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Message: <blockquote data-quote="eamon" data-source="post: 5005587" data-attributes="member: 51942">A lot here has focused on monster group composition; so let's see if I can add a few tactical considerations.(1) It's my impression that monster roles are more varied than PC roles.  What this means?  The PC's ability to kill your artillery or lock down your big damage dealer matters more than your ability to do the same to them.  If you want to annoy them, therefore, have a few low level soldiers mark their defenders, preferably keeping them away from the fray.  This is particularly effective against low-damage defenders, since it can take them a long time to actually kill the soldiers.In short, include marking soldiers and make sure they loosen up combat; keep it spread out to avoid them easily focusing one by one on the enemies.(2) Now, most barbarians are chargers.  To charge; you need to move.  What you want, is a readied action: as soon as he moves; you do XYZ where XYZ slows him, drop him prone, etc.  This can really ruin his day.  Of course, for that to work, you need to hit, and it's probably gotta be a ranged attack; so getting this to work is much much easier if you're not swarmed by defenders, see (1).  To keep it fair, I would only do this if the guards have a reasonable way of expecting the PC to do much charging - say on the second combat of the day.  To up the tension, you can interject some barked commands or communication between the hobgoblins.  If one of em shouts "I'll cover the runner!" and then says "runner down" when he trips the barbarian, they'll know they're dealing with smart opponents, which is always extra scary ;-).(3)Warlocks need to move to avoid being very fragile.  Anything you do to limit that movement will be nasty - slow, in particular, makes it hard for them to move more than 2 squares, which makes getting their concealment tricky.  (4)In general, focus fire works well (excepting above tactics; so it's ok to lock down the defenders with separate soldiers!).  You can have more creatures on the battlefield than there are PC's, and that's a good idea anyhow since higher level creatures quickly turn into a hard, slow, untactical slog (on a similar note, don't use too many soldiers - they may be strong, but they can make the game boring and unfun!).   That means you can have a few creatures covering specific PC's to annoy them, and most of the rest focusing fire on particuarly vulnerable enemies.  If you want to deplete their healing resources quickly, focus on low-hp low-AC characters first; these will require more healing per attack from you.  That's probably the cleric or the warlock.(5)Anybody particularly dependent on minor actions will hate to be dazed.   If you can't lock down the defenders, that's probably the paladin and  the swordmage.  Particularly, if the paladin can't engage, he get's  penalized, so that's nasty.  On the other hand, it's even better if you  can just lock em down with soldiers, so I think an actually juicier  target is the cleric (for dazing).  The reason for that is than in any somewhat challenging battle he'll need to heal somebody, and if he does, he needs minor actions to do so.  There are few as critical minor actions as healing.  If someone is sustaining a nasty power, that's another obvious target.  People that like charging don't care as much about daze; so in any case prefer targets without a good melee basic attack and that have someone next to them to take OA's if they try anything ranged.(6)In addition, there's obvious stuff like using the terrain to the monster's advantage (i.e., put artillery in hard to reach places, give em cover and have em spread out so it's hard to get several of them locked down with a single defender.)  You can overdo this kind of stuff too though; it should stay believable and reasonable, IMHO - if the archers don't have a believable reason to be holed up in a fortress, they shouldn't be.</blockquote>

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