Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 4906442" data-attributes="member: 82106">Hmmm. I don't find that AoEs really make minions useless. I had a bunch of lowly Goblin Cutters running around last night in a level 6 encounter. They annoyed the party plenty, managed to hit a couple of characters and ended up annoying the fighter until he burned Rain of Steel to get rid of them. It was WELL worth the 10% of the total encounter budget from a tactical standpoint.The encounter before that the hobgoblin warrior minions were lovely. blocked up a chokepoint for a couple rounds, and then 2 out of 3 still managed to beat feet out of the inevitable AoE and gave a Hobgoblin Commander flanking for a couple rounds.Sure, auto damage is going hurt, but the way I look at it if I can force a player to burn an auto damage power clearing them, its usually worth it. I'd far rather that than it was slagging the artillery. This is kind of a key point too. Tactically minions should pose a "damned-if-I-do and damned-if-I-dont" kind of dilemma. If the party concentrates on a leader/controller/artillery with their good stuff, then those minions are going to make themselves into a bigger annoyance. On the other hand if the spell casters deal with them right off, that gives you a lot better chance of your key monsters getting to work their good stuff for a couple extra rounds. Make no mistake, minions certainly have little staying power and often enough things go the other way and they just plain die, but I think if you pay careful attention you'll find that even then they still usually earned their keep. Plus there are always those times when you get a single minion that just won't go down and proves to be a significant thorn in someone's side. When you get into paragon and epic minions also work a bit differently. They really should synergize with leader/boss monsters, traps, terrain, etc. in interesting ways. I agree that MM1 higher level minions generally missed the boat a bit in that sense. One way to mitigate auto damage in those types of encounters is to create trade offs for the party. Someone wants to swab the decks down with radiant auto-damage? OK, but maybe it carries a small situational cost, like creating an unfavorable terrain situation or a new hazard.</blockquote>

Verification