Something important to note about 4e for those who never played it. A saving throw in 4e is NOT a saving throw like in any other edition. Its a straight d20 roll, 10+ passes.... aka a near coin flip. While PCs and monsters can have bonuses to these saving throws, most creatures don't.Believe it or not, this is what 4e actually did, in a few different ways. You had the "poison/disease track," which would have effects that scaled up(/down) depending on how many saves you failed(/succeeded). You also had several powers and monster actions which would only trigger their full, devastating effects if you failed three saves in a row or the like, with each failed save making the problem progressively worse.
E.g. a medusa's Petrifying Gaze: it's an at-will attack, standard action, attacking all creatures within 25 feet, which causes the target to be slowed (save ends); on the first failed save, the target is instead immobilized (save ends); on the third failed save, the target is petrified (no save.) Blinded targets are immune. This is important for three reasons: one, it heightens tension, especially because this is an at-will so it can be used repeatedly; two, it allows the players to do something about it, because they can do things to try to boost their saving throw results; and three, it has a clear means of attempting to avoid it, by accepting blindness, but this specific monster is a medusa archer, and has a melee attack (her snake hair) which reduces Fortitude, making the petrifying gaze more likely to land, so you have to weigh the pros and cons of various approaches to the problem.
The "5e like saving throw" in 4e is actually an attack roll. A wizard made a "spell attack" against a creature's "constitution defense". On a hit, the effect went off.
This is one of my pet peeves in 4e, using familiar dnd terminology in a completely different way, so different they don't even mean the same things anymore. They should have just given it a different name, like "Escalation check" or something.