High Levels?


4th Edition

Silver Crusade

Hi 4ers. Just wanna ask a question. For anyone who has played a campaign up from level 3 into the 20's, how is higher level play? I'm looking for people who have played all the way through, not those who just try the high levels to see what ti is like. The play is different when you use a character for that long. Are the battles still exciting and flow nicely? Are the enemies still challenging? Do you find yourself with too many option, or it is a nice fit?


We have just entered the paragon tier, starting at level 11, and arriving at level 12 this weekend. The choices available via hybrids, multiclassing and paragon paths make it hard (in a good sense) on what should be played. Therefore, I will have no problems re-visiting the levels again with different classes.

As to excitement, and flow, I would expect most that state the levels are boring or it is the same old, same old, are victims of a certain style of play (players or DM), as sometimes you get in a rut and it is hard to break out.

I will let others speak of the higher levels closer to 20.

I am currently playing a warforged, hybrid fighter/cleric/divine oracle.


I'm playing an 18th level half-elf warlord. I started him at about 6th level after my tiefling paladin bit it.

After around 13th level we dominated everything. Our tactics, combined with inherent flaws in the game, made us nigh unstoppable. Our defenders' ACs were too high to be hit, and our strikers' damage output was insane. And the paladin and I had a silly amount of healing. The only close to weak link was the wizard that focused on damage over control, and he wasn't a liability, he just wasn't super effective.

The fix came in three forms. First, I began retraining my character taking the focus off of healing because I literally had too much. I was holding back on powers because the healing they supplied was never needed. Now, we still have more in-party healing than absolutely necessary, but we're not at full hp through entire fights.

Second, the DM and I worked together to get out of older edition encounter design. As the veteran player and most experienced GM in the group I offered to do what I could to push the party into the room, instead of the way more tactically sound option of letting the monsters come to us. He made an effort to change the encounters away from standard enter the next room of the dungeon fare. That's a biggie, especially in higher tiers, and if you have ranged strikers. The party is at a huge advantage when the monsters have to close on them in a confined space, like a doorway.

You need to lure them into the encounter area and surround them. That makes fights tough.

The 3rd aspect that changed was the easiest, and surprisingly most effective. From one of threads on these forums I saw that upping monster damage goes a long way towards improving encounters. Double the damage bonus of paragon and epic monsters, and triple the bonus for brutes. So a soldier that does 1d10+5 should do 1d10+10. And a brute would do 1d10+15. It's that simple, and even without the other changes, it changed the entire dynamic of fights.

Now even though the paladin's AC is astronomical, when he does get hit, it matters. If the strikers or the wizard get too close, or too far away from a defender, they're in trouble. Not so much that they're crippled by a single hit, but enough that they don't just shrug it off.

Just the damage boost would have made the higher tiers much more exciting, but certain groups need different fixes tactically. Ours was a solidly defensive group that could hold a postion and strike from range, and the other changes made the game more fun.


ghettowedge wrote:


Second, the DM and I worked together to get out of older edition encounter design. As the veteran player and most experienced GM in the group I offered to do what I could to push the party into the room, instead of the way more tactically sound option of letting the monsters come to us. He made an effort to change the encounters away from standard enter the next room of the dungeon fare. That's a biggie, especially in higher tiers, and if you have ranged strikers. The party is at a huge advantage when the monsters have to close on them in a confined space, like a doorway.

This was also neccisary in older editions too. In my 3.5 campaign the players had 3 great ranged people and a spike chain wielding half giant. They wanted every fight to be - blast at the enemies and force them to attack the players. When they tried they'd be tripped as an opportunity attack when they where something like 15 feet away, smacked on the way down and then smacked when they stood up and smacked some more if they kept trying to approach.

I suspect part of the answer is the same as the one I came up with - lots of area burst range attacks - try and convince them that being clumped up is bad.

That said more dynamic encounters for other reasons is an even better answer - just 'cause dynamic encounters are the win.


My current group is at level 27, having started at level 1.

The game still works, which is in some ways more than I was expecting (after past experiences with epic level play.) The group is rapidly approaching the end-game, and the characters still feel like the same people as at level 1, just more awesome.

Mechanically, the group is harder to challenge (being well-built characters with a lot of tricks up their sleeves.) They have one defender and no leader, though, so while they kill things fast they can also drop quickly. They tend to either not drop at all, or have someone go down and basically have no way to get them easily back in the fight.

