Martial Class (core only) vs Hecatoncheires

[Donox]

Hey playground,

What level would a core (and ELH) only martial character (paladin, monk ranger, rogue, barbarian, or fighter) have to be to defeat a Hecatoncheires (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/monsters/abomination.htm#hecatoncheires)in solo combat.

Said character can only use printed magic items (so no custom magic items).
Leadership is forbidden (so no caster allies).
Pretending to be a caster via UMD is also disallowed (because it makes the point of this thought exercise irrelevant).
The character in question must also use core races (because a dragon monk could fly circles around the abomination, infinitely deflect its boulders, and kill it at its leisure).

[Big Fau]

So are just the classes restricted to Core-only, or is every build restricted to ELH+Core? Cause the latter is outright impossible without insane amounts of WBL-mancy.

[EugeneVoid]

I suppose you'll be wanting to kill it in melee combat, too.

[Donox]

So are just the classes restricted to Core-only, or is every build restricted to ELH+Core? Cause the latter is outright impossible without insane amounts of WBL-mancy.

All options are restricted to core and ELH.

A couple of ideas that I've been throwing around.

Play a ranger/paladin, get a fast mount, and fly circles around the abomination (you'd have trouble over coming the fast healing 50 though :/ not sure what level that can reliably be done by)
Play a monk and crank your AC (I believe that, at high levels at least, monks can do this better than most). Once again your biggest problem would be overcoming fast healing.
Be a rogue/assassin/shadowdancer, abuse hide in plain site. You'd have a better chance overcoming fast healing than most



I suppose you'll be wanting to kill it in melee combat, too.

Eh. Ranged combat would work too.

[Rubik]

This monk (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?p=15474863#post15474863) could do it, but he does rely on feats and items outside of Core. The psywar level is only there for a small boost, and isn't technically needed.

But it does use stuff outside of Core, which probably invalidates it.

Oh well.

[Donox]

This monk (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?p=15474863#post15474863) could do it, but he does rely on feats and items outside of Core. The psywar level is only there for a small boost, and isn't technically needed.

But it does use stuff outside of Core, which probably invalidates it.

Oh well.

Heh. I've read that build before. While it would work it certainly is way to far outside of core to qualify. Its a nice piece of work though.

[Rubik]

An enlarged and mounted paladin with a lance, a really fast flying mount, Power Attack, Ride-By Attack, and a good Strength score could probably work, if you could somehow manage to get Ride-By Attack to function as it was likely intended. Alternately, a barbarian with the same setup. A fighter might work, though not as well as either of the aforementioned.

But alas, RBA doesn't work at all, so you're still screwed.

But it's a nice thought, at least.

[Donox]

But alas, RBA doesn't work at all, so you're still screwed.


I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this. The mounted combat rules are certainly unclear...but I've never heard of a problem with ride-by-attack.

[Renegade Paladin]

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this. The mounted combat rules are certainly unclear...but I've never heard of a problem with ride-by-attack.
To use it, you must charge. To charge, you must move directly towards your target. The charge must be in a straight line, including the Ride By Attack move afterward. Geometry should tell you the problem. :smalltongue:

[Rubik]

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by this. The mounted combat rules are certainly unclear...but I've never heard of a problem with ride-by-attack.Ride-By Attack requires a charge, which itself requires you to pass directly toward your opponent. You also must pass through your opponent's space according to the wording of RBA, but you also cannot pass through your opponent's space, since this is not allowed by default, and nothing about RBA counteracts this.

So basically the feat requires you to break the rules in order to use it, and yet doesn't allow you to break said rules at all.

It's like a feat that requires you to fall upwards rather than downwards, but that doesn't actually alter gravity to let you do so.

[Donox]

I would disagree with that. Say you end the first part of your charge diagonal to an enemy. That would still allow you a straight line to continue to move on. This becomes even easier to do when you have a reach weapon and size increases.

EDIT:


You also must pass through your opponent's space according to the wording of RBA

Not sure where you see this


Benefit
When you are mounted and use the charge action, you may move and attack as if with a standard charge and then move again (continuing the straight line of the charge). Your total movement for the round can’t exceed double your mounted speed. You and your mount do not provoke an attack of opportunity from the opponent that you attack.

[Rubik]

I would disagree with that. Say you end the first part of your charge diagonal to an enemy. That would still allow you a straight line to continue to move on. This becomes even easier to do when you have a reach weapon and size increases.But you have to charge directly toward an enemy, not diagonal to it, which requires you to pass through its space regardless, unless you're using non-Euclidean geometry.

