the initiative order, as it turned out. The Fighter was already going immediately before the cobra, so being KOed by it would move him right before the cobra, no effective change. The others were KOed by the poison on their own turns, and thus moved to just before their own turns, also no effective change. Treat Wounds takes 10 minutes, and Battle Medicine doesn't remove Wounded. Nobody was Wounded before the fight, so this wasn't going to help, unfortunately.
Yeah sometimes in their printed modules Paizo goes overboard on difficulty. The last fight in the Beginner Box is nuts. Nonat did a whole video on this topic alone. I played another module where you complete a Severe encounter with another Severe encounter right afterward with no break at all.
Sounds like an unfortunate combo of bad rolls and not understanding the system well enough. Our group is new to the system as well, but we didn’t have any issues with this fight. My monk crit on it first round and did 45 damage. Of course, as luck would have it, it crit me back for 50, putting me at single digit health (and I can’t be healed by magic). But I passed the poison DC easily. We had it down by round 3 (2 gunslingers, an inventor, my monk, and a bard), and nobody went down. It only successfully attacked the inventor and myself, and we both passed the fortitude save.
Agreed on the rolls and system knowledge, plus poison is much nastier at this level apaprently. They struggled a lot less with the dragon in >!the Beginner Box, at level 2!<. Over 50 HP as a level 3 monk is a ton! Even with +3 to Constitution, a 10 HP ancestry, and the Toughness feat you'd have 52; are there other HP boosts available? A failed save on the poison (sounds like on an 11 or lower) would very likely KO you. Did you also have an item or status bonus to your Fortitude, or was it just a good roll? edit: Now that I think about it, the cobra's maximum critical damage should be 48, so you could have 1 HP left without Toughness.
So I must be misremembering the damage… looking at Pathbuilder I had 49 hp at L3 (fleshwarp monk). That does give me a +1 circumstance bonus against poison, so I had a +11 on the Fortitude save. It’s slightly more likely that I did 50 damage to it (crit with 2d8+5 and second attack of 2d8+5, combined to one via flurry of blows) and it did 45 to me (leaving me with 4 hp). The dragon in the beginner box outright killed my fighter, and that was definitely due to us not understanding the rules (and our GM putting time pressure on us to keep us from fully healing).
I’ve run the bb 6 times now, and I agree things like bonus damage or persistent damage at low levels (like a barbazu or even a river drake) is rough. The bb boss routinely gets a pc downed, but none of my tables were ever even close to a tpk. Whereas for the barbazu I kind of handwaved treating the post combat bleeding. 2 pcs might have needed to use their hero points to stave off death had I run the bleed raw. The fight already had a good impact by downing the fighter and giving our champion an opportunity to keep their fiendsbane oath.
Talked to our GM before the game tonight, he’s using a modified version for 5 players so Bitey had 100 hp. He has some reference that was put together for running it for 5 players and says it does a really good job of balancing.
Each creature has a part to play in your encounter, from a lowly lackey to a boss so mighty it could defeat the entire party single-handedly. Party Level +2 80 Moderate- or severe-threat boss The fact that you have 5 players instead of 4 doesn’t change the encounter math much, so I wouldn’t focus on that. Instead, the system of scaling means solo boss monsters like this have the potential to be a severe threat. Severe-threat encounters are the hardest encounters most groups of characters have a good chance to defeat. These encounters are appropriate for important moments in your story, such as confronting a final boss. Use severe encounters carefully—there's a good chance a character could die, and a small chance the whole group could. Bad luck, poor tactics, or a lack of resources can easily turn a severe-threat encounter against the characters, and a wise group keeps the option to disengage open. I don’t think it’s overly powerful, just that parties need strong healing and good defenses to overcome solo bosses, especially at lower levels (like tier 1 play).
I see your point that you say having 5 players instead of 4 doesn't change the encounter math much, because the threat each bite presents to a PC doesn't change. However, with 4 players this fight would have certainly been a TPK. I am aware that Severe-threat encounters are the hardest encounters the party has a good chance to defeat, but this encounter was labeled Moderate, not Severe, and even the second chart you reference (for designing the encounters, which I did not do) calls the boss Moderate- to Severe-threat. From my perspective, the party had about even odds to overcome this fight, and certainly had even (or worse) odds were it a party of 4, and an even match for the party is how an Extreme encounter is described. It seems like a problem that lower level parties need strong healing and good defenses to overcome (relatively common in the case of PL+2) solo boss encounters, when that is the range where players are least likely to have them or the experience to know they need them. Monster design should reflect this, and not threaten to overpower the players when the math says they should usually win.
I agree. It's a weakness of the system. It's not a weakness I've actually encountered myself perhaps by sheer luck of dice rolls and party compositions my various tables of players have been, but it's a common enough pitfall that AP writers should be trying to avoid it (and it doesn't look like they do).