Aegeri,
While I like your design, I have to admit the majority of the statblocks you have posted are too complicated for my tastes, so I'll probably simplify them before I use them in my games.
This is pretty true of my design. My inspiration for solo monsters are Lolth, Allabah, Demogorgon, Sea Kraken, most Dragons (except a few), the underwater primordial whatisherbeak (can never remember, but she drowns people), Vecna and similar. They are all reasonably complicated stat blocks and I tend to favor a solo having a pretty complicated stat block. This is just due to my design theory: I'm not afraid to make solos complicated because I'm making them the entire center of the encounter. I only put a few other monsters, traps or terrain with them that are highly synergistic with their powers.
I tend to make a stat block as "Solo" capable as possible. That is if you use it with some terrain vs. a party of 5 players it produces a decent encounter with minimal effort. Any effort above that just makes the scale go up a couple of notches. In many cases, I playtest solos on "planet bowling ball", basically the worst case scenario for many solos and see how they perform. Something that will be adequate in a completely terrible situation is likely to do reasonably okay in a real game with actual terrain. This leads to fairly complicated stat blocks, but in reality you should bear in mind a few things:
1) Powers are usually redundant. For example, you can ignore the tremor shock of the purple worm entirely and remove the slam attack. Bear in mind that if you keep the bite as it is, the worm will lose its opportunity attack as it won't be able to do anything when biting someone. If I redid the stat block - which I totally am NOT - I would make the bite a melee attack and the slam a melee basic. Making it clear the bite is usually what he wants to do on his turn if able, while the slam is the opportunity attack.
I would remove drag under and burrow and burst. This simplifies the stat block quite a bit and already makes it more manageable - without noticeably decreasing its power that much.
Same with the dracolich, you can easily remove Mesmerizing Glare and Energy Drain if you want, making the monster much simpler to run and without compromising its ability to fight terribly much. I find that removing complexity during a game is less obvious than adding it. So if the fight is too tough, start "forgetting" powers. Coming up with powers on the fly is harder to balance if you aren't basically running around with all the maths in your head on a consistent basis.
The point is you shouldn't view the stat blocks I make (or Wizards ones either) as a sort of straight-jacket. Remove (or even add) powers to suit your game. If your party isn't using a lot of stun/dominate/daze effects protective powers against these effects are quite pointless - just needlessly punish what few powers the PCs might have. So you should ignore this and it won't affect the balance much. The point of those protection powers is to prevent chain daze/stuns and similar so it can't do anything for the entire combat - not one or two rounds.
2) I am pleased you liked the Dracolich. I actually want to run the Dracolich in my own campaign at some point in future. I quite like the stat block I made for him.
CovertOps said:
I was so ready to shut down the Bard's constant creature sliding (on miss 1/round) because of the Worm's aura (Restless Earth). In his last upgrade he went from sliding to teleporting on miss so it wasn't forced movement.
That aside it was a very challenging encounter for the group and I was quite pleased (other than I did a "Drag Under" on the Minotaur and he used a power to get out of it immediately). At one point I almost got the Bard (he was flying) with the Thundershock? (burst 3) to get him prone and can't stand, but I missed and the next round he moved out of range (mental note to self - always include artillery in encounters).
I am glad it went well. In future, with melee monsters like this, simply limit how tall the ceiling is and bear in mind that he's huge so he occupies a 3x3x3 space. In other words his burst "3" attack reaches up a total of six squares up (as he's fat and occupies a lot of squares). So long as the ceiling is less than 6 squares or 30 feet high, flying out of range of that attack is impossible and the purple worm can still get him. I sort of had a narrow cavern environment in mind, so that's why I didn't give him any particular ranged or similar attacks. You can always change out a power for an acidic spit, I would say ranged 10; +19 vs. Reflex; 3d6+12 acid damage and the target is knocked prone and blinded (save ends). That would do the trick.
Glad it worked well though. Always good to have theory replaced with actual in game experiences.
@Thread in general, I will have more solo goodness and some other updated monsters (all the MM abominations) soon. Breaking somewhat from the threads tradition, I will also be providing an abomination monster theme as well to go with them. If there is something that deserves a theme, it's abominations and it's also because I wanted to present "power swap" powers for some of them. As I felt having a few variable powers would be good for a DM who likes to customize his creatures. This has come about because I *love* the replacement tables in Demonomicon for getting rid of variable resistance. Abominations like the Atropal are perfect fodder for such a system - particularly as the atropal can gain an aura that seriously ruins any radiant mafia's day.
