D&D 4E Is Paragon Tier the "sweet spot" of 4E? And other ruminations on the tiers

[S'mon]

I think the 3e sweet spot is 4th level - robust PCs who can't wipe out a horde of gnolls with fireball.

Re 4e, at the London D&D Meetup, whenever a DM suggests running a Paragon-tier game, IME the reaction is: "It's too complicated! You should run at Heroic Tier instead". The one exception is the campaign that has organically gone from 1st to high-Paragon, so the players and DM are familiar with PC abilities and how the game develops.

However, I think that 4e Paragon now is a lot more playable, with the simpler Essentials characters, and the newer monster stats that do more damage and inflict fewer status effects.

 

[Dice4Hire]

I think the 3e sweet spot is 4th level - robust PCs who can't wipe out a horde of gnolls with fireball.

Have you read fireball in 4E?

 

[Dice4Hire]

I do agree that paragon works much better now than before. It used to be in heroic fights dragged on forever, and now they do not.

I am not sure what Epic needs, but the characters need to be dialed back a bit, I think.

 

[S'mon]

Now I personally have only experienced the first 12 levels, so I can't say much beyond early Paragon tier, but so far the verdict is that Paragon tier as a whole is the sweet spot of 4E, imo. Heroic tier was just fine, but Paragon tier is better and, from what I've heard, Epic tier has a whole slew of problems, mainly centered on the lack of support from WotC and, I would imagine, the bottle-necking of possibilities the higher level the party becomes.

...In Paragon tier, PCs have more options, powers, and are able to do more dynamic actions than in Heroic tier, yet they are not yet super-complex. Monsters and other challenges also start becoming more interesting, and the array of potential adventures becomes more varied, from more involved Heroic-style campaigns to Underdark delving to planar exploration.

I think Paragon offers the widest range of adventures and monsters, from up-levelled Heroic to de-levelled Epic; Heroic threats can become Paragon Minions, Epic threats can become Paragon Solos. Paragon PCs are super-heroic but have not transcended humanity. The default scale of Paragon is one I like - nations & empires, political conflict, save the kingdom - and easier to relate to than Epic's save the universe/reality/the spacetime continuum.

That said, I have never DM'd or played 4e Paragon; my current campaign I DM (Vault of Larin Karr) will wrap up soon after 2 years (June 2009-July 2011) at around 9th level, at least for now, and doesn't seem particularly suitable for extension into Paragon. The one I play in (Punjar) is scheduled to top out at 9th too; and my next planned campaign (Wilderlands 4e) is provisionally 3rd-9th, although I'm hoping the Heroic tier stuff might set the groundwork for a Paragon Wilderlands campaign.

I like the idea of starting a campaign at Paragon, but I don't see much support for this approach from WoTC. The kind of thing I'd like for Paragon is a campaign where PCs start as the rulers and national champions of realms, more King Arthur than Trollhaunt Warrens - the published Paragon adventures don't seem notably different from Heroic Tier stuff.

 

[S'mon]

Have you read fireball in 4E?

In 4e it's pretty weak - kills minions on a hit, but even post errata it won't kill non-minion gnolls. Even vs minions it's far weaker than spells which create zones and do start-of-turn automatic damage.

 

[S'mon]

I am not sure what Epic needs, but the characters need to be dialed back a bit, I think.

Well, in my successful 1e AD&D campaign one notable feature was that PC group size got smaller at higher levels - 5-6 PCs at 'Heroic', 3-4 at 'Paragon' and 1-2 at 'Epic' was typical. That's just the way it evolved, but it had many advantages in terms of keeping things manageable at all levels, and I get the impression Gygax's Greyhawk worked similarly, with very high level PCs often adventuring solo, and team-ups being a big deal.

Obviously this is problematic if you want a 5-player group at the table over the whole 30-level campaign, and WoTC's attempts to accommodate this in eg E1-E3 were not very successful as far as I can see. Paragon Paths & Epic Destinies imply that PCs are these cool legendary figures, but that doesn't come out in play when the entirety of play is just a linear dungeon full of 28 encounters to kill.

 

[WalterKovacs]

Here's my opinion:

1) They got heroic tier right pretty much out of the gate. The numbers at level 1 are pretty solid, and the rate of growth is pretty solid. Once players have played for a while, the single encounter/daily at level 1, and the need of 3 or 4 feats to solidify a character (you want to get the 'improve your class' feat, or the 'improve your race' feat, or the get a better weapon feat, the get better armor feat, etc, etc ...) so the earliest levels are sort of a race to the 'better' part. Level 1 is still fun, but things get better as you accumulate more 'stuff'.

2) Paragon was when players hit their encounter attack power cap, and by the end they get their 4th and last daily attack power. The monsters used to start getting bad at this point, as the extrapolation of the improvement rate started to fall apart. PCs, outside of a few things like attack mod and defenses were doing fine but monsters were becoming useless sacks of HP. With the updates, the feat 'taxes' and redesigned monsters made paragon fun again, and is a good stable sweet spot. For 10 levels, you aren't getting more encounter attack powers, or daily attack powers, just trading up to better ones. You do get some new stuff (feats, utility powers, magic items), but with magic items, a lot is merely getting better versions of stuff you already have. The big thing that makes it "level 9, but cooler" is the