if your 4 player party can get rid of 20 or so minions in 1 round then they deserve to feel awesome.
My advice
1. use minions
2. use minions with a MAXIMUM of 2 attack options,
3. Make their attacks very damaging and more likely to hit.
4. Make all the minions go one one initiative count.
Emphasis mine.
This is entierly your opinion and has no basis in any rule in any book of 4th edition.
It can be the way YOU play and that's totally fine. But your gaming style doesn't apply to what I like and appreciate about D&D. Nor what I think is "absurd" or not.
I disagree. Alignment doesn't exist within normal RL people so why should characters that are supposed to be complex and interesting have to stick to some arbitrarily decided moral code.
Let me clarify my point:
1. While probably more mischievous than most cats, and definitely more intelligent, I would be hard pressed to call them "monster-worthy" I don't see them as serious threats. Even a unicorn or a riding horse could easily do more damage physically then a pixie.
2. When...
They don't list housecats either. I think they fall into that category. If a DM told me that there was 5 or 6 pixies in the next room, my reaction would not be to roll initiative.
Regardless of your opinion of how dangerous these creatures can be, they certainly don't encompass the idea of fey...
If you want a big baddie I would not use levels to make it big and bad. I'd give it extra hp, lots of minor action powers, free actions when hit, powerful recharge powers.
It isn't very fun for players to fight something their level +7 or 8 mainly due to their defenses. round after round of...
Go to build-retraining, select the level of retraining, highlight the feat you want to retrain out of in left column, highlight the feat you want to retrain into in the right column, then click "take element"
Yeah, sorry jbear but Aulirophile is right. Also I think people should pay more attention to when something adds rolls to that which was previously NOT a roll. Because as the OP pointed out, the result can be FAR more than the actual average of the dX roll.