Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6008551" data-attributes="member: 996">There was a bit of 'you're doing it wrong' behind some of the early 'grind' complaints.  Sure, the KotS fight with Kalarel was a grind.   But, it was also a fight that broke the DMG guidelines, which come right out and say that an elite that many levels above the party can be problematic.  Of course, that section of the DMG may well have been written /after/ KotS...  The grindy fights in the first two modules were the result of using a 3e convention: make the bosses much higher level than the party.  In 4e, instead of making a 'more powerful' monster much higher level, you just make it an elite or solo.  By using overleveled elites instead of near-level solos, those combats were 'done wrong.'  By the same token, when I listened carefully to early 'grind' complaints what I heard was people using 3.5 tactics in them.  In 3.5, the 'nova' was the winning strategy:  hit first, hit as hard as you can, FTW.  Translated to 4e that means throw a daily+AP+encounter combo in round 1.  In low-level early-4e that gets you some bloodied and pissed off monsters and leaves you with nothing to do for the rest of the fight but spam at-wills.  If you're more judicious with your dailies and encounters, the fight won't take any longer (it might even be a little shorter), but will be more interesting and feel less like a 'grind.' So, yes, playing using tactics that leveraged the broken bits of 3.5 didn't work as well, because 4e was differently broken.  Not really 'wrong' or punished, per se, just not over-rewarded.But, no, I'm not about to defend some of the early gaffes, like the first set of Skill Challenge rules.  OMG.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  They were fixed, but it was still quite an oversight.</blockquote>

Verification