Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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I recently played a level 12 Druid character who was killed by 2 Disintegrate spell scrolls used one right after the other.
There were 2 Sorceror NPCs and each had a Disintegrate spell scroll and cast it at my Druid during the same round. He passed ST on the first attack, but the second attack was successful, and that motivates my question.
What ways are there to survive Disintegrate?
Obviously proficiency in Con STs is good (which my Druid had) and buffing up HP would help (which my Druid did not do).
Is there any way to get Advantage on Con STs?
I thought use of the Silence spell might have helped, though my Druid wouldn't have had it. Would the Sorcerers have known their spells wouldn't work once Silence was cast?
Any other ideas?
First, I would like to point out that Disintegrate is a spell requiring a Dexterity saving throw, not Constitution.
As far as surviving it, Circle of Power can help give you and your party advantage on saves against spells. The Silence spell would prevent them from being able to cast the spell inside the Area of Effect, but the enemies would know they are being affected and could just move out of the area (it's only a 20' radius).
If you know a big spell is coming your way, you could try to hedge your bets with a spell like Death Ward, which essentially gates your hit points at 1 so you don't drop to 0 (and thus turn to dust).
There’s ways to give yourself better odds to make the save: have a bless cast on you, stand near a paladin, have a bardic inspiration die. Lucky feat for advantage on the save. Heroic inspiration for advantage on the save.
Have the Scion of the Outer Planes (lawful) feat and you can resist force damage.
But no matter what you do or how many advantages to stack up on, eventually, the dice will have their say, and sometimes they’ll say you got disintegrated.
I would be concerned their might be an OOC issue here. Unless you had specific knowledge that two sorcerers were after you with specific intention to destroy your character with virtually no chance of resurrection you would have no reason to spend considerable resources to protect yourself. They both had at least one disintegrate spell scroll which mean they were not using up character based resources so if you made both saves I would expect there would be a high risk in the next round they pull out another spell scroll to try again.
I would be asking your DM how they expected you to approach the encounter in a way that is both logical given the knowledge you had and survivable. Did they have an issue with your character? (for example were they highly optimised where the rest of the party was not) so you can create a replacement character that will not be a problem. Is there issue with you as a player in which case you might need to find another group to play with.
Maybe my memory failed me or maybe the DM goofed. Thanks for the correction and pointers.
Thanks for your first comment. I've altered my question to be less campaign-focused and more on how to prepare (buff) high level characters in general and defend against high level spellcasters.
This was DM's first campaign and he was struggling with battle difficulty. He had made most prior battles fairly easy, so I was not prepared for the scale of that final battle. I can see how it can be difficult to balance battles. I think it was even harder for him because he allowed the party to acquire some very powerful magic items prior to that battle. Maybe I can get him and the rest of our players to do a quick post-mortem of the final battle so we can all learn something.
One of the issues with high level play is the saving throw math really falls apart. You have some saves with a +10, and could well have others at a -1. It gets impossible to set save DCs, because for some characters they are trivially easy, and for others they become mathematically impossible. Unless you have a big pile of buffs, which is reasonable at that level, but still really annoying to have to do.
It's not so much falling apart as intended design- if enemies are going to be threatening to tier 3 PCs, they need some weak points they can aim for. There's a reason they shifted from 3 saving throws to 6 and guaranteed that a baseline character will only be effective in 2 of them.
In reading Mike Mearls’ patreon posts, it does not seem it was intended.
I don't think this was an issue of a large discrepancy in saving throw throw maths, highlighted by the fact the OP saved the first time but not the second.
A high level monster might have a saving throw DC of 20 and one PC might have a +12 and another -1, the first one has a 65% chance of success without potential resources being thrown at it (bardic inspiration, indomitable etc) while the second PC has no chance of success without resources (it available). In my experience this is an issue with spells where you have a repeat roll every turn, a low level spell like hold person can completely lock down a PC so they have nothing to do for an entire combat. Another example of this in high level play is maze, a high level wizard with expertise in investigation will have no problem getting out but a character who dumped int might not even need to bother rolling each round and only hope the caster loses concentration.
Disintegrate has only one save, either you succeed or you don't so that is not an issue (even if some characters are guaranteed to succeed and others guaranteed to fail). The issue is if you have less than about 75 hit points it is the ultimate save or suck spell. Fail the save and you not only go to 0 HP, the character dies in a way that nothing short of a 9th level spell can bring them back. Combine that is focussed fire and you pretty much guarantee someone will have to create a new character.
You should have chosen the monk
You should have chosen the monk
Monks aren't any better at face-tanking disintegrate than druids are*. In fact, druids have less stat allocation pressure on their Con than Monks, and have a commonly-used ability that gives them a good chunk of temp HP.
Now, I've recently had my monk successfully eat a Disintegrate without dying, but only because the character, who is the party's only front-line fighter, has both feat and item support for extra hit points, and it was still a "yikes" moment.
* Until they get deflect energy, anyway.
Who tanks a Monk? You aren't playing one correctly if you are trying to tank one. You can't use Deflect Energy on a Disintegration ray either. The Monk is the better choice over the Druid, in this case, because of the Monk's Evasion, Proficiency in all saving throws and it's ability to re-roll a saving throw.
I mean me, for one. When you're the party's only front-line fighter, you do what you can.
And monks can tank, just not as well as a specialist. An elements monk, in particular, can hold quite a bit of the front line.
True; it's not an attack. I wasn't thinking about the mechanics when I said it.
Evasion doesn't work on disintegrate, either. (It's not a save for half damage spell.)
And the saving throw gimmicks are very late-game. By that point, most people can soak a disintegrate if they're not banged up. Ultimately, hit points are the only defense guaranteed to work.
True Evasion is only if you get a save that will give you half-damage, but the saving throws are relevant here because the OP is talking about a 15th level Druid. In addition, you can always use Patient Defense to replace some of your lost HP with Temp HP and then replenish the depleted THP as needed for 2d10 per focus point. So there's tanking in that capacity.
And that doesn't include any special abilities of the subclasses might have to offer.
Giving away my age here, but I used to play when spell casters could have lots more spells prepared. The buffs would have been easier then....
Thanks for all the input. My next character is a fighter (for HP) with solid Dex and Con and human for the Lucky feat. Our party avoids multiple characters with the same class, so Monk was out for me. Hopefully Lucky will save him when he needs it.
Oh, and regarding Silence, if you are fairly sure one of the spellcasters against you is going to cast something, you can Ready Silence and trigger it on noticing an opponent starting to cast anything....
Yeah, I rolled an 18 first and a 4 second. So ST modifiers didn't play much of a role.
No, saving throw math is just kind of broken. Saving throws and to hit rolls are supposed to be semi-equivalent, but your odds of landing an ability requiring a save is generally lower than an attack in tier 1, and by tier 3 is generally higher.
Anyway, by the time people are likely to be spamming disintegrate on you, true resurrection should be a theoretically available (if expensive) option. There's also clone as an ahead-of-time prep.