(3.5) Templates/Monster Combos that Hold Up at Epic Level

[Phelix-Mu]

So, first of all, it's not a terribly optimized game, so I'm not up against the worst dysfunction that epic brings with it. No Epic Spellcasting, either. Next, my system mastery is quite good at this point; I am able to modify stuff on the fly to cope with unexpected player character actions, but not too proud to just let them wreck stuff when they've earned it.

Now, specifics:

- 3.5, all sources legal, 3.0 materials allowed on request, much houseruling to iron out 3e dysfunction.

- 25th level party, generally mid-op, with a few even lower-op choices by players. I am very flexible on the DM side, but have a penchant for throwing them in the deep end.

- Party consists of an amped up warlock, a warlock/sorcerer/eldritch theurge tweaked to be on par with the warlock (in theory, lol, I know it is doomed to not stay balanced), a VoP cleric/Rimefire Witch/homebrew psionic PrC, a druid, and an illithid paladin with most of its racials removed except the stat adjustments and telepathy.

So, basically the title explains it. I am looking for any experience/advice y'all can give on templated monsters that can be used in place of the generally terrible monsters provided in the ELH. I am amenable to some stacking, but this is practical optimization, so too much number-crunching on my end is impractical. Let's try to keep it to five templates or less.

Finally, I am a master refluffer/reskinner, and regularly heavily augment monsters from the books when it suits my purposes and the flavor I am working to create for the game. So feel free to toss around unlikely combos (and even some illegal ones...those are the kinds of rules that epic should be breaking, IMHO).

Thanks in advance!

[Vaz]

La buy off allowed? Winged (SS) can be okay free wings.

Evolved is brilliant with LA buy off. NI boosts to stats for free, if you can find yourself a hyperbolic time chamber.

[Phelix-Mu]

La buy off allowed? Winged (SS) can be okay free wings.

Evolved is brilliant with LA buy off. NI boosts to stats for free, if you can find yourself a hyperbolic time chamber.

Sorry if I wasn't clear; I am looking for combos for enemy monsters, not for the players. So LA-buyoff is probably irrelevant. (Though I did allow it for the players, but I juiced it up a bit since it was going to suck badly for he illithid, the only one using it in any serious degree.)

Basically just looking for nifty templates that can be used to boost normal monsters into epic-threat territory. Evolved Undead is a good one, though, and I'll probably even use that for this coming weekend's threat du jour.

[Astralia123]

Spellstitched undead.




I guess if boosted enough and with sensible tactics, multiple attack ability may still hold? Like, some heavily boosted Hydra or some reasonable circumstances that force the PCs to face an evolved Hecatoncheires in meele.


Anyway I guess you are just free to make your own monsters and forget CR. This CR system hardly fits epic level battles, as party performance vary so much depending on how optimised the PCs are and how much the players are into power-gaming.

[Bluydee]

IIRC, if you just give some extra immunities and AC boosts to some ELH monsters, they aren't so bad. Like the xixecal, for instance.

[Phelix-Mu]

IIRC, if you just give some extra immunities and AC boosts to some ELH monsters, they aren't so bad. Like the xixecal, for instance.

Indeed, but I hardly want them to fight a whole bunch of xixecals, since those are more along the lines of iconic boss monsters (like almost all of the Abominations).

I'm more looking for CR 18-30 stuff that I can use as mooks/more typical encounters, and to avoid having bunches of mariliths (again, intended as boss-types), I was hoping to beef up some lower-level stuff with extra HD and a handful of templates.

Obviously Dragons and Outsiders scale the best among monster types, due to their basic HD benefits being strong and having access to relatively large amounts of magic (and material resources, allies/minions, etc).

So, yeah, I'm really just brainstorming. I don't really template stack much historically, and just homebrew stuff wholesale. But I'd rather cut down on the workload this time by taking some decent statblocks, modding them with some templates, reskinning the monster so it fits my flavor for the campaign, and calling it a day. I'll still homebrew bosses, but I need a campaign's worth of enemies first.

[Martimus Prime]

I'm a big fan of half clay golem (MM2), personally. Once, I threw that on mid-boss before turning him into a vampire for the fast healing/DR vs two different materials and broad array of immunities that resulted.

The party fighter and mage were not pleased.

[Phelix-Mu]

I'm a big fan of half clay golem (MM2), personally. Once, I threw that on mid-boss before turning him into a vampire for the fast healing/DR vs two different materials and broad array of immunities that resulted.

The party fighter and mage were not pleased.

Hmm. Good call, as that is some useful stuff for most any creature, and a rather obscure template. Also really easy to refluff as any sort of deformed hybrid, Frankenstein's monster, Borg-like alien, cyborg-human (*cough* Spehss Mehreens *cough*), or just straight-up magical pcp junky.