[Donox]

Eh. I see your point. Granted I think its getting into nutty RAW...

Anyways. I think its fair to assume that everything works as intended in core for the purpose of this thought experiment.

EDIT:
Actually Charge's wording doesn't require your to move directly towards your opponent. It instead merely requires you to move to the "closet space from which you can attack the opponent".

[AstralFire]

When the intent of Ride-By Attack is pretty clear (flyby attack while mounted), what kind of a DM wouldn't allow it to work?

[Renegade Paladin]

When the intent of Ride-By Attack is pretty clear (flyby attack while mounted), what kind of a DM wouldn't allow it to work?
No DM who has his head on straight, but the fact remains that the strict wording of the feat disallows its own function.

[demigodus]

Infinite Reflection lets you ignore his ability to chuck boulders at you. Reflect Arrows lets you hurt him if he chucks boulders at you.

Wield a Light Crossbow, and get Rapid Reload. On your turn you reload using both hands, but since you are only armed with one hand, your other hand is free to deflect attacks.

Drop enough enhancements on the crossbow to make it Epic, one of which should be Holy (+2). Use Cold Iron arrows. Now you are bypassing DR and Regen.

That leaves dealing with Fast Healing 50, AC 70, and staying the hell out of melee range. It can run up to 400ft, with 15ft reach, so you need to be at least 420ft away at the end of each round, unless you can get out of melee range without provoking an AoE.

I would suggest having a ride (say, by being a ranger with an Animal Companion) so you can full attack while your AC keeps you out of range. Except in that case your AC would be vulnerable to ranged attacks.

It can be done, but not before Epic Levels, and not without either a very optimized, or a very specialized build.

[EugeneVoid]

Don't forget that, if you don't kill it within a turn, it'll immediately clone itself.

I think the best bet is (if assuming that the Hecatoncheires doesn't have mindsight) to get as close as possible with invisibility (difficult, because of true-seeing) or some such or use teleport, optimize and win initiative and then kill it with a single charge.

One problem is that it has a ridiculous spot and listen modifier, so it'll probably see you, and then wallop your ass.

[Karnith]

One problem is that it has a ridiculous spot and listen modifier, so it'll probably see you, and then wallop your ass.
It also has Blindsight 500 ft. in addition to the other stuff, so trying to sneak up on it would be a bit difficult, yeah. Normal Invisibility certainly wouldn't help in that range.

[NeoPhoenix0]

It also has Blindsight 500 ft., so trying to sneak up on it would be a bit difficult, yeah. Normal Invisibility certainly wouldn't help in that range.

only 500ft? Then you can fall on top of it in one round from outside of his blindsight.

[Urpriest]

Infinite Reflection lets you ignore his ability to chuck boulders at you. Reflect Arrows lets you hurt him if he chucks boulders at you.

Wield a Light Crossbow, and get Rapid Reload. On your turn you reload using both hands, but since you are only armed with one hand, your other hand is free to deflect attacks.

Drop enough enhancements on the crossbow to make it Epic, one of which should be Holy (+2). Use Cold Iron arrows. Now you are bypassing DR and Regen.

That leaves dealing with Fast Healing 50, AC 70, and staying the hell out of melee range. It can run up to 400ft, with 15ft reach, so you need to be at least 420ft away at the end of each round, unless you can get out of melee range without provoking an AoE.

I would suggest having a ride (say, by being a ranger with an Animal Companion) so you can full attack while your AC keeps you out of range. Except in that case your AC would be vulnerable to ranged attacks.

It can be done, but not before Epic Levels, and not without either a very optimized, or a very specialized build.

Why a crossbow, of all things?

[AstralFire]

Why a crossbow, of all things?

Ranged, one-handed.

[Rubik]

Ranged, one-handed.Except you don't have to hold a 2-handed weapon at all times -- just when you're attacking with it. You can cast a spell or deflect a rock by removing one hand when the situation requires, I imagine, especially for a bow, which only requires two hands when you're actually pulling back the string and aiming.

[Red Fel]

Even assuming you could stay out of range and could overcome all three (!) of its DRs and its hideous AC, and had access to an epic-level arsenal, you're still facing the recurring pain of core martial classes - a lack of scaling. This is a creature with Regeneration and Fast Healing out the wazoo (which, on a Heca, is where it traditionally comes out). A spellcaster, psion, or other non-core class is better able to scale up its abilities as it levels - core martial characters don't scale nearly as well. You have to be exceeding its healing every single round in order to deal lasting damage, unless you have tricks that turn off its healing. You have to do this while staying out of melee, because that is a fight you will lose, which basically limits you to ranged weapons. Any round in which you do not attack is one in which it gets free healing. You have to deal over one thousand HP to it, after healing, to put the damned thing down.

