breez said:
Did you apply the fear test? A Daemonhost has fear 4, so -30 to the fear test. Each Degree of failure adds +10 to the shock table.
In one of my sessions, the players plus 40 armed guards encountered a daemonhost and every npc was reduced to an inactive screaming mess.
Fear tests are part of what make Deamons nasty. I remember someone about a year ago complaining Fearless was busted because it made daemons not that scary… and he had given it to the players at rank 2 or something (even though accoring to most of the tables I think it is a rank 6+ Talent). He had some element of a point, as aside from the Bloodletters the daemons in the core rulebook are not that scary as combat machines. Above average, sure, but they don't carry ranged weapons, and though they have TB of 6+ they generally don't wear armour (the fact the bloodletter does it what makes it more of a threat). The errata that gave them warp weapons (rather than the Primitive Weapons they carried before) means they continue to be able to harm PCs after they get heavy armour, but overall there are nastier enemies in pure combat terms. The real threat posed by them is the fact that PCs will quite possible totally loose control due to a fear test and so be near helpless for several rounds during which the daemons can play merry hell with them.
In the adventure in the rulebook the deamon at the end sent one man into a helpless hallucinatory stupor for the entire combat (and lost 9 permanent points of willpower… oops), another guy just pucked up his guts (on the bad guys shoes) for about 4 turns, another cowered behind a pew for a few turns, and another was sent screaming out of the Cathedral. Only 2 people passed the test (one because they were Dusk born and so reduced the severity of the check, and the other because they were just really, really jammy). If I had really wanted to annihilate the party, I probably could have done. As it was I was relatively lenient on them (partly delibirately, partly due to inexperience). Predictably after that the players took as many things as they could that helped them resist fear.