Sounds like some distinct possibilities. Thanks.

[atemu1234]

I'm a big fan of half clay golem (MM2), personally. Once, I threw that on mid-boss before turning him into a vampire for the fast healing/DR vs two different materials and broad array of immunities that resulted.

The party fighter and mage were not pleased.

What would that look like?

[Phelix-Mu]

What would that look like?

Vampiric Igor? Blood-sucking Terminator? Sparkly cyborg?

[Xelbiuj]

Haven't played epic but isn't this one paragon (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/monsters/paragonCreature.htm) and pseudonatural (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/monsters/pseudonaturalCreature.htm) templates are for?

[Phelix-Mu]

Haven't played epic but isn't this one paragon (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/monsters/paragonCreature.htm) and pseudonatural (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/monsters/pseudonaturalCreature.htm) templates are for?

Indeed, these are the obvious options, and you could staple Paragon on a bunch of ogres with a few class levels and end up with decent mooks for low-epic (they'd die horribly, but they could get a few hits in).

But I was looking for any other suggestions people might have. Again, just fishing.

[Fuzzy McCoy]

What about class levels? I figure a few bearded devils* with some warlock levels and eldritch glaive would be nasty. It shouldn't be too much number crunching, hopefully. You say you've got two warlocks - maybe their benefactors have decided it's time to collect?

*Chosen due to interactions between them and glaives, but I'm not sure it applies to EG.

[Phelix-Mu]

What about class levels? I figure a few bearded devils* with some warlock levels and eldritch glaive would be nasty. It shouldn't be too much number crunching, hopefully. You say you've got two warlocks - maybe their benefactors have decided it's time to collect?

*Chosen due to interactions between them and glaives, but I'm not sure it applies to EG.

Hmm. Certainly an interesting idea. Might try it on something a bit better than bearded devils, and maybe spot them some EB dice through Practiced Spellcaster or the like (or that item in MIC). Targeting touch ACs and a chance for rider effects would be good. Pair it with Paragon so it has a chance to have challenging DCs, perhaps.

Good, good. Keep 'em coming.:smallsmile:

[Psyren]

Paragon (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/monsters/paragonCreature.htm) makes anything an epic threat. Combine with Phrenic (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/psionic/monsters/phrenicCreature.htm) and now their PLAs have ML = HD + 15. And pseudonatural was mentioned.

[Phelix-Mu]

Paragon (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/monsters/paragonCreature.htm) makes anything an epic threat. Combine with Phrenic (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/psionic/monsters/phrenicCreature.htm) and now their PLAs have ML = HD + 15. And pseudonatural was mentioned.

Ooh, phrenic. That will work nicely with Paragon template, and also with some of my flavor. Nice.

[Vaz]

Winged Template is a neccessity for some.

[Phelix-Mu]

Winged Template is a neccessity for some.

Well, admittedly less necessary when more than half the party will be raining down ranged death of one sort or another, but 3D tactical combat is just superior to 2D, so it's still important. And fun to refluff! I'll probably be using some kind of anti-gravs for my fluff, as many of my iconic enemies are looking to be constructs or robo-something or others at this point. Inevitables with class levels? *laughs merrily*

[*.*.*.*]

Spam a hoard of Monster Manual 2 Jovoc(make them paragon if you must) and laugh maniacally(until someone in the party gets Mettle). Besides purely long ranged parties, I have rarely seen encounters with Jovocs to not get nasty.

[Phelix-Mu]

Spam a hoard of Monster Manual 2 Jovoc(make them paragon if you must) and laugh maniacally(until someone in the party gets Mettle). Besides purely long ranged parties, I have rarely seen encounters with Jovocs to not get nasty.

*MANIACAL LAUGHTER*

Yes, now here's the fuel I need to light the sacrificial fire at Orcus' altar the bonfire of my inspiration. Jovocs are AWESOME, and that ability of theirs lends itself easily to refluffing.

Maybe this weekend's undead thing will be against undead jovocs. Hmm. They probably can't be actual jovocs, but I could file off the serial numbers, make 'em undead, apply the Evolved Undead template X times (where X is likely Y times too many for any of the party to survive), then fill the currently abandoned cities with them. The only question now is "SHOULD THEY BE INCORPOREAL???"

