[4e] But I LIKE minions!

[Zaq]

Ranged minions. Minions that explode when they die. Suicide berserker minions with better offense and lower defenses.

Those only really work if they go before he does, and he's invested enough in his initiative to make that highly unlikely. Again, nothing that he's doing is out of line and is in fact quite reasonable, but it's very inconvenient for me.

Human Gnome wave attack. Each round, more cannibalistic gnomes appear to fight the party. You can justify it by the gnomes not thinking that they need a larger force to take on the party, and when the first wave dies, a second, and then a third wave of hungry munchkins attempt to eat the party's kneecaps. Another justification would be that the party managed to lock the only entrance to where they're holed up but a few gnominators managed to get through. However, the gate won't hold, and in a few rounds more hungry midgets are going to try and eat them.

Seriously, send monsters in waves.

This is pretty much what I was doing with the minion summoner. It's as good as I've gotten so far, and it seems to be what everyone's suggesting.

First, is he using the power properly? Even with Enlarge Spell, it is only a burst 2. It stays a burst 2 until the Wizards second turn, upon which he uses his Orb power to enlarge it by one more, making it a burst 3. So anything not in the burst 2 is fine. Yeah, burst 2 is big, but that shouldn't catch more than half the minions in it.

Secondly, have the minions come in after the first round of combat somehow. Minion generator, guy who brings them back to life in his aura, guy with power to bring them back, guy who summons them, etc. There are a lot of ways to bring them in (or back) after round 1.

Third, make the opportunity cost for killing the minions lower than doing something else. He's an Orb wizard, so if you put him against a solo with minions, he has a decision to make: use his orb power to lock down the solo or to kill the minions.

I'm pretty sure that he's using the power correctly. He casts the spell, taking a free action as he's doing so to make it last longer, make it bigger, and make it party-friendly, as the spell explicitly allows. Then he applies Enlarge Spell to make it one step bigger. It looks legit, so far as I can tell. Even if he applied it afterward, it'd still auto-kill minions.

It looks like everyone's suggesting just bringing in more and more minions after the first couple of rounds. I was hoping that there would be another answer, but it looks like that's as good as it gets. Any suggestions for dealing with their initiatives or starting positions? It's one thing when you're in a closed room (they just appear at the door), but what about in a more open area?