Order of Operations
As one of our Patrons so eloquently put it, “Seems this guy didn’t take the other comic’s advice on ‘minimum safe distance.'” Well observed! But even if it’s a good point, I am aghast that somebody actually learned something from this comic. I will endeavor to insert less substance and more scatalgical humor in future.
Anywhodles, what do you say we tackle that perpetual question: Who we gonna kill first? No doubt most of you will supply snarky answers to that little query down in the comments. But from my standpoint, it really is a fundamental question of tactics. When you’ve got a boss monster and a bunch of minions, what are you supposed to target? There are big nasty attacks coming from the boss, but the minions just keep on minioning unless you take ’em out quick. That damage really adds up over rounds! What the crap is the priority!?
As with so many things in this great hobby of ours, that’s a big fat, “It depends, Hoss.”
This is one area where you’ll have to keep your head on a swivel and play it by ear each and every time. If the boss in question is a thin-wristed caster, and if your mage-hunter monk bro can close the distance, then yeah. Go nuts. But by the same token, if you’re running around in 4e D&D and packs of literal 1-HP minions are nicely clustered, make with the fireball and clear the room. These two extremes are more obvious examples. For all the in-betweening, you’re going to have to decide for yourself.
Happily, there is at least one general rule that I think applies. Once you do know what to target, make sure you focus fire. There’s nothing that grinds my gears more than a gaggle of gamers targeting whatever, swinging wildly at this or that while bringing down no one. The goal is to weaken enemy forces, not to watch them all plop down at exactly the same time when their hit points all simultaneously run out!
That’s my stance anyway. But how about the rest of you guys? How do you decided an order of operations when it’s time for the killing to start? Hit us with your own personal butcher’s bill down in the comments!
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First point of business: take down enemy support casters. Healing is not an asset when the enemy’s using it. Neither is some guy nerfing or strafing you, whittling you down while his boss launches big attacks.
But there is always the division of duties. If you are yourself a squishy caster or healer, get thee well away from the front line and get started on the enemy support, your natural counterparts. Tankish and roguish people on the boss and keep them busy until you can all focus fire.
Good call. I think my rant was assuming weird CRPG rules where everybody can target everybody freely. GJ spotting the more realistic dynamic.
Rule of thumb : default priority is whatever is going to die the fastest. This is especially important in systems where even minor enemies can be dangerous or a least drain your ressources, like 5e with bounded accuracy. Then adjust your priority depending on specific circumstances – like you said, casters are usually more important to target than their minions (although barring extremes examples, they tend to be fragile targets too, so they actually fit under the default rule). It’s MMO logic, but honestly it applies, most of the time.
Also there are caveat depending on your party composition. If you’re the fighter and can choose between killing a minion or getting a lot closer to the boss, typically you’d choose to kill the minion… But if you know your wizard buddy is about to fireball those minions, you might as well dash and get closer to the boss.
Basically, it’s like you said, you’re going to have to adjust every time, but if you’re in a situation where you’re not sure what to do : just stab whatever looks the most fragile.
I also agree with you on focus fire. In D&D-like systems a creature with 100HP is just as dangerous as one with 1HP, so don’t spread your damage, it’s asking for trouble.
Loving that “fragile rule.” Really useful insight for all us struggling tacticians!
Agreed… dead opponents (usually) don’t get actions, so cutting down the numbers should always be the default priority.
But beyond that, it depends on what your characters can contribute. My last real combat character was a sniper but not a super hard-hitter, so he’d get a lot of mileage out of taking on the tougher minions… as a ranged combatant, he could pick targets without needing to get close, so he’d be the finisher, preying on anything that looked like one more arrow would put it down.
“Kill stealing”, some would say, but effective at making sure opponents didn’t get any more chances to hit back, and effective at ensuring the barbarian could focus his appalling damage output on targets that needed it.
I’d be worried about the demons legion of confetti/glitter spectators.
Ain’t no evil like an evil sports fan Nerf ball.
The fun of being in a party with a blaster caster and a Magus means that we never have to ask that question in the game I’m currently playing in, because we can do both. Though it’s best when you can get the boss and the adds at the same time.
We used to do a T-shirt that just said “Fireball Fireball Fireball.” It was autobiographical about our party.
It’s not always Fireball, sometimes it was Flame Strike, because Elemental Patron Witch.
And knowing is half the battle *GI Joe!*
Porkchop sandwiches!?
While the Fragile Rule can apply, I would suggest another dimension needs to be tacked on.
