Solving all minion issues (long)

[Ceraus]

That's fair: I apologize about the extra-dismissive attitude. I didn't mean for it to be that way but I do have that tendency.

And I apologize about shouting. Well... the big bold text. Y'know.

I think if you follow the idea of the damage increases, and you include more minions per monster slot at higher levels you will get better results. Minions should probably still die by the bucketload by if they always do respectable damage they can get the job done.

For example, the suggestion at epic was to make minions do 20 damage a hit. Combine that with 6 minions per 1 monster slot, that's a theroetical 120 damage a round! (far more than other epic monsters). The tradeoff of course is that that damage will drop very quickly.

The other epic monsters get harder to kill, the minions don't, so some kind of compensation is needed. Only their damage can raise.

20 damage a hit is quite balanced from low Epic if it's still 4 minions = 1 standard. It's certainly in line with the damage minions used to do at level 1. Minions (of old) also don't inflict status effects. However, at 6 minions = 1 standard, their damage would be a little too high at low Epic but quite reasonable by level 30.

EDIT: Whoops, I just realized that you were actually agreeing with what you typed, expecting me to agree too. And there I went trying to convince you back.


I like the proposed solution of increasing minion numbers at higher levels. Their 1 hit = 1 kill property makes them so much more vulnerable at higher levels that it's not funny.

I suggest the following values (untested). Make sure to modify XP accordingly.

• Level 1: 3 minions
• Level 6: 4 minions
• Level 11: 5 minions
• Level 16: 6 minions
• Level 21: 7 minions
• Level 26: 8 minions

It's not perfect, but it alleviates the problem of low-level minion deadliness and makes high-level minion combat much more exciting. Even though player HP triples from levels 1 to 11, the 3-minion 12 damage will rise to a 5-minion 30 damage. And 5 minions are probably easier to kill at level 11 than 3 at level 1, so maybe there's still not enough!

Importantly, it also keeps the "minion spirit" of 1-hit kills, which I had no idea was held so sacred. The "bloodied" condition on automatic damage or damage on a miss corrects most of the remaining issues.

A further fix, as mentioned in my first post, would be to cap the amount of targets a single area effect can affect. Astral Wave is still mighty effective if the Cleric reaches the 10-target cap! Without the cap, that's half the fight's minions dead, which would require a ridiculous amount of minions to overcome... enough to scare a Wizard-Druid-Invoker team away.

My goal by posting this topic was to get feedback on my house rules and help people have fun with minions (which are a great idea) no matter the level. Since the "more minions per slot as levels rise" idea does balance minions, I'll throw myself behind it and maybe even work on its maths to produce a better numbers/damage curve.

Still, it's not for me. I really like my minion roles and their consistency with automatic damage and damage on a miss. I have friggin' minion barbarians that really feel like the brutes they are! (each worth 1/3 standard)

 

[keterys]

I'll admit, it would be nice if the "brute" and "artillery" roles for minions could be meaningful in terms of them normally getting extra/less hp

It'd be very useful to see your numbers on how many minions are appropriate. It's my understanding that WotC has actually publicly admitted multiple times that minions are worth less than 1/4 a monster at high level, so I suspect that's a route they're beginning to examine themselves.

 

[Ceraus]

D8+2 (or D6+3) damage is strong damage against first level PCs, but not overwhelming. It would take an average of 27 successful minion hits to wipe out a party of 5 first level PCs (taking into account healing surges and leader heal powers) at the 35% to 55% hit ratio of the skeletons.

Or an average of even more successful Kobold Skirmisher hits, apparently.

As you've pointed out, your version of the Decrepit Skeleton minion does as much damage as the average standard creature of its level. However, you're supposed to be able to bring four times as many because they're minions.

As it stands, if five standard monsters win initiative, they can drop a Wizard by focus-firing if they get good rolls, doing about 28 damage if they hit four times, more if they use their encounter powers.

Your Decrepit Skeletons? If they win initiative, the twenty of them will deal over 100 damage if they hit 4/5 of the time. If they only hit 1/2 of the time instead, which is expected, even moreso with CA, that's still 65 damage, not counting criticals.

In a normal situation, two of three players will get to act before the minion group, dropping maybe 4 of them if they get lucky*. The sixteen minions left will still get to down a player or two!

* A Fighter with Cleave drops 1 on average. A Ranger with Twin Strike drops 1 on average. A Wizard with Scorching Burst drops 2 on average (with that amount of minions, surely 4 of them can be targeted at once). Most other controller classes fare as well as the Wizard, most other non-controller classes fare worse than the Fighter and Ranger.

Regardless of how easy minions are to kill, 6.5 average damage is way too much for these levels. Even 4 damage is pushing it.

The 4E mindset? Or your mindset? Nothing in the 4E rules indicate that a monster using a weapon should not do weapon damage. In fact, the opposite occurs in the MM.

