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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aegeri" data-source="post: 5264349" data-attributes="member: 78116">A non-optimized bloodmage with Archmage as an ED beats Orcus trivially, let alone a party of 5 epic PCs. My point is that one PC can trivially kill Orcus, what do you think five of them does (even when non-optimized)?Edit: Of course, this largely depends on how many people have even run an encounter with Orcus. For those curious;[spoiler]I ran E3 and the empowered Orcus is quite a bit better than his original MM counterpart. Still not great, but he wasn't a total pushover. For curiosities sake, I also ran the same encounter using the MM Orcus and he really struggled to put up a coherent challenge against the same group of PCs. Power design and action economy are just huge factors in a solos challenge - something Wizards didn't get to grips with fully until MM2[/spoiler]I actually do agree with this, terrain and other factors are also absolutely essential in making a competitive solo. But it is possible now to run a solo as a solo, plus have it as a fun and relevant encounter that isn't a walkover. I have achieved this with a minor houserule about daze/stun and similar action denial conditions being savable - but I am pleased that's all I needed to do.But having actually played extensively at high paragon/epic, I can say for certain that MM solos aren't competitive even with adjusted maths. MM2 and MM3 ones are.Catastrophic Dragons being elites was a surprise, but there are a good dose of solos in MM3. The good majority of them are really good as well! Lolth is fantastic fun and works very well. The Astral Kraken is just brutal and the Sea Kraken is one of the most fun solos for its level in all of 4E IMO. Imix I don't get and need to figure out how to use, but he has potential. Allabah is fantastic etc.Also IMO MM3 felt like compensation that there wasn't really a good set of non-elite and non-solo high paragon and epic monsters. That's really what was desperately needed and the book was full of them, something I vastly appreciate. This is something I kind of hope monster vault does as well, I hope it balances out less solos and more "normal" monsters at high paragon and epic especially. There are billions of viable heroic monsters - even I don't think MM heroic monsters are not worth using, everyone loves zombies after all - but we really need more paragon and epic regular monsters. I've been doing that for a long time myself, but unfortunately before the MM3 the sheer "cat-scratch" factor often meant it was just as grindy as a regular encounter. Now I can just use one solo and get the same effect. I think I'm a bit better off now <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />You know, my players are going to hate you eternally when they find out you were the source of this: I haven't tried two solos at once since the MM3 came out. I am interested to see how that goes.</blockquote>

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