Hi to all of you DMs! A Rise of Tiamat DM here! I need some help buffing Tiamat for my, how to say, overly equipped table of adventurers. As for as my knowledge goes about these bunch of misfits, they have prepped up spellcasters wielding staffs of the magi and they're just gonna retributive strike my dragon queen to kingdom come, not to mention level 9 spell scrolls (god that TIME STOP / PLANE SHIFT combo). Not to mention a heavy hitter Samurai fighter with an average of 250 damage per turn.
Any ideas in "legally" tweaking her stats or at least some creative insights that you can share to make Tiamat battle encounter more memorable and not short lived? Thanks!
Would transforming Tiamat a venerable spellcaster with magic items be plausible? Read her 3.5 version and thinking to rebuild her to something similar just fitting enough for the 5e version.
She's CR 30 if the party does nothing to weaken her. You could always ramp up the encounters that would lead to her being de-buffed to make them more difficult to win at or you could eliminate them all together. If you're going by milestone leveling, the PCs should be roughly L14-L15 when they reach Tiamat.
I've estimated that they will be lvl 16 when they reached Tiamat. No problems with their levels though. It's their prep work that made me think that this Tiamat would not last 3-4 rounds at best (killing maybe 1 or 2 of them). Somewhat underpowered as a Diety.
So to give them something to work hard for (and hopefully a formidable challenge), options would be transforming Tiamat to a 5e version of its 3.5 counterpart, turn her into a venerable spellcaster with magic items, or play around the Red Wizards and Severin's Summoning Ritual to buff the Dragon Queen as she rise out of her hellish gate.
Shorten the ritual from 6 rounds to 3, 2, or even 1. That way she is powered up much quicker. I would say give her the full stats, but I would want the team to know that the stuff they did helped weaken her. (If they got 2 debuffs, maybe just give her 1 instead.)
The biggest thing I will be doing (because I will be in the same situation as you are pretty soon) is bring in minions. The module specifically states that there are chromatic dragons there, and the numbers are up to the DM. If you are worried it will be over too soon, adding an adult or ancient chromatic dragon or two to the mix will drastically change how the encounter goes.
Lets see, fully weakened, Tiamat has 240 HP, 20 AC, resistance to non-magic weapons, immunity to 5 elements, has 5 legendary resistances, still has 21DC saves, +14 to hit, makes 3 attacks on her turn totalling 76 average damage, can make a reaction every turn, and will have 3 legendary actions to do up to 138 more damage before her turn comes back around.
Those scrolls you mentioned your players only have a 35% chance of beating the ability check to use Time stop otherwise their scroll anf action are both wasted. And Tiamat can use a legendary resistance to succeed if her +9 CHA save doesn't beat plane shift's DC18 save.
I don't know how your samurai is doing that much damage, but that might be a legit threat, but if the dozens of enemies fought on the way to the ritual chamber didn't burn enough resources, there are still 11 enemies performing the ritual that can use more of those resources.
Formulated some ideas from you and this is what I was able to sum up: For every shrine that they did not destroy, Tiamat will increase her HP to 500 and gains a charge to negate a damage bigger than 500 (this gives them an objective to really destroy the shrines). Each head has a threshold on her total HP (this is important). I turned her into a Level 20 Cleric Spellcaster and each head has a uninterruptable spell (Mostly auras like Anti Magic Field, Hallow, etc to avoid those heavy PC plot devices.) which can only be dispelled when the HP reaches to a certain threshold also reducing the attacking power of that dragon head. But this in turn makes Tiamat go into a "berzerk" mode in she will gain a certain buff if a head becomes weak.
With 5 spellcasters each having staff of the magi (with the intent to break it in front of her face) and a samurai doing heavy damage (Average of 200 / per round) with quivers of arrows of dragon slaying, hope this build would really give them a battle worth of legends.
Feel free to give suggestions to this. Would appreciate it.
Given that she is the Dragon Queen, yep. I can say that I am confident enough that this will present a formidable challenge. They're mowing down my ancients in 3-4 rounds.
If you wanted to be super cheesy, you could give her resistance to force damage to take half damage from the staff retributive strikes. Combined that with successful saving throws, she would take zero damage.
Counterspell is an awesome spell for bosses to have.
