This morning, my level 10 party fought a severe encounter against a bunch of rather hungry sea life, as part of our quest to complete the chores of the elder of a village prove ourselves worthy to receive pieces of the sun from a tribe of giant turtlefolk as part of our quest to put the sun back together.
This was definitely a fight to prove ourselves and not to collect dinner for the tribe. (It was 100% us getting dinner for the tribe)
The combat was against a bunch of monsters at a coral reef, many of which were lurking and hiding at the start, only to emerge and ambush us in the first round of combat, but in the end, was ultimately:
2x Con Rit2x Giant Jellyfish2x Deepwater Dhuthorex2x Giant Octopus
The combat only lasted three rounds, as we pretty much pasted the monsters.
Our bard, Kanna, cast Fortissimo Rallying Anthem in the first two rounds of the combat, succeeding both times, giving the whole party a +2 bonus to all defenses (and DR 2 against physical damage), while tossing out a rank 3 Fear in the first round of combat.
In the end, these two things combined to prevent a whopping 185 damage to the party, between hits turned into misses and crits turned into normal crits (plus a bit of physical DR helping as well). This 185 damage didn’t count the fact that many of the monsters had poison attacks that would add additional damage as well.
Moreover, the Dhuthorex never got the chance to swallow anyone whole becuase they never hit with an early enough attack to grab anyone.
The other party members prevented damage as well – the Barbarian took 14 less damage thanks to her DR, the champion prevented 36 damage via justice champion reactions and another 15 via amped shield block, the Leshy caused two misses thanks to messing up enemy vision (preventing another 47 damage), and the druid prevented 26 damage to herself (not including potential poison) through Interposing Earth, resulting in the party preventing a whopping 323 damage to themselves over the combat.
On top of this, the champion also used lay on hands twice to fix 60 hp of damage.
As a result, in the end, the party only was only down 91 hit points collectively at the end of the encounter, in an encounter that “should have” dealt us at least 474 damage, not even including the grabs, swallow wholes, and poisonings we didn’t end up having to endure.
The end result was that the party was able to avoid spending actions on healing and got to burn down the enemies, dealing 1,290 damage in just three ronds of combat, with the kineticist not even getting their final turn because all the tasty seafood monsters were dead.
Damage prevention is very effective in this game; my level 10-11 parties are now routinely preventing 100+ damage per combat, resulting in far fewer actions spent on healing.
I’m curious if anyone else has any fun stories about damage prevention, and how much of a difference it has made for them.