What Are You Playing: 9 Years since the Last Dragon Age

[Zevox]

Okay, wrapped up the main campaign of Solasta. For the most part, opinion of the game didn't change much throughout - it does the combat of D&D well, the rest of it fairly meh to weak, and isn't exactly my personal type of D&D in tone or style. I will say I did not much like the final battle; it was a huge difficulty jump compared to the rest of the campaign, simply because the bosses did so much damage (on their turns and as legendary actions) and were accompanied by so many other allies, some of which were pretty durable, and practically everyone gets 3 attacks per turn.

Spoiler

Show

And that random Gold Dragon that joined me as an ally helped way less than it feels like it should've. Hell, I had to restart a couple of times just because it was AI-controlled and dumb enough to use its breath weapon on my party, killing 3/4 of it, twice. Outside of that, pretty much every enemy resisted its attacks, it kept rotating who it attacked rather than focusing on any one target, and it started with half of its health already gone, so even as a meat shield it wasn't that great. It did not survive wave 1, despite me having Zelda cast Heal on it to try and save it.

Blessedly I'd picked Improved Invisibility as one of Midna's spells, so casting a twinspell version of that wound up being my answer. With Midna and Zelda permanently invisible and these enemies seemingly having no way to see invisible things, they were safe to do whatever they wanted throughout the fight, while Link's AC and Sheik's mobility made them tough to kill (although boy did they both come close).

Also, screw them for including Shikkaths in wave 2. Why on earth would you be dropping one enemy with 160+ hp, legendary actions, and legendary resistance every turn during the survival portion of the fight?

So, overall, not bad, but not that great either. I'm hesitating on whether I want to pick up with the Palace of Ice right now, or move on to something else.

Oh, and here's a weird one: remember I mentioned being on a Yu-Gi-Oh nostalgia kick? Well, that included rewatching the original show, and when I got to the end of the first season, I was reminded of an old GBA game for a Yu-Gi-Oh spin-off: Dungeon Dice Monsters. And wouldn't you know, digging through my old games, there it was, and the oldest system I still own just so happens to be a GBA SP. So I've actually played a little bit of that recently. It's honestly a decently fun little spin-off game, but it can be frustrating because everything is so RNG-dependent - even moving and attacking with your monsters requires a resource you get only by rolling specific "crests" on your dice, so some games can go by with one side basically unable to do anything because they just don't roll any attack crests or movement crests. So not any kind of hidden gem or anything, just a strange thing I happened to still have when the mood hit to play a little bit of it again.

I don't see it as a misread of the 5E text. Calm Emotions does specify that it can cause all targets to become indifferent to hostile creatures as one of the effects. The main difference in the book text is that Calm Emotions is restricted to Bard, Cleric (a bit weird that a mass control spell is available to Clerics earlier than Wizards) and when any of the affected targets is attacked, it breaks for the whole group. Hypnotic Pattern is Bard, Wizard, Warlock, Sorcerer and each target is affected individually, so you can pick them off one-by-one.

Haven't booted up Solasta yet, but it seems like they implemented it faithfully reading the book text versus the game text.

Hypnotic Pattern has a larger radius and makes them unable to take any actions at all. Calm Emotions still allows for non-hostile actions and movement. In practice of the game, however most enemies with low will saves don't have actions that aren't hostile so they will just meander about for their turns.

The fact that attacking any of the targets breaks the effect on everyone is a notable disadvantage relative to Hypnotic Pattern for it I'll grant. I do feel it's a misread of the spell though. Altering the enemies' attitude towards you would only sometimes help, and even then only if you also stop acting hostile in turn. The spell doesn't change what the enemies know about the situation at all after all: they know that you were fighting and why, so depending on that "why," their attitude may not matter. The spell could stop someone who was only fighting you because you made them angry for something like that I feel, but a bandit who wants to kill you and take your money? An assassin who was paid to kill you? More monstrous humanoids who see you as attacking their homes, or even as dinner? Not so much.