Well, man with the unpronounceable name, you have saved my bacon on designing this weekend's encounters, and I think that earns you a cookie.:smallwink:

[WhamBamSam]

Law Archdragon (Dragon Magazine 321) is a brutal +1 CR at just about any level. Creatures damaged by the dragon's breath are affected as if they were in an AMF and energy based damage within 5ft per age category not originating from the dragon itself are minimized. Chaos Archdragon is also pretty serious business, but probably doesn't hold up as well at higher levels because it's breath is the comparatively tame Glitterdust and its miss chance aura seems to be beatable by attacking from outside of it. Consider combining with Ravening (Dragon Magazine 313) for breath spam.

I generally favor class levels over templates for my monsters, but those ones I like. I also like ones that raise Int up to 3 or higher, so that I can start adding class levels.

[Vaz]

Multiheaded Cobalt Dragon Dungeoncrasher Fighters can be hilarious - as I understand it, Dungeoncrasher can still apply to the Cobalt Dragons Breath Weapon. Apply Multiheaded to that. You get to make a bull rush attempt for each breath attack on it, with a DC = to damage (line of force as well). If you have 8 heads for +4 CR, that's 8 breath attacks on a Loredrake Great Wyrm Dungeoncrasher Fighter 6 (CL19, CR35-36, can't remember if loredrake increases CR), each dealing 21d4 damage. Pick up maximise, to turn that into 8 checks of 84 - plus your Size, and other modifiers, etc. For each check you make, you push him back a number of feet (5ft per 5 you beat his opposed roll by) - and as it's an opposed strength check, that's probably around 100 versus 20 or so - in other words, beaten by 80, so move back 80ft, 8 times. If there's a wall in the way, as I read that combination, you then hit them for further damage for each one which would push them into the wall for 8d6+21 damage, 8 times.

Should be enough to punch someone well and truly out of the fight - around 1000 damage from a single breath weapon might not be CharOp, but unless they can resist a bullrush...

[*.*.*.*]

Well, man with the unpronounceable name, you have saved my bacon on designing this weekend's encounters, and I think that earns you a cookie.:smallwink:

You can call me Stardot, if you wish. I'm very happy to help, Javocs(especially Javoc Crusaders) have been good to me in the past and I like to spread awareness of THE best mook monster. My players have grown to absolutely despise the lil' buggers.

Since you're already making it undead and homebrewing around a bit, you could have a 'horde' of them lead by High HD 'Multiplying' (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/undead/skeleton-medium/skeleton-multiplying-t-rex) Jovoc with the
Destruction Retribution feat/ (http://dndtools.eu/feats/libris-mortis-the-book-of-undead--71/destruction-retribution--591/). I do think your players would hate you, though.

If you want a hard-as-nails fight, put an Iron Golem in a supernatural AMF. I've found that one or two in said situation can take down Balors and almost any other monster with ease.

[Biffoniacus_Furiou]

Put Divine Rank 0 (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/divine/divineRanksAndPowers.htm), and (variant (http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/we/20060630a)) Half-Fiend on the Tarrasque. Pick a fiend that has wings and some decent class skills, such as Hide and Move Silently. Adjust his new base skill ranks and his feats to suit his new capabilities. Basically just read this post (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?156029-Optimizing-the-Tarrasque/page2). Note that any broken wizards.com links in old posts can have 'www' replaced with 'archive' and they should work.

Also have a look at this post (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?358732-I-need-a-lot-of-easily-playable-builds#4), which reportedly lasted eight rounds as a solo encounter and took out two PCs before it was finally killed. Just about anything with Hide in Plain Sight or similar plus the feat Darkstalker and preferably a Heightened Deeper Darkness effect is pretty solid unless they have Touchsight or similar.

Powerful dragons and the tricks and minions that go with them, such as this (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?86672-Running-a-high-level-Dragon-encounter-3-5&p=4645537&viewfull=1#post4645537), this (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?209130-I-am-a-Dragon#6), and this (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?322346-Volcanic-mountain-cavern-style-dungeon-as-red-dragon-lair#2).

[WhamBamSam]

Multiheaded Cobalt Dragon Dungeoncrasher Fighters can be hilarious - as I understand it, Dungeoncrasher can still apply to the Cobalt Dragons Breath Weapon. Apply Multiheaded to that. You get to make a bull rush attempt for each breath attack on it, with a DC = to damage (line of force as well). If you have 8 heads for +4 CR, that's 8 breath attacks on a Loredrake Great Wyrm Dungeoncrasher Fighter 6 (CL19, CR35-36, can't remember if loredrake increases CR), each dealing 21d4 damage. Pick up maximise, to turn that into 8 checks of 84 - plus your Size, and other modifiers, etc. For each check you make, you push him back a number of feet (5ft per 5 you beat his opposed roll by) - and as it's an opposed strength check, that's probably around 100 versus 20 or so - in other words, beaten by 80, so move back 80ft, 8 times. If there's a wall in the way, as I read that combination, you then hit them for further damage for each one which would push them into the wall for 8d6+21 damage, 8 times.

