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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kinneus" data-source="post: 4761802" data-attributes="member: 48215">Great guide, as others have said. I love the monster roles; at first I thought they were superfluous fluff, but after I staged a fight comprised solely of soldiers, I realized role matters. Role matters a lot. My favorite roles:1. Brute. Before I select a soldier, I'll always look for a brute of the same level, and use that instead. My group is four players with two of them playing strikers, so the bloated HP doesn't contribute to grind as much. Good use of brutes can make combat exciting, in a very 4e kind of way. Players will be thrilled that all their cool powers are hitting the brute's crappy defenses, but they'll still be threatened by their high damage and staying power. I do wish their damage was a bit higher though. 2. Artillery, for basically the reasons Stalker0 has already laid out. My only complaint; I wish there were more archery-types, and less magic-types. It's hard to justify using a Kobold Wyrmpriest in every fight... after the party kills the ninth or tenth necromancer in the temple, necromancy suddenly doesn't feel all that scary. That's clearly a pet peeve, though. Artillery are clealy very well-designed. 3. Skirmishers. These guys just mix well with everything. Sometimes they feel a little fiddly with all their shifting and immediate reactions and such, but for the most part, any encounter can be improved with a clever skirmisher or two in there to shake things up. Due to their mobility, skirmishers are especially nice because they can do stuff other than whack the PCs yet again. They can provide flanking for the brutes, dash off to activate the trap, run away to warn the leader. They're plot-tastic. Minions I'm fond of, but don't use much, as my group lacks a controller (although maybe this a good reason to use them more... they might actually seem threatening!). If you need help on making minions actually scary, I find giving them a decent ranged attack can make them frightening well into high heroic tier. Your defender has to decide: can I really take seven crossbow bolts to the chest in order to charge them?Soldiers I avoid like the plague. Lurkers are hit-and-miss; they generally do terrifying amounts of damage in all-too-specific circumstances, so I feel like you really have to design the whole encounter around them if you want to use them.</blockquote>

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