Are minions dangerous enough?

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

I've found minions with ranged attacks very dangerous due to focus fire.

Minions do more damage per point of XP than regular monsters, at least with their at-will attacks (which means 4 artillery minions could dish out frightful damage). A 1st-level minion usually does 4 damage, while a 1st-level monster usually does 9 damage, thus 4 minions can do more damage than a monster of equal XP in one round (they would dish out 16 damage, just under twice as much), with the same attack bonuses. Of course, minions don't last as long and usually don't have encounter powers. I wonder if the relationship holds at higher levels.

More experienced DMs often comment that at paragon minions aren't worth their XP and you need more, maybe a lot more. WotC seems to be making minions more dangerous. I've seen a few brutes that do reduced damage if they miss, for instance. And there's always the "blows up and does damage" kind of minion or "food for demonic powers" kind of minion.

 

[the Jester]

I'll have to wait to render an opinion on minions now until I've seen how much of a difference the new zone rules make (generally you take damage if you end, rather than start, your turn in a zone).

Given appropriate defenses and attacks, though, minions are reasonable at 4:1 at low levels (imho).

 

[Zaukrie]

Elite minions in my games take two hits to kill.

 

[Stalker0]

I find that minions are worth their money at low levels, but are worth much less at higher ones.

I know that some of the newer monsters have better minions, don't know what people's experiences with them have been.

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

I have had wildly variable experiences with minions; sometimes they're too good, other times they're barely even relevant. I have also experimented with ways to make them more effective, as in "elite" minions, and other tricks.

Basically, what some of the others have pointed out - whether or not a minion has an effective ranged attack - makes a huge difference. If they can keep their distance, stay out of range of retaliation, and not clump up, they can actually be very deadly with focus fire. I nearly TPK'ed a party this way once. Lots of minions with range and focus fire, and they just won the battle of action economy, pure and simple.

Melee minions tend to go down easily though, and often enough don't have anything interesting to bring to the table, except perhaps to draw a few attacks, but even at low levels, a lot of classes have multi-target powers, so often this is a non-issue. Sometimes I just throw these in for flavour and don't count them for XP at all.

I have had some success with minions providing adequate challenge. One such scenario was as part of a normal, balanced fight - the minions were there for colour, but I used minions that were 2-3 levels higher than everything else in the fight. That made them harder to hit, gave them a greater chance to hit, and made their damage meaningful. While the PCs were busily focusing on the rest of the fight, the minions were nickel-and-diming several of the characters. One player even thought they were enough of a threat that he focused on them, which basically pulled a striker out of that fight. This use of them felt "just right" to me.

I've also had some success "beefing up" regular minions by granting them resist x all (a damage threshold - as has been suggested), having their allies buff them with temp hp (it needs to be a half decent amount to not just be mopped up by "effect" damage), and doing the "death save" to be bloodied instead of dead. Success here has been more mixed.

One thing that has been said that bears repeating is that not all minions are created equally, even at a given level. Their ability to actually attack is a huge factor. As a rule, I've found that they must be versatile to be useful, most fights. I find it helps to think of all minions as skirmishers (or multi-role); this means giving them ranged options, usually (even if it's just as simple as copying their melee basic and making it ranged). Their attacks should all be basic attacks, so if the PCs try to ignore them, they can take a swing. Also, damage isn't everything; minions that impose conditions affect the fight for at least a turn after they're dead.

Generally, the newer minions are better. The orc minions are a pretty good example of effective minions - you can kill them, but they still get to retaliate if they die, so wiping them out has tactical considerations as well.

 

[S'mon]

I prefer more resilient minions to eg 'exploding' minions like the Orc Savage, at least at Heroic Tier. I ran a mass battle with dozens of minions on each side, it would have worked great except I used Orc Savage minions - every time a PC-side minion killed one, it killed a PC-side minion too, which really screwed up play balance. I think exploding minions, if used, are best reserved for Paragon & Epic Tiers.

