Quote Originally Posted by Talya View Post
2) You don't need to make every monster defeated by any group of characters, that's poor game design. You make many types of monster's who require very different abilities to defeat.
I fully agree with that. Part of the fun of the game is occasionally getting into a situation where the "normal" tricks don't work, and having to do something about that. Besides, it's really quite ok if the player characters sometimes have to run away from things.

Thus, the 4E way of handling swarms is actually more boring, because you can handle them the exact same way you're handling anything else - by hitting it until it breaks. It encourages Xykon strategy rather than Redcloak strategy. Of course, this depends on your group - if everybody wants to be at maximum efficiency in every single encounter (which appears to be what 4E aims for) then that by definition reduces possible variation between encounters. Cue flaming reaction in 3... 2... 1...