Combats take slightly longer. Partly due to the numbers involved - we've got a ranger who can take a lot of attacks, with a good number of conditional modifiers, as well as a sorcerer who drops a lot of multi-target powers.

But it is also due, in many ways, to the fact that there just aren't 'random encounters' happening at the epic tier. Most fights are big and dramatic, and time is then spent on the RP moving on to the next scene, rather than worry about jumping them with random monsters along the way. And occasionally there are still quick fights - they jumped a boss they didn't like last session, caught him without his backup, and blew through the fight in 20 minutes.

I've been finding more ways to challenge them and keep them fearing the threat of death (even with immortality itself at their fingertips). Like ghettowedge, I'm hoping adjusting for the MM3 math will help with that - by the book enemies worked fine at earlier levels, but they do need a bit more oomph these days.

The battles are definitely still exciting. Usually. Occasionally we'll have a combination of powers that makes for a dull fight - for example, Ygorl, Slaad Lord of Entropy, and Entropic Slaad as backup. Sounds good on paper - in practice, it is a fight with lots of insubstantial guys that summon clouds that block Line of Sight and turn into more enemies when they die. That was a slog-through.

But those tend to be the exception by far, and taking a close look at stat-blocks in advance can let a DM avoid such dangers. What really defines the Epic experience is more the things they are doing - diving into myth and taking part in shaping it. They confront gods, explore history, and get to see the things they do have a real impact on the core elements of the setting.

That's cool.

I'm certainly looking forward to wrapping the game up and getting back to some low-level play, but I'm definitely enjoying getting there.


what is your group make up? that sounds like a fun challenge without a leader. Sorry about the derail but i have to know.


It's actually gone through quite a bit of change over the levels. It's only been since level 20 or so that the group has been without a leader.

Currently, we have a Warforged Warden, a Tiefling Warlock (Infernal/Dark pact), a Revenant Druid (predator, stays in wild shape), a Dragonborn Sorcerer (dragon magic, unsurprisingly), a Githzerai Ranger (archer) and Deva Avenger of Pelor.

So, 1 defender, 4 strikers and 1 controller. And the controller is basically a striker, since her strategy is to run up and maul things.

So things die fast, especially since they have several characters who tend to blast multiple enemies at once. Most have a few tricks to avoid danger - the warlock is hard to pin down (regularly invisible, teleporting, etc), and the sorcerer has a lot of "interrupt and gain +10 defense" powers, which are a pain to deal with. When people do drop, the others will try to get to them and use heal checks or potions to get them up - or, sometimes, just finish the enemy off instead.

Interestingly, at level 1, the group make up was much more defensive. 3 defenders, 1 leader, 1 striker, 1 controller. As characters changed and people swapped places (I took over running at level 20, with the former DM joining as a player) they got more and more offense, and seem to be doing well despite the lack of healing. :)

Silver Crusade

Thank you all.


Matthew Koelbl wrote:

It's actually gone through quite a bit of change over the levels. It's only been since level 20 or so that the group has been without a leader.

Currently, we have a Warforged Warden, a Tiefling Warlock (Infernal/Dark pact), a Revenant Druid (predator, stays in wild shape), a Dragonborn Sorcerer (dragon magic, unsurprisingly), a Githzerai Ranger (archer) and Deva Avenger of Pelor.

So, 1 defender, 4 strikers and 1 controller. And the controller is basically a striker, since her strategy is to run up and maul things.

So things die fast, especially since they have several characters who tend to blast multiple enemies at once. Most have a few tricks to avoid danger - the warlock is hard to pin down (regularly invisible, teleporting, etc), and the sorcerer has a lot of "interrupt and gain +10 defense" powers, which are a pain to deal with. When people do drop, the others will try to get to them and use heal checks or potions to get them up - or, sometimes, just finish the enemy off instead.

Interestingly, at level 1, the group make up was much more defensive. 3 defenders, 1 leader, 1 striker, 1 controller. As characters changed and people swapped places (I took over running at level 20, with the former DM joining as a player) they got more and more offense, and seem to be doing well despite the lack of healing. :)

Sounds like a blast, we are currently finishing up some local adventures via the forgotten realms with the anticipation of starting the against the giants series. Hopefully, not much has changed, because it was a lot of fun per the original series. We alternate DMs, so I am preparing a whole bunch of drow NPCs to meet up with in the future.

It is definitely interesting to change gears in paragon and seeing what is available. I am also curious about changes made in the monster manual to handle solo encounters.

But like anything, even going back to 3.5, there is always some tweaking involved once you know the party make up to keep the story interesting.

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