NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aegeri" data-source="post: 5266038" data-attributes="member: 78116">My Balor in another thread and Turaglas I just ran today (less than 30 minutes ago) disagree. Brutes aren't useless now. They do incredible damage and they aren't packing a tiny six shooter (aka +3 vs. AC and +1 vs. NADs) to a firefight with epic PCs (aka Howitzers) anymore.I am finding that good power design will override a solos flaws. If it can do things, it can challenge players. If it cannot do enough things in a round it cannot challenge a party. Finding the balance between making sure a solo is fairly able to "do stuff", while not making it feel like you're unfairly making your players feel their power choices are irrelevant is the true challenge.But I am firmly convinced with the MM3 damage and new maths assumptions using solos by themselves is viable - especially with simple terrain in their favor. I've had two of the most fun solo battles I've had since starting to run 4E two years ago, a MM3 upgraded Turaglas and my Balor.Also soldiers aren't as sadistic to use anymore by themselves. You don't need to go overboard on defenses, EL + 2 is good enough now. I am becoming convinced if Wizards makes some kind of change to "until end of next turn" effects being instant and unstoppable lockdown, I honestly feel solos will be perfectly able to function as solos with all the new ideas about power design and damage.Incidentally Turaglas is damn fun and awesome to run. Though he did fail a few too many expand recharge rolls <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" /> Sad panda.The problem with this is if a solo is taking up a good chunk of the EXP budget you must ask yourself "Is it contributing that to the encounter?". In someone like Lolths case, you can bet she's contributing her XP to the encounter and making those chaff creatures incredibly hard to deal with. That would be a fun and exciting encounter.Is a purple worm really contributing its XP - five monsters worth - to an encounter? That's the key question with a solo. The other key question is, what is this solo doing that I can't do with a cheaper elite, more traps or terrain hazards in my XP budget? That's the question I ask now.Edit: I also spotted the ridiculously dumb flaw in my purple worm, as well as the original one once someone pointed this out to me in the not dissimilar discussion in another thread. With bite as his only MBA he can't actually make opportunity attacks and grab a PC at the same time. That was so incredibly silly of me to overlook. I shall have a ponder and post a better version. I shouldn't really post initial "drafts" of something I make without considering all its interactions first.</blockquote>

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