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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3279231" data-attributes="member: 4937">Not even close.  I'd expect 4 gnolls to go down to a level 4 party without forcing the PC's to break a sweat.  Again, not even close.  By the time that the party is 6th level, the players AC is reaching the point where the gnolls can't hit except by being lucky, and the party generates damage fast enough that the gnolls will be hitting the floor without doing much of anything.You are wrong for several reasons.  For one, 15k worth of equipment is significantly above the expected treasure for EL 8.  Secondly, after 4 such encounters, the party would have 60k worth of treasure to split amongst them.  After 13.3 such encounters enough to hit level 9, the party now has 200k amongst them - or 50k for each 9th level character plus what they had to begin 8th level with.  So the 'logic' of having the 8th level NPC fighter with 15k worth of equipment breaks down a bit.  Besides which, the DMG states something completely different in Table 4-23.  Besides which, I'm not even sure that the equipment does make up the difference in most cases.  Besides which, its not like the stone giant is necessarily naked either.Then it lacks a weak point of a low AC character which is vunerable to the gnolls physical attacks.  No, they are not.  With two fighters and a cleric on the front line, mooks will get lucky to hit anyone.  Meanwhile, they have to deal with the problem that none of them can generate damage fast enough to ever force the cleric to do more than an occassional cure light wounds, multiple attacks from the fighters without an AC that can protect them from even the iterative attacks, and probably cleave from at least one of the fighters.  It will be a slaughter.I'm saying nothing about the absolute difficulty of a fight.  I'm just saying that relative to other encounters of the same EL, multiple mooks is an easier encounter period.  It's not just an easier encounter for parties with evokers, its an easier encounter period.  In fact, one of the many reasons that evocation is not worth wasting spells slots on is that the sort of encounters it really helps on are no real threat to the party anyway.  Fireball is overkill against almost anything it is useful for (swarms excepting), and pretty much a waste against anything that's an actual threat for your EL.Well, then we are an an empass.  That's not my experience.  There is no chance that we would convince each other than are own experiences didn't happen.</blockquote>

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