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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 4955034" data-attributes="member: 82106">I guess I would have to say that a DM who can't threaten a fairly average or even modestly optimized heroic tier party with a level +3 encounter is either misinterpreting some rules seriously in favor of the party, building highly unoptimized encounters,  extraordinarily tactically challenged, or some combination of the three. Or else the OP's definition of an average party is pretty skewed. Even a heavily optimized party of hardcore optimizers should at least get some challenge out of level + 3.The reason monsters don't dish out massive damage in a single round is actually pretty simple. It means success hinges on a very few die rolls and combat runs only 2-3 rounds, which means there is no time for interesting tactics. Worst case you end up with battles like in 3.5 at higher levels where the initiative roll is practically a flip of the coin to decide who wins.4e combat is designed so that most battles should go about 6-8 rounds with some easy encounters maybe being as short as 4 rounds and some really super fancy big ones maybe going 12 at most. I've been DMing 4e since it came out and I don't recall a fight longer than 18 rounds yet, and that was a whopper where the party pulled in multiple groups of monsters and fought a running battle that took pretty much all night.Its hard to give specific advice on how your DM could up the difficulty or why things are so easy without knowing more specific details. How long are your fights? What sort of PCs do you have in the party and what kind of damage are they doing? What sort of monsters are you fighting?Minions should actually be moderately effective. Personally I haven't found them to be lacking overall. Sure sometimes they just die horribly, but that is after all part of their shtick. Other times I've had minions really over perform. It seems like at paragon tier and up minions would just start to be useless, but there are a couple reasons that isn't entirely the case. For one thing they still keep up in defenses, so they never become trivial to hit. Admittedly characters will eventually have a decent amount of auto-damage effects that can wipe them out, but that generally assumes the DM bunched a whole lot of minions in one place and left them dangling in front of the PCs noses. A smart DM will do that once, and then the next time they'll have a reserve wave of minions that show up right after the party is baited into expending their nice auto-damage minion sweeper. Tends to make them start guessing pretty quickly.The other thing is minions aren't really useless if they force the party to pay attention to them. Better even is a clever DM will create encounters with combinations of minions and other monsters that create catch-22 situations. Like some cheap minions backed up by say a spectre that will be happy to raise his minions into more spectres if you are foolish enough to kill them. OK, you can ignore the minions, but that may not be a real good alternative, especially if they happen to have some annoying power that puts out a status condition or an aura or something like that. Basically while my players enjoy minions and are glad to find out some of the monsters are minions, they have learned to stay wary of them nonetheless.</blockquote>

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