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<blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6000464" data-attributes="member: 996">Nothing particularly makes them /more/ exciting than a good battle against other monster types (except, perhaps, the barely-tenable all-minion encounter).&nbsp; MM3 and latter Solos are pretty well-designed to be a good and interesting challenge.&nbsp; They'll have a fairly large number of powers, some particularly brutal ones on infrequent recharge, and some 'action preservation' traits or powers that let them keep fighting in the face of attempted 'lockdowns.'&nbsp; Put together, it can make for a battle in which the Solo opens strong, establishing that it's a bad ass, and doesn't go down easily, with at least some tactics or meaningful player choices or surprises of one sort or another happening in the mean time.But, an Elite also has some of that, and some variety provided by a few other monsters, and a 'standard' encounter has that variety, with movement, positioning, terrain, and tactics (including very simple tactics like focus fire) becoming correspondingly more important as the number of enemies increases.&nbsp; Minion fights, OTOH, are pretty blah, with every hit killing a minion and the minions not putting out variable damage (nor even significant damage, unless they're some ranged minions concentrating fire or something).5e, so far, has monsters two kinds of monsters, AFAICT, they have 'boss' monsters that are essential leaders, synergizing with lesser monsters in some way, and regular monsters that are various size blocks of hit points with a distinctive ability of some sort.&nbsp; With bounded accuracy and with damage scaling more dramatically, a monster can take on a whole party at low level and be little more than a mook at high level, with the same stats.&nbsp; That's unlikely to deliver the kind of solo fights 4e does, so there'd have to be something more added to get there.Though, I'm not sure why the OP wants only solo battles to be interesting...</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Tony Vargas, post: 6000464, member: 996"] Nothing particularly makes them /more/ exciting than a good battle against other monster types (except, perhaps, the barely-tenable all-minion encounter). MM3 and latter Solos are pretty well-designed to be a good and interesting challenge. They'll have a fairly large number of powers, some particularly brutal ones on infrequent recharge, and some 'action preservation' traits or powers that let them keep fighting in the face of attempted 'lockdowns.' Put together, it can make for a battle in which the Solo opens strong, establishing that it's a bad ass, and doesn't go down easily, with at least some tactics or meaningful player choices or surprises of one sort or another happening in the mean time. But, an Elite also has some of that, and some variety provided by a few other monsters, and a 'standard' encounter has that variety, with movement, positioning, terrain, and tactics (including very simple tactics like focus fire) becoming correspondingly more important as the number of enemies increases. Minion fights, OTOH, are pretty blah, with every hit killing a minion and the minions not putting out variable damage (nor even significant damage, unless they're some ranged minions concentrating fire or something). 5e, so far, has monsters two kinds of monsters, AFAICT, they have 'boss' monsters that are essential leaders, synergizing with lesser monsters in some way, and regular monsters that are various size blocks of hit points with a distinctive ability of some sort. With bounded accuracy and with damage scaling more dramatically, a monster can take on a whole party at low level and be little more than a mook at high level, with the same stats. That's unlikely to deliver the kind of solo fights 4e does, so there'd have to be something more added to get there. Though, I'm not sure why the OP wants only solo battles to be interesting... [/QUOTE]

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