The Burning Shores is one of the places that I find most memorable in the modules, and perhaps I'm biased in the early days that I was new to Arelith and only knowing it from distant whisper. There is a wonder in all that.
However, the Burning Shores suffer from a tragically annoying design in the mobs.
To list:
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The damage and high AB of... flatly, everything in the burning shores means instantly that anything with low AC (below 55, if you can call that low) is going to be consistently hit, and anything that is consistently hit, is going to die very, very fast. I would list the mobs that deal high damage, but the thing is that everything deals high damage. The gargoyles, margoyles, magma giants, mephits, snappers, nothing hits below 50 flat points of damage.
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The most annoying part of the Burning Shores is, without much argument, the margoyles. These mobs autocast acid sheath at about CL 20, are tough, sneak immune, hit as in the point above, and have some DR, I believe.
You can say "durr, just breach them", but all the time you lose employing your standard and trusty arelithian beach wand is time the mobs are fixing on you, and the time you take simply breaching one margoyle, you'll find that there are other two or three... per spawn, that also need to be breached, and if you are going around, this means that before completing a lap by the Shores you are most likely to have burnt off your wand. Breaching is an option in some cases, but any dungeon that you have to run with a weavemaster on piggyback shooting breaches around is probably due to some rebalancing. (Did I mention that the margoyles recast their acid sheath occasionally? Well, they do)
What is the alternative to not breaching, then?
- Run away.
- Take five million points of damage, which from an IC point of view, is something you want to avoid.
-Craft the whole bug set for glorious acid damage immunity (yeah, no).
-Drag your elven archer death squad with you.
-Don't go to the Burning Shores. <--- winning choice.
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The fire lords have them.
The azers have them.
The BLOODY half-dragon boss has them (and apparently also has it quickened).
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Not only everything hits hard, but everything is hard to kill as well.
Half the mobs have some manner of DR.
The mephits use improved invisibility.
Everything is stacked up in HP and saves.
The azers have higher AC than the rest of the mobs.
The worst offender of this last part are the fire snapper, that doesn't have any less than 550 of HP.
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I'm a sucker for treasure chests. They are the loot piñatas that have all sort of delicious goodies inside, and there is a massive lacking in them around the Burning Shores.
While there are more resources, with the new loot system I can only see zinc as far as the eye can see.
If this place had remotely the experience gain of The Ascent, this would be somewhat justifiable, but I don't get that much, and even if the experience was higher, this still feels like a place too annoying to run to be actually enjoyable to take a party through.
Burning Shores, more like Burning Sores, amirite?
. . .
I'll be over there.