Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nemesis Destiny" data-source="post: 5768900" data-attributes="member: 98255">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.</blockquote>

Verification