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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KarinsDad" data-source="post: 5779862" data-attributes="member: 2011">Interestingly enough, this is mostly an issue with 4E. In 3.5 and earlier versions, players often prepared for the unexpected with consumable items, charged items, etc. Even the 10 foot pole was a PC staple in some versions of the game. But now, half the party can teleport, so 10 foot poles are out of vogue.In 4E, the most prep ahead of time usually done is the Adventurer's Kit combined with a few rituals. Spamming powers is sufficient for nearly all situations, so when a situation like a ton of minions comes up, players are not prepared for it.This isn't a problem with the game system or with the type of the encounter. It's a problem with lazy players who don't prep for the unexpected.The minion grinder is a perfectly valid and even challenging encounter design. Just because players do not prepare for it and are caught unaware because most of their powers aren't explicitly designed for it doesn't mean that there are not groups out there that do prepare for this.I think it is very heroic for the PCs to hold off wave after wave of a ton of foes. What you call grindy (because your PCs are not prepared), I call fun and exhilarating and heroic.Again, it's the spamming powers issue. If you don't have the right tool (i.e. power) for the job, it's going to be difficult and even grindy to get the job done.Every sorcerer that I've played (and I usually play Storm sorcerers) and every sorcerer that I've played with took one of those "crappy" AoE At-will powers. Not just for handling a bunch of minions (which those crappy powers do a good job with), but for multi-target radiant damage or for multi-target fire damage with a bunch of elemental boosts.And I could easily blow away Lightning-Admixed Acid Orb damage with Lightning-Admixed Burning Spray damageEven if your PC had a Warlord handing you a free attack on some rounds, the extra target(s) every other round or so of Burning Spray would make up for the 1 average point of damage per round more for Acid Orb over Burning Spray combined with the small difference between the Warlord giving his attack to the Sorcerer and what the Warlord could do using the attack himself, or giving it to another PC.Overall over a course of an average encounter, Burning Spray will do more damage than Acid Orb because every boost one could give to Acid Orb, one could give to Burning Spray. Granted, until one gains Arcane Admixture, there are a few more creatures with fire resistance than acid resistance, but that was more true when MM1 was the only monster book. Now, the number of each type of heroic level resistant monster is fairly equal, about 1% of all creatures in both cases, not worth worrying about.Again, not all strikers. Some smartly played strikers go out of their way to do lots of damage to more than a single target. I've even played Defenders who did more overall damage with burst powers than our optimized party Strikers have done. For nearly every time that a Striker does mega-damage and takes out 2/3rds of a foe's hit points, I've also seen a Striker waste a ton of damage on a foe that was already 2/3rds or more damaged and a non-Striker PC could have probably taken that foe out, allowing the Striker to focus on a less damaged foe.</blockquote>

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