Ok, I'm really new to 4e, believe it or not. I've played for a bit, but no DMing for me. And, like many here, I've heard a lot about the whole "grind" issue in the game. Not wanting to run into this, a thought occurred to me as I was brainstorming an adventure to write.
In the 4e DMG, under adventure design, it posits that the base unit to use is a soldier or a brute. By and large, the encounter templates were two or three soldier/brutes, with the remainder taken up by the other roles.
What if you shift that? Instead of the front line being soldier brutes, why not use skirmishers? So, the meat and potatoes of any encounter will be skirmishers, with the remainder being taken up by artillery, controllers and the odd brute.
And, as an additional thought, how much affect would it have to make up the xp budget with lower level monsters, but more of them? Instead of five baddies, drop a level or two on the baddies and use seven of them?
Again, avoiding using a majority of brutes/soldiers. But, with a two level drop, the brutes/soldiers go down pretty quickly. Or at least it looks that way on paper.
Would this work? Or would the monsters be totally ineffectual against the party? Does using a couple of levels down nerf the monsters to the point where they are too wimpy. I'm coming at this from 3e experience where dropping a couple of CR's turns a monster into tissue paper that hits like a wet noodle.
Would this work?
At heart your analysis is pretty good. There are a few details where I think a bit differently, but in broad strokes I think you're on to the nut of it.
The assumed 'base' monster is in fact the skirmisher. I think the DMG1 encounter templates bear this out, and if you look at the monster design rules skirmishers are 'baseline' on everything. They do obviously tend to have a certain specific thrust to their powers but a 5 skirmisher at-level encounter will give your characters baseline chances to hit and defend. In general skirmishers are also the easiest monster role to foil and tend to be less troublesome than other monsters if the party is reasonably well designed.
Brutes can easily be over leveled. I've actually tossed in brutes up to level+7 now and then, and level+5 is certainly not a real problem (but stick to standard brutes and avoid ones that are too specialized). A Hill Giant for instance can be engaged by an 8th level party. It will be a tough opponent, but the party can hit it, deal enough damage to knock it out reasonably quickly, and survive its attacks. This is a bit of an exception though and not something to do all the time.
Soldiers definitely present a significant grind hazard. Personally I use them sparingly. One soldier monster in an encounter is usually enough and throwing in over leveled soldiers is indeed usually a bad idea. Even an equal level elite soldier can become tedious. They tend to damp down the party's ability to move around and just generally require a lot of attacks to kill. This is somewhat dependent on player ability though. A party that is sharp and knows how to focus fire well, has good debuffs and knows when to use them, and can direct attacks against the monster's weakest defense can find many soldiers to be fairly easy.
Well used controllers can really sometimes slow things down a good bit too. It really depends on the degree of synergy with the other monsters and the tactical situation. Most parties will hammer these monsters flat right off if they possibly can though and their mediocre defenses do mean they'll usually go down pretty fast.
Lurkers are hard to quantify as each one is pretty unique. Some are hard to kill, others pretty much get off one shot and go down.
Overall avoiding higher level monsters, keeping down the number of soldiers, using minions etc. and tending towards more monsters vs tougher monsters will generally make combat less tedious and more fun.
The combat environment is a big factor too though. Regardless of encounter design its generally tough to make a really interesting encounter without interesting terrain. Every fight should present some sort of tactical puzzle for the players to solve. Sometimes it can involve ways to overcome some sort of advantage the monsters have from terrain, other times it can involve figuring out how to gain an advantage yourself. Hazards, traps, 3 dimensional terrain, dynamic terrain, etc can really add to the encounter. They can also help make it shorter at the same time. Knocking a monster into a pit or turning a trap against it, pushing it into a hazard, etc SHOULD all be good ways to dish out more damage more quickly as well as breaking up the monster's tactical plans.
When it comes right down to it though if you have a lackluster party with little tactical coordination, a fairly vanilla tactical situation, and a couple of robust monsters you are likely to end up with a fairly static fight that can extend into a bunch of rounds of exchanging at-wills to little effect while everyone simply stands their ground.
I think the main difference with earlier editions is that 4e has a bit narrower sweet spot when it comes to encounter speed. In the old days the magic user could always whip out some nasty spell and close things out pretty quickly. Low level monsters in the old days also behave a lot more like 4e minions than anything else, they rarely take more than 1 or 2 hits to kill and most of them have poor defenses. 2-3 round combats were pretty typical in 1e and 2e vs less important foes. The threat level of monsters also had a lot more to do with their abilities than anything else, so it was pretty typical to have larger numbers of weaker encounters with the threat being more things like poison, level draining, or a particularly high damage output. 4e tends to lack these kinds of things and DMs seem to be drawn towards fewer tougher encounters. Overall the party can probably deal with more stuff more quickly in 4e, it just tends to come in fewer bigger encounters.
Also I think there's a lot of rose colored glasses being worn. I personally don't find 4e combat overall to be slower than 1e or 2e combat was. It may SEEM slower paced when you compare one combat to another but I remember PLENTY of 2-3 hour 2e encounters in the last campaign I ran using those rules. Especially when you add in things like preparation time.
