as a judge, I would like to see less enemies on the battle field (I'd like to throw out a particular reference to Jimmy's Lifeblight Golem as my favorite example of that) the game seems to get watered down during combat if i have a billion less significant enemies to run rahter than 2-3 awesome ones.

Something needs to be done for single Adversaries to make them a threat. No matter how awesome they are the action economy means they are going once every 5-6 player turns. Perhaps a way to give certain creatures 2 initiative tracks? One for martial maneuvers and one for magic? Or something like that? Otherwise you just need to give the creature huge AR or stamina.

John

+1

I'm ok with some minions, but we had encounters with more than 20 opponents on the board and a time limit. It takes a lot more time to get through all that.

With a sweep of his hat,

Paul

@john, look up the stats from the HPs there is one that should stand out for you.....

its not that there needs to be one adversary, but fewer adversaries, you know the kinds that aren't minions or weenies with 30Hps, more guys like the Death Warden, or the Fire Giant King, less guys like the minion harpies or the lava hounds, those guys are just speedbumps to the real fights.

Not sure which HP you mean. I'm going to return this thread back to the Thank You thread it started as.

John

I think Adversaries are fine, but they do their best work with Commons or Elites backing them up rather than Minions. Minions just drop too fast to really be support for the REALLY big guys.

The packs of dwarven crossbow minions were deadly!

John

They certainly were. We had more people go down on the bridges mission than any other one and some people were taking wounds from the crossbowmen pretty regularly. We had far more trouble from the crossbowmen minions than from the ogre-type guys.

I certainly hope players realise that crossbows are the lethal weapons they should be.

Old tactic from DragonWarriors RPG in the back:

Front rank kneel and fire. Middle rank (wizard and lantern bearer) kneel. Rear rank fire. "The party figures that a volley of four crossbows should deal with the two orc patrols they expect to encounter".

As an opening 2-tick attack, a heavy crossbow at 2d12+~1d8* (potentially ignore 2 pts of AR with Point Blank Shot) can really thin out Elite foes.

We had issues with the crossbowmen as well, but fortuneately we had a couple of divine casters (including me) who could cast area affect castigate to get rid of the minions. I had the extra range adaptation which helped a lot as well. Without that we would have been pincushions.