Should be enough to punch someone well and truly out of the fight - around 1000 damage from a single breath weapon might not be CharOp, but unless they can resist a bullrush...Dungeoncrasher does indeed work, since it's "as if bull rushed by the dragon." Improving the Bull Rush check beyond just cranking damage is a pain though, as it's not a Str check and therefore the vast majority of Bull Rush boosting which refers to "Str checks (such as bull rush checks)" or "Str checks to bull rush opponents" or what have you doesn't work. It's also not clear whether size modifiers apply since it says the check result is equal to the damage dealt, which likely means the bull rush check rather than just the Str check part. The Marshal's Art of War Minor Aura does work though, as it only says Bull Rush checks. You can give the dragon itself a level of Marshal, or toss a few on a Succubus or Yochlol minion. You can also use Power Surge (Dragon Magazine 313) to increase the damage and hence the bull rush check by 1 per damage dice (so 21 for a Great Wyrm).

It doesn't matter as much when you're a Great Wyrm using Maximized Breath I suppose. That's a 1/encounter thing unless you're Ravening though, and if you are using Ravening then you want to fire off a Quickened Breath which you can't maximize each round as well. Still, I guess for a Great Wyrm the average non-maximized damage is 52.5 (73.5 with Power Surge), which is probably enough against characters not optimized for bull rushing.

Trading away spellcasting is really, really bad, but the Xorvintaal template is sort of cool for breath blasting. If you do toss a Succubus/Yochlol Marshal minion in, they can grant a move action before the Dragon's turn which the dragon uses on Deep Breath for 4 extra dice of damage. Also, one of the twist of fate abilities lets the dragon bull rush/dungeoncrash with a beat of its wings as an immediate action. Even just Persistent Dispelling Breath is probably worth keeping spellcasting for though.

Also, Lingering Breath is pretty hysterical with a Cobalt Dragon's breath weapon. Any enemy that walks/is bull rushed into the line of the dragon's breath on the following round they take half damage and risk getting bull rushed again.

[Phelix-Mu]

Heh. Some really good suggestions here. I'm gonna have to do something along the lines of this bullrushing concept; not sure if it will be that dragon, but it's cool beans no matter what the final monster looks like.

While we are on about bullrushing, what are some of the most common defenses one can have against bullrushes? Spells, items, maneuvers? I know a flying creature can bullrush, but can one bullrush flying creatures? I'm a bit worried I might catch the players with their guard down, as I don't often use bullrush (I tend to stick with grappling and tripping for some reason).

[Astralia123]

Indeed, but I hardly want them to fight a whole bunch of xixecals, since those are more along the lines of iconic boss monsters (like almost all of the Abominations).

I'm more looking for CR 18-30 stuff that I can use as mooks/more typical encounters, and to avoid having bunches of mariliths (again, intended as boss-types), I was hoping to beef up some lower-level stuff with extra HD and a handful of templates.

Obviously Dragons and Outsiders scale the best among monster types, due to their basic HD benefits being strong and having access to relatively large amounts of magic (and material resources, allies/minions, etc).

So, yeah, I'm really just brainstorming. I don't really template stack much historically, and just homebrew stuff wholesale. But I'd rather cut down on the workload this time by taking some decent statblocks, modding them with some templates, reskinning the monster so it fits my flavor for the campaign, and calling it a day. I'll still homebrew bosses, but I need a campaign's worth of enemies first.

I guess you can just stack the typical monsters with class levels and features to make them more threatening. It is not exactly impressing, but enough to hold when you don't have that much inspiration.

And when they are more monstrous characters than monsters, it may be easier to attach extraordinary story hooks to any of these encounters.

[WhamBamSam]

You can bull rush flying creatures. Xorvintaal Dragons' bull rushing Twist of Fate ability (which I misremembered slightly, it actually replaces an AoO rather than simply being an immediate action) actually treats airborn targets as one size category smaller.

Most of the time I'd expect to use standard anti-charge defenses against bull rush focused enemies, though that won't work against a Cobalt Dragon (and could potentially be gotten around with Knockback or the like as well). I know there are a lot of things that can boost the check to resist a bull rush, but I don't really remember what they are offhand or if they're worth it (I seem to remember a lot of soulmelds that specifically resist bull rushing though, so a meldshaper going in prepared might get to feel really cool).

[PraxisVetli]

I've found Paragon Steel Predators from Fiend Folio to be pretty solid.
And advanced Alkaliths, same book.
Also, for epic fights where there's two perfect creatures and you can't decide which... Symbiote 'em!