It says: Cast and exhaust to lower a monster's toughness by 1 (to a minimum of 1) and ignore one of its special abilities other than Magical Immunity until the end of this combat.

Does word monster include "Ancient One"? If it does, can reduction of toughness be used (for example in 6-player game you'll need only 5 hits to take out doom token)? If so it's a great spell...

no, a monster is only those little square ones that cluster together in cups, not the big bad GOOs, Im afraid. nice idea though!

dj2.0 said:

My hopes are crushed by the GOO!!!! I wish that I could at least remove GOO's special ability...

The GOOs crush all hopes! BUT, if you truly want to strike a blow, get hold of Zoe the cook from Innsmouth (she can remove both resistances outright and turns both immunities into resistances even on the GOOs!) or get DH and try to complete the Sealing the Beasts Power mission, which reduces the GOOs modifier. Hell, get the cook to seal the beasts power for a true kick in the nether regions, and have Lily Chen the martial artist from Kingsport in your team when it wakes, shell pass her personal story and remove two doom straight away.

-2 modifier

2 less doom

cancel resistances

immunity downgraded to resistance

- See how the GOOs take that!

Suck it up and face Quachil Uttaus like a man. QU is only -3 modifier with Physical + Magical Immunity, his attack is "first player devoured", no checks, no nothing.

Dam said:

There are items / allies to ignore an AO's attack, and the Messenger can be discarded to prevent being devoured. No checks - indeed. No nothing - not quite. ^^

HëllRÆZØR said:

QU makes you toss all Allies at start of combat ! I think there are 2 GOO-attack cancellers. But since you basically have just base Fight...

Thanks for the correction, I didn't have QU's sheet in front of me.

Dam said:

Pah. Manhood is overrated and Quachil is a ***** After hearing what people had to say I took him on last night, our first date, nobody was devoured, and Quachil had the indignity of all gates closed on him. Had he awakened, I reckon hed still have gone down. All you need is a bit of luck with clues (like Rice or Akachis PS), a couple of good fighters, and a decent Luck score (your own, not the investigators) for picking the right Dust card. And no, Patrice, Mandy or Daisy were not in the game.

dj2.0 said:

How many investigators? You have 48 Clues in the game, Blessed that's 24 hits, normal 16 (+1 Fight skill helps, ditto Joe). In a 4-investigator game having every Clue in the game and being Blessed gets you half-way, if you have 4 Fight 6 investigators (pretty unlikely) that's 12+9+6+3 (30) dice barring attack cancellers, so Blessed 15 hits, still 9 short.

4 investigators. You mention Joe and +1 Fight, but are overlooking many other things, such as the mythos skill, voice of ra, warding stature, sealing the beasts power, alien device (ok not sure but think this one is a magical weapon), Lilys PS, cryptozoology collection...just to name a few that I can think of off the top of my head.

dj2.0 said:

You can technically beat anything, but theory is usually just nice and all that. After Solan mentioned beating fully-laden Bokrug in final combat (so -8, Magical + Physical Immunity, only 4 attacks barring cancellers, 18 doom tokens), I did a bit of math:

Lily -2 doomers

Marie -2 doomers

Norman -4 doomers

Tommy -1 doomer

Sanity 7 investigator + Duke + Third Eye + Call Ancient One = -9 doomers

Even collecting all 48 Clues is a pretty steep task for 4 investigators. Of course, all that just reeks of prep-work, so you probably haven't spend many Clues sealing gates. Also, I recall someone mentioning that Voice of Ra would not count against Magical Immunity as it adds +1 to skill checks, meaning +1 to combat checks and Immunity negates bonus to combat checks from the mentioned source (Magical/Physical) and VoR is "Magical Spell".

Dam said:

ouch, thats awesome, thanks for sharing!

Yes reckon you are right about VoR it doesnt count, I dont have my cards here and just pulled those out of memory, there must be more I have forgotten. I think there is also an Otherworld card you can keep that either cancels an AO attack, or removes doom, probably the former.

Could a investigator cast the red sign on a monster in a different location?

It's a combat spell, requiring 1-hand, so you have to be in combat (you can use it pre-Horror check to remove one of the special abilities).

Perfefct! Thanks, Dam.

Since that seems to sort that out, I feel less bad doing a bit of a thread-jacking...

dj2.0 said:

I think you need way more than "a bit of luck" in order to beat QU in the final battle. I've been thinking about the numbers for this.

If you're in a four-player game, Quachil has 48 "hit points". In order to expect a success, you need to roll three dice, so in order for your dice to average out at 48 successes, you need to roll 144 of them. You'll get a turn in which four investigators attack, then a turn in which three, then a turn in which two, then one guy alone, then you lose. That's a total of ten "attacks". Each attack needs to average 14.4 dice in order for them to all add up to enough. Obviously since there's a flat penalty of -3 to all those attacks, the average number of dice rolled for each attack actually needs to be 17.4.

So in the first round, with four people, you need a total of nearly 70 dice to be rolled in order to be on course for a victory. You can get 2 of those dice from Fight and Wrestle skills. Even if you have four investigators with base Fight 6 (and I don't think there are that many) you're still about 45 dice short of your target! That means you need 45 clue tokens. On the second turn you're gonna need another 30 clues. The turn after than, about another 20. Then about 8 more on the last turn. In short, you'd need in excess of a hundred clue tokens in order to get the job done. If you go in with many fewer than that, it's barely worth trying to hit the thing.

Even if every die you roll just happens to come up as a success, you need 48 successes in 10 attacks. Even if 7 or 9 of those attacks are made by Fight-6 investigators, you're only just pulling through.

That's all based on a small non-optimized group of course. QU doesn't "scale" well, since it still only kills one player per turn. If there are 8 players, Sealing The Beast's Power has worked, everyone is blessed or has grapple (and keeps their blessing for the whole FB), and the player who will die last has Endurance (effectively ensuring 8 successes)... then you STILL need everyone to have an average base Fight of 5 just in order to make it LIKELY that you'll win - and it's still not certain to work!

In other words, getting lucky in the final battle against the Treader In The Dust is not really an option. If you want to fight it and win, you need to plan the entire game around upgrading your characters, and a single screwup will probably kill you all. Have I missed anything?

thecorinthian said:

Only that the only final combat win vs QU I've seen listed (haven't looked at the stats in that much detail this week) was 1-investigator game, with Joe Diamond selected AFTER the GOO was known .

thecorinthian said:

Yes - I still would have won

Dam said:

It's pretty obvious that the person who submitted that game was not playing with Kevin's "anti-clue shotgunning" rule.