Well that is an argument for minions to be more realistic, missile weapons are extremely common in the real world
I'd agree that ranged attacks should be more common... but how does that help, say, animal minions. Like hyena minions for gnolls are very appropriate.
You hit this same problem with resistances, mind you - like necrotic resistance makes you immune to vampirespawn fleshrippers.
There's a few problems highlighted there, though - inadequate damage on many minions, resistance values too high, and battlerage vigor triggering many times per round and/or when you don't actually take damage.
and from the heroes perspective if I recall every one of company of the ring had one... Bilbo was a gifted stone thrower.
Many of their enemies lacked ranged attacks, however. Generally not the minion types, mind you, but the breadth of enemies arrayed against them wasn't all that high.
Do people complain an Eladrin can teleport every 5 minutes or so.. or do they abstract in between encounters or figure it doesn't matter that a company of Eladrin can travel through otherwise unpassable mountain areas by teleporting from cliff to cliff... Eladrin are the worlds best explorers.
Teleporting 25 feet every five minutes isn't that much more impressive than other options - I mean, Goliaths can roll two Athletics checks for climbing and jumping, every time, so they can leap across such gaps often enough, certainly climb much faster, etc.
Some people do complain, though, but I think mostly based on some sort of realism kick.
If I thought an encounter power was overly used overly powerful when used outside of encounter... a general restriction could cover it.
During an encounter spirits rise and energy with it... saying encounter powers can only be used once an hour outside of an encounter... Would that restrict too many things?
Eh, not really great precedent I suspect.
If unicorns touch qualifies as broken then the game must be awefully close to completely not broken so we are reducing the standard of what it means to be broken.
Yeah, I don't see Unicorn's Touch breaking any games. Maybe people are not arguing that it's broken in the 'breaking a game' sense, but in the 'this power is flawed to the point it should be scrapped or redesigned'. Using that definition, I could call lots of things broken, and it's not a bad definition.
I actually try to avoid using the term broken for such arguments, though - encourages boring play, trivializes certain encounters, overpowered, underpowered, dangerously imbalanced, easily exploitable, trumps <minions/solos/other game aspect>, etc are a whole lot more clear and less likely to get an instant 'That's not broken, my game's working fine with it!' or 'You just have to use this thing back at them!' response.