Is it really a lot of work to make monsters more 5e?
Imps = Resistance. Add sting attack.
Intellect devourers = Resistance. Add Devour Intellect attack.
Phase Spiders (not Matriarch because she's a unique spider. Homebrew works fine with her) = no Misty Step and remove spitting. Give proper Ethereal Jaunt
Not huge changes.
We are going into the nitty gritty details here... The casual gamer will pobably not notice the difference. But I have already started so...
On the imps it does not sound too bad. At least give the resistance to fire, even though they are lesser imps. Why not learn new players that some creatures have elemental resistance?
I think they can just add the "young" tag to the intellect devourers. That way they can still surprise us with the grown up version. I am not too bothered about the int. devourers , though.
I actually liked the spit attacks and the misty step on the phase spiders... I was kind of used to a similar interpretation (in the sense of misty step) in BG1 and BG2. But that's me.
I am kind of split on the duergars... the encounters are already challenging and giving them advantage to all spell saving throws might be problematic for some (although spells such as chromatic orb and magic missile will hit just as fine). On the other hand, it is a cool feature...
That being said, I would not want to hijack the discussion with examples. Once again, overall I am satisfied with how the encounters worked on EA.
