Orc Archer - overpowered?

[MrMyth]

The 4th level artillery Orc Archer in Monster Vault has a 'clustered volley' at will, that is area burst-1 within 20, ATT +9 vs AC, hit d10+6 damage. I'm wondering if this is too powerful; should it be a recharge power, maybe 4-6? His basic ranged attack is ATT +11 (edited) for d10+6 & push 1 square.

I can kinda see this guy as an uber-archer Ranger-style leader of Orc Savages (the Essentials Orc minion-4), but if I used 5 of these guys together and they won init vs a close-grouped level 4 party I think they'd slaughter 'em.

Keep in mind, in your example, it doesn't matter what they recharge on - if they all nuke the party at once, the party is going to be messed up.

I think having it an At-Will is fine - once PCs see him using bursts, they can try and stay spread out to minimize what he can do. If the only worry is nova potential... that could happen with MM1 monsters, too. I remember our party running into issues in Thunderspire Labyrinth with some Duergar who had devestating area attacks - we learned to avoid clustering, and to try and take them down first.

Compare to say... Greenscale Marsh Mystic, from MM1. Level 6 instead of 4, and has Bog Cloud. Burst 2 instead of Burst 1, +9 vs fort is likely much more accurate, 2d8+4 is higher damage, and it dazes. Sure, it is a 5+ recharge instead of At-Will - but if you present the same scenario (a group of them winning init vs a clustered group of PCs), things will end badly for the party.

Honestly, I think the more important thing is to:
1) Not start combats in a way/environment that encourages PCs or monsters to be grouped into a small cluster;
2) Not use encounters consisting of multiple versions of just one monster;
3) Or if you do so, have each monster roll init seperately if you fear this sort of nova potential.

 

[Mengu]

3) Or if you do so, have each monster roll init seperately if you fear this sort of nova potential.

This is good advice. If I'm going to use multiples of the same creature, I usually just make a small tweak to a subset, designate one as leader, and at least have 3 initiatives. For instance if I really wanted to make an encounter with 5 orc archers, I might give one an encounter power minor action designate quarry, and his allies would get +2 to hit that target till the end of the leader's next turn. I'd leave two as is, except put the AoE on a recharge. I might modify two to be rapid shooters and instead of the AoE, I might give them a double attack on a recharge to target two creatures within 3 of each other with a -2 penalty to attack (or rather, without the +2 artillery bonus). And obviously I wouldn't use this encounter against a level 1 or level 2 party.

 

[S'mon]

Thanks everyone - I'm satisfied now that he's not too overpowered if I treated him the way I'd treat a level 4 Artillery Wizard, ie don't have lots of them vs a low level party. In fact the 1e 'Ranger Rule' - no more than 3 together! - looks good here. I've inserted those level 4 minion Orc Bowman stats directly under the archer, which I can use if I need a bunch of mook archers.

 

[Rune]

MV lists him with 30 arrows - should I take off 9 each time he cluster-volleys?


My concern is that when I GM I normally go into 'killer DM' mode, in the sense that I play the monsters realistically. Realistic for these guys is going to be ambushing the PCs from favourable terrain...

The way I see it going, the orcs ambush the PCs in a dungeon corridor, ravine, or forest trail, likely firing from elevation, possibly with surprise if they're sentries. First round 5 of them concentrate fire on 3 of the PCs, who each take several hits. Rinse and repeat a couple times (they might get two volleys off before the PCs act), and several PCs are down and the party is in big trouble.

I think in general 4e underrates artillery for my play style, and I've been very careful about using them. This looks like an extreme case.

If this is so (and I wholeheartedly approve), you should assign the terrain an XP value when building your encounter, just as you would with a trap. This will either reduce the number of foes the PCs face in the challenge, or appropriately reward them for the actual challenge faced.