More importantly don't have her fight the party one on one. Maybe give her two lieutenants. A high ranking cleric of Tiamat and a greater invisibility archmage. Maybe an ancient red dragon retainer could also work wonders. That way when the heroes cast a spell and the dragon queen counterspells it, and the heroes counterspell the counterspell, you can have a yet invisible creature counterspell that counterspell. The end result is a bunch of nervous heroes.
Also, give her max HP for her HitDice instead of the printed average.
Lair Actions... use them as much as you are legally able.
Legendary Actions... give her a few more choices.
Legendary Resistance... give her five instead of three.
Have her go first and cast time stop, and break the staff's or take them away with a wish spell immediately. That will put the heroes off balance and could be a whole lot of fun.
"Retributive Strike. You can use an action to break the staff over your knee or against a solid surface, performing a retributive strike. The staff is destroyed and releases its remaining magic in an explosion that expands to fill a 30-foot-radius sphere centered on it.
You have a 50 percent chance to instantly travel to a random plane of existence, avoiding the explosion. If you fail to avoid the effect, you take force damage equal to 16 × the number of charges in the staff. Every other creature in the area must make a DC 17 Dexterity saving throw. On a failed save, a creature takes an amount of damage based on how far away it is from the point of origin, as shown in the following table. On a successful save, a creature takes half as much damage."
This is interesting. (1) They would most likely parrish themselves by setting off 6 retributive strikes. (2) She could just blow through legendary resistance to pass the saves. If you give her 5 resistance, instead of three, that is five auto passes (let alone the fact that the save is probably pretty easy for her to make on her own). (3) She has Limited Magic Immunity. Unless she wishes to be affected, Tiamat is immune to spells of 6th level or lower. She has advantage on saving throws against all other spells and magical effects. I might rule as a DM that the retributive strike is a magical effect and say that she only takes half damage from each attack (before she even saves).
Maybe she drinks a Potion of Invulnerability prior to the fight when she notices a party of adventurers coming with her 36 passive perception. Another thing to keep in mind is she gets one reaction per turn, so any magic items that are used via reactions (a Ring of Evasion, or a Ring of Spell Storing loaded with reaction spells for instance) are more powerful for her than for the typical user. Her AC is 25, and a shield from a Ring of Spell Storing could put that up to 30. If she had something like bracers of defense, too, it could be 32. Perhaps the PC samurai can do 250 points per round, but you've got to actually hit when you're a fighter, and a 32 AC is not trivial to hit even for a fully-loaded fighter PC character.
None of this requires tweaking any stats. It only requires giving a dragon queen some treasure, which seems appropriate. Dragons are well known for having treasure. One rare consumable and a handful of rare magic items are all it would take, too. It's not like we're talking about loading her up with a bunch of legendary items. If you did want to give her even more powerful items, the Ioun Stone of Greater Absorption is pretty nice for a reactive creature.
I think each head gets a reaction per turn. So she would get 5 reactions a turn. But that is from the Stat Bloc in the Rise of Tiamat adventure.
Yes and no. Getting multiple reactions for having multiple heads is represented by her ability to take a reaction each turn (instead of the normal 1 reaction per round).
Lot of good options for buffing Tiamat mentioned, but what about the area itself?
Who says Tiamat can't go behind cover or have some sort of weird, shifting elemental terrain. Could be cool and also give Tiamat a smaller leg-up in strength without too much number crunching.
That said, giving more legendary resistances, giving damage immunities, giving powerful minions, using spells that limit what the party can do or buff Tiamat, etc. could all be used. I'd also advise giving Tiamat the max HP of the recommended hit dice rather than the default amount.
With 5 spellcasters each having staff of the magi (with the intent to break it in front of her face) and a samurai doing heavy damage (Average of 200 / per round) with quivers of arrows of dragon slaying, hope this build would really give them a battle worth of legends.
I don't think she is an underpowered deity. I think it's exacerbated because you have 5 spellcasters each with the most powerful spellcasting item in the game. Breaking the staff can do what? 400DMG...if fully charged...the game wasn't made for 5 of those at the same time. But remember breaking the staff also has negative repercussions and hits any creature in range. So I'm not sure how they'll pull that off without killing each other.
to me, those are some crazy buffs you're giving but they're not as a result of a deity being underpowered. but do what you must.
