Monsters not dishing enough damage

[HP Dreadnought]

So. . .

Does it seem to anybody else like the monsters just don't hit hard enough?

My 12th level fighter only becomes bloodied if I want him to be - and that is with the party healer having to expend minimal effort. He usually has daily-healing left over at the end of the day when we stop to rest after our 4th or 5th encounter.

It seems like a fight has to be Level +3 for us to break a sweat. None of us is using uber-twinked characters. . . although my fighter is pretty tough. We haven't had somebody drop unconscious since 4th level. . . and the only time any of the rest of the party (aside from the Paladin) takes big damage, is when I screw up and don't do my job - letting critters get past me to the "squishies."

And minions. . . minions are absolutely worthless.

Between the Wizard and the Cleric, the dragonborn paladin's BW, and even a couple nifty powers I have, there is so much area/burst/blast damage that every minion is dead by the end of round 2. . . unless they were way in the back and out of range. . . in which case they die the following round.

Anyway. . . I think the critters definitely need a damage power-up. Anybody else experienced this?

 

[keterys]

There's some very high variance between the effectiveness of different critters, as well as PCs. I've done adventures with my warlord where I never even threw an inspiring word, while a friend of mine at a different table had a near TPK.

That said, yes, lots of monsters do not do enough damage. Some do too much, but they're generally outnumbered.

This is especially true against a fine tuned party who can output damage rapidly to take down enemies and has a fair amount of defenses and resistance to damage.

 

[Iron Sky]

We went from level 1 to level 16 and pretty much the only times we were really worried in fights were when we only had 3 of our players there and when we "aggro'd" multiple fights at once. We also had rolled stats for that campaign though, so our experience might have been a bit off.

In my current game that I'm running, we've gone from level 3 to level 8 with 5 PC deaths. Someone goes unconscious almost every fight. There's been 4 or 5 fights that I didn't expect the characters to survive that they somehow pulled off.

That said, I rarely throw a fight at the PCs that's less than level +3, partially because I eyeball the fights for what I think will be a challenge rather than xp balance them out before hand(most of the time).

Most of the players between the two campaigns are the same. We're all powergamers with most pre- and post-session discussions being discussions of feats, builds, alternate characters, tactics, etc. No items or powers are banned in either game.

Individual character optimization, individual PC tactics, party composition, party tactics, DM(monster) tactics, encounter composition, individual monster challenge, terrain... all of it has an effect on counter difficulty.

Two fights with the same XP difficulty can have radically difficult outcomes due to the above factors, much less the vagaries of how the dice are falling on both sides of the screen.

 

[CapnZapp]

It seems like a fight has to be Level +3 for us to break a sweat.

Then it works as intended.

If you never feel threatened, then you should talk to your DM.

The game definitely offers infinite ways to threaten you, so it isn't the game. Perhaps your DM is only running official adventures, and running them by the book?

 

[keterys]

Then it works as intended.

Whoa, since when is Level + 3 to 'break a sweat' working as intended? Level + 3 should be in the serious danger realm and Level + 1 should require actual work, even if the chance of death is extraordinarily low.

 

[sfedi]

Whoa, since when is Level + 3 to 'break a sweat' working as intended? Level + 3 should be in the serious danger realm and Level + 1 should require actual work, even if the chance of death is extraordinarily low.

For a group of well built (not optimized) and well coordinated PCs I can totally see how they wouldn't sweat on encounters of their level + 1 and some level + 2 encounters.

Coordination being the key factor here.

 

[keterys]

HP Dreadnought said they weren't optimized (unlike Iron Sky, where it'd be acceptable)

The problem with setting the bar higher and higher on encounter level is that you make the game drag due to needing to clear more hp, enemies having higher defense, etc.

A normal group should break a sweat* at level +1, have a serious challenge at level +3. A... group that lacks coordination and ability to build their characters can then face their challenge at level +1 and face possible TPK at level +3. That's all well and good

And powergamers, well, we shoot ourselves in the foot in some cases, win on others.

* Assuming we're talking 'work for it', have to pay attention, throw a heal, etc and not _just_ talking about the sweat from fear of death. Maybe I'm working from a different sweat-based definition.

