When you kill your monsters do you kill the boss one last?

[ferratus]

I was just wondering what the better strategy is. Is it better to kill the boss monster first because he generally does the most damage, or is it better to kill off the lesser monsters because they are easier to hit?

The damage doesn't seem to scale up as much as it did in 3e, so I've been wondering.

 

[Benlo]

Depends a little on your class. A Ranger probably doesn't want to blow arrows on Minions if faced with a bigger target if he has a Wizard on his team to drop some Scorching Bursts and the like to cull the herd.
With me, usually I take out minions first, if they're closest. I won't go out of my way for them off the bat, though.

 

[Gort]

Strikers should never attack minions unless the striker can do area attacks.

With minions out of the way, I'd probably say to kill the weaker monsters first. An elite monster often does twice the damage of a normal, and a solo often does about three times the damage, but they're both more than twice as hard to kill than a normal monster (usually double/triple the HP and higher defenses also). Therefore in general I'd say to go for the easiest killed normal monster first if you're concentrating fire.

Monster role also makes a big difference. Ignore those soldiers, they don't do much damage and will take all day to kill. Get the artillery! Once that's dead, I'd probably say controllers next, then brutes, then skirmishers and lurkers, and soldiers last.

 

[Blackbrrd]

Generally my party will go for the extra mobs, not the boss. They will probably use all their debuff-abilities on the boss though. For instance the Ranger has a daily that gives a mob -2 to attack (-1 on a miss) for the rest of the encounter.

Let's say you have 4 normal mobs and a solo mob. Each normal mob takes 1 unit of damage to kill and the boss takes 5. The party does 2 units of damage each round. If they attack the solo first, the mobs are doing full damage in rounds 1-3. If the players go for the normal mobs first, the damage is down already after round 1.

Unit's of mobs doing damage. (The first column is if they go for normal mobs first, the second column for solo mob first)
9 - 9
7 - 9
5 - 9
5 - 3
5 - 1
0 - 0
31 -31

So in other words - what damage pattern do the players want? It really depends on the situation I believe.

 

[Dice4Hire]

For my group it really varies. If we see a monster that is really being effective, we usually move to take him out first, so I guess the leaders tend to die a bit faster in our games.

But it really varies a lot, so no hard and fast rule.

 

[Artoomis]

If we can, boss first. That's because sometimes the others will surrender or urn the boss is taken out.

 

[Mengu]

Depends on who you can get to. If the eladrin ranger is the only one who can teleport to the boss while everyone else is fighting soldiers and brutes, then it would be a very bad idea for the ranger to attack the boss.

My general answer will be, whatever enemy you can focus fire on and take down fast, is the enemy to attack. I've had fights go both ways. Sometimes the "boss" is considerably squishier than the elite brute in the front line. And may surrender when his brute falls. Sometimes, a gang of bandits may split when you take their leader down, so it's hard to make a generalized strategy of what's best. The more mobile a party is, the more options they will have for focusing fire on the biggest threats.

My experience in a lot of fights has been that the artillery end up being some of the last creatures to die, despite the fact that they deal a lot of damage (and as such are a big threat), just because they are harder to get to. But on the bright side, combat ends really fast once they are the only ones left on the board since they go down quick (or run away/surrender, or I just narrate they've been neutralized and move along).

 

[babinro]

My party consistently targets the boss last while at the same time hindering it.

Basically, one player will debilitate the boss with something like Immobilized, or Dazed, etc. The rest of the party will focus on the other threats while the boss plays its non-optimized turn.

When the smaller creatures are done, the boss likely has a ton of hp left, but so long as the party healer is alright, the party is no longer truly threatened barring unexpectedly bad rolls or critical hits.

This seems to be a pretty optimized strategy as the battles that typically challenge my party the most are battles leading up to a known boss, rather than the boss battle itself.

 

[MarkB]

Generally speaking, debuff/hinder the boss while taking out the rest, then take out the boss.

Simple logic in turn-based combat: Each extra baddie killed is one less set of actions per turn for the baddies, so concentrate on diminishing the number of baddies as swiftly as possible.

 

[Ryujin]

I would think that such tactics would depend upon the party mix and powers. For instance my two (arguably) best attack powers take a couple of rounds to set up, because they attack everything that my Warlock has cursed in a radius 20.

In most cases we go after any leader-type the other side might have, or anything that we perceive as having the potential to heal opponents. The logic is simple; take him out now and we won't have wasted any damage we've done later on. If we're finding that we're getting beaten down by specific opposition elements though, we'll concentrate fire on them.