This is much more fun than the cleric battle in Azure City.
Malack may well be at 1 hp now, or very close to it*. An action that allows any chance at an AoO would be a risky move. Durkon may not have a great chance of hitting him, but if he does connect, there’s a very good chance Malack goes poof. Granted, Durkon’s chances of doing 11+ damage with a mundane hammer aren’t very good…but do we really believe a 15th-level character regularly goes into melee without an enchanted weapon? All it takes is +1, and the hammer bypasses Malack’s DR completely.
If he runs, he’s risking getting vaporized with an AoO. If he withdraws, he can’t heal himself that round and is still in range of another lightning strike, which could also vape him. It takes 2d6 rounds for the swarms from Children of the Night to arrive; he can’t just conjure them up to intercept the next attack. In his place, I’d take a 5-foot step, cast Harm to patch myself up, hope Durkon goes for another (survivable) ranged hit, then try something else.
*My mistake, earlier: Vampires do get a specific lightning resistance of 10, so Malack didn’t take full damage from that strike, after all. Given how much it appeared to hurt him, that inclines me to think it was a Lightning Bolt equivalent for 10d6 damage. (Even a max damage Call Lightning strike would only have done 8 points to him. A max Bolt would have done 50, and an average one 25.)
Isn’t the DR for vampires overcome only by a weapon that is both Silver and Magic? I had thought it was OR instead of AND, but it’s ambiguous. Nevertheless, I agree with you that it looks like Malack’s in deep shit. Still, he gets off one Harm, and he’s back in the game.
Save or Die magic targets one of three saves, right? We know Durkon’s a Dwarven cleric, so anything going to Will or Fortitude seems like a poor choice. That leaves Reflex, but Flame Strike’s the only Cleric Spell I know off hand that targets that save. If indeed Malack has Destruction as a domain, why not a Disintegrate? Malack can’t use any Death magic against Durkon while the Death Ward is up, and he doesn’t have time to Dominate Belkar, drop the Hold and sic him on Durkon, so what’s left other than fleeing or grappling Durkon (after being Harmed, thank you) and trying to blood suck him?
Edit: As for the Children, why wouldn’t he have summoned them while he was parleying with Belkar? If nothing else, they’d be good lookouts. And how he blew a Listen check, with those bonuses, against hearing Sir Clanks-A-Lot, is beyond me. I guess one’s mind is rather…preoccupied…when feeding.
I was wondering about that. The only weapon they make a deal out of being magical is Roy’s sword but I find it a bit implausible in any normal campaign that a party could reach their level and not have the standard +1 or better gear.
According to the massed analysis of the OotS forum geekery–
Roy: +5 greatsword
Belkar: multiple magic daggers, unspecified bonus
Haley: +5 Icy Burst longbow and +4 blade (not sure if it counts as a dagger or short sword)
Elan: +3 keen rapier
Durkon: heirloom warhammer
Vaarsuvius: No weapons listed at all, though I think we saw a staff at some point.
So, most of the team is known to have magic weapons, generally with substantial bonuses. (Haley, unsurprisingly, is particularly well-armed.) I suppose it’s possible that Durkon’s warhammer is a nonmagical heirloom that he continues to use out of sentiment, but it seems unlikely. Even if it wasn’t magical to start with, he could have gotten it enchanted by now.
The damage done by the Thor’s Lightning is mostly irrelevant, since Heal can’t take Malack below 1 HP, and it was likely to hit that limit with or without the lightning. It’s not completely irrelevant, since it brings it from “likely” to “almost certain”, but the point is, Malack is probably at 1 right now.
A grapple attempt will also trigger an attack of opportunity, unless Malack has Improved Grapple, which seems unlikely.
Neither. Dwarves are medium creatures.
I must be too out of the loop regarding you kids and your new-fangled rules these days. I remember Haley trying to remember if Nale’s succubus* chippy was harmed by silver or iron but, back in my day, a +5 bow would be more than sufficient to put the hurt on a demon.
*In practice even if not in bona fide Monster Manual terms.
Haley didn’t get her nifty bow until the Greysky City arc, and magic weapons don’t automatically bypass damage reduction now.
A succubus is vulnerable to cold iron and Good-aligned weapons, so Haley still needs to shoot her with the iron arrows or do more than 10 damage with a shot to injure her. (It’s a lot easier for her to do 10+ damage with that bow, though.)
A vampire’s DR, on the other hand, is defined to be bypassed by silver or magical weapons. (Or, presumably, a wooden stake…which always brings to mind my 2nd Edition monk staking a vamp with a thrown bonsai tree and a called shot.)
I love it when you guys geek out on this stuff. No way in hell am I learning as much D&D lore as is on display here, but its fascinating to watch the parrying back and forth about battle minutiae and spells and saving throws and so forth. Thanks!
Almost forgot: are dwarves immune to poison?
Lastly: it’s interesting that the way Malack moves is evocative of the Three Fiends. Connection? I doubt it, but it seems like foreshadowing anyway.
You have no idea until you look at the Class and Level Geekery threads on the OotS forums, where readers analyze the available evidence to determine every possible detail about every character that catches their collective eye. There are over 500 posts in the current one, and it’s the ninth dedicated thread on the subject. The others were closed when the post count became a threat to the forum software. I just touched off a page and a half of discussion over there by suggesting that Malack’s use of Bolster Undead could give us a clue as to his highest possible cleric level.
As for me…I cheat. I look stuff up in various System Reference Document pages, rather than trying to remember it all. 
+2 racial bonus on saving throws against poison, and a racial Constitution bonus that also helps them on Fortitude saves.
Not immune, but they have a racial bonus to saving throws against it. Which, usually, is close enough.
[ETA: Ninja’d by Balance’s edit! See what I get for finding cites?]
Definitely (for those that don’t remember it).
Here’s a more detailed Durkon vs Poison breakdown–
Base Fort save (15th level cleric): +9
Racial bonus vs. poison: +2
Estimated Con bonus: +1
So, to save against poison, he’s got 1d20 + 12.
The save DC for Poison is DC 10 + ½ caster level + Wis modifier. The cap under discussion for Malack’s caster level is 13, and his Wisdom is 16+ (required for casting Harm), which gives him a +3 bonus. Total DC = 10 + 6 + 3 = 19. Durkon only needs a 7 or better on his d20 to beat it. Not a sure thing, but enough to justify a little taunting.
Whoa, Balance, I didn’t notice that was the same you over there.
And it’s also quite plausible that Durkon’s Con bonus is even higher than that, since adventurers usually have above-average Con. Everybody likes hit points, after all.
True, but there’s no specific in-comic evidence of it, so it’s currently held at 12 (10 + racial bonus, I guess).
And yep, same me–and I had a notion that was the same you from reading the posts. So now you know what my avatar would be like if we had avatars here.
So couldn’t a vampire Malack be centuries (heck, millennia) old? And if so, even if he dawdled over his books for decades, he could find some way to level up once in while. Yet he’s not high enough level to dispel Durkons Death Ward spell. Doesn’t this argue that he couldn’t be a V-lord, since he’s too new at the vampire game? I mean, unless he got lucky and slew his V-lord dad almost from v-birth and v-graduated early?
With OOTSverse being D&D brought to its logical conclusion - I think the only way to level up is to kill stuff.
Haley makes a comment when explaining her history with Crystal that Crystal is “Pretty deadly with that funky dagger.” (No link, sorry, I can’t figure out how to dig that up directly.) That’s not definitive, but it’s likely. Haley also stole a bunch of magical jewelry from Crystal, and while it’s not specified what they are, I think we can figure that Haley’s getting either improved saves or improved AC from them.