Let us set Fragility or perhaps its inverse Toughness as the X Access. Annoyance/Danger should be the Y access. The ones with the highest Fragility and Danger should be targeted first when possible.
Fragility is a fine thing to consider, but if the enemy does lightning damage only and you all have Energy Resistance Lightning 30, then killing it is a waste no matter how fragile it is. Alternatively, the boss with stupid high touch AC, great saves, etc, may still need to die first if it can do half your hit points in a round, especially if the minions can’t do much.
By the way, Claire? You got a typo in today’s writeup. It’s spelled “scatological”.
As for today’s question, admittedly, again, I am not a combat minded player or GM, so uh…
First enemy to die tends to be decided by which enemy is the closest and which one’s dealt the most damage so far. Or whoever just smacked the player who’s turn it was. Vengeance is a fun and relatable motivator for combat priority.
I like Mindsword’s Fragile/Tough vs. Nuisance/Threat comparison; I can already see the graphic in my head. In a mixed group, I can see letting AoE handle the minions so your damage dealers can focus on the big guns.
Then again, my personal rule is that casters are trouble. Left to my own devices in combat, I usually look for anyone in robes with WA-AAA-AY too much bling who is quite obviously Concentrating (Con) on a lot of fancy hand gestures–then I kill them with extreme prejudice.
I don’t always succeed, but never once have I guessed wrong or accidentally taken out a fashionista sign-language interpreter as a bystander.
See targeting leadership is how you get mooks to stand down, so that’s my MO.
> Mousover
We’re calling him Oath of Vengeance Paladin.
This is where diversifying the party pays off. In the one 4E campaign I played that actually went anywhere, I was playing an archery ranger and a friend was playing a Swordsage, and we were at opposite ends of a spectrum. He was the bane of minions, baiting them into swarming him and then throwing out AOEs that slaughtered them in droves. I was the boss-slayer, dealing ludicrous single-target damage packaged with minor debuffs and forced movement.
This made our battle strategy very simple: I target the most dangerous-looking enemy, he mopped up the weakest, and the rest of the party swung between those depending on the specific situation.
I will note, however, that we had misunderstood my Hunter’s Quarry ability, and didn’t realize it could only be used on the closest enemy to me. This made my target selection much easier than it was supposed to be.
Who do we target first is an important strategic question.
The answer, I think, can vary. Often I like targeting the minions first, because in many of the games I play, action economy trumps having a special power, and the priority is to reduce them from having a dozen attacks per turn to ten, to seven, to four, to two…
Sometimes though, that special power is really nasty. Recently we fought a mind-controller who effectively reduced our group’s vampire heroine from her respectable 9 hp (with high evasion) to an effective 2 hp (with garbage evasion) by having a particular type of attack that targeted a particular defense in a particular way. And instead of just knocking her out, hitting zero would put her temporarily on the enemy team!
You can bet that we piled onto that guy right away while ignoring the heck out of his minions.
My groups have always tended to go after whoever looks like they can hit the group first, be it mages or archers. If there is an obvious leader (how do you know that particular gnoll is the leader?), then it is usually the target for the second wave and if the thief feels like backstabbing that is usually also their target. The rest let whatever is left run up on them and try to ensure the party members get at least one free attack (I use movement points in my homebrew).
This is a problem I love posing to my players, and I love messing with it to shift them in one direction or another once they realize what’s going on. It’s a great way to mix things up from the standard ‘one big boss’ style fights that tend to be party-favored due to action economy unless there’s a HUGE discrepancy in strength between party and boss.
EG) A cultist leader whose minion’s deaths charge her spells, and if too many die, she completes a ritual and REALLY bad stuff starts to happen- accompanied with a music shift when they hit the halfway point, the party got it pretty quick (though I may have given the game away by using This Cannot Continue from the Nier Automata soundtrack for the warning)
And B) A king reborn as a fire elemental, summoning soldiers of ash who would slowly move from the edges of the arena to their king, then burn themselves away to heal him. As soon as the first one reached him and they watched the ash flow into the elemental and his wounds sealed, they knew *exactly* what was going on.
Kind of like when the boss summons up eight 8HD water/plague elementals and part the way through the fight two of them, who noone was fighting, merge into a 16HD elemental…really shifted our focus from just trying to hit the big bad…
This grinds my gears too.
I was playing a Halfling Paladin of The Lady (you know, the one you never call on by name, patron of gamblers, the fickle friend). I built them to be a little tank of a paladin.
We’re running through a swamp and a bunch of lizardfolk arrive. And behind them is a giant lizardfolk. And behind them, a small lizardfolk with a staff and feathered headdress chanting something.
