Following up a little bit on my last post. One of my players also pointed out a major imbalances in third edition. He found that any battle that focussed around fighting a single entity almost always was easy. This seemed especially true at later levels. Imagine a high level battle. Healing is so powerful that a major bad guy has to dish out enough damage to kill a player every round. If his damage is below that a healer character can easily negate his damage potential because healing is so strong.
One of the tactics is the final battle was for the cleirc to wait invisibily after having used a feat that would allow him to heal from a distance instead of touch. He simply readied his heal action to go off when anyone was badly injured. The big bad guy could have gone after him, but any round lost was a major loss because the players would get an action each while the bad guy got a single precious action.
This is one aspect they tried to fix in 4th by introducing 'elites' and 'solos' as well as focussing encounters as several units against several units.
2 comments:
Not going to comment on that 4e stuff...
But 3/3.5 has some balances for this. Often high level opponents have henchmen or the like to do their bidding (or hack and slash melee fighting) for them. Dragons, Demons and Devils are all known for this. Demons and Devils often can summon lesser of their ilk in pitched battles.
Well, dragons aren't really known for having henchmen, but you are right about demons and devils. The problem is that the summoning powers are massively swing inducing. A summoning is like a 20% chance that the battle gets twice as hard. In almost every fight I ignored this ability because it would have made the fight go from challenging to impossible.
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