D&D Solos - just not that threatening

[SlyFlourish]

Ok, I've complained about solo creatures in the past with my Glave-wielding fighter seeming to eat everything up and my Hospitaler paladin healing everyone for 9 when a creature even thinks about attacking someone.

Tonight we played a dungeon delve with four PCs and the level 12 delve with the green dragon.

The green dragon does 1d8+6 damage on a breath weapon. That just seems crazy to me.

After about eight rounds, it became clear that the players were bored. I was bored. The dragon had 200 hitpoints left. The party had burned encounters and dailies. The dragon wasn't really going to hurt them. It was just boring for everyone. So I started pouring the dragon's hitpoints into damage about 10 at a time. That made things a bit more exciting, but I still left feeling hollow.

D&D 4e monsters just don't seem that threatening - particularly elites and solos who don't really do much more than regular monsters yet count for far more. Every time someone says "they're not meant to be ran solo" I want to claw my eyes out. They're called "solos" for crying out loud.

I'm seriously considering doubling the damage and halving the hitpoints of a lot of the creatures we play. I bet it would make things a lot more exciting and might make battles quite a bit shorter without any loss in drama.

Maybe I'm just not playing it right, but my two biggest problems right now are weak monsters and long battles.

Any other thoughts or solutions to help me out?

Update: Ok, Two things I clearly messed up on. One, the dragon's breath does ongoing 10 which could hurt quite a bit and I don't think I kept up with that. Second, the dragon's bite is quite a bit tougher than the dragon's claw attack with the ongoing 15. I should have done that quite a bit more.

Still, I think things could be greatly improved with monster damage output and speeding up fights. I still want to try my glass cannon modification.

 

[Badwe]

also worth noting is that the adult green dragon causes adjacent squares to be difficult terrain (no shifting) and gets a free attack against anyone who does not move on their turn while adjacent. Therefore players should either be provoking a fair deal of opportunity attacks or getting tailed a lot.

In general it is probably true that damage of solos is low while hitpoints are high, but this was clearly also misplayed. it can go the other way too. our dm pitted a black dragon against us and we all misunderstood the cloud of darkness to move WITH the dragon, making him virtually impossible to hit no matter what we did.

if nothing else, try just secretly tacking on 5 damage to everything going in and coming out of the dragon.

 

[Minigiant]

Solos play like complicated PCs. They have a lot of little tricks that work together. If you forget one thing, they suck. If you don't forget, you might kill the party.

 

[MerricB]

Ok, I've complained about solo creatures in the past with my Glave-wielding fighter seeming to eat everything up and my Hospitaler paladin healing everyone for 9 when a creature even thinks about attacking someone.

Tonight we played a dungeon delve with four PCs and the level 12 delve with the green dragon.

The green dragon does 1d8+6 damage on a breath weapon. That just seems crazy to me.

Are we looking at the same Green Dragon? Dawn deals 1d10+5 poison damage, and ongoing 5 poison damage and slows (save ends both). Aftereffect: slows (save ends).

That's not exactly trivial, and when you consider a fighter who parks himself next to the Dragon, he could well be up for 3d8+18 damage per round (2 claw attacks plus tail sweep).

Yes, your Hospitaler will give you a definite edge; that's the point of a daily utility power, after all!

I do feel that monsters in 4e have slightly too many HP. Dawn has 620 HP, AC 28 and low defense 25.

Cheers!

 

[SlyFlourish]

So here was the bigger problem, I have: they never put out an errata for Dungeon Delve. It was published months and months after a monster manual errata came out but creatures like the green dragon still used old stats from the monster manual without the errata. That makes the product a lot less useful because now I can't trust it to have updated stats. Some of the adventures are the same way, I noticed. In this adventure it made the difference between ongoing 15 and ongoing 5 for his bite and ongoing 10 vs ongoing 5 for the breath. That would have been significant.

Yeah, overall I probably didn't play the dragon as effectively as I could have. I forgot about the difficult terrain and probably didn't do the tail swipe as much as I could have.

 

[Jhaelen]

Every time someone says "they're not meant to be ran solo" I want to claw my eyes out. They're called "solos" for crying out loud.

Well, call them Super-Elite, then, if it makes you feel better

Almost all solos don't work well solo. They simply don't have enough actions to keep up with a party of five. They gain five action points but that isn't enough to last them through a combat. Add the very least they should be accompanied by a bunch of minions.
They also have too many hit points.

Elite monsters are mostly fine. But solos simply haven't been playtested enough. It seems, it was basically a last-minute decision to give them quintuple hit points (as can be seen from the DDM rpg stat cards for Dungeons of Dread), and it was a bad one.

Allowing them to burn hit points to reuse encounter powers or gain additional action points might work for some Solos. I've also suggested to apply their bloodied effects five times: once for each 20% hp lost. That also helps with some.

I hope DMG2 will offer some solutions to the problem.

 

[crash_beedo]

Since monsters and NPC's have a 'magic item threshold', I've considered giving all monsters extra damage dice on crits up to their threshold; I've had plenty of deaths though, so I haven't implemented the rule.

However, it could make solos more threatening, especially ones with area attacks that will roll lots of attacks per encounter.

 

[Runestar]

I wonder if wotc got too conservative in designing solos. Maybe they wanted to avoid the glass cannon phenomenon in 3e, but they ended up overcompensating by giving solos too much hp and had them deal too little damage because they did not want PCs to be one-shotted before they had a chance to contribute meaningfully to the encounter.

But it seems they did not learn their lesson from 3e. The reason why solo fights in 3e did not work is quite similar to the problem plaguing solos now (namely, the magnified impact status effects have on solos).

 

[Markn]

I essentially agree with the OP when it comes to solos. I have yet have an interesting solo encounter and I've run several so far. I also feel that solo's do too little damage as well. I know that not everyone agrees with me but that is my opinion on the subject.

What we do to speed up combat, has been to knock 20% of the HP off the monster and add a damage bonus equal to hal their level. We are currently on 9th level and this has worked just fine. I've read some posts that on higher levels the half level damage bonus will be too much for the PCs so be aware of that but so far this has not been an issue at all.

 

[Bolongo]

The best solo fight I've run is the specially designed one in Pyramid of Shadows. You know, the one with the multiple actions and the hazard backing it up. That one had my party on the ropes until they (by sheer luck) discovered the monster wasn't immune to the hazard...

OTOH, possibly the worst, most boring solo fight is in that same adventure. Yeah, that's right, the dragon...