Hardest Monster you've ever faced?

[Eldest]

My brother tried his hand at homebrewing in 3.5, and made four armed skeletons with an attack per arm, with no attack penalty. He then put two of them at the bottom of a ladder. The (level 1) barbarian went down the ladder and promptly got hit three times with a scimitar and died. Then they managed to come up the ladder through a wall of fire, and kill the rest of us. My brother was completely mystified as to why we all died. He hasn't DMed since (though I'm giving him another chance soon).

[Just_Ice]

I haven't fought that many difficult monsters by raw, but I have to say that cloakers, gnome rogues and wraiths are pretty irritating to fight under certain conditions.

[Lostintransit]

Hi all,

Well the hardest fight I ever threw at my party was a lvl 40 solo controller and 12 lvl 30 solo soldier minions. But that was at the end of a year long campaign going from lvl 1 - lvl 30 when 4th ed first came out. It was an epic fight that lasted a good while with superpowers flying around and everything. The players ended up being the new gods of our 4th ed setting!

Regards

[Eldest]

Solo... minions...
A bit oxymoronic.

[Lostintransit]

Solo... minions...
A bit oxymoronic.

Well it's easy actually. All you do is take a solo monster and then give it 1 hit point instead of its usual amount. Works fairly well as it gives a powerful threat that drops if hit. The monsters in question where fought at earlier stages of the campaign as proper solos, and were used as a scale to show how the players had grown (1st time was going to lvl 21 and just 1 of them, then at lvl 26 with 3 of them then the full 12 at lvl 30.) there stats stayed the same just the hit points changed.

Hope that helps????

Regards

[Dylaer]

Well, to my experience, it's the Adamantine Horror. Dear god, where do I start? Disintegrate, Disjunction and Implosion at will. This is CR 9. I'm fairly sure that the DM didn't look too hard at it, because otherwise it'd be easy to tell to not use it.

[DMfromTheAbyss]

Balor (Monster Vault version)

Party was level 22.

It does 150 damage when bloodied.. Each party member had 130ish HP..

Scaped by by the skin of our teeth and loved every minute of it.

[DragonBaneDM]

Gahhh. I knew I shoulda bought the Vault before I did the Arshardalon fight!!!

Seriously, the Balor was a huge joke compared to the Dragonborn Exarch they were still up against. 150 HP when bloodied? That's awesome!

[Seerow]

If we're bringing homebrew monsters into this...


I once decided that regular minions were boring, and decided I wanted 2-step minions. ie, you hit them once, they become bloodied, hit them again after that, they die.

That actually worked pretty well....

What didn't work out so well was when I decided I wanted to take it a step further, and make a set of minion skeletons, that were magically linked. As long as 1 of the 4 lived, any others that are dropped stand up on their turn, and each skeleton granted some buff to the other 4 skeletons. Their general strategy would be to spread out quickly, and harry enemies while other monsters in the encounter did the heavy lifting.

Unfortunately, they turned out to be more than a minor nuisance since the party didn't figure out to focus fire them down all at once, in the end I started making them spend a full round action when standing back up rather than a move action, for fear of a TPK via minion.

[Mindfreak]

This is my Story, it is full of woe, and horribleness:

I used to be in a D&D group comprised of 3 other people, a DM and 2 other players. I played a level 1 paladin, and me and my party played for over a year. Playing on Mondays, Fridays, and Saturdays. On Saturdays we would play though the night. Eventually after a year, our party were all level 21, and our DM decided to rain hell on us. So, he introduced a Rod of Chaos. Our party stumbled upon it, and our wizard fumbled an arcane check on discovering it's purpose, and we all thought it was a wand of some sort. So, we tried it out, and the result we got was that it started raining. It wouldn't be too bad, if it wasn't raining young white dragons. Our party was able to take down like 40 of them before an Elder White Dragon came down. We were all on At-Will powers by then, and our wizard still had one utility power left, the bad thing was that it was feather fall. You can probably guess what happened after that. It was a pretty sweet effect though, our group was able to level up after killing about 30 of the young white dragons, so our DM allowed us to go back to that point and have a final adult White dragon come down. My old DM was a pretty cool guy. The young white dragons thankfully took some good damage from the falling.

But nothing says hell until you got young white dragons falling from the sky like rain.

[Drglenn]

Not one I've faced but the hardest monster I've used (based on deaths per encounter when using them) are Gelatinous cubes. In both the D&D 4e campaigns I've run I've had one encounter involving a gelatinous cube: the first encounter killed 3 party members, the second killed 2. So on average they have killed 2.5 PCs per encounter.

[BoutsofInsanity]

Gotta go with the homebrew boss encounters our dm has made. (BTW brilliantyly I might add). These bad boys generally leave our four man party out cold with only one of us standing in the end. The boss guys have stages, go twice in a round and have some of the coolest mechanics Ive seen.

Umm, first guy had a zombie wall, tranformed into a flyer, then a bone golem for the last stage.

The second boss guy had a permanent darkness spell around him, teleported, and hit fairly hard. However, because we had a guy who joined us for a session playing an essential rogue, (Either play essentials or Core, not either because they dont mix well at all) he was brought down. Those guys were hard to fight. Personally I hate ghouls though, the whole, your stunned and roll a save sucks.

[artstsym]

As a DM, I once made the mistake of throwing a (MM) phane at a 4 player party in relatively small confines. Worst fight ever (yet best learning experience). For those unfamiliar with the phane's particulars, let me sum it up for you with the power I should have read beforehand, Wizening Tempest: an at-will close burst 1 attack that stuns everyone it hits (save ends) with an aftereffect that dazes and weakens them (also save ends both).

It's an elite, so I threw it in with a couple other guys figuring this might make a fun warm up battle. It did not. I actually only realized halfway through the fight that it had insubstantial and the players still nearly died. I actually apologized for that fight afterwards. Don't know what they were thinking with that one.

I'm looking to one up it (in terms of difficulty, not annoyance) with my Ultra Super Kobold Squad Go! in my upcoming game. Fingers crossed.

[dradio1]

4e homebrew colossal fiendish dire rust monster my DM cooked up. I was playing a warforged fighter/wizard with a focus on magical melee weapons.