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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AngryPurpleCyclops" data-source="post: 4710691" data-attributes="member: 82732">But this is a best case pc targeting the specific weakness of that monster.  Change the sorcerer to a fighter and it's lights out.  This also disregards the fact the the death knight is a powerful creature apt to be leading other undead.  In our campaign if one pc is distinguishing themselves as the major threat in an encounter, the monsters target him in the exact same way pc's target a monster who is over performing I'm ok with all this too.  If a party with a chaladin and cleric runs into undead, I expect the undead to be in huge trouble.  I would feel that the divine classes were broken if this wasn't the case.  Switch the scenario to a sorrowsworn and your average chaladin is in massive trouble.  The swarm has +30 vs reflex attack and can fly 12.  The deathlord has an aura that will enable him to mop the floor with a sorcerer or zap cleric.  He can keep most ranged attackers constantly struggling to get away from his daze and other debilitating effects like weakness and the -2 penalty on melee and ranged attacks and insubstantial ability coupled with teleport and very substantial defenses make him a serious problem. I'm ok with all this too but there's a fine line between intelligent encounter design and either designing specifically to party strengths or weaknesses.  Published encounters will neither be designed to help nor hinder any specific build.  It's obviously more complex than the raw math, but the math is a great place to start.  Arguing that pc synergies outclass monster synergies just implies lazy encounter design to me.  The expectation is that N+3 encounters are hard.  If they're not hard their's something wrong with one of three things.  The game system, the encounter design or the monsters actions/DM's tactics.  It can be more than one of these combining to make something less effective than expected.   Obviously a great plan by the pc's or a particularly effective build vs encounter type might sometimes change a hard encounter into something less difficult (i.e. if you have a bunch of ranged strikers and there's lots of difficult terrain for the pc's to hide behind you have an optimum situation vs melee creatures. but the inverse should be true just as often, if the pc's are in a foggy swamp with limited visibility suddenly ranged strikers are at a disadvantage) this is denying the mathematical reality of the game.  "Must have" is the wrong verbiage but "vastly superior effectiveness" is an understatement after level 15.  I doubt they responded to complaints, I think if you were a fly on the wall at WotC you would find that the person who designed the scaling of the game specifically planned for the numbers to ascend symmetrically as a matter of balance.  It's a very elegant system factoring, stats + enhancements + level + feats to maintain parity.  If you take a look at the rules for adding magic items to creatures, specifically the "magic threshhold" on page 174 of the dmg you can interpolate the scaling model.  They put a lot of thought into the balance of this game with regard to combat encounters.  They keep getting better and better with each revision.  In the earliest versions the DM was somewhat on his own with regard to appropriate encounters(there was no rule for easy, normal, hard).  3.0 and 3.5 really got pretty sharp with the EL system but even this had flaws.  4e has nailed this concept down in a way that maximizes dm's range of choices while ensuring that encounters will not spiral out of control.  This is the reason for scaling defenses and attacks.  In older versions of DnD 2 monsters of a comparative level could have defense values that were miles apart.  This system has a range of about 40 for defenses where as the the thac0 system was about 20 so a difference of 6 in thac0 would be a difference of 12 in 4e. Making things like a will-o-wisp very problematic in terms of balance.  This problem is removed by the mathematical model they use in 4e.  They probably hired someone with a lot more knowledge of probability, systems and game theory or at least decided that these things needed to be part of the model.  The problem is that instead of just adding errata to the level advancement table they made this a feat.  It's a horrible choice mechanically (effectively a feat tax) and they're clearly not "necessary" in a literal sense.  Obviously the DM can adjust the encounters as needed (maxing encounters at N+2 instead of N+4 and/or cutting the L+5 to L+7 monsters out of the mix at epic) but denying that this was not the intent of the design is a little silly.  The rules don't say "when you get to epic level, make the range of foes smaller because the math doesn't scale".  The rules for designing encounters remain constant.  Bottom line: If you want to maintain the scaling model and encounter design system the correction of 1 per tier is indeed necessary.  PC's are going to struggle massively against L+6 monsters in epic.  L+6 monsters in heroic are challenging but not overwhelming, something changed between tiers since facing L+6 monsters is part of the game. Anecdotal scenarios of how some pc's can still compete with L+3 monsters isn't a valid argument to the contrary.  L+3 is not L+7 and for every situation where a pc is strong against a monster there's a monster that is too powerful for them to deal with.  The sorrowsworn level 28 leader can conceivably be in a battle with level 21 or 22 pc's.</blockquote>

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