Well... It isn't entirely balanced in my experience. Solos work pretty well at heroic tier, but once you get up into paragon things start going downhill. They DEFINITELY are not workable as truly solo monsters at that point, they are just more like really hefty Elites.
Yeah. I'm not sure we should be fixing that, though: it's somewhat inherent in the setup: if you have just one single point of failure, one vulnerable point to attack, you can expect trouble when people find and abuse it. It rubs me the wrong way to have to implement effects (etc.) differently for solo
on principle. Perhaps we should, I don't have the answers here, but that does mean that you're basically saying that stuff that works well against single targets happens not to work very well at all
if that single target is a solo. As is, save-ends effects seem to work pretty well for a behir; he's affected potentially for multiple of his rounds, but he saves much more quickly, so it's not a lockdown kind of effect.
More problematic are the effects which impose some penalty until the attackers next turn; such powers are generally intended to be weaker than save-ends effects, but will actually be more powerful do to the Behirs unusual hyperactivity. But... how bad is that?
There's a cost to all these fixes. The game works well with a group of monsters. A very very simple fix is just to accept that solo's are a tricky proposition and not to expect them to be a very reliable threat (sometimes, sure, but it's really dependent on circumstances) and have solo's backed up by others rather than changing quite a few fundamental mechanics.
Just to be completely inconsistent
, I'll say that I can well imagine using various specific ideas proposed here individually on specific solos, just to spice things up. So, the ideas are useful, but I think it'd be better to keep them as distinguishing gravy for some creatures rather than a system-wide fix. And if you think about it, that's not unlike what's been happening with solo's all along, and hopefully more of it will happen with newer MM's. Some have specific resistance to daze and stun, some have peculiar initiative trick (the behir, say) to balance the "action economy, etc...
Now, ongoing damage specifically:
Personally, I'm
definitely against stacking ongoing damage. Yes, it makes accounting for damage output easier, but not by much. Overlapping ongoing damage (i.e. multiple effects, multiple saves but no stacking) still has a bit of an advantage, but not the full amount: this is good both because it discourages pile-on play (i.e. you can have "extra" damaging powers with an incentive to spread the damage around rather than focus fire), and because when you
do focus fire, the extra benefit the extra ongoing damage grants is
least when the player rolls poorly (i.e, if he's not saving anyhow, then the extra ongoing has no effect; the damage per round is capped), so that reduces swinginess.
If ongoing damage just becomes yet another way to deal damage, you remove that tactical element. So, the complexity of accounting for ongoing damage isn't so much a weakness as a strength: it's a real tactical element encouraging the damage dealer to weigh various tactics against each other (focus fire vs. slightly higher damage total).
