Dracolich

[doctorhook]

Good question that, let's see...

Stoneborn looks much better. Immobilizes and damages, instead.
Icewrought... eh, less stun, tons of immobilize, but doesn't look very threatening. Not enough happening outside of its standard action.
Dreambreath looks decent unless the DM recharges the breath too much - it does have some Unconscious, which could turn bad, basically.

So, none of them are good, but each are possibly better. Maybe. Eh.

lol Okay then. Care to give your overall review of the monsters in that book? It's one of my favorites for fluff, but the monster design is still pre-MM2, so I'm curious how much I should trust it.

 

[Delgar]

Well I ran my modified Dracolich (see page 1) and it was definitely not as annoying as the stun machine from MM1.

 

[Ryujin]

I'm running P3: Assault on Nightwyrm Fortress for my PCs, which has a Dracolich encounter part way through. My PCs were destroying most of the encounters in the module (mostly due to Radiant weapons and Necrotic resistance) right up until they faced the Dracolich. This is the FIRST encounter that my PCs have actually run away from since we started playing 4e, and the only encounter the PCs have ever run away from in a published adventure.

The Dracolich is horrible. It's stuns way too often and way too easily; I think it only needed to roll a 4 to hit most of the PCs with the stun power. It's also really hard to hit; my PCs needed to roll 17s or 18s to hit the stupid thing.

Now, I don't think that the problem is the Dracolich is poorly designed; I think the problem is that it is miss-leveled. In other words, it's more like a level 23-24 solo than a level 21.
(That's how it seems anyway. I know there is a big power jump for PCs from level 20 to 21, so maybe the problem is that the PCs are only level 19? Maybe the Dracolich wouldn't seem miss-leveled to a party of level 21 PCs?)

I have to agree. Anyone who thinks that the Dracolich isn't a viable solo needs to run one in combat. It's at least 2, possibly even three levels low by description.

In Nightwyrm we started the encounter poorly positioned (clustered) and never recovered. We started all stunned. It got two rounds of combat in on us before a single character could act. That was me, teleporting to the far side of the beast. Our fighter managed to not get stunned for a round and opened things up, by moving to the other side also. The Dracolich's immediate reaction stun kept him locked down too, so I was really the only one doing any reliable damage and, as a Fey/Darklock, I wasn't exactly pouring it on. I managed to get the party two rounds of clear attacks, but that was it.

We were slaughtered.

If the point of the encounter wasn't completely different from the norm, and the DM hadn't taken pity on us, it would have been a TPK. It effectively was, anyway.