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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KarinsDad" data-source="post: 4713176" data-attributes="member: 2011">Adding terrain difficulties adds to the XP of the encounter. I was testing a hard encounter 3 levels higher, not 3+ levels higher.The terrain was fine. The Ash Disciples could move to the middle and explode and all three of them did that at opportune times when they could catch at least 4 of the PCs in the area effect. Every monster used up every single one of their powers in this fight.Without having a larger area for the Ash Disciples, they could not use their Cinder Burst and Death Embers as effectively. I purposely set up the terrain to maximize their area effects to catch as many PCs as they could.The larger area also prevented the PCs from creating a choke point so that Doresian could always attack the most PCs with his Ravenous Frenzy.This was a test case. The fact that the PCs were vastly under-optimized more than makes up for any addition difficulties that you think were needed to create a fair test.In our campaigns, the players purposely go out of their ways to acquire resist items, even if they have to disenchant other items and enchant new items themselves.In a real campaign with real PCs, they would have MORE fire resistance items and spells (this group had one item) and would have taken less damage.Like I said, even the Wizard shouldn't have gone down. But, after playing the game at that point for nearly 8 hours, my friend probably wasn't making the best choices anymore.In a real campaign with real PCs, it would have been unlikely that the PCs would have taken as much damage as they did.The Ravager could not teleport. He was actually pretty easy to keep pinned down.Doresian did a lot of damage though. His chances to hit are high. He could hit on a 4 in a lot of cases. His ongoing 10 was on one to two PCs most of the encounter and on as many as three PCs for a few rounds. That's probably 300+ points of damage just from his staff. In the 19 rounds, he probably dished out over 500 points of damage. He did more damage than the other four combined.I wasn't validating that, I was stating that his assumption that using up half of the dailies somehow weakened the party to the point that they could not do 3-4 more encounters. Obviously, they could not do 3-4 more hard encounters, but that is not the game design.The game design is set up in reality for x XP over a given day (on average). Throwing a hard encounter first just eats up a larger portion of x than a different order, but the encounter order really doesn't matter.</blockquote>

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