Take a Minotaur Warrior with Str 23 and a Greataxe. It should do 1d10 + 6 damage. It does do 1d10 + 6 damage.

The 4E mindset appears to be that monsters with weapons should often follow the standard weapon damage rules. The main exception to this appears to be minions and we are in a thread discussing house rules for minions.

There are exceptions at high levels, but those consist of monsters doing weapon damage plus some other amount of damage, often to get on par with the DMG monster damage suggestions for those levels.

I stand corrected. It's my mindset.

(I'm wholly consumed by it, too. I use Excel to generate my monsters' damage in combat: I just enter their average damage and the program bell-curves it for me at the press of a button, also telling me the attack roll and auto-calculating criticals. The goal is to reduce low-level damage swinginess and up it at high levels.)

The Monster Manual really goes out of its way to have monster weapon dice values stay consistent with their size and weapon. Yet, they arbitrarily add damage on top when they feel like it (and they should!). And non-weapon damage is all over the place.

Still, minions do not, cannot and should not be restrained to what their weapon and stats would indicate. Low-level damage would be out of hand.

I was going to add "why would you expose yourself to all that dice rolling?", but that question would have been hypocritical. You already told us you don't want your players to know which enemies are minions, and if my Lord of the Rings analogies don't sway you, we'll just have to disagree.

 

[Ceraus]

I'll admit, it would be nice if the "brute" and "artillery" roles for minions could be meaningful in terms of them normally getting extra/less hp

It IS fun, but it IS much more work than the very-satisfying-enough method I outlined/stole at the beginning of page 3.

It'd be very useful to see your numbers on how many minions are appropriate. It's my understanding that WotC has actually publicly admitted multiple times that minions are worth less than 1/4 a monster at high level, so I suspect that's a route they're beginning to examine themselves.

Official errata would be great. Too bad it would require reworking all minions' XP... do I hear "4.5" ?

• Level 1: 3 minions
• Level 6: 4 minions
• Level 11: 5 minions
• Level 16: 6 minions
• Level 21: 7 minions
• Level 26: 8 minions

I've double-checked my how-many-minions-by-level numbers and find them really appropriate! Any change I'd make would be minor.

Yet... be very careful. The numbers achieve nigh-perfect balance in the following circumstances:

• Monster Manual minions. Elsewhere, there's crazy cheese like minions that deal minion damage and cause daze (save ends).
• Bloodied minions. Automatic damage, whether from an effect or a miss, makes minions bloodied. It won't come into play often enough to slow down the game.
• Capped number of area targets. Beware Astral Wave and Legion's Hold. You don't want half of your monsters wiped out by an encounter power, do you?

For completeness, the area cap was as follows (convert blasts):

• Burst 1 : 3 targets
• Burst 2 : 4 targets
• Burst 3 : 5 targets
• Burst 4 : 6 targets
• Burst 5 : 7 targets

And so on...

From experience, those numbers do not intrude on player fun. Areas powers still win the day against minions, just less overwhelmingly, and controllers still feel special.

 

[the Jester]

Here's a quick and dirty solution that gives minions a little more toughness with pretty much no extra work: give them resist all x, where x is a number that you think is right. So, for instance, I used some level 10 minions (iirc) the other day that had resist weapons 5. That saved two of them from the fighter's rain of steel damage.

I also agree that raising minion damage is a very good idea, at least at high levels, but bear in mind that (by the RAW) 5 minions should inflict as much overall damage as one non-minion creature. At low levels, this is much truer than at high levels; I think the best 'fix' here is to give higher- level minions more cool attacks and to increase the number of minions that it takes to equal one 'standard' monster at higher levels.

For low to mid-heroic levels (say, 1st through about 8th), I think 1:5 works fine. I'd start increasing it from there- maybe 1:6 for up to 15th level, 1:8 up to 20th level, 1:12 up to 25th level and 1:20 up to 30th level? I'm guessing here; I've only run 4e up to early paragon levels, excepting a one-shot or two.

 

[KarinsDad]

Or an average of even more successful Kobold Skirmisher hits, apparently.

As you've pointed out, your version of the Decrepit Skeleton minion does as much damage as the average standard creature of its level. However, you're supposed to be able to bring four times as many because they're minions.

As it stands, if five standard monsters win initiative, they can drop a Wizard by focus-firing if they get good rolls, doing about 28 damage if they hit four times, more if they use their encounter powers.

Your Decrepit Skeletons? If they win initiative, the twenty of them will deal over 100 damage if they hit 4/5 of the time. If they only hit 1/2 of the time instead, which is expected, even moreso with CA, that's still 65 damage, not counting criticals.

In a normal situation, two of three players will get to act before the minion group, dropping maybe 4 of them if they get lucky*. The sixteen minions left will still get to down a player or two!

* A Fighter with Cleave drops 1 on average. A Ranger with Twin Strike drops 1 on average. A Wizard with Scorching Burst drops 2 on average (with that amount of minions, surely 4 of them can be targeted at once). Most other controller classes fare as well as the Wizard, most other non-controller classes fare worse than the Fighter and Ranger.