 

[Iron Sky]

The problem with setting the bar higher and higher on encounter level is that you make the game drag due to needing to clear more hp, enemies having higher defense, etc.

The game may drag, though not necessarily. In my experience in the really hard fights (level+4 or more - I had one that was level +7!) the fights do take longer, but my players know when they're in a fight that's pushing the limits and so usually those fights have much more tension and are far more dramatic because of it.

There have been one or two that dragged (such as the one where I tried two-hit minions... 40 of them), but for the most part I think drag is a matter of perception of time, not of the amount of time itself.

I've watched movies that were so slow it felt like it was dragging on 45 minutes in and watched other movies that I walked out of the theater saying "wow, can you believe that was 3 hours long? It flew by!"

In my experience, the group I play with doesn't break a sweat until the level +2-3 range. They face TPK at level+4-7, but have somehow managed to pull through half-a-dozen of said fights - though in one 4 out of 5 players died...

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I guess I would have to say that a DM who can't threaten a fairly average or even modestly optimized heroic tier party with a level +3 encounter is either misinterpreting some rules seriously in favor of the party, building highly unoptimized encounters, extraordinarily tactically challenged, or some combination of the three. Or else the OP's definition of an average party is pretty skewed. Even a heavily optimized party of hardcore optimizers should at least get some challenge out of level + 3.

The reason monsters don't dish out massive damage in a single round is actually pretty simple. It means success hinges on a very few die rolls and combat runs only 2-3 rounds, which means there is no time for interesting tactics. Worst case you end up with battles like in 3.5 at higher levels where the initiative roll is practically a flip of the coin to decide who wins.

4e combat is designed so that most battles should go about 6-8 rounds with some easy encounters maybe being as short as 4 rounds and some really super fancy big ones maybe going 12 at most. I've been DMing 4e since it came out and I don't recall a fight longer than 18 rounds yet, and that was a whopper where the party pulled in multiple groups of monsters and fought a running battle that took pretty much all night.

Its hard to give specific advice on how your DM could up the difficulty or why things are so easy without knowing more specific details. How long are your fights? What sort of PCs do you have in the party and what kind of damage are they doing? What sort of monsters are you fighting?

Minions should actually be moderately effective. Personally I haven't found them to be lacking overall. Sure sometimes they just die horribly, but that is after all part of their shtick. Other times I've had minions really over perform. It seems like at paragon tier and up minions would just start to be useless, but there are a couple reasons that isn't entirely the case. For one thing they still keep up in defenses, so they never become trivial to hit. Admittedly characters will eventually have a decent amount of auto-damage effects that can wipe them out, but that generally assumes the DM bunched a whole lot of minions in one place and left them dangling in front of the PCs noses. A smart DM will do that once, and then the next time they'll have a reserve wave of minions that show up right after the party is baited into expending their nice auto-damage minion sweeper. Tends to make them start guessing pretty quickly.

The other thing is minions aren't really useless if they force the party to pay attention to them. Better even is a clever DM will create encounters with combinations of minions and other monsters that create catch-22 situations. Like some cheap minions backed up by say a spectre that will be happy to raise his minions into more spectres if you are foolish enough to kill them. OK, you can ignore the minions, but that may not be a real good alternative, especially if they happen to have some annoying power that puts out a status condition or an aura or something like that. Basically while my players enjoy minions and are glad to find out some of the monsters are minions, they have learned to stay wary of them nonetheless.

 

[keterys]

In my experience in the really hard fights (level+4 or more - I had one that was level +7!)

Right, and you already admitted your players are actually powergamers and plan for optimal characters and tactics. So that's all correct.

A normal group should be almost guaranteed to TPK at Level+7 and Level+4 should be very serious business. Now, it does help when minions are a major part of that, since minions are, well, not costed appropriately, but I've seen one group take 3.5 hours to do a combat due to it being high level (though not crazily so, lvl+3 or lvl+4 at most), and them just missing a lot and having a lot of trouble burning through all those hp. Thankfully I was at the other table and mine tore through the encounter in reasonable order with heavy focused fire, lots of damage buffs, etc. Clearly, I was at the powergamer table, and my other friends weren't.