His stats list as
Avoidance 25
Fortitude 34
Discipline 34

Are those 34s valid? I think I dropped him to 28s when I ran before, but wanted to see if might have missed an errata. The 25 Avoidance I get, especially with Overpower and Reckless Swing evening out the odds a bit by dropping it.

If you look at his statblock, he's a Tier V character. If you look at the bestiary statblocks on how to build an Adversary, their base defences are 2 Moderate (15-16) and 1 Difficult (17-18), and they get an additional +3 at Tier I, II, and III, and +4 at Tier IV and V. This means that his BASE defences before taking size, talents, etc into account should be between 32 and 35.

I get that, but how'd he get a 25 Avoidance? I assumed maybe he was weakened by his fight with Xabal.

Before Huge would be taken into account, he'd have A-27, F-32, D-34. His Avoidance is low and either 1) Reflects his weakened state, or 2) was artificially lowered to making him a BIT easier to fight at these tiers. Having a 30/34/34, especially with the tail and mace involved probably would have been too much at Tier I.

As I recall, those stats are the (severely) weakened stats. This is after he's gone toe to toe with a Valinor who fully healed himself multiple times (committing a near genocide in the process), and while he's being engaged by an entire army *by himself*.

I'd say to all GMs running this (and any other module): If the fight is intended to be lethal, and its 4/5/6 vs. a single opponent like this case (even accounting for the multiple attacks, he's still just one target), I would adapt the numbers on the fly based on how well the Heroes have been hitting throughout the rest of the event. If they're consistently rolling 25+, I'd up the Avoidance to 27/28. I'd want them to hit it 25-40% of the time. Because if every player hits every time, with the stats as presented, he will drop within 24 ticks. If you want the players to enjoy beating on him, you can raise the Stamina instead, but that just turns into a grind instead of a matter of tactical positioning and assisting each other to get the hits.

that's actually exactly how I've run him. This is my third time at this (2 tables and a pbp this time) and I've both upped and dropped his stats accordingly about at the rate you suggested. I have also not allowed tac edge unless they have a talent because of the tail and mace. To counter, I do use Reckless and Overpower pretty frequently. the PCs have hated it...but, they start hitting.

Besides, he only has 2 Fate. . .

Him sitting on his own on a big open map makes it easier for the players as well to move to where they want to get the best bonuses for hitting and to maximise their own talents.

His AV includes the reductions from his Talents. I would have to look at the homeplay version, but I know the one at Origins made that clear.

<shrug> If his avoidance is 34 then he can't really be beat by Tier 1 or tier 1.5 heroes. From a plot perspective its just that simple. It has to be lower or the plot has to assume the players "loose." Personally I would have been fine with him escaping to fight another day but I know there are also people who really wanted to face him as the "boss fight" of the Crusade Arc.

I've played that BI and run it twice now. How tough I made the Uhxbrachtit fight varried with party composition. The first time everyone through down I had six combat effective players and I pulled out all the stops to scare them. The second time I had four players (one an archer who hid in the back) and I had to be creative to not nerf the encounter ... but not TPK them either.

Ran this last weekend, dropped 4 of the 5 characters with wounds, due to massive damage rules.

They ranged from 1.5 to 1.9

partially this happened because of a really high discipline score (one of the martial character depends on being able to hit discipline score, I nerfed the fight by dropping 15 hps from the bad guy (I justified this because of one less player than the fight was designed for)