Regardless of how easy minions are to kill, 6.5 average damage is way too much for these levels. Even 4 damage is pushing it.

DND is not a game in a vacuum. The DM has to be aware of many things. One of those is the DMG suggestion to NOT use 20 minions.

Any 20 first level minions targeting one PC will do a lot of damage because 8-10 of those minions will hit. It doesn't matter if it is 8-10 hits at 4 points, or 8-10 hits at 6.5 points.

If the DM ignores the suggestions in the DMG, he gets what he pays for.

I do understand your issue here. As DM, it is my responsibility to ensure that any changes that I make to the rules are if not totally balanced, at least controlled.

In this case, I would never have 20 minions because I rarely use normal minions. I use "tough minions" that get double XP. These minions fall after 1-3 hits depending (50% on one hit, 25% on two hits, 25% on three hits, or on 1.75 hits on average), they do average monster damage instead of wimpy damage, and they can even critical a PC.

So at most, there would only be 10 tougher minions in a standard encounter assuming that I did not follow the DMG guideline and have a controller or artillery with fewer minions (which would be more likely, I tend to try to make interesting encounters instead of just a mob of foes).

And even if a PC falls, there will almost always be another PC there to heal him back. Stuff happens. So as DM, I try to give my players the tools they will need to overcome unusual or unexpected adversity.

Even with the core minion rules, the dice can go cold for the players and hot for the DM and 20 core first level minions can TPK a party.

 

[DracoSuave]

One minion I find interesting is the Coatl Mockery from Open Grave.... this is a minion that is -made- to die.

 

[Garthanos]

Even with the core minion rules, the dice can go cold for the players and hot for the DM and 20 core first level minions can TPK a party.

Yup "be careful" how you use them... note some suggestions would have only 3 per pc...at level 1, even 15 of those could (though a little less likely) have the same effect and mob firing on a single pc can be quite ummm rude

 

[keterys]

Any 20 first level minions targeting one PC will do a lot of damage because 8-10 of those minions will hit. It doesn't matter if it is 8-10 hits at 4 points, or 8-10 hits at 6.5 points.

Well, it _does_ matter - after all, 8-10 hits at 4 will knock 1 party member unconscious (and certainly beat up a 2nd) and 8-10 at 6.5 will knock 2 down and potentially even a 3rd, since fair chance one of those hits will be a crit which gives you another 3.5 damage.

That said... the ability for minions to critical in _some_ fashion might be nice. Certainly it would help address the 'attack completely stopped by resistance and/or battlerager' issue.

 

[KarinsDad]

Well, it _does_ matter - after all, 8-10 hits at 4 will knock 1 party member unconscious (and certainly beat up a 2nd) and 8-10 at 6.5 will knock 2 down and potentially even a 3rd, since fair chance one of those hits will be a crit which gives you another 3.5 damage.

That said... the ability for minions to critical in _some_ fashion might be nice. Certainly it would help address the 'attack completely stopped by resistance and/or battlerager' issue.

This is one advantage of my "tougher minion" system. For all intents and purposes, they are normal monsters. They just fall over easier, so there are 2 of them instead of 1 regular monster instead of the 4 for normal minions. They use all of the normal monster rules, so battlerage and other new features that ignored minion rules do not ignore them.

So, it would be 4-5 hits at 6.5 instead of 8-10 at 4 per round. 30 points of damage instead of 36 core.

They average less damage per round, but spread it out over more rounds because they are harder to kill. This flattens out the damage curve compared to regular minions who do a lot of damage early in the encounter and very little damage near the end of the encounter. If the PCs survive by round four in a normal minion encounter, they are mostly good to go.

Tougher minions are not as simple to DM as normal minions. I have to put a little check mark next to each one on my list each time it is hit and not killed. I have to put a bloodied token on the miniature if the tough minion is hit twice and not killed. I have to roll damage dice.

I don't consider this major bookkeeping and I gain the advantage of their "minion-ness" being somewhat hidden from the players, at least at the start of the encounter. My players are not stupid. They figure it out eventually and sometimes quickly. But the point is that the players don't merely use anti-minion powers automatically as if they were being spoon fed by the DM.

I seriously dislike spoon feeding my players. I want them to be challenged. I want them to make mistakes on occasion. I want there to be mysteries about the monsters so that there is more drama and intrigue and even player dread if a monster seems a lot more powerful than it actually is. My tough minions are not really that tough (1.75 hits each to kill * 1/2 the number of creatures * slightly increased damage). But, they have the illusion of being tough. They have the illusion of being normal monsters and that decreases the amount of metagaming player decision making and makes the encounter seem more powerful than it might actually be, just due to increased numbers of foes.

It's something that adds to the potential player dread and tension. And IMO, that's a good thing. It decreases player combat boredom.