Too easy a time with Thunderspire?

[SlyFlourish]

My weekly group is sailing through Thunderspire at the moment. It is a party of five level 5 characters with a Warlord, Cleric, Fighter, Rogue, and Ranger. Some of them have multi-classed so the Rogue can use hunter's mark and the warlord has some wizard spells.

Right now they don't ever seem to be that stretched by a battle. The fighter and warlord manage to control the battlefield so well that even when I attempt to employ some strategy, I'm locked down too much to do much of anything.

Every battle I've been adding another creature or making one of the creature's an elite. Still there doesn't seem to be much of a push.

I think the players in the group have powergamed pretty well; they aren't really overpowered in gear but they really know their strategies. I'm thinking that the pre-published adventures were intended for players who didn't work nearly as well together as the group I have.

I'm also thinking that I let them fully rest too often - about once every three battles when it should be more like once every six. That's something I plan to remedy.

Anyway, I wanted to get other people's thoughts on it.

 

[Prism]

From a players perspective so far

There are 4 PC and they are 1 level higher than they should be (ie 5th) by now so no encounter level adjustments have been made. We have a wizard, ranger, fighter and warlord. So far we have played Shadowfell to basically get used to the rules and now I think the DM is going to take the gloves off a little. This week we took on the slavers which was our first major fight. We didn't manage to do it quietly so basically the entire dungeon emptied out into the first room area on 5 round intervals (it felt a bit like the old WG4 Tharizdun adventure). I think we had to fight 4 encounters in one without an extended rest. Pretty hard but we are all still alive. We now have a situation where we need to finish them off without an extended rest but have no dailies or action points left, which will be hard. The DM had a few of the monsters escape when they were ineffective (such as an archer with no soldiers in front) or on very low hits. I imagine that just like us they will be healed up to an extent

I found it enjoyable to a fast paced dungeon with little or no chance to rest between fights and it certainly makes it very dynamic and much more difficult. However I guess you can't overuse this tactic for more static adventures. Another thing you can do is to target single PCs just like the PCs do. In this fight almost every arrow and ranged spell was been hurled at our wizard since he was the most effective in the first few rounds, and to be honest much of the fight. I wouldn't do this all the time but it can certainly allow the monsters to regain some control of the enviroment when the wizard is hiding at the back drinking potions of healing

 

[MrMyth]

How far into Thunderspire are they?

Our group were pretty strong coming out of Keep on the Shadowfell, and easily blew through the early part of Thunderspire, but we soon got to the more appropriate encounters and have had some tough fights since then. I wouldn't be surprised if your group has similar - it does seem like the start of Thunderspire is filled with some fairly easy fights.

 

[the Jester]

Yeah, the first part of Thunderspire was pretty easy for my group too. They've pretty much only done the slavers and just started the duergar, though.

 

[SlyFlourish]

Where we are

My group just finshed Murklemore and they didn't have a single character drop. It felt too easy to me but I let them have more full rests than I should have.