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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aegeri" data-source="post: 5288556" data-attributes="member: 78116">First, I must say one of your core arguments - about the Goblin - is just a gigantic strawman built to support your argument but without being a truly valid example. There are numerous creatures that deserve the term "solo" on purely logical grounds. That they need certain mechanics is just a function of the game, but it is not inherently illogical.Many of them already do. A dragon doesn't need special justification why you should be terrified of it: It's a damn dragon. Why is Iron-tongue who commands every Kobold from the Fire Mountains or Skullsplitter the fierce Orc Barbarian also a solo, with comparative resistance? Because these individuals don't lead entire armies by themselves unless they are unique and special.Just like your PC is unique and entirely special compared to most other NPCs in the world, so too are the elite/solo unique and special compared to the general mass of monsters in the world.  I absolutely, 100% categorically state that this is completely wrong. I cannot disagree more strongly with this statement in words over the internet. Before MM3, I might have agreed with this but now that solo design has been moving a certain way and with the new damage - solos are a fun, threatening and SHORT encounter. One reason that solos were no fun before is huge amounts of grind with constant lockdowns.It either took forever to kill, doing very little damage in the process leading to a boring fight or it didn't do anything because of daze/stun/dominate lockdowns. Now that solos have the guts to solve the second problem and the damage to solve the first, they are more fun and take less time. Why is this? Because a solo of the parties level or around two levels higher produces a fun fight. You don't need to go overboard on the EL to make them relevant.<a href="http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v305/Aegeri/?action=view&current=Ter-Soth.jpg&newest=1" target="_blank">Ter-Soth</a> for example is a 28th level brute that I used against a level 28 party. The fight lasted four rounds and was utterly intense. Ter-Soth was hard to lock down with conditions and dealt huge amounts of damage accurately. At the end, the three melee classes had a huge amount of healing surges taken off them, one was unconscious and the others had 15 and 30 HP respectively. He also took big chunks out of both ranged party members. Total time (real time) of the fight was a mere 35 minutes. If that's not an absolute success when you combine new damage, a lower level (less missing) and guaranteed action economy (how solos are being designed now more and more, see the <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/4e-discussion/289555-redone-black-dragon-gencon.html" target="_blank">young black dragon</a> as an example) I don't know what is. This isn't even true and is easily disproved. Open your PHB, turn to the description of Dwarves. Oh look, as a racial feature they get a +5 bonus to saves against poison. It is limited, but it does show that getting high saving throw bonuses isn't exactly uncommon for even low level characters. It is possible with feats to get bonuses quite high as well - particularly against specific conditions.All solos get +5 to saves because in the end they need it. One effect on a solo deals 5x the effect (because it's one roll to effectively hit 5 monsters simultaneously). So they need the resistance to reduce the power of save ends effects. In the end though, nearly every solo in 4E is defined by what it actually does on its stat block, making this particular point a rather irrelevant curiosity. The purple worm and dracolich have +5 saves in the MM, but it doesn't make them suddenly equal to truly excellently designed solos like Lolth, Allabah, Oublivae, Vecna (so much potential here), Demogorgon, Elminster (I hate the character, but the stat block is glorious) and similar. For that matter even decently designed MM solos like the Ancient White Dragon are good examples.In the end a solo monster IS defined by its stat block. Most of the solos that are really good are good because of their powers and abilities. The +5 saves does little to save a poor stat block.Considering that all solos are made or break on how good their mechanics gel to produce a good fight, I just can't see what point you're trying to make here. Flavor and similar is the DMs job, the stat blocks job is to make that fun. I can't even comprehend how you think this argument is valid. Different solos vary widely in abilities and how they function. There are multiple turn solos, there are single initiative "nova" solos, there are those that rely on zones and ranged attacks, there are solos that simply beat the ever loving snot out of PCs. The difference between a Kraken, Demogorgon, Lolth, Elminster, Allabah and similar are massive. There is no denying those creatures play nowhere near the same - despite being all solos.The only common features of them is a general resistance to being constantly stun/daze locked to varying degrees. They all have a solid amount of HP, which is just required frankly, 2 APs and a +5 bonus to save. Nothing else makes them consistent with one another in a way that is "dues ex machina" at all. Your argument doesn't make any sense, because aside from a few common features none of the solos I've listed have very much in common mechanically at all. They all do the same thing in widely different ways. PCs are not getting deja-vu here - except perhaps for dragons. Dragons have the flaw of being too overly mechanically similar to one another. If the Black Dragon is any indication though, this could be ending.This is the strawman I mentioned at the beginning of my post. It's just a completely silly and made up situation designed to make the rules for solos more ridiculous than they really are.Try the same thing with a red dragon, or a hulking 9 foot orc warchief who leads an entire band of thousands of warriors to see how many DMs actually use solos.Nonsense. None of your arguments support this conclusion period. Since MM3 and just the changing of design away from stun/daze lock being a viable tactics solos are finally coming into their own. I've had a lot of successful, fun and intense solo fights recently. The game has finally figured out that it is okay to make solos resistant to things if it means they do stuff, don't need to be obscenely high level to last long enough to do something and will ultimately be more fun.Like most of your arguments, this just entirely fails to make any sense as an argument IMO. If their mechanics are solid and allow them to accomplish what they actually should be doing: Challenging 5 PCs that is not making the situation "worse" by any means.According to the compendium there are 4059 creatures in 4th edition. Of these, 385 are solos (it's 384 in the compendium, a cookie to the first person to tell me where the extra is from!). That's a pretty small percentage of the overall number of monsters in 4E. So this is not a very strong argument from the facts at all. In fact I'd like to point out that MM3 and Demonomicon were not very solo heavy. Both books added a lot of regular standard monsters - particularly at paragon and epic (where they are desperately needed). So they are moving away from publishing a lot of solos, like Catastrophic dragons being elites as an example. When they do, they're publishing better quality and more interesting solos. Yes, they are built to a template, but the few fixed things solos get doesn't change that you can build different kinds of fun and entertaining solos if you put your mind to it.</blockquote>

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