Quote Originally Posted by Delicious Taffy View Post
Wow, holy crap. I've really been fumbling my encounters. Thanks for the tip, I'll definitely be reviewing that section of the DMG.
Something that's really important that the DMG doesn't really go over particularly well is that you shouldn't really put in enemies whose levels deviate too heavily from the players'. Because defenses and attack bonuses scale with level, enemies that are too low level are basically impossible to miss and effectively incapable of hitting while the inverse is true of higher level enemies (although extremely well optimized parties in the paragon/epic tier can actually manage to handle enemies that are +5 or even higher without problem). As a rule of thumb, in the heroic tier, stick to enemies that are +/- 2 levels of your party.

Also, don't feel beholden to the monsters that are printed. MM3 on a Business Card gives you pretty much everything you need to know about designing your own 4e enemies. As long as you stick to that math and don't go crazy with status effects (e.g. at-will dazes or stuns in heroic tier), it should be all you need when coming up with functional minions, standards, and elites (solos tend to need their action economy tweaked to some extent so, until you've had a bit of experience running the *well made* MM3 and later solos, don't try making your own).

I'm actually pretty confident that most of us that still run 4e don't even bother *using* written monsters and prefer to just make our own (such that they fit our campaigns rather than the inverse).