Dailies vs. Encounters vs. At-Wills

[Stalker0]

As mentioned, the reliance on powers depends on tier.

At heroic, your at-wills are the main source of your power. By epic tier, people have enough dailies that everyone should be using at least one daily per combat.

 

[ac_noj]

I have a fairly mathmatical system for it:
I assume that the combat will take 6 rounds.
I assume that you will use your dailys every 4th fight.

If you have 2 At Will, 1 Encounter and 1 Daily it's:
Best At Will x 4.75 + Encounter + Daily x 0.25

If you have 2 At Will, 4 Encounter and 4 Daily it's:
Best At Will + each Encounter + each Daily x 0.25

Sometimes a class will have powers that don't use up a standard action, like the Rangers Lighting Shot. In cases like that I add an extra use of an At Will.

 

[robsenworldaccount]

I dont think people need more at will abilities.

I think we could use a greater selection of at will abilities however; this would enable the first rogue your roll to be different than the third.

As for whats broken, or whats strong. You already have the universal compass in terms of Exp relative to a groups target experience encounter.

 

[Scarface6174]

I think that a power should be rated by how well it works within a group.

-(At-Will) Thunderwave is good, but what if you use that with (encounter) Dire wolverine Strike from the ranger? Push enemies toward the ranger, let him hit more things!

-Cleave is not that great of a power, but then again, as a fighter you're supposed to take hits and protect. sure you're gonna hit and take out baddies with cleave, but GETTING HIT which is not an abililty, is as important as any at will or encounter or daily power from a striker.

Point in case: We were a lvl 3 group of 5 PCs and went through a portal into the shadowfell. enter in about 15-20 zombie/skeletons. The Defender did his job and literally got in front of about 5 of the undead at a time and did get taken down. But that was the last 2 rounds of combat. By then, their numbers were culled down by the wizard and rogue.

Sure he didn't do all that much damage and only took out 3 bad guys, but he TOOK a hell of a lot of damage himself. Without him playing his rile, we would have been toast.

 

[Otterscrubber]

It depends on the tier you're playing at.
At epic, for instance, you can reasonably expect a Wizard to open most encounters with a daily, and see the combatscape change from 'difficult fight' to 'cakewalk.'

In the limited play testing I've done with higher level characters Daily powers rarely alter the fight dramatically unless the scenario is such that the daily can be used to maximum benefit based on its secondary effect. Which is not always (usually?) the case. I find At-wills to be much predictable in terms of defining what you can expect from a class as those will always be available for them. Encounters help out for a few rounds, but usually do absolutely nothing if they are an attack power and miss.

Honestly my feeling for what defines a class is At-Wills and utilities, as those are often very often used.

 

[Runestar]

At lower lvs, it is true that you don't have much of a choice, since it is usually encounter power, followed by spamming of whichever at-will power is most apt.

But at higher lvs, you have 4 encounter powers to use (not including racial powers) in each fight, in addition to a daily (and you should have means of replenishing those during/after combat). Surely that must count for more than at-wills....

 

[keterys]

In the limited play testing I've done with higher level characters ... I find At-wills to be much predictable in terms of defining what you can expect from a class as those will always be available for them.

How long are the fights running? Even my 12th level guys are only using at-wills for a couple rounds of each encounter and there should be even less need to use them at high level.

Course, things like heavy blade opportunity and the few select at-wills I mentioned earlier are a different story

 

[Grabuto138]

The class abilites cannot be ignored. For example, the warlord and cleric at-wills can be useful or not depending on situation. If the defender rolls a 19 your +3 from Furious Smash didn't help; if the enemy hit AC 26 the +1 to AC from Priest's shield was a waste. But you will be healing people, flanking, maybe using utilities. Often your standard attack action is the least important thing you did that round.

Edit: As an aside, I think Fighters desperately need an at-will that allows them to make an attack against a single opponent that is slightly better than a basic attack. Since Reaping Strike isn't even a sure kill against minions I would like to see something that is useful even if you don't want to move the target. I dunno, add your CON modifier or something.

 

[Plane Sailing]

At low levels, at-wills matter the most purely due to lack of other options, but that actually quickly solves itself.

Later on, if combats average around 6 rounds, that's enough time for people to do about 4 encounter abilities... which leaves 2 rounds of daily/at-will to work through. I find it's fairly common for one person to use one daily each combat so you might see 7 round combats if people don't, and then the big fights will tend to burn a lot of dailies so that works out okay. But, in general I find that things like 'Blood Pulse' and 'Healing Strike' matter a lot more than the once a day Beacon of Hope or Wall of Fire.

How long are your fights running?

My 1st-2nd level fights are typically running for 10-15 rounds, and it looks as if monster hit points ramp up much more quickly than the damage from various powers (a 19th level wizard unleashing one of his daily attack spells might expect to knock off only about 5% of a Glabrezu's hit points, for instance!).

At the moment it is looking likely that the majority of most battles is going to be spent using at-wills, so I'd love to hear how your higher level game experiences are panning out.

Cheers

 

[Plane Sailing]

Edit: As an aside, I think Fighters desperately need an at-will that allows them to make an attack against a single opponent that is slightly better than a basic attack. Since Reaping Strike isn't even a sure kill against minions I would like to see something that is useful even if you don't want to move the target. I dunno, add your CON modifier or something.

Wouldn't that be 'sure strike'? Losing a bit of damage against a minion doesn't matter, and you get +2 to hit.

(fighter in my campaign was using 'sure strike' quite a lot in the last game)

Cheeres