Last night they took on Mammy Graul, and I decided to beef up the encounter quite a bit. I made her three sons have each 60 HP up from 12. I also made the combat unique by allowing Mammy to cast her spells through her sons, allowing for her to cast 4 times a round.
The fight was a slaughter, even with her flying through the air and getting 4 casts per turn she was killed in 3 rounds, they killed her 3 times over.
Now the party im running is as follows:
Paladin
Monk
Bard
Rogue
Cleric
The rogue has 22 strength and wields a battle axe, which makes for some crazy damage he averages 40-50 damage a turn.
The Paladin is we all know is crazy and is a beast in melee doing about 45-55 damage per round (thanks smite evil)
The Bard Shoots 3 times a round and always makes sure to have Haste activated on the party and he averages about 25-35 a round
The Monk hits not hard but a lot with furry of blows and manages to get off around 25-35 damage per round.
All toll this comes out to about 160-170 damage on one turn.
Here is the clincher, everyone in my group are game designers by trade or game programmers and they min-max the hell out of this game.
I am at a loss as to how to provide a challenge and interesting encounter where their best choice isnt just "attack it"
I have tried a huge series of debuffs from bestow curse to blinding members, but even so that only cuts down their damage to about 80-90 per round which is still enough to one shot most bosses that we encounter.
It would appear that short of filling the room with a lot of heavy hitting adds and just doing things that resort in the players having no fun, I can not seem to get this right.
