The Shards of the Gate of Darkness, Part 6

After the nearly disastrous fight against the cambion and the tiefling, I was really concerned about throwing essentially the same encounter at the group with extra monsters. I needn't have worried because

1. The dice decided to reverse themselves suddenly
2. I gave my bruiser a small Achilles heel and they exploited the crap out of it

So as noted in the last post, this combat was two tieflings, a cambion hellsword, and a fire beetle. The first good move the girls made was to draw the bad guys out onto the Jungle Temple map with ghost sound so they could stay near the healing font. The tiefling darkblade came out first, invisibly, to investigate. He blew a Stealth check and the ranger made a massive Perception roll followed by a massive attack into his square. That set the stage for the whole group to spend two rounds beating the crap out of the guy while the wizard yelled downstairs in Supernal "Everything's okay! Got it under control!" and made a nice Bluff check while the crew downstairs blew their Insight checks. See what I meant about the dice?

After the darkblade was destroyed, as the girls fell back toward the font, the rest of the monsters came up from below. The girls didn't like the look of the beetle and unloaded enough ranged firepower at it to bloody it immediately. The Achilles heel mentioned above was the fact that the cambion thought of the (pretty fragile at this level) beetle as a pet. He got perturbed and charged the wizard, doing a chunk of damage. Then the warlord and paladin engaged him while the wizard withdrew. The warlord hit him with Viper's Strike and the paladin marked him.

Then the ranger shot the beetle again and killed it.

With a cry of "YOU KILLED SCUTTLES!!" the cambion disengaged from the warlord and took a blow from the paladin due to Viper's Strike. Then he charged the ranger, missed, and took more damage from the paladin's mark. To make matters worse, the ranger proceeded to taunt him and shift back after each attack she made for the next two rounds while the warlord and paladin came in from behind to keep him marked and viper struck. When it looked like he might come to his senses the wizard taunted him in his own language, reminding him that the ranger killed Scuttles. He went down from paladin mark damage during his third missed attack on the ranger. After that the last tiefling was slowly whittled down with ranged attacks so he couldn't teleport away.

Analysis:
This was a cake walk by comparison to the first fight, mostly because the party couldn't seem to miss and the cambion only hit once or twice, but the viper striking and paladin mark damage didn't hurt either. On the plus side, I suspect this is one we'll be harking back to and laughing about for a long time....