75% health, +1/2 level damage and... ongoing damage?

[lostingeneral]

As the title implies, I'm currently using a system in my game where the monsters have 75% of their given health, and in exchange do extra damage equal to half of their level. I absolutely love this change - battles are more deadly, more exciting, and overall, more quick. The grind was already starting to set in before I put this in place, and now things are buzzing along smoothly.

But an issue has come up regarding ongoing damage. Until now, I haven't been adding the 1/2 level bonus to ongoing damage, but the party is coming up on a fight with a solo that sort of relies on this kind of damage - almost all of its attacks do somewhat underwhelming damage on their own, but give ongoing. The solo has a lot of health, so cutting it back by 25% has had a pretty big impact on its survivability. I wonder if it might not be so bad now to add the bonus (which would be +4 for this particular monster) to bring the 5 ongoing damage up to 9.

Would this work? Or would I basically be sentencing my players to death in the long run, particularly as we enter paragon tier and beyond?

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

Which monster is it? If it's a recent monster, boosting its ongoing damage would probably be overkill.

If it's an early monster, it'd probably work just fine. Alternatively, you could bump its regular damage by +1/2 and then some. Personally I like ongoing damage in increments of 5 for easy tracking, but YMMV.

 

[lostingeneral]

Thanks for the reply.

It's a recent monster, as I really only like to use post-MM3 damage expressions - it's a young green dragon (thought I specified that, sorry!) that has been scaled up to level 8. It has multiple ways of dealing that ongoing poison damage, including poisonous wounds, bite, and the breath weapon, not to mention flyby attacks that include the latter two.

I suppose I'll just leave it at 5 then, and leave the boosted damage on the actual attacks alone.

 

[Quickleaf]

Yes on single target attacks, No on multi-target attacks.