Well, that does not even *need* to be disproven, because it is *obvious*.
You know, you'd think that, and yet, here we are. Not you, obviousely, but some people are still claiming that an ogre is a threat to a 10th-level party.
An actual threat? No. Something you'll need to seriously consider prioritizing as a target? I'm not so sure.
4E minions are a threat because, while they may not do a lot of damage, they hit just as often as other on-level monsters, meaning you can never safely trust to your high AC / Ref / whatever to render them largely ineffective.
Similarly, in an armor as DR system as usually proposed, a guy in platemail can pretty much ignore a guy with a knife - yes, the knife wielder might do some damage on a crit, but on a round-to-round decision-making basis, you ignore him and go after the guy with the battleaxe. Applying the analogy, yes, the ogres might get lucky and do a bunch of damage in one round - but, statistically, on average, they won't (if bounded accuracy isn't tweaked correctly) so you can ignore and focus on the bigger threats.
My point was that ogres can still be a reasonable threat at higher levels, but obviously not at the same numbers that they are a threat at level 1.
I think a good next step would be to see, for level 5 characters (because that's as much as we've got in the playtest), exactly how many ogres it takes to be a meaningful threat.
But, past a certain point, I think you'll get into an issue where, academically, a given amount of ogres represents a threat, but, in practice, such an amount will never be playable (e.g., 400 standards kobolds are certainly a threat to even a really high-level 3E Fighter, just because of the natural 20s, but you'll never actually run a 400-on-1 combat).
I'd like to see a bit more math on that break point; maybe we can talk [MENTION=6694877]slobo777[/MENTION] into running some numbers for us.
We've already seen someone (again, not you) balking at 10 monsters as the absolute upper limit on what he's willing to run.
It also means that in a given encounter, where you have 4 PC and 8 ogres, the ogres make two hits against one of the PC in the first combat round.
Yeah, you need about 5 attackers before you hit the 50/50 tipping point for "at least two hits."
Plus or minus a bit for varying ACs across PC types, of course.
That makes for a meaningful damage, specially if they are hitting the Wizard or Rogue.
This gets into things that are harder to model, like are those hits on the same PC? Is that PC in range of a Fighter who can Defend? Do those PCs actually have defensive reactions of their own (e.g., a spell or high-level rogue ability)?
Ferinstance, the 1st-level Wizard spell Cause Fear requires a Wisdom save (at -2 for the ogres, against DC ... 14?), which requires those who fail to run away from the wizard for 1 minute. With 8 ogres in the room, you've got a 10% chance for them *all* to fail their save. The effect ends on damage, certainly, but that's why your group would then focus fire individual ogres down. At 5 ogres, it's a ~24% chance for all of them to fail. That's a 1st-level spell, and one I just sorta picked quickly from the list.
We don't know yet what more powerful abilities those 10th-level Wizards and Rogues are going to have, but a single low-level one is already making a large number of ogres much less threatening than they might otherwise be.
The ogres do not have to fight by themselves alone either. At lvl 1, you fight one single ogre. At level 5th, you might fight 4 ogres with a pair of tripping dire wolves and one evil orc shaman, which also have spells to back up them. At level 10, you'll be fighting a pair of fire giants, with have half a dozen hell hounds and half a dozen ogres.
And I don't dispute that - but the question is, in that 10th-level combat, are the ogres actually a threat by themselves, or are they only a threat because the party is distracted by / focused on the fire giants and hell hounds?
And, given where 10th-level defenses and offenses might be (because we don't know, yet), I'm not sure that "I fireball* the ogres" isn't going to be a good move to take out a lot of them, and I don't know that the ogres' attack bonuses and damage amounts are going to be enough for the party to take them seriously, rather than as an annoyance. Is "I take 1 action away from the Wizard to eliminate most of them" or "I take a single hit from a Fighter / Rogue" a meaningful part of the combat? Maybe!
Bounded accuracy promises that the party will need to take them seriously; I just haven't seen enough to be convinced that it's working yet.
(And, as an aside, maybe 10th-level is past the point at which even bounded accuracy wants to make ogres still relevant, in which case them being largely inconsequential in the 10th-level fight is just fiine from a design perspective.)
Anyway, good conversation. Thanks!
* More likely to be ice storm or chain lightning or something, at that point, but I hope get my point.
