D&D 4E The grindyness of 4e combat: anyone tried a solo monster yet?

[Felon]

So far, my group's had a lot of trouble getting one more combat in a five-hour session. Everything other than a minion takes a metric ton of damage to bring down, and things get much worse if an elite comes into the fray.

My last encounter was three 10th-level characters pitted against a galeb duhr and a bulette. It was only a 1400 XP encounter (not quite even 10th level) but the party still wound up giving up on the bulette and leaving. They weren't too badly hurt, they were just bored with trying to deal 204 points of damage after having exhausted the galeb duhr's 111. Once they ran out of encounter powers, they were blowing dailies just to have an alternative to the monotony of mashing at-will hotkeys. It reminded me much of the podcast with the party trying to take down the mind flayer, rakshasas, and minotaur.

So, I'm looking in the monster manual and reviewing solo monsters. Man, those things look like they'd take forever just to bloody. Has anybody tried one yet?

 

[Old Gumphrey]

Solos take about as long to kill as 5 monsters, strangely.

What's your party makeup? I'm gonna guess paladin, wizard, cleric.

 

[Felon]

Solos take about as long to kill as 5 monsters, strangely.

That sounds more like presumption than experience talking. Elites take longer to kill than two monsters, and likewise a solo will likely take far longer to kill than five monsters.

What's your party makeup? I'm gonna guess paladin, wizard, cleric.

We've got at least two different parties going. They run the gamut.

 

[Old Gumphrey]

Sounds like you're presuming that I haven't run five solo encounters since June 8th in a standard party.

I'm not surprised your experience differs with a party of three. What classes did you say they were, again? No strikers?

Do the math. If 5 characters take 90 minutes to take down a solo, wouldn't 3 characters take nearly twice as long to do the same job?

 

[Anthony Jackson]

My experience is that solo fights aren't very interesting, but are quick enough.

 

[MacMathan]

We finally got to a solo fight in KoTS and I found it to be a good change of pace and required some different tactics of the players but didn't really take more time.

As far as grinding so far none of our fights have taken very long at all. It has been a lot faster than in previous editions we never used to get through 4 or more fights in a 4 hour session now we can. We do have 5 players however.

 

[Victim]

Our recent solo fight wasn't really grindy. The black dragon did waste some time by hiding in his stupid darkness cloud, but the parts when we could actually fight went pretty quickly. Especially since I hit with Lead the Attack.

However, when we played at higher level with 3 characters, things did seem very grindy. With our group make up, we weren't all that able to get synergies and combos going - our fighter and wizard had some tricks, together but without leader buffs and with some bad luck, they just weren't coming off. With only 3 people and no leader to help things along, there was no critical mass.

What'd you have in your group?

 

[Graf]

I've only run one solo fight so far (17th level 8pcs) but the solo isn't proving particularly hard to hit or damage (even with an annoying high set of defenses).

Its all online on the pplay by post forum look for KK1 The Grotto of the Kua-toa. (can't link right now I'm afraid)

 

[Runestar]

The white dragon in the DMG adventure. Basically, all PCs blew their daily and encounter powers in the 1st round, then spent the remaining 14 rounds using their at-wills.

 

[Charwoman Gene]

The white dragon in the DMG adventure. Basically, all PCs blew their daily and encounter powers in the 1st round, then spent the remaining 14 rounds using their at-wills.

I think it lasted 5 rounds for us. That was with full daily spam and action points and 6 members. I;ve found this party (Pal, Ftr, Wiz, Wld, Rog, Wlk) very deadly.