I know I said I was going to do this awhile ago, I kept forgetting about it when I was actually at home. Here's what the stats for the Galeb Duhr should look like, based on the 3.0 MM II and the 3.5 update booklet: Medium-Size Elemental (Earth) Hit Dice: 8d8+40 (76) Initiative: -3 Speed: 10ft, Burrow 10ft AC: 22 (-3 Dex, +15 natural), touch 7, flat-footed 22 Attacks: 2 slams +7 melee Damages: Slam 1d6+1 Face/Reach: 5ft/5ft Special Attacks: Spell-like abilities Special Qualities: DR 10/magic, elemental traits, freeze, SR21, tremorsense Saves: Fort +11, Ref -1, Will +7 Abilities: Str 13, Dex 5, Con 20, Int 11, Wis 16, Cha 12 Skills: Concentration +9, Diplomacy +3, Knowledge (geography) +4, Perform (sing) +7, Sense Motive +11 Feats: Combat Casting, Iron Will, Negotiator Climate/Terrain: Any Mountain Organization: Solitary, Pair or Tumble (3-5) Challenge Rating: 9 Treasure: No coins; standard goods (gems only); standard items (potions only) Alignment: Always Neutral Advancement: 9-15 HD (Medium), 16-24 (Large) Spell-like Abilities: At will--animate objects (stone only), stone shape; 1/day--move earth, passwall, transmute rock to mud, wall of stone. Caster level 20th, save DC 11+spell level Elemental Traits (Ex): Immune to poison, sleep, paralysis, stunning, critical hits, flanking. Darkvision 60'. Freeze (Ex): A galeb duhr can hold itself so still it appears to be a boulder. DC 30 spot check to notice it's alive. Tremorsense (Ex): Can automatically sense the location of anything within contact with the ground within 300'.
Here's the Galeb Duhr stats listed in the protos.tab: Str 22, Dex 10, Con 20, Int 11, Wis 16, Cha 12 Damage 1d8+6 To Hit: +11 CR 4 Base Ref: 0, Base Fort:11, Base Will: 7 Natural Armor: 18 HP 8d8+50 DR 15/- Fire Resistance 15 SR 15 So they pumped their Strength, Dex, to hit, damage, hitpoints, AC, DR and gave them Fire Resistance, lowered their SR 6 points and lowered their Challenge Rating 5 points. This is why I hate fighting them and feel entirely justified in using the cheapness that is Scather against them.
I agree and I think that programmres didn't had any idea of what a DR 15/- is Only VERY strong barbarians may overcome it. 15 means that a warrior with a 2 handed sword+1 and specialization and STR 18 deals usually 15 damages, so deals 0 damage to them, so a PC must be stronger than that!!!!! Unfair!
Fireballs are the answer Flame them with fireballs, that always does the trick, lots and lots of fireballs (a wand of fireballs is a good idea here). Just make sure you have your own characters out of harms way when the fireballs go off, otherwise ...
I flank them with my rogue for added sneak damage and use cleavers to get crits about 1/4 of the time. Tripling cleaver damage will net around 100 often enough, and with -15 that's still 85. I don't have much problem with them. We should still get at least the original CR, though. 4 is ridiculous. Could that at least be changed by a modder? Please?
It is absurde that the Troika guys haven't had the time to set some creatures immune to sneak/critical attacks.
If you're using fireballs, you're losing 15 points of damage off of every one. Not the most efficient way of doing it. I'm not saying they're impossible to take down, just that they're ridiculously tough compared to 1) the PnP counterparts and 2) the CR rating of 4 they've been given. At the very least they should be, as others have said, their original CR of 9.
What effect does the druid spell, Soften Earth and Stone have on them? I have a druid(Meleny), but i've never used that spell. Would it even work?
I remember that skeletons are still affected by critical strikes and elementals should be immune to sneak and critical as well, as well as many other monsters kind. A critical means that you are able to strike a vital point, dealing much more damage, but elementals and undead doesn't have any vital point so there is no way to damage them more than with the maximum weapon damage.
Looking inside the protos tab, it looks like that there must be somewhere some general characteristics for monsters according to their kind (undead, elemental, external....), like in the monster manual, since effectively the protos.tab contains too few places to fill with monsters informations, so effectively the "error" about criticals and sneaks should be, following my feeling, somewere else in the game.
Actually, Based on D&D 3.5 rules, neither undead, constructs, or elementals can be critically struck. A critical strike means you hit something vital for the creature to live. those creatures don't have "vital" organs or parts. No sneak attacks either. Oh, by the way, oozes, jellies, and plants are the same. Not sure if ToEE gets that right...I think it does, though...