I had a thought about what might come next. Call it a prediction if you want.
The next strip will start as an internal Durkula/Durkon scene. Durkon will see Durkula give a telepathic order to Hilgya. He’ll try to interfere with that, perhaps giving a countermand or a different order. He may even be able to converse with Hilgya. Anyway, Hilgya will be paralyzed by indecision or confused or something which will prevent her from doing anything. It’s possible this may tie in with the last memory that Durkon wanted Durkula to see.
How does that work if Greg wins the fight, can he quickly create coffins and assign them to his minions? Is there any way that Greg without distractions could rescue a coffinless cloud of smoke?
I assume the “x” over the eyes (and that some were killed with fire, and the others with special anti-undead green “fire”) means they are killed for real, not just forced into gaseous form.
But Durkula doesn’t give a shot about the others except as allies in this fight. If he wins the fight, he has no motive to bring them back from the dead, even if he could whip up some coffins. So either way, I think they are dead for good.
Standard fire (inc Fireball, Flame Strike, etc) doesn’t permanently kill a vampire. The only three ways listed in the rules to immediately destroy a vampire are:
(1) Exposure to direct sunlight for two rounds
(2) Immersion in running water for three rounds
(3) Staking the body and then destroying the body while staked. If you remove the stake beforehand, the vampire recovers.
Everything else that reduces a vampire to 0hp just pushes it involuntarily into gaseous form where it must return to its coffin for be permanently destroyed. I suppose Burlew could homebrew a magic sword that permanently destroys vampires upon death but I haven’t seen evidence of that and it’d be pretty pointless since no one, not even Durkon, has a coffin so reducing them to 0hp should be a de facto permanent kill.
I don’t know if Durkon could do anything for the vampires currently smoked but I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure that there’s been rules in sourcebooks or Dragon magazine articles about how a vampire could get a new coffin but they all included a lengthy period of becoming attuned.
Edit: I made a mistake before in that I thought the vampires with the evil eyes were dead. They’re the ones who (voluntarily) turned gaseous to escape the fight and warn Durkon. Likewise, Malack and Durkon had eyes when they voluntarily turned gaseous. Still, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence and since the rules are explicit about what happens to destroyed vampires, I’m confident that the ‘smoke’ from the death ones is their involuntary gaseous form.
If Durkula sees Durkon’s memories “at the speed of thought”, how is there an external action sequence? Unless he showed the whole memory and it didn’t do anything (yet).
There are a few other ways in the rules to insta-kill vampires. For instance, the Hunter of the Dead prestige class gets an ability that undead they reduce to 0 HP are instantly destroyed, and can’t use any of their undead mojo to come back (this applies at least to vampires, ghosts, and liches, all of which have undead-coming-back-mojo of one sort or another). So there could be another mechanic (like Roy’s nifty and unique sword) which also has that effect. But as said, it’s not too relevant, given the lack of coffins.
Could it be that the particular memory isn’t important? Maybe one of the spawn (or Dominated Order team members) will take an action that harms (or, Thor forbid, kills) little Kudzu, in violation of his promise. Any chance of such an eventuality freeing Durkon’s soul, and enabling him to fight Greg, mano-a-mano, inside his head?
In-comic I don’t know, but it usually makes sense in AD&D strategy. This because a monster with 500 HP left and the same monster with 1 HP left are exactly as dangerous (and even if they’re very weak, they still have 5% chance to do something annoying every turn) and it’s only when a character is unconscious that they aren’t a threat any more. IOW there are no benefits whatsoever to merely wounding someone, no matter how heavily.
Focusing on the Big Bad with their 500 HP and one set of attacks/spells per round typically makes less statistical sense than clearing 10 idiots with 50 HP each, and one set of attacks/spells each (in this case, apparently, innate Dominate Person, which is a double whammy of sucky) ; even if the spells and attacks of the Big Bad do more individual damage/turn.
It’s also typically easier to inflict high damage on the underlings to begin with, which only compounds their statistical targettiness.
Roy knows from his previous battle that he can’t kill Durkula with a one-shot that way. The underlings have fewer hit points, so a single strike against them combined with previous damage does them in.
As far as my idea of Durkon interfering with telepathic commands to Hilgya, I’m afraid that’s a no go. It seems he promised not to say another word during this battle if D* looks at one last memory. Another clever idea bites the dust…
Well, Durkon has enough hit points that it’s unlikely Roy could one-shot him. And the “Action economy” school of thought says that a lot of smaller monsters is more of a threat than a single large monster since each one gets its own attack. Each vampire standing, even if only a fraction of Durkon’s level is one more Dominate gaze attack, one more Dispel Magic (or other spell) or even just one more melee attack. Clearing out the ‘trash’ before hitting the big guy is standard procedure for most parties.
There’s also the possibility that Roy hopes to stake Durkon to destroy his body (as resurrect the remains) rather than popping him into gaseous form with a magic greatsword blow.
It tends to be rather foolish to ignore minions in D&D and Pathfinder. Sure, you want to focus fire as best you can to take down the big guns, but you gotta wipe the pawns off the board too.
Hell, I remember a 4E combat where everyone mobbed the boss leaving 3 ‘minions’ to me. Only they weren’t minions, and they dropped me rather quickly.
On the other hand, Roy does damage to one foe at a time, while V can hit many at once. It might make more sense for Roy to focus all of his attacks on the biggest threat, while letting others mop up the trash.
Which was why I was surprised that V hadn’t memorized more than 1 Quickened spell. V’s got gobs of spell slots—three 7th levels, +1 Evocation spell for each known spell level, +1 more 7th level slot with a forum-best guess Intel of 24. So five 7th level slots, and they probably all aren’t Forcecage. We know that one of them was taken up with a Quickened Fireball, which probably got lost with the slam attacks mentioned below.
The two sets of slam attacks stacked a few negative levels on V (I count at least two levels removed, best case, and it probably was anywhere from 3-5.), and while the levels got Restored, the memorized spells from those levels didn’t.
But that’s still a bunch of 6th level slots for Disintegrate or a Forceful hand to get in the face of one of the casters and make it challenging for them to try and Dominate with their gaze attack. And a bunch of 5th level slots for Quickened Magic Missile. Etc…
It just seems strange, and strange for the Order to waste time dealing with mooks who really can’t harm them when they were warded, yet mostly ignore the group of monsters that can remoove all of those protective wards. But, and as mentioned upthread already, I guess it’s no stranger than a ~14th level cleric blowing a Will save and, knowing how unlikely it is for the cleric to blow it, the vampire still choosing to waste an action on trying to Dominate the cleric in the first place.
Sure, Roy can hit multiple enemies in one round, but he still can’t hit multiple enemies at once. A level 16 fighter can do perhaps 35 damage per attack, which means that he can either do 35 damage each to four mooks, or 140 damage to the boss. A wizard, meanwhile, can do 35 damage with a Fireball to all the mooks, or 112 damage to the boss with Disintegrate (and using a higher-level slot, to boot).
Although what would probably have been best of all for Roy would be to close to melee range, waste one of the mooks, and then Cleave through possibly another mook and Not-Durkon. It’d mean not making all of his iterative attacks, but he’d still get two or possibly three in, with better bonuses (swords aren’t made for throwing, and iterative attacks are less likely to hit anyway), and the next round he’d be in a better position.