Hardest encounters

[Nebulous]

The Blue Slime from KotS seems like an absolute butt kicker. Our paladin and wizard were surprised by it, and by sheer luck the monster missed ALL of its attacks, including burning an Action Point. I'm pretty sure one of them would have died. The whole party ran from the thing and never returned.

 

[the Jester]

The closest fights I've seen usually involve the pcs triggering a second encounter before they can get a short rest in. The worst one involved a trap, several soldiers and a couple of skirmishers, followed up by another pair of soldiers.

Another bad one that I have seen was a mess of crossing a river across logs, with terrain effects that really slowed things down. A pc ended up dying in that fight, but the party could have saved her if they'd worked at it. (Instead they left her behind while they advanced on the enemy, not thinking to get close enough to heal her first.) That one was designed as a hard encounter.

 

[ricardo440]

Ah yes, I did forget the hardest encounter we have ever had which was by far and a way the closest to a TPK. Crossing a river.
Skill challenge to build a raft, failure meant the raft broke in the middle of the river. The river kicked ars*

 

[TheNovaLord]

the last encounter in the LFR mod MOON 1-1

when i gmed it the party rolled 7 natural 20's and i still nearly TPKed them

it was also genereally difficult as it had so many things that slowed the game down and needed clariifcation rules-wise

spoiler: 2 bugbear stranglers and a goblin hexer with goblin sharpshooters up on a ledge

 

[Iron Sky]

The closest fights I've seen usually involve the pcs triggering a second encounter before they can get a short rest in. The worst one involved a trap, several soldiers and a couple of skirmishers, followed up by another pair of soldiers.

In the 4e game I'm playing in, most of our toughest fights have been multi-encounter "pulls," like when at 2nd level we fought an entire temple full of cultists(8 cultists + 2 zombies - none minions) at once.

A group of 2 possessing ghosts and 4 marking ghosts gave us a ton of trouble too, especially when one of them possessed our rogue and did a sneak attack that dropped our cleric. Fortunately, when it possessed my ranger 3 times, I rolled horribly and missed with all 6 twin-strike attacks.

I missed the session where we fought it, but the other 3 players took on a level 7 solo red dragon that dropped 2 of the 3.

 

[Appleseeth]

I've put my PCs through the ringer with a nasty group of gnolls that pushed the PCs into a corner, right where they could get Pack Attacked every round until they started actually killing the gnolls. That Pack Attack is nasty, espcially with the archers. I hit one PC with a barrage of attacks from 3 gnolls and did 39 damage. I'm glad they didn't give that ability to the gnoll PC race.

Overall, as a monster type, I'd have to go with soldier as being the toughest. They aare the only ones that the melee PCs tend to miss, at all.

 

[Rechan]

I don't know what I'm doing, but my PCs have pretty much eaten through everything they've come up against. I've only had PCs drop to negative HP three times.

I was stunned when the PCs surprised some enemies, and obliterated two soldiers in the first round.

Soldiers and controllers seem to go down real fast in my games.

 

[Hambot]

Needlefang drake swarms. 5 of those will wipe most equal level parties, and will probably take out parties a few levels higher.

Yeah these critters almost TPK'd my party. And they rolled lots of 1's, AND I was letting PC's have Opportunity attacks against them as they entered the PC's square (that made them much closer to being balanced, otherwise fast moving swarms have all the rules in their favour!)

Glad I DIDN'T read the proper swarm rules before hand, otherwise the PC's would have been dead for sure. (no wizard in party=monster with double hit points, effectively each one is an elite by its very nature)