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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 5537359" data-attributes="member: 7006">Whenever topics come up with regards to the deadliness of battles in 4E in its current form... the first thing mentioned is to use MM3 damage expressions, because monsters from MM1 & 2 are underpowered and don't cause enough damage.  Now I certainly understand this and would agree that in the game as it currently stands, they definitely are.  However, many times it seems that as I read it, the point is made now that these MM1 & 2 monsters were always underpowered.  Which seems a bit at odds to what I remember from the earliest part of the game and I'm wondering if that was truly the case?The reason I bring this up, is because I think that it is hard for us to recall just how the game originally played before the splatbooks and Dragon articles opened the rules options up.  When looking at just the baseline powers available to the eight original classes (averaging about 4 powers per level per class), the combinations that could be put out onto the battlefield interacting with each other during a fight did not seem to have the same escalation in synergy and effectiveness that things do now.  So at the time, the monsters from MM1 appeared (at least to me) to be perfectly adequate in providing a challenge to the PCs.  (BTW - for the sake of this discussion I'm ignoring MM1 Solos, because there's much more evidence to suggest that the Solos truly were underpowered even compared to normal MM1 monsters.  I'm talking just standard and Elite monsters here.)  It was only after the the release of all the additional books, adding in all manner of new class powers, magic items, special rules etc., that building PCs that worked synergistically with each other without even planning or thinking about it became much more commonplace.  Much of this was simple power escalation due to expansion, as invariably there were always new powers introduced to the system that for any particular DMs game, had a much better chance of being overpowered in that game based upon how that DM ran it.  That was just simple odds.  And much of this was also WotC (or anybody for that matter) just not being able to foresee or playtest how every power/item/feat/boon created in every new book/article would interact with every other power/item/feat/boon currently in the game, when facing every new monster/encounter.  There was only so many PC power combinations any particular playtest group would experience versus any select monster encounter combinations.  Throw in parties that added a sixth, seventh, eighth player etc. to the battlefield (and thus all those other potential options to work in synergy during a fight) and your PCs grew exponentially more powerful as time went on.But the question still stands... were the regular monsters of MM1 actually underpowered when compared to the PCs built from PH1?  Or did they only devolve that way as PC options became greater over time?</blockquote>

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