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Damage per round?
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<blockquote data-quote="Mike Sullivan" data-source="post: 962728" data-attributes="member: 9824"><p>The bugbear example could be phrased in an average-damage-per-round way, Elder Basilisk -- as long as you take Cleave into account, you'll see that the PA approach there yielded slightly higher damage per round than the non-PA approach. The weakness of the naive analysis isn't damage per round, but rather that it ignored Cleave.</p><p></p><p>That said, no, damage-per-round isn't the figure to look at if you're interested in optimizing your character. Actually, what you want to look at for a melee character is "own hit points lost at end of fight."</p><p></p><p>Because it's rare that you care how long it takes to kill your opponent(s) -- if you could kill them without taking any damage, but it would take 20 rounds, that's certainly very favorable instead of killing them in three rounds and losing half your hit points, in most scenarios.</p><p></p><p>Damage per round only very roughly approximates "own hit points lost at end of battle," on the assumption that if you kill your opponents quicker, you'll take less damage.</p><p></p><p>The problem with "own hit points lost at end of battle" is that you have to know a <i>lot</i> about your opponent to make it work. For a purely offensive analysis, all you need to know is your own AB and your opponent's AC. For "own hit points lost at end of battle," you need to know your AC, your opponent's AC, your attack progression/bonus, your opponent's attack progression/bonus, and your opponent's hit points. At that point, we start to rapidly lose generality -- there're just so many combinations that it becomes impossible to gain consensus on what an opponent is.</p><p></p><p>Just look at the arguments which have raged about what constitutes a common AC opponent for a fighter level whatever, and whether partial attacks or full attacks are more worth looking at, and all that jazz. Imagine expanding those arguments to take into account opponent's hp's, attack rating, attack progression, and your own AC. <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite7" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue :p" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":p" /></p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Mike Sullivan, post: 962728, member: 9824"] The bugbear example could be phrased in an average-damage-per-round way, Elder Basilisk -- as long as you take Cleave into account, you'll see that the PA approach there yielded slightly higher damage per round than the non-PA approach. The weakness of the naive analysis isn't damage per round, but rather that it ignored Cleave. That said, no, damage-per-round isn't the figure to look at if you're interested in optimizing your character. Actually, what you want to look at for a melee character is "own hit points lost at end of fight." Because it's rare that you care how long it takes to kill your opponent(s) -- if you could kill them without taking any damage, but it would take 20 rounds, that's certainly very favorable instead of killing them in three rounds and losing half your hit points, in most scenarios. Damage per round only very roughly approximates "own hit points lost at end of battle," on the assumption that if you kill your opponents quicker, you'll take less damage. The problem with "own hit points lost at end of battle" is that you have to know a <i>lot</i> about your opponent to make it work. For a purely offensive analysis, all you need to know is your own AB and your opponent's AC. For "own hit points lost at end of battle," you need to know your AC, your opponent's AC, your attack progression/bonus, your opponent's attack progression/bonus, and your opponent's hit points. At that point, we start to rapidly lose generality -- there're just so many combinations that it becomes impossible to gain consensus on what an opponent is. Just look at the arguments which have raged about what constitutes a common AC opponent for a fighter level whatever, and whether partial attacks or full attacks are more worth looking at, and all that jazz. Imagine expanding those arguments to take into account opponent's hp's, attack rating, attack progression, and your own AC. :P [/QUOTE]
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