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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mengu" data-source="post: 5289667" data-attributes="member: 65726">Actually in the few simulations I've done, that bloodied damage can take people from dying to dead if the dragon just parks next to their bodies, so reach doesn't really help that much. And the main difficulty is usually well before the dragon gets bloodied. It's round 1. The second simulation saw 3 people unconscious before they got a turn.The thing that makes the biggest difference is resistance. If you have a permanent source of resistance like Form of Mountain's Thunder, it helps immensely because after that initial onslaught, the dragon just nickel and dimes you to death.Just for kicks, I put the same party (warden, runepriest, sorcerer, rogue, invoker) against 3 Great Apes and 2 Yeti Howlers from MM3 (these are using the new damage guidelines). That's five standard level 4 creatures. Threw a bunch of trees around to give the Apes the terrain advantage. The party got through that encounter just spending some healing surges, one person spending an action point, and one person using an item daily. No one went down, there was never any threat of anyone dieing. The warden ended the fight with single digit hit points. For the same level of encounter (level+2) and experience, I shouldn't be getting consistent TPK's on one side despite using every single daily resource and action point, and a mildly resource draining but safe encounter on the other side.If we believe the XP budget to determine the difficulty of an encounter, there is something wrong with the dragon. If solo encounters aren't supposed to conform to the XP budget, then we need an update/errata/memo. I'd prefer if the encounter design system was uniform. This makes scaling for 6-man parties a bit easier. It's not unusual for me to use an equal level solo with a few equal level standard creatures to make it a level+2 encounter. I'd like to continue to be able to have this flexibility, trusting that 1 solo is as difficult as 5 standard creatures, 1 elite is as difficult as 2 standard creatures, and 4 minions are as difficult as 1 standard creature.(Perhaps this perception is influenced a bit with my war gaming experience where I expect at least approximate power equality in same point value armies, regardless of whether you take 10 beefy guys, or 30 cannon fodder.)</blockquote>

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