Barghest CR (3.5)

[lunar2]

the barghest looks horribly under CR'ed, even for such an obvious BBEG monster. especially the greater barghest. so, i have a few questions.

1. what CR do you think the barghest is?

2. what CR do you think the greater barghest, as printed, is?

3. what CR do you think a properly advanced greater barghest (one with the ability score increase from its 8th HD, and the increases for being large) is? are the higher ability scores and natural armor enough to push it up 1 more CR, or not?

[Diarmuid]

I've run Barghests myself and had them run against me. I dont think they're under CR'd at all. If you're crafting an encounter where they're able to prebuff with a lot of their SLA's and and take advantage of that, then the encounter itself would be higher than simply calculating based on how many Barghests there are, but if the PC's turned the corner and ran into some barghests and "it's on", I dont see any issue with their CR.

They do have a lot of abilities, but they dont have much damage output. My party had trouble killing them due to concealment but no one was in any danger of dying.

Greater Barghest is another story. Based on the MM "Advancing Monsters", Adding 2 Outsider HD bumps the CR +1. Similarly, going from Medium to Large bumps the CR +1. The additional SLA's the GB gains would likely fall under either "Monster possesses special attacks or qualities that significantly improve combat effectiveness (CR +2)" or "Monster possesses special attacks or qualities that improve combat effectiveness in a minor way (CR +1)"

So I'm not sure why the GB is only a 5 when the normal is a 4.

With regards to advancing them beyond the basic Greater Barghest, it seems problematic developing a decent formula. Eating 3 HD equivalent or better corpses gets them +1 HD/Str/Con/Natural Armor which is accounted for in the stats of the GBarghest, but the GB also has +4 Int/Wis/Cha and the additional spell-like abilities which are not mentioned in the whole "Feed (SU)" section.

Without anything else to go on, I'd simply use the "Advancing Monsters" section of the MM for advancing GB's: Every 2 HD = +1 CR. Not sure if you need to do any further boosting to account for the Str/Con/Natural armor boosts they're getting or if you'd continue advancing the size (which would further increase the CR per the table).

[lunar2]

yeah, looking back on the barghest, i guess i was off a bit. so, GB should be CR 7 as printed, and CR 8 if they're advanced properly? as printed, they shouldn't get the CR increase from increasing size, since they didn't get the ability score or natural armor increases from it.

btw, what spell level would mass enlarge be? i was thinking enlarge monster would be 4th, since charm monster would be 4th. but mass charm monster is an 8th level spell, and a simple enlarging isn't enough effect to be an 8th level spell no matter how many creatures you put it on. maybe 6th? that puts it on par with mass bull's strength, etc.