The-Magic-Sword
Small Ball Archmage
My criticism comes from a place of understanding all of that and GMing and playing 5e for several years, tried many different solutions, none of them work as half as well Paizo's approach, especially since Paizo's isn't as dependent upon attrition as a means of creating difficulty. By the end, I could do it in 5e, but it was a lot of effort for limited payoff, especially since my players were less than thrilled with the way legendary stuff works (and funnily enough, I came from 4e before that, where I also preferred the bosses.)I'm going to disagree here. The encounter guidelines never provide you with the explicit guidance to make a dangerous solo battle. They don't exist in the RAW guidelines, so you can't overshoot them.
However, if you do get into the math, it is pretty clear what you need:
The mistake people make is seeing "deadly" (also the mistake in WotC's naming) and assuming it means deadly without reading the description or actually looking how that encounter's XP cost compares to the daily XP budget.
- Ideally a Legendary Monster for the action economy (which I think is better than 4e solos or PF2 monsters)
- Use 50-100% of the daily encounter budget. Here is a table to make it easy for you: Encounter Building - It's not Deadly, its Epic!
Also, 5e does not handle optimized PCs very well at all, which is a big problem for our playstyle in terms of 5e's bosses, even with legendary stuff in play.