Oh, and it can move faster than you can, and fly.

So... Yeah. I don't see this as working out all that well.

[Urpriest]

What about Diplomancy? Even Core-only that shouldn't be too hard with enough levels and Epic Skill Focus or the like.

[jindra34]

I'd honestly say low 60's, pitiful mundane scaling being the damning factor there. At which point if your small you will only get ten attacks around (15 if medium). Its a bloody big, relatively mundane-ish melee machine. Its just figuring out at what point can you match or better its numbers with stat increases from levels, tomes, and gear.( At what level could an epic barbarian have DR 72, and an outside (evil) dread weapon)?

[Chronos]

Quoth demigodus:

Drop enough enhancements on the crossbow to make it Epic, one of which should be Holy (+2). Use Cold Iron arrows. Now you are bypassing DR and Regen.
Just making the weapon an epic item won't make it overcome DR/epic, so Holy won't help at all there (though it will of course give you some extra damage, and gives you the alignment requirement). To overcome DR/epic, you need an enhancement bonus of +6 or greater. You can meet part of this via Bane, but you still need at least +4 other than that.

[Pickford]

Except for what is noted here, fast healing is like natural healing.

Fast healing does not restore hit points lost from starvation, thirst, or suffocation.


Right, so to overcome Fast Healing, we only need to deal damage that can not be restored via natural healing or deal starvation, thirst, or suffocation damage. (Probably not going to drown it unless we try real hard).


Obvious non-core solution is obvious:
Cursed Blade (Hexblade 4, Assassin 4) should do the trick for anything with 14 levels of Hexblade. Incidentally, I know the OP isn't satisfied with the idea of non-spellcasters using UMD...but that's exactly what it's for. Anyone with half a brain would try to figure out how to use magic for their benefit even if they aren't a scholar of it. Furthermore, it's a game rule that one can hire a caster, so I find it odd to arbitrarily handicap in the way asked.


Now, from the other end, the solution for avoiding any damage at all should be...well ridiculously obvious: Flying Mounted Combat.
Hecatoncheires only has throwing weapons (max range: 100') vs Any bow (max range: 600-1500, depending on which bow). As a result, if you've more than 100' in the air, the Hecatoncheires can't even fight back.
Aha you might say: At will fly!....except check the flight speed on fly. 60'. That's not even close to what is needed to keep up with any given flying mount. (Upwards of 600'/round).

So, let's say a +10 composite longbow (+

To overcome DR we'd need good, epic, cold iron weaponry. And...well that's it really.

Snarky Alternative:
Buy a Luck Blade with 3 wishes....get creative.

Rubik: You're not correct about charge. All that is actually required is that you move the the closest space from which you can attack, and and no space between that space and your starting space may be blocked.

So imagine you are represented by the A and the opponent is B.


A....................
....................B

If you want to charge you would move here

...................A.
....................B

And if you were to do a ride by attack it would look like this

.....................A
.................B....

Get it?

Oh, and incidentally, if you/your mount, happens to have the ability to turn during a charge (see: Fleet of Foot (CW)) you could even hit someone directly and angle away. (hint hint))

[Phelix-Mu]

It can fly as an SLA, CL 50 at will. Which means it's always up. Granted, that's not very fast in the scheme of things.

[Emperor Tippy]

I would probably do it with an Archery Monk.

Use Infinite+Exception Deflection and Reflect Arrows to ignore its boulders and Distant Shot to remove the range limitation on ranged weapons before running around at extreme range plinking it with arrows until it eventually dies. You are fast enough even at level 21 (with Boots of Swiftness and Epic Speed it is 240 ft.) to keep Hec from ever closing to melee range.

Now just consistently do more than 50 damage and you can win. Using a Monk/ Fighter combination to get the feats you need, probably doable at ECL 26 or so, 30 at the outside.

[Pickford]

It can fly as an SLA, CL 50 at will. Which means it's always up. Granted, that's not very fast in the scheme of things.

Yes, I accounted for that, the flying mounts in the MM are all significantly faster than a creature using the fly spell (i.e. 120'+ vs the 60' of fly)

edit: I was looking at Monk myself Tippy, but Epic Speed says it doesn't stack with magic items improving speed...which I think is silly, but it's there.

