Undrave
Legend
If you do too much, it stops being 4E and becomes another game.
To me, the 4E system is a very strong system - but not one that works well to support the variance found in a D&D fantasy setting. It works better when the enemies you face are more limited in variance. The mechanics just don't support a wide range of ideas in enemies. To that end, the way fixed 4E and made great use of it was to use it for more modern settings. I found that a port of it worked very well for a Dead-West style game, a modern spy game, and a 1920s Call of Cthulhu style game. When most of the enemies were either humanoid or human like, the system just worked better.
And what you say of 5E is what I find to be true of 4E. And I tried - hard - to create greater diversity. 4E monsters were generally built on a very similar core with a few random abilities that were less definitional and more incidental.
I have a very clear recollection from about 6 months into the 4E era when the group of PCs were wading through a room of foes, slaughtering minions and pushing on to the big boss ... when one of them commented they were going to kill the orc on the right. Another player said, "You mean the hobgoblin? We're fighting hobgoblins, right?" They argued back and forth for a few seconds then turned to me. I had a confused look on my face, apparently, because a third player said, "I'm pretty sure he didn't say what we were fighting, just that they were shadowy brutes."
It wasn't that people were confused or made assumptions - it was that most of us never even noted that we'd failed to discuss what type of monster it was. It was just - interchangeable. That was the moment I realized that 4E would never be the D&D I'd known for so long.
Sorry to say this, but I think you were using your monsters wrong. Hobgoblins gain bonuses when standing next to each other, and thus would battle in formations, matching their militarized and ordered society. Orcs on the other hand get bonuses to charges and non-minions, in the MM, had a power to recover HP. They fight like Barbarians and charge into battle with no fear.
Monsters in 4e are incredibly well designed to have emergent strategies built into them as long as you play them as wanting to use their unique abilities. Lurkers will lurk, leaders will lead, etc etc.
At the same time, focusing on the same status condition over and over feels like a weakness.Too many high level creatures basically had to have "cheater powers" to represent a threat, such as immunity to conditions and other abilities specifically designed to counter the players. I put my game on hiatus while I tried to brainstorm a better way to handle this (daze is a common debuff on player powers. If I use an enemy immune to daze, in my mind, at least, it's basically punishing a player for not taking another power, and it's not like they can just change powers willy nilly).
But you're also right on that point that it does feel like the synergistic nature of powers was possibly underestimated. An issue though is that some party are just better tacticians that other so their battles will be more effective and knowing what level of skill to design for is difficult. I think it might be possible to lower their efficiency with a timed turn so they can't obsessively plan everything, maybe even prevent them from coordinating out of character.That's a very important change that I think needs to be made to not just 4e, but every version of D&D; not enough testing is done with high level play, and the "solution" seems to always be "just let monsters ignore player abilities", either through immunities, "I just save at this time" effects, or special abilities that completely neuter characters, like debilitating auras, huge AoE's that inflict negative status effects, off turn actions, multiple actions, and even negative status effects delivered by regular old attacks.