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<blockquote data-quote="Lancelot" data-source="post: 3839685" data-attributes="member: 30022">In my campaign, Balors are brutes.Pit Fiends are bosses. They &quot;hide&quot; behind layer after layer of minions, forming complex schemes to deceive, misdirect, dominate, subvert and corrupt hapless mortals. If they end up in combat with said mortals (and those mortals are powerful enough to survive an outright squishing), they lead with magic and only revert to melee if the spells aren't working. They summon lesser devils to do the dirty work, because they're &quot;above it all&quot;. I'd personally like to see that emphasis reflected in 4e - the ability to summon a small army (or a small group of brutal elite soldiers), some insanely-terrifying spells (meteor swarm, dominate monster), and a whole host of corruption and deception capabilities.Balors are loners. They may have a pack of (cowed and bullied) lesser demons doing their bidding, but at the end of the day... the balor wants to get its claws dirty. It wants to be right in the middle of the fight, tossing charred bodies around like feathers. It doesn't want to share the carnage with lesser demons, and it doesn't want to kill with something as impersonal as a meteor swarm. It wants to cleave heads off, and burn mortals to death on its own immolating hide. Accordingly, I'd love to see its melee capabilities kept or even beefed up (!), and greatly reduce its spell capability. My players have fought balors before. But even though they've been on the wrong end of telekinesis and implosion and suchlike, it's not the spells that they associate with the balor. They think about the whip and the vorpal sword (and the 100 points of damage explosion). That's what has them bringing a spare pair of trousers to the session.&nbsp; <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile&nbsp; &nbsp; :)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

[QUOTE="Lancelot, post: 3839685, member: 30022"] In my campaign, Balors are brutes. Pit Fiends are bosses. They "hide" behind layer after layer of minions, forming complex schemes to deceive, misdirect, dominate, subvert and corrupt hapless mortals. If they end up in combat with said mortals (and those mortals are powerful enough to survive an outright squishing), they lead with magic and only revert to melee if the spells aren't working. They summon lesser devils to do the dirty work, because they're "above it all". I'd personally like to see that emphasis reflected in 4e - the ability to summon a small army (or a small group of brutal elite soldiers), some insanely-terrifying spells (meteor swarm, dominate monster), and a whole host of corruption and deception capabilities. Balors are loners. They may have a pack of (cowed and bullied) lesser demons doing their bidding, but at the end of the day... the balor wants to get its claws dirty. It wants to be right in the middle of the fight, tossing charred bodies around like feathers. It doesn't want to share the carnage with lesser demons, and it doesn't want to kill with something as impersonal as a meteor swarm. It wants to cleave heads off, and burn mortals to death on its own immolating hide. Accordingly, I'd love to see its melee capabilities kept or even beefed up (!), and greatly reduce its spell capability. My players have fought balors before. But even though they've been on the wrong end of telekinesis and implosion and suchlike, it's not the spells that they associate with the balor. They think about the whip and the vorpal sword (and the 100 points of damage explosion). That's what has them bringing a spare pair of trousers to the session. :) [/QUOTE]

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