Dming Controllers

[TerraDave]

daze craze is something else. Though lockdown can come from different places..the fighter in my group stil bugs me with this, you think I would have gotten use to it, and for a while we had a cleric with a powerful control type affect.

its now common for solos at least to have a save at the start of their turn against a lot of these effects. Variety of monsters, and, yes, targeting the source can also work.

 

[eternalsandwyrm]

daze craze is something else. Though lockdown can come from different places..the fighter in my group stil bugs me with this, you think I would have gotten use to it, and for a while we had a cleric with a powerful control type affect.

its now common for solos at least to have a save at the start of their turn against a lot of these effects. Variety of monsters, and, yes, targeting the source can also work.

having solos save at the beginning i like that. i just hated to ban a class, but i have to keep the game interesting for my players too. i think saves for solos at the begining of their turn with minions with 2HKO might even everything out enough to unban it. thanks every one.

 

[the Jester]

flame seed
twisting vines
savage frenzy
vine serpents
since i made minions 2 hit kills they are not the issue, it how the druid locks every thing down all the time.
in one fight in our last game the druid literally tied up the boss the entire fight.

This really doesn't look so bad to me. A few auto-kills on minions (before you changed them)? That's what minions are for. They're there for the pcs to mow down in huge numbers, at least, in my mind. Use waves of 'em; use minions with cool on-death abilities, or whatever, but you shouldn't be surprised when they die quick and easy.

Remember, savage frenzy is a daily; twisting vines is great for slowing down one guy, but only one.

What kind of encounters are you using? There doesn't need to be a "boss"- just use a mix of artillery and brutes or soldiers, and he can go ahead and slow down the brutes (allowing the artillery to destroy him by ignoring them) or slow the artillery uselessly.

Another option: Use more skirmishers, especially ones that have abilities that trump difficult terrain, slow, etc.

Another option: Daze him. If he's dazed and flanked by bad guys, he has to choose between making some sort of escape or getting ripped to pieces.

Another option: Get next to him with multiple enemies.

Another option: Eladrin bad guys or other teleporters.

Another option: Hidden/invisible foes, especially lurkers. A warlock with eyebite. If he doesn't know where they are, it's harder for him to lock them down.

I have an extraordinarily effective and frustrating "stop hitting yourself" mage (enchanter) in my epic game; he's the most frightfully effective controller I have seen in 4e. But I still challenge him plenty. It's just a matter of building encounters designed not to neutralize him, but rather to make him sweat. It would never occur to me to ban the class, or any other class, for being good at what it does.

Compare your problem druid to a "come and get it" PH fighter. He can be the entire front line by himself, locking his foes down or punishing the hell out of them if they ignore him. A good defender is extremely annoying to deal with as a dm. Yet I love it- a good defender, like a good controller, lets a pc excel at what he wants to excel at. Yes, you need to adjust your tactics, but it's quite possible to challenge that pc- ANY pc- with the right monsters. And in 4e, it's easy to make whatever monster you want to use the right monster. It is so easy to swap in an appropriate power to a monster in 4e that I hardly use standard creatures at all anymore.

 

[Balesir]

having solos save at the beginning i like that. i just hated to ban a class, but i have to keep the game interesting for my players too. i think saves for solos at the begining of their turn with minions with 2HKO might even everything out enough to unban it. thanks every one.

If you don't have the Monster Vault, it has lots of "updated" solos that get around daze, stun and domination in interesting ways that make it a worthwhile purchase (maybe second hand, if you don't need the tokens) just for them. Dragons that make 'reactive' attacks off turn (10 initiative points before their "real" turn) - if they are dazed, stunned or dominated, though, the attack doesn't happen but the condition causing the daze/stun/domination ends - for example.

 

[eternalsandwyrm]

Another option: Use more skirmishers, especially ones that have abilities that trump difficult terrain, slow, etc.

i was just thinking about skirmisher, the game with the druid is over now and it was befoer i found this site and read all kinds of great idea to make 4th edition better(ie use more brutes). i just didn't want to run into the same frustrations with my new controller

 

[sabrinathecat]

Yeah, you'll find lots of good advice here. And some you should ignore (like mine).

4e has lots of odd tweeks. One encounter power was Hellfire chain lightning which was a minion-popper of horrendous scale when you get to epic. Round 1 after that character's turn, the minions were almost always dead (or at least 1/2 of them were).

Part of the fun is watching the PCs do something unexpected. Sometimes I'll have something I expect to be a challenging encounter, and they romp through it. Other times, something that should have been a cake-walk turns into a massive challenge. Go figure.

 

[Starfox]

My solution to many minion issues is to ALWAYS require an attack roll against minions. Auto-hit powers are not auto-damage against minions; they still require a to-hit roll. That way, wide-area low-damage effects are not minion autokill.

Then again, considering the number of normal and elite monsters my PCs could handily defeat, I didn't really use minions past heroic tier.

Mind you, thjs was long ago; rules might have changed since then.

 

[Jhaelen]

i had to ban druid until i can figured out how to deal with them.

It's really funny sometimes, how different experiences can be in other groups.
In our group we pretty much all agree that our druid character is by far the weakest and most replacable of all characters. Apart from a few gimmicks that are mildly annoying he doesn't seem to contribute much to combats _and_ he's the squishiest character! We don't always have the same party composition and most of the time we play without a controller. My sorcerer seems to be a more than adequate substitute, except he _also_ does a ton of damage.

 

[the Jester]

My sorcerer seems to be a more than adequate substitute, except he _also_ does a ton of damage.

Of course! He's a striker!

The sorcerer in my epic game dishes out insane damage- he does about 40 or 50 points with his at wills.

 

[Storminator]

I think my group is running without a controller right now. They never seemed to be particularly impressive to me. Maybe my group doesn't know how to build one, or maybe my encounters don't reward them well enough.

PS