Are Noble Salamanders Cheating?

OK, I know that the Noble Salamanders like to toss fireballs, but I think these guys are cheating.

Why in Level 2 of the Temple when fighting Bassanio, the commander of the Fire Temple, do the Noble Salamander fireballs fly through walls to reach my PCs that are around the corner in other hallways (or in other rooms) trying to hide from said fireballs?

Or in the Fire Node, I can have my party at the exit in the upper left of the map, and walk one guy over to the gang of Noble Salamanders that are guarding the chest on the right edge of the map. End combat engages they toss fireballs all the way across the map to bombard my other party members that across the map standing at the exit.

So are these guys cheating? Why do their fireballs go through walls (or around corners for lack of animating it correctly) and have the ability to fling fireballs across an entire map?

Aren't they bound by LOS and range limitations?

 

I just use lesser globe of invulnerability and walk up to them and chop them to little little pieces.

 

They seemed to be targeting my wizard more than anyone, so after she cast lesser globe of invulnerability on herself, they naturally never tossed another fireball at her after that. Like they knew that the fireballs would not be effective, but she is not even in LoS to them so they divined it

The salamanders then started throwing them at my cleric non-stop.

My cleric wanted none of it, so she just melded into stone and the rest of party was able to walk up and finish them off.

While my cleric was happily catching all the fireballs, my tanks worked their way through their ranks.

I don't mind a tough fight, but if I can't toss fireballs across an entire map, through walls and whatnot, then why should they be able to.

I get the feeling that this is not isolated to Noble Salamanders and their fireballs, but all enemies are able to do this with ranged spells. And if that is the case, then that truly isn't fair.

 

At higher levels, clairvoyance/clairaudience effectively allows you to pan across the whole map and target spells at foes who are out of normal sight, and who can't see you. I haven't tried it in the Fire Node, but I suspect that you could probably pop a Cloudkill on top of them like this.

 

With far shot and an invisible scout, you can also drop arrows on targets from beyond their LOS. That's why I haven't had any trouble with the salamanders since my second or third fight with them.

 

In my very first run through of the game I took out Hedrack & CO this way. I had a vague memory from my DnD PnP days that fireball had some insane range. Scouting with my hidden thief, I realized there was a bunch of baddies just sitting there at the end of a LONNNGG corridor. I summoned a large Earth Elemental as a tank, walked it alone up the corridor till everyone was in sight, then let loose with fireballs from the safety of the stairway leading to lvl 3. REALLY poor dungeon design by Gary Gygax imnsho.

 

How did the Earth Elemental communicate what he saw to the other partymembers? A player may be able to see everything on the screen that every member of the party and their summoned creatures see - but in P&P that would need more magic to work.

 

Magic, duh!

 

All it takes is a Message cantrip.

 

wow, I've always been curious what the use of clairvoyance/clairaudience were in the game.

I've never bothered with them.

Now this can be fun to use.

Thanks a bunch everyone.

 

"Message" is language dependant so either someone has to know Terran - or another spell is used up to whisper with the Earth Elemental.

The range of Message (100ft +10ft/level) is far shorter than the range of Fireball (400ft+40 ft./level) so if the intention is to use the Earth Elemental to scout ahead and spot and perhaps engage all enemies to find the perfect point to aim the Fireballs at while staying at maximum range it´s a problem.

 

To get the elemental to do anything other than attack your enemies immediately, you have to be able to communicate with it, so that problem has to be solved prior to mooting the "use an elemental to scout" tactic.

As far as the range, the scenario in question is the long passageway on the 4th level of the temple. It's easily short enough to be in range of Message cast by someone high enough level to summon an elemental.

 

In a PnP game you'd likely summon something else to scout for you. In such a game, an elemental wandering up to Hedrack and co wouldn't go unremarked, but a (regular size) mouse or bat might.

 

Actually, I think Hedrack's mob isn't set up to attack on sight (to give you the option of joining up I think), so you can walk up and attack at leisure. In my first playthrough I had my own PC wizard plus Burne and Spugnior and a Rogue9/Wiz1 PC with wands attacking from the corridor, just in visual range, all casting 10 dice fireballs.