Ranged minions are potentially much more powerful than melee minions. Per RAW you can easily make area-burst ranged minions ridiculously lethal. I find the trick is to use level+5 not level+7 for artillery minion ranged attacks, and do no more than basic 1/2 level +4 damage vs 1 target, much less (say about half of that) on a burst.

In general, the best results I've seen have been from increasing minion durability, not lethality. The big advantage of using minions IME is reduced book-keeping, not 'pile on the damage'. I recently used 6th level Wraith Figments who had a Damage Threshold of 8 (Incorporeal) - this meant that unless attacked by Radiant damage it took 16 to destroy them, 8 to Bloody. The 8th level PCs fighting them had no trouble doing 16 damage, & but it gave them exactly the right level of staying power.

 

[S'mon]

So, my feeling is that if anything I should be upping the 1-hit-kill Damage Threshold, perhaps to Level +4 for Brutes, but keep a low Bloodied threshold (1/2 level +1 rounded up?) so that minions are not generally immune to PC Hirelings & other minions. That gives the following progression:

Brute Minion Level DT to Kill DT to Bloody
1 5 2
2 6 2
3 7 3
4 8 3
5 9 4
6 10 4
7 11 5
8 12 5
9 13 6
10 14 6

I can also see a case for 'any hit bloodies' though.

 

[Riastlin]

Going back to the OP, if you are running with a new group that has not tried 4ed before, you may well find that 4 minions is about right for a level 1 party. As others have said though, I would make sure that they all at least have a ranged attack in there.

My experience has been that early on 4-5 minions was about right for a standard monster. Now that my party is in mid-paragon tier, I usually need at least 6 to make the equivalent of a single standard monster. Part of this has to do with party makeup though as half the party has a wide array of multi-attack powers. That being said, in a fight with an elite dragon, I had a bunch of minions on rooftops firing at the party. The result was that the ranger spent most of the combat trying to kill the minions (and largely failing due to poor die rolls), which really helped keep the dragon alive for a while longer. Made for a much more interesting fight imho.

So yeah, the key as you go up in levels is you will need more minions (in all likelihood), they need ranged attacks, and they should often times be in relatively hard to reach areas. Doing that will certainly give them some punch.

I do occasionally use the exploding minions as well as those can ensure that the minion does something at least, though here too you have to be careful depending on exactly how they explode as you could suddenly have a bunch of minions exploding at once -- which may be more spike damage than you are intending. Psionic minions are actually kind of nice for this as I often just give them "feedback" damage where they damage the PC that killed them.

 

[Ryujin]

I've found that minions, as written, are rarely dangerous enough. Limited, fixed damage and character resistances tended to result in my players simply ignoring them, unless they actually got in the way. I always tried to use them as ablative armour, for the major baddies, but was rarely successful.

Three changes have altered that. I increased their static damage to just over the normal resistance levels; 7 in Heroic, 12 in Paragon, 22 in Epic. After that I added the ability for them to do additional d6 worth of damage, equal to one die less than appropriate for their level, on a critical. Lastly I started avoiding single damage keyword creatures or adding the weapon keyword, in addition to their other damage type, in order to make it less trivial to ignore them.

 

[Quickleaf]

5+1/2 level to kill is the formula I use, yup. But I let them take damage on a miss.

I also halve monster hit points.

Generally this works well; there is a minor issue that with these mods a level 9 minion (100 XP) is nastier than a level 1 standard monster, but that is more due to monster theat level in 4e scaling faster than monster XPV - you're always better off fighting weaker monsters.

I do exactly the same thing!

I also try to make "overkill" damage against minions useful. For example, the PCs are fighting cranium rats with a hive mind trait where surplus damage is spread to nearby cranium rats. Another example was a paladin critting a wraith and I let the next player to hit that turn gain the surplus damage as a bonus - the paladin showed them the wraith's weakness.