Despite my low dex, I roll first. I channel my inner shadowrunner and shout “geek the mage!” as I charge in. Thanks to the blessing of being small, I can move in a direct line through the crowds and am prepared to go ham on the thing because movement distance is rough on little legs.
The fighter is up next. It’s a melee fighter who is bigger than me, so I assume they can’t hit the caster, fair enough. They are a tanky build as well, with low damage but high survivability, so maybe they’ll square off against the big fellow. Nope. They give one of the little guys a poke after maneuvering *out* of their way to give a clear charge into the squishes at the heart of the party.
Well, the ranged rogue is up next, I am sure they’ll shoot the casterrrrrrrnope, they just shot the big guy, with no sneak attack setup.
The wizard uses a cantrip to pew pew a different little guy. The wizard I know has crowd control capable of keeping half the foes from reaching the team.
The end result was a nightmare. The wizard used crowd control, but only after everything was in their face and pounding things. The fighter kept hitting different lizardfolk rather than taking them down, and almost ate dirt because they gathered around him like piranhas and action economy’ed his butt. The rogue kept poking at the big guy, who nearly ate them. And I got trapped in a duel with a caster run by a good DM, which one the one hand burned through spell slots keeping me away from their vulnerable knees, but on the other hand kept me from, going back to tank the big guy.
I eventually managed to catch the caster outside their darkness spell and smote them so hard the DM oof’ed in sympathy. I spent the rest of the fight darting from PC to PC, propping them up as their ineffective plinking finally started paying off through sheer repetition.
Focus fire. Focus fire. Focus fire.
Doesn’t matter the game, but if you’re not focus firing down enemies and instead having four separate duels, you’re going to get your ass kicked sooner rather than later. Also try to take down casters first as they’re force multipliers. They’re either buffing their allies, hindering your party with stuff like Hold Person, summoning in more allies, or just absolutely blasting party with AOEs. Fortunately, they’re also USUALLY not the toughest to take down.
That, and even if it doesn’t kill them, hitting casters tends to force concentration checks, and if you’re lucky, makes buffs and other ongoing spells go away.
Ominous shadow demon looks great 😀
Division of labour is important. You need someone who can deal some damage to a large number just as much as you need someone who can drop massive damage onto a single target. Dealing with the minions really is just as important a combat role as dealing with the boss…particularly when they are flanking you and the boss is an assassin…
When I was playing Irlana, I tended to go after the minions as she could mow them down really quick with her nat 15 crits. The bosses tended to have higher AC so Irlana wasn’t getting her crits as often against them. So Irlana and Mick would destroy the crowd while the rest of the group took on the big bad. Worked pretty well.
Usually the plan is to get the healers and high damage dealers first, but matters are always frustrated by needed to account for action economy (as such it’s often better to just wipe out all the minions asap than trying to wail on the boss’ big pile of hp). And of course you have to keep in mind defending your own side’s assets. So often as not there’s what you *want* to do, and what your party actually can afford to do.
So my groups usual orders of operations have been mentioned so not going to add to that, but I am going to ask a question of folks in these comments.
How often do you find yourself using enemy healers and have you ever used one to bring back a downed enemy? And how do your players feel about a downed enemy suddenly getting back up again?
Because it struck me that I pretty much never use healers for my enemies, outside of a very few situations, and that since I usually treat an enemy reaching 0 HP as dead, they generally can´t be healed. It is something I have thought a lot about including, but it does also strike me as being more bookkeeping and something that could prolong combat a fair amount. So I am curious about peoples experience with it.
In my games, I tend to have my characters focus on whatever they’re best equipped to handle. If I’m playing a sniper-rogue who deals lots of damage in one hit or a mage with a lot of single-target debuffs, I’ll concentrate on the most dangerous enemies to try to take them out quickly. On the other hand, if I’m a tough defensive warrior or an area-controlling blaster-caster, I’ll focus more on the mooks, keeping them off my allies’ backs so they can take on the bigger threats. My first 4e game is an excellent example of this – my wizard’s main job was to use crowd-control spells to clear paths so the ranger and warlord could get to the biggest threats and kill them quickly, while the warden kept other enemies off our backs.
The ‘adds’? Is that short for ‘additional mooks’ or something?
Always. Geek. The. Mage. First.
In 5e, action economy rules all. You do whatever takes as many actions away from the enemy force or prevents the enemy from taking away your actions as early as possible.
But yes, focus that fucking fire. Gonna burst an artery if I have to keep watching that damage get spread out and not actually do anything to that economy.