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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aegeri" data-source="post: 5393258" data-attributes="member: 78116">This is an interesting question and subject to another thread entirely as well. There are two judgements that I make when deciding when monsters attack and who, noting that at epic the game is heavily in the PCs favor power and ability wise. Monsters that do not work together die doing very little. So creatures need to have basic tactics 101 or they will fail entirely. However, this is going to be a summary of various "things" that happen. Bearing in mind that I often divide it into creature type, how difficult the encounter should be and what the intent is. Sometimes my monsters act like complete morons and fall completely into the PCs optimal tactics: Because it's a good thing to remind your PCs why they are at epic tier. I also change all these tactics by tier. You want to be easier on heroic PCs who nobody has heard anything about, while having primary antagonists know something about how these legendary heroes are renowned to fight by epic.1) The swordmage would not be pulling "threat" on such a monster as he's not doing any damage to it. A fighter, battlemind or similar would nearly always be at. An unintelligent monster that gets hit tends to want to kill whoever hit it for the most damage. The lack of threat of being hit from the swordmage, combined with low damage of their attacks generally means a creature will ignore them. Unintelligent creatures frequently provoke marks and act completely incompetently, usually killing themselves in the process (as it frequently misses whoever it attacks if that character also has high defenses). Unfortunately, the Shielding Swordmage is unique in that it fails to actually present any threat in this manner. Then again if nobody else was hitting that creature it would be very unlikely to ignore the swordmage and keep flailing away at him. Same with the fact if someone hits it from a considerable distance away, it wouldn't be intelligent enough to disengage. It would only ignore the mark if someone was stabbing it really hard - like a striker or if there was a bloodied PC within reach.I like provoking marks from solos especially, say a huge Heroslayer Hydra, so it ends the combat a bit quicker and makes sure the defender gets some use out of it. 2) By creature type, I use daemons a lot in my examples so their behaviour (especially at epic) is good to bring up: Daemons and other chaotic evil creatures hit bloodied characters first, even if this would provoke a mark if it means killing the PC in question. If you get bloodied and there are demons, they go for you like bloodhounds if possible. They also coup de grace like crazy, so PCs quickly learn you go down around a daemon and it will be lights out. Demons also completely despise Divine characters in my games: They will always kill a divine character if they even remotely get the chance.Demons fight intelligently, but their decision making process becomes reckless when a PC is bloodied or injured. They risk OAs, mark actions and similar "punishment" for the chance to down or murder a PC. For example they won't realize that killing the Shaman is a better idea than trying to finish off the wounded Avenger (Divine, Bloodied, within melee distance or range of spells/powers).This can be altered and isn't set behavior as....3) One difference that I put into my games at epic especially, is that monsters begin to act extremely optimally and intelligently as they are being commanded. Daemon princes, a Pit Fiend, a Molydeus, avatars of monsters like Caiphon and similar all increase monster "intelligence". They fight more optimally, realize more about their environment (using it fully) and such forth. This literally is when the PCs are fighting the personal guard of Orcus, or magically summoned/commanded enemies that are as intelligent as the creator. These monsters work together in perfect unison and completely understand the state of the game. They optimally direct their attacks against the PCs weakest defenses (who are, remember known heroes of legend by epic tier), they know what tactics the PC use and take advantage of the smallest of disadvantages. This describes maybe 2 out of 10 encounters, only the most important and strongest encounters. Heroic tier monsters almost never ever ever have this level of intelligence, except in the most incredibly rare circumstances.Effectively you can replace this with: Pure metagaming. This represents creatures commanded by intelligences so far beyond human, they are practically clairvoyant. Given the opponents of epic PCs, it makes good sense.4) Whatever works. Any human intellect monster, who is paying attention will do what humans will do: If something works they will keep doing it. If punching the mage over and over works, they will continue to do that. If punching the mage over and over fails, they will try something else (or risk taking something else). This depends on the monster: Undead are unlikely to ever get bored. If for whatever reason I was using an epic zombie, it would sit there flailing away at the defender all day without realizing it was doing it wrong.On the other hand a Balor will get frustrated and tear into something else - even if it means being hit. A molydeus can decide its current course of action is stupid and hit someone else. A star spawn of Ulban will ignore the dominate centric Wizard - who is just a liability anyway - and direct more attacks against the barbarian. Monsters engaged by a defender will ignore the defender when he cannot enforce his mark punishment; if they are intelligent enough to realize that at the time. And so on.The idea is to make sure monsters are challenging first, but interesting and diverse as well. Star Spawn for example fight amazingly intelligently, given a bit of prediction to what PCs will do (almost unnatural ability to predict in fact). Demons are destructive and are very quick to use coup-de grace the instant they can - this makes them incredibly scary to fight in a difficult encounter. Devils fight simply extremely intelligently, but are not particularly prone to coup-de grace or provoking marks unless it strictly benefits them (Daemons will provoke marks if it at all thinks it will kill a PC).And such forth. This is a hard question to answer, because I roleplay monsters depending on a huge number of complex variables. The most important of which is to A) Make them fun and B) Make it clearly feel like a group of demons is a DISTINCT threat from a group of devils (for example), which are different to star spawned horrors, which are different to undead and such forth.Hopefully that is a sufficient answer, but that's a very hard question to answer. In general though, the most difficult situations fall under scenario 3. Those creatures and those encounters, which are my classic "EL+3" hard encounter at epic as well, are where monsters are going to act most optimally. IMO at that point, most optimally means to avoid and ignore the shielding swordmage as much as possible.Edit: The most simple thing, that I completely forgot is "Will this kill me". If action A will kill me and action B will not, most monsters will take action B. Hence damaging marks are really important to stopping your average creature from deciding "This is worth the risk".Edit2: Completely missed this question sorry.Ouch, you need to be adjacent for the +2 bonus and while that is solid, it really opens you up for "Horrific AoE" murder. Given, as I've mentioned a lot, most of the powers that will drop/cause major complications are bursts that is a terrible idea. It also stacks the party up nicely for auras and automatic damage effects. That's going to be useful at best when monsters don't have bursts or area attacks: But could well get the party in trouble.Punishing Sigil is really good though and is exactly the sort of power the Shielding Swordmage will need (this PP is solid for that alone, the powers are good as well). An OA is better than an immediate interrupt and easily gets past the "Doesn't get killed" part. Ignoring the Swordmage with the ability to make an OA, regardless of reach would be quite difficult. Personally, a shielding swordmage with that PP I think would go from useless at getting attention to probably being almost unignorable for most creatures without issue. Especially because it will prevent multiple attack powers from healthy creatures with sigil of safety. The only complication is getting bunched up in epic is a genuine trap. The Cleric in my last epic campaign had <a href="http://www.wizards.com/dndinsider/compendium/power.aspx?id=7891" target="_blank">Divine Phalanx</a>. I cannot name another power that PCs have I've seen in epic tier that almost killed the party more. It grouped them up for powerful effects nearly every single time.It was delicious. Every time he used it, I could bring out the bursts and blasts and drop 3/5 party members. If it wasn't for his immediate reaction healing feat, that let him use healing word when a party member dropped to 0 they would have screwed themselves multiple times. When Demonomicon came out, they were extremely lucky I had finished and balanced most encounters. I didn't use soul stealer until the end of the campaign, so on several occasions one of those PCs would have been knocked unconscious immediately after healing.</blockquote>

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