Hi to all of you DMs! A Rise of Tiamat DM here! I need some help buffing Tiamat for my, how to say, overly equipped table of adventurers. As for as my knowledge goes about these bunch of misfits, they have prepped up spellcasters wielding staffs of the magi and they're just gonna retributive strike my dragon queen to kingdom come, not to mention level 9 spell scrolls (god that TIME STOP / PLANE SHIFT combo). Not to mention a heavy hitter Samurai fighter with an average of 250 damage per turn.
Any ideas in "legally" tweaking her stats or at least some creative insights that you can share to make Tiamat battle encounter more memorable and not short lived? Thanks!
Antimagic Field? That will be an unpleasant surprise if she's in the middle of it waiting for them.
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Would transforming Tiamat a venerable spellcaster with magic items be plausible? Read her 3.5 version and thinking to rebuild her to something similar just fitting enough for the 5e version.
She's CR 30 if the party does nothing to weaken her. You could always ramp up the encounters that would lead to her being de-buffed to make them more difficult to win at or you could eliminate them all together. If you're going by milestone leveling, the PCs should be roughly L14-L15 when they reach Tiamat.
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I've estimated that they will be lvl 16 when they reached Tiamat. No problems with their levels though. It's their prep work that made me think that this Tiamat would not last 3-4 rounds at best (killing maybe 1 or 2 of them). Somewhat underpowered as a Diety.
So to give them something to work hard for (and hopefully a formidable challenge), options would be transforming Tiamat to a 5e version of its 3.5 counterpart, turn her into a venerable spellcaster with magic items, or play around the Red Wizards and Severin's Summoning Ritual to buff the Dragon Queen as she rise out of her hellish gate.
Shorten the ritual from 6 rounds to 3, 2, or even 1. That way she is powered up much quicker. I would say give her the full stats, but I would want the team to know that the stuff they did helped weaken her. (If they got 2 debuffs, maybe just give her 1 instead.)
The biggest thing I will be doing (because I will be in the same situation as you are pretty soon) is bring in minions. The module specifically states that there are chromatic dragons there, and the numbers are up to the DM. If you are worried it will be over too soon, adding an adult or ancient chromatic dragon or two to the mix will drastically change how the encounter goes.
Give a few consorts. A few chromatic dragons around should take the heat off her a bit.
Lets see, fully weakened, Tiamat has 240 HP, 20 AC, resistance to non-magic weapons, immunity to 5 elements, has 5 legendary resistances, still has 21DC saves, +14 to hit, makes 3 attacks on her turn totalling 76 average damage, can make a reaction every turn, and will have 3 legendary actions to do up to 138 more damage before her turn comes back around.
Those scrolls you mentioned your players only have a 35% chance of beating the ability check to use Time stop otherwise their scroll anf action are both wasted. And Tiamat can use a legendary resistance to succeed if her +9 CHA save doesn't beat plane shift's DC18 save.
I don't know how your samurai is doing that much damage, but that might be a legit threat, but if the dozens of enemies fought on the way to the ritual chamber didn't burn enough resources, there are still 11 enemies performing the ritual that can use more of those resources.
Give each head 275 hp.
Give her resistance to EVERYTHING and Immunity to some.
Her heads can do a combo attack combining their effect and saves against this combo attack are at disadvantage.
If the party still smacks her hard, let her die. Then, "That was amusing. That clone spell was worth every copper!"
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
Formulated some ideas from you and this is what I was able to sum up: For every shrine that they did not destroy, Tiamat will increase her HP to 500 and gains a charge to negate a damage bigger than 500 (this gives them an objective to really destroy the shrines). Each head has a threshold on her total HP (this is important). I turned her into a Level 20 Cleric Spellcaster and each head has a uninterruptable spell (Mostly auras like Anti Magic Field, Hallow, etc to avoid those heavy PC plot devices.) which can only be dispelled when the HP reaches to a certain threshold also reducing the attacking power of that dragon head. But this in turn makes Tiamat go into a "berzerk" mode in she will gain a certain buff if a head becomes weak.
With 5 spellcasters each having staff of the magi (with the intent to break it in front of her face) and a samurai doing heavy damage (Average of 200 / per round) with quivers of arrows of dragon slaying, hope this build would really give them a battle worth of legends.
