Thanks for your comments Dualazi!Your fiery grab looks like it works well, but it's not clarified if the Immolith gains extra bonus actions from having people held, since it's not making the additional claw attacks. It sounds pedantic (and is) but I could see nitpicking being made over it.
Yep, sustained grapples are supposed to reduce claw attacks, which reduces bonus actions. The fire damage seems cripplingly low. That's (sort of) alright, given that enemies will probably take some retribution damage from multiattack in melee, but at level 8-9 (when I could see players fighting one) ongoing 3 is just pitiful, and unless they're grabbed then fire resistance might still apply, dropping it to 1 damage.Continuing from the above point, at AC 11 and 147 hp, this thing is going to get smoked before that aura has any chance to be a threat. In my opinion, auras really work best as high damage threats to keep PCs off enemy casters/artillery, or as low damage pressure from tanky foes. This does neither really.
My suggestion would be to ramp up the aura significantly and reduce the claw damage somewhat, since you want the fantasy of a controller of sorts who slows the player's movement and then drags them to fiery doom, and it makes the melee characters a little more cautious about capitalizing on that ridiculously low AC. As it stands currently I'd just ignore more of its mechanics and spam quad attacks to get some damage in before it drops.
Right, the 4e immolith's stats make it a melee controller. Not really tanky, not really a caster/artillery. It was designed to pull PCs into its aura and cook them, while vexing artillery/caster PCs with its Deathfire Curse (lightning them on fire and slowing them). You nailed its function: dragging the PCs to a fiery doom. So I can just borrow the balor's 3d6 damage Fire Aura.
I was hesitant to do that for two reasons:
(1) The balor is a CR 19 monster leagues more difficult than the immolith, so I assumed there was a reason that was the only creature in the MM with such a damaging aura was CR 19.
(2) It's obviously stealing a feature from the balor, something I usually only do in when there's an obvious relationship between two monsters (e.g. designing a variant yuan-ti, I would probably give it poison immunity, innate spellcasting, and magic resistance).
About its AC 11: I was using the fire elemental (whose AC of 13 is derived just from Dex) as a guideline. Generally in 4e all ability scores are exaggerated – for example a 4e vrock has 19 Dex whereas a 5e vrock has 15 Dex. Similarly, the 4e firelasher elemental has Dex 21 whereas the 5e fire elemental has Dex 17.
There is no precise formula in WotC's conversion document beyond "if an ability score is over 20, drop it to 20" which is pretty useless, so it's up to my instinct and educated guess. The 4e immolith has a Dex of 16, so it's safe to say that its 5e version will have a lower Dex given what can be inferred from the vrock & fire elemental. So a Dex of 12 or 13 would be reasonable, which is what I did.
Another potential suggestion (although not drawn from its 4e statblock) would be to give it stacking regen when enemies are affected by Deathsmoke Gaze. That would justify the low damage and make players have to deal with a sort of opt-in self CC if they want to cut down on the healing or burn through it.
Interesting idea, and definitely in keeping with the concept! What's CC stand for? I'm not up on the lingo.Saelorn said:
I just don't understand a creature that is a living (or unliving) inter-dimensional portal, especially if it can only teleport corpses. The whole thing is so far out of left field that I can't really parse it.
You seem to have a penchant for focusing on one thing you dislike or don't understand, and then throwing out the baby with the bath water. Still I'll do my best to address your comment...Rather than thinking of it as a perfect instantaneous portal, think of it like a hungering flame, a burning-in-the-fireplace process. We see the object burning, but in the fantasy it's actually slowly being consumed by the Plane of Fire. While it isn't yet wholly burned, it still has a chance of escape. However once it's burned up (represented by 0 hp), then it is at last drawn bodily into the Plane of Fire.
The way I see it is that a living creature is going to fight being pulled into a monster's space. In fact, the 5e rules usually make that impossible in the heat of combat (which is why some monsters like the fire elemental have traits allowing them to enter the spaces of enemies). Like the immolith itself, whose moment of death happened with it being sent to the Plane of Fire, the immolith enacts the same upon its foes.
Moreover, granting a creature the ability to send a living conscious creature to another plane qualifies as a "save or die" effect, or at least the same ballpark. 5e is careful with such effects; for example the sea hag's Death Glare will only reduce a creature to 0 hit points...so that the Dying rules then kick in...and the Medusa involves multiple saves vs. incremental petrification.
Think of this like incremental planeshifting, if that makes it easier.
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