[tyckspoon]

You have to deal over one thousand HP to it, after healing, to put the damned thing down.

Oh, and it can move faster than you can, and fly.

So... Yeah. I don't see this as working out all that well.

Not as difficult as you might think, even in Core - you can still pull together a reasonable Charger build (although it does require being mounted) and with Epic feats you can get a (pretty crappy) form of Pounce.

So let's ballpark with.. say a level 30 Paladin. He does triple damage with a lance charge using Spirited Charge. He Smites for 30 extra damage, does 1d8 +1.5x Str with his two-handed lance, plus whatever bonuses are on his weapon. We know at least +6 so it can break DR/Epic. Add +3 for Divine Favor because why not. I'll assume 30 Strength, because that should be a pretty trivial number to achieve for this level..

so per hit on a charge, we've got (d8 averages 4.5 +15 from Strength +6 Weapon enhancement +3 Divine Favor + 30 Smite) = 58.5 x3 = 175.5. The Paladin will need to hit the Hecatoncheires 6 times like that to put it down. That's not quite good enough - we can only reasonably expect 5 attacks from BAB + Haste effect.

Fortunately, Paladins have a reasonably good Epic feat: Great Smiting. Each time you select it, you add your level to your Smite damage again. Level 30 Paladin gets 3 Epic Bonus Feats from his class levels, so we'll put them all into Great Smiting (there isn't really anything else on his options worth taking unless you intend to abuse Epic Leadership - everything else interesting is done pretty trivially with Epic-grade WBL.) That gives us another 90 damage per hit going into the base calculation, or a tasty 270 extra once we put it through the charge multiplier. Our Paladin is now whaling on the Hecatoncheires for 446 per Charging Smite Attack, and only needs to hit 3 times to put it down for good or just 1 if we permit him to be lucky and crit as well, resulting in an x5 total multiplier and overkilling the Hecatoncheires by an excess of 1000 points of damage.

So.. at least one class can get the necessary damage output at a relatively low level. Can he *hit* it at that level? I don't know yet. Finding some way to make touch attacks would make it very easy, but I don't recall any good way to do that within Core + Epic Handbook stuff. A Brilliant Energy weapon wouldn't hurt (-12 AC for ignoring the Armor), but really we want to get rid of the Hecaton's Natural Armor bonus.

Edit: And of course by level 57, when you're supposed to be able to fight one of these things, you can do it really easily.. not least because you can afford the Epic version of the Holy Avenger (rebuild it as a lance, natch) which basically gives you another instance of Great Smiting to stack in. Heck, you can probably do it without the charge at that point.

[rweird]

Okay, this is not a feasible build for an actual game excepts for a 1 shot to kill a Hecatoncheires, but I'll post it anyways.

Paladin 7. Special mount is something flying, lets say a hippogriff. He'll have a bunch of arrows (16000+ for certainty), probably in a bag of holding, a LG candle of invocation, and a composite longbow. Feats: rapid shot, far shot, point blank shot, mounted combat maybe replace rapid shot with mounted archery.

The process:
1) Use candle to gate a solar, have it use its Wish SLA to enchant your bow to be +1 Evil Outsider Dread (If your going to fight an abomination, it probably would comply, besides, by RAW, it has too).
2) Fly above the target, stay at least 150 ft above the ground, and at least 200 ft away from the target (out of boulder range).
3) Use scroll of bless weapon, then, while constantly flying away, shoot blessed evil outsider dread arrows at it, only 1/20 will hit, and it won't do serious damage, but thats not what matters, the important thing is the critical hits (1/400), which force a DC 27 fortitude save or die. It passes on anything but a 1, meaning it'd be a 1/8000 chance, though he never can reach you, meaning you have time, and if it fails, you can fly away, buy more arrows, and try again tomorrow.

At higher levels this could be done without the candle and you just purchase one. You also probably could use buffs to overcome DR (bless weapon and cold iron arrows), along with regeneration, meaning you might be able to actually hurt it a bit (unlikely with fast healing though), and make more attacks/round, meaning a quicker battle.

[EugeneVoid]

OP says without emulating casters, yo.

EditMy bad. Proceed

[rweird]

OP says without emulating casters, yo.

What build emulated a caster? :smallconfused: They usually fall into the category of spam attacks while not getting hurt, or charge in and kill it in one round. Neither really emulate casters, it is casters that do those things that emulate mundanes.