Feel free to give suggestions to this. Would appreciate it.
I hope your level 20 PCs are min-maxed enough with a few artifacts to power through that CR30+ encounter.
You are house ruling that arrows of dragon slaying work on Tiamat?
Given that she is the Dragon Queen, yep. I can say that I am confident enough that this will present a formidable challenge. They're mowing down my ancients in 3-4 rounds.
If you wanted to be super cheesy, you could give her resistance to force damage to take half damage from the staff retributive strikes. Combined that with successful saving throws, she would take zero damage.
Counterspell is an awesome spell for bosses to have.
More importantly don't have her fight the party one on one. Maybe give her two lieutenants. A high ranking cleric of Tiamat and a greater invisibility archmage. Maybe an ancient red dragon retainer could also work wonders. That way when the heroes cast a spell and the dragon queen counterspells it, and the heroes counterspell the counterspell, you can have a yet invisible creature counterspell that counterspell. The end result is a bunch of nervous heroes.
Also, give her max HP for her HitDice instead of the printed average.
Lair Actions... use them as much as you are legally able.
Legendary Actions... give her a few more choices.
Legendary Resistance... give her five instead of three.
Have her go first and cast time stop, and break the staff's or take them away with a wish spell immediately. That will put the heroes off balance and could be a whole lot of fun.
This is interesting. (1) They would most likely parrish themselves by setting off 6 retributive strikes. (2) She could just blow through legendary resistance to pass the saves. If you give her 5 resistance, instead of three, that is five auto passes (let alone the fact that the save is probably pretty easy for her to make on her own). (3) She has Limited Magic Immunity. Unless she wishes to be affected, Tiamat is immune to spells of 6th level or lower. She has advantage on saving throws against all other spells and magical effects. I might rule as a DM that the retributive strike is a magical effect and say that she only takes half damage from each attack (before she even saves).
The first Tiamat is a DC 30 Phantasmal Force.
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
Maybe she drinks a Potion of Invulnerability prior to the fight when she notices a party of adventurers coming with her 36 passive perception. Another thing to keep in mind is she gets one reaction per turn, so any magic items that are used via reactions (a Ring of Evasion, or a Ring of Spell Storing loaded with reaction spells for instance) are more powerful for her than for the typical user. Her AC is 25, and a shield from a Ring of Spell Storing could put that up to 30. If she had something like bracers of defense, too, it could be 32. Perhaps the PC samurai can do 250 points per round, but you've got to actually hit when you're a fighter, and a 32 AC is not trivial to hit even for a fully-loaded fighter PC character.
None of this requires tweaking any stats. It only requires giving a dragon queen some treasure, which seems appropriate. Dragons are well known for having treasure. One rare consumable and a handful of rare magic items are all it would take, too. It's not like we're talking about loading her up with a bunch of legendary items. If you did want to give her even more powerful items, the Ioun Stone of Greater Absorption is pretty nice for a reactive creature.
I think each head gets a reaction per turn. So she would get 5 reactions a turn. But that is from the Stat Bloc in the Rise of Tiamat adventure.
Yes and no. Getting multiple reactions for having multiple heads is represented by her ability to take a reaction each turn (instead of the normal 1 reaction per round).
Lot of good options for buffing Tiamat mentioned, but what about the area itself?
Who says Tiamat can't go behind cover or have some sort of weird, shifting elemental terrain. Could be cool and also give Tiamat a smaller leg-up in strength without too much number crunching.
That said, giving more legendary resistances, giving damage immunities, giving powerful minions, using spells that limit what the party can do or buff Tiamat, etc. could all be used. I'd also advise giving Tiamat the max HP of the recommended hit dice rather than the default amount.
I don't think she is an underpowered deity. I think it's exacerbated because you have 5 spellcasters each with the most powerful spellcasting item in the game. Breaking the staff can do what? 400DMG...if fully charged...the game wasn't made for 5 of those at the same time. But remember breaking the staff also has negative repercussions and hits any creature in range. So I'm not sure how they'll pull that off without killing each other.
to me, those are some crazy buffs you're giving but they're not as a result of a deity being underpowered. but do what you must.