After playing some more of 4e, I've decided that the combats are pretty boring. Every combat is the same: hit, hit, healing powers, hit, hit, monsters dead, PCs use healing surges. The monsters usually hit every round but don't do enough damage for anyone to care about. Monsters take forever to die and the group ends up grinding them down with at-wills once the battle is clearly won. I have never once felt truly threatened during an encounter. The only time I'm nervous about the outcome of a fight is when the healing runs out and we're trading 1[W] + stat attacks with the monsters and it's a toss-up as to which side will sandpaper the other to -1 first.
That to me sounds like you're using the Monster Manual 1 for monsters and not Monster Vault - even low level monsters are a whole lot meaner in general in MV. It also sounds as if your DM is making two textbook mistakes that the rulebooks don't emphasise enough.
To compare the difference in meanness between the two books, a level 1 kobold skirmisher in the MM1 does d8 damage and has a d6 sneak attack. The level 1 kobold skirmisher in Monster Vault does between d6+3 and d6+11 damage depending whether the slippery little bugger is dancing circles round you or you've shut him down. You are right that you can safely ignore d8 damage - but
no one is able to ignore d6+11 damage at first level.
The first mistake is that 4e is a game of combined arms. Unless using solos you
need more than one monster type and monster role per fight (with the sole exception of non-vanilla skirmishers). Artillery does +25% baseline damage at range and -25% baseline in melee - and both have very poor AC and hit points. Brutes and soldiers don't have ranged attacks but are nasty in combat. Artillery need a battle line in front of them.
Skirmishers deserve their own special note because they, to me, come in two types.
The first are vanilla skirmishers who have exactly the expected math, melee and ranged attacks, and very little special about them. Useful for making up the numbers with veterans. The second are the interesting ones which have high and low damage states - textbook would be a heroic tier monster with a 2d6 sneak attack when they have combat advantage.
But there are other conditions such as the Kobold Quickblade (the MV level 1 skirmisher) that does +2 damage for every square they have shifted so far this turn, and both have Shifty and an at will move action that lets them shift 3 (bumping their damage up from d6+3 to a possible d6+11). You shut down Quickblades by methods like dazing them, knocking them prone, or putting them into the fighter's Defender Aura - or anything else that cuts their move action, like throwing them off something or putting them into difficult terrain to slow down their shifting. Or anything else you can think of including throwing the wizard into the line to box the kobold in to make sure this level 1 skirmisher is doing d6+3 damage rather than d6+11 at will.
And deciding whether the monsters do low damage or high (which is around 66% higher than low damage) is decided by positioning, mobility, and tactics. Can you keep the artillery monsters in melee? They are doing low damage. If they can escape and shoot they are doing high. Can you shut down the variable skirmishers and stop them moving the way they want to (normally to sneak attack)? Low damage. If they get to move almost freely it's high damage. A level +1 encounter where the monsters are always allowed to do high damage and focus fire = dead PCs.
Out of curiosity, is the difference between a level 1 monster doing d6+3 damage and d6+11 swingy enough? And does it count when the size of the swing is determined by tactics rather than dice?
The second mistake for setting up combat in 4e and keeping it interesting (as well as combined arms) is to put terrain in. Most 4e PCs have some sort of forced movement powers and/or some form of mobility. Put a simple pit trap into a classic battle and people will shrug and step round the pit. Put it into a 4e battle and, due to the forced movement, you've changed the entire dynamic of the combat. If the fighter has Tide of Iron or the wizard Beguiling Strands, any monster who stands too near that pit is probably going to be pushed in. You've just changed the entire battle from a slugfest to the PCs and monsters dancing round trying to force each other into the hole - a fundamentally
much more interesting situation. And make the terrain more interesting than a simple pit...
Does any of that help?
It's interesting because I see many proponents of 4e claim that the encounter building guidelines work very well... but I'm not sure exactly what that means. IMO, a challenging encounter as put forth by the DMG (with the rare exception of certain creatures) is rarely if ever actually "challenging".
In the Rules Compendium a hard encounter is defined as one two to four levels above the group's level. I don't expect a standard encounter to be that likely to kill PCs unless something goes
badly wrong (hi there, completely out of position wizard) - otherwise the death rate would be absurd.
In fact I'd be curious to hear from some 4e fans on why they consider the 4e encounter guidelines to work so well. In other words what criteria are they judging them by?
EDIT: Maybe I should create a new thread for this...
That as long as I leave some terrain in I can get an interesting fight where the monsters seem to have a chance and one of my players worries "We're all going to die" by pulling out a by the book hard encounter.
