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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6365290" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, if that's the whole entry, it's definitely simplified.  In some ways I'm ok with that, in some ways I'm not.Good: At will greater teleport is gone.  That has always been problematic.  Likewise gone is the ability to self-summon at a certain percentage chance, leading to unexpectedly varying degrees of difficulty in the encounter.   It's much better for a DM to be able to set the number appearing rather than to only know the number appearing in an encounter to within +/- 35%.  Likewise, gone is the overlapping fear aura that makes running large numbers of monsters difficult.  If you have 7 monsters with aura/gaze attacks, then it's pretty much guaranteed everyone will fail thier save against one.  Bad: Things aren't fixed, they are just gone.  This is going to lead to situations where in order to make the monster interesting, you'll have to invent the new versions and fix them yourself.   While the overlapping fear aura mechanic needed to go, it's not at all clear that the general idea of 'this thing is scary especially up close' needed to go.   While the teleport needed to go, the general idea of 'this thing has extremely high mobility and evasion skills' needed to stay.  Gone is the list of options that make non-combat interaction with the creature more interesting.  Powers like teleport, dimensional anchor, fly, invisibility, major image, and wall of ice gave the creature depth.  They provided fodder for making the creature proactive and having non-fiat plots to utilize its powers to accomplish evil deeds.  It was stealthy.  It was mobile.  It could deceive people.  It could cope with high level magic and respond in kind.  It could trap people and cut off escape, and alter the environment in interesting ways.  By creating illusions and walls of ice, it was practically its own lair generator.  These all provided opportunities to spotlight the creature in something other than a straight up combat role.  Likewise, while self-summoning and percentage chances of summoning working was problematic, the ability to summon minions itself made the monster more interesting as a BBEG. You can do this all yourself, creating scenarios where the illusions are there, the ice walls are there, the minions are there, and there is a backstory of the monsters nefarious plot where it does things off stage to NPCs that aren't on the stat sheet, but I personally think that's less satisfying and that its certainly as a stat block less thought provoking.</blockquote>

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