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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6904680" data-attributes="member: 996">It's neither a new nor a surprising problem.  In classic D&D, monsters often weren't really all that incredibly tough.  They got pretty good saves, but not like high-level fighters and magic-item-festooned PCs did, often didn't get much of a bonus to their HD, and tended to lean on magic resistance, immunities, and outright gotchyas to stick around.  In 3e, it was full-on rocket tag with imminently cheesable save DCs on save-or-else spells.  Even in relatively-balanced (for D&D) 4e, there were problems, early on, with 'lockdown' combos - harder to pull off and not leading to as rapid an anticlimactic victory as what you experienced, but basically the same problem in kind.What you ran into is inevitable given 5e's general design - lone opponents are just going to be at a big disadvantage that way, thanks to the action economy, BA, and tuning for fast combat - but 5e provides monster protection factors like magic resistance and legendary resistance (and, yes, you can always just decide in the moment that the BBEG was immune all along, thankyouverymuch) to guard against such eventualities.  Just make full use of them, and your BBEG might see a second or even third round of combat in spite of being outnumbered 5 or more to one.  But, yeah, you have to work at making D&D deliver on fantasy tropes like the climactic battle with the lone, terrible foe.</blockquote>