Are Minotaurs underpowered, or is high-level combat broken?

[Jack99]

The other day, I had the rare opportunity of being a player for once. There is only two players (fighter with some warlord multiclass, and me, brutal scoundrel rogue) total in the group, and we are dragging along a heal-bot.. erh I mean a cleric. We are level 13, and the cleric is level 9.

According to the xp charts, that should make a Minotaur Warrior (10 soldier), a Minotaur Cabalist (13 controller) and a Savage Minotaur (16 brute) a decent fight, bordering on hard.

But it was extremely easy. I only used at-wills and maybe 1 encounter power. My teammates used a bit more, but hardly anywhere near using up what is usual for a standard/hard encounter. It is worth mentioning that neither group had any clear advantage from the get go (I got the jump on the Warrior, but on the other hand, the rest of my party were still outside, with the portcullis barely open.

So, my question is the following. Have anyone else noticed this? Because looking at the numbers, none of the minotaurs look out of sync with the math. Maybe it is my (or our) characters that are too optimized? Maybe fights at higher level are just a bit too easy? Or maybe we were just very lucky on our rolls (didn't feel that way though)?

Anyone else has any actual experience with higher level fights?

Cheers

 

[Ander00]

How many healing surges did you use? Was that your only encounter?

While I've played at a higher level (18th), the experience has been somewhat limited so far. One encounter that turned out to be really easy probably would've been less so if that first round sleep spell hadn't landed. Another (a blue dragon) would probably have wrecked us if he had been played more aggressively. A third was a bit marred by a long clean-up phase. The fourth, while at least to me not seeming particularly threatening, did end up costing us plenty of resources, if I remember correctly.


cheers

 

[Jack99]

How many healing surges did you use? Was that your only encounter?

While I've played at a higher level (18th), the experience has been somewhat limited so far. One encounter that turned out to be really easy probably would've been less so if that first round sleep spell hadn't landed. Another (a blue dragon) would probably have wrecked us if he had been played more aggressively. A third was a bit marred by a long clean-up phase. The fourth, while at least to me not seeming particularly threatening, did end up costing us plenty of resources, if I remember correctly.


cheers

I used 0 healing surges (had a total of 13 damage when fight was over) and I think that the fighter used 1, maybe 2 tops (out of a lot). And it was one of several fights.

It just struck all of us to be way easier than the other fights worth the same xp, so the DM asked me to post and see if it was just us, or just the monsters.

 

[Mengu]

I've run a minotaur encounter with a Cabalist, and some Barlgura. But it was against a 5-man party. It didn't feel easy. With the Minotaurs flanking, and the Cabalist giving them extra attacks, they did a good bit of damage to the party. I also used Horns of Force, and some shifting/charging tactics to get the most bang out of the Cabalist's aura and Goring Charge.

But combat can be swingy. When a majority of encounter powers fail, an encounter can go south fast. When a majority of them succeeed, the encounter can become easy. When monsters get a good round of hits, players begin to panic and start throwing around daily powers.

 

[Anguirus]

I was in a fight against a Minotaur Warrior and Minotaur Cabalist in a party with me (Orc Rogue), a Taclord, and a Wizard. It was relatively challenging despite the fact that we had the drop on them and I got two rounds of sneak attack + encounter power off before they could even react. So you might have just been lucky.

 

[babinro]

Our group has yet to hit higher levels (currently level 5)...but I've noticed that when you scale back the party to 2 or 3 players, that the encounters have so far become quite simple for the group.

My group was made up of a fey based warlock and a controller style wizard. The warlock would just use eye-bite effectively making him safe to about half the enemies while the wizard would case sleep, or chill strike while keeping at a distance then using Magic Missile.

My belief is that 4.0 almost relies on having 4+ players simply so that the number of enemies can be sufficient enough for actual tactics to take place. After running about 2 levels of this, we opted to up to four players, each person taking on two characters.

On a side note, Eye-Bite is way too powerful in my opinion. I believe a party of 4 eye-biting warlocks would by nearly unkillable since enemies could almost never see them, and when they finally close in, the warlock would likely just teleport away. It should probably make the warlock appear invisible to that creature so if it had true sight or see invis it could still make attacks.

 

[mlangsdorf]

Eyebite only makes the warlock invisible to the target. The other monsters can still see them.

The Feylock in my group prefers to use the defenders for cover while she Eldritch Blasts the monsters. Eyebite is great if she's separated from the group and has to deal with a lone pursuer, but that's not the preferred plan.

4 Feylocks fighting 4 monsters using Eyebite are going to get themselves killed.

 

[Jack99]

I was in a fight against a Minotaur Warrior and Minotaur Cabalist in a party with me (Orc Rogue), a Taclord, and a Wizard. It was relatively challenging despite the fact that we had the drop on them and I got two rounds of sneak attack + encounter power off before they could even react. So you might have just been lucky.

At 109 hp, a Minotaur Warrior would be dead the second it attacked my rogue, if he had gotten the jump on it like that. Maybe the problem lies with the frost build, which seems lethal, even more so combined with the assassin PP.

 

[RangerWickett]

At 109 hp, a Minotaur Warrior would be dead the second it attacked my rogue, if he had gotten the jump on it like that. Maybe the problem lies with the frost build, which seems lethal, even more so combined with the assassin PP.

I'm not that familiar with how people are making high level character builds (my game's only 2nd level), so could you walk me through how that character works in combat? I thought that even at high levels, characters wouldn't be dealing more than 30 or 40 damage per round.

 

[fissionessence]

To the OP: A standard encounter is an encounter of the party's level up to the party's level +2. Beyond that is considered difficult. A standard encounter for two 13th level characters and a 9th level character is 2,000xp. EL+1 is 2,500xp, and EL+2 is 3,000xp. The minotaur fight you described is worth 2,700xp, midway between a +1 encounter and a +2 encounter.

I'm not sure exactly how easy this fight was for you, but a few good rolls could easily put a standard encounter like this one away with little to no difficulty.

~ fissionessence