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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ceraus" data-source="post: 4737008" data-attributes="member: 76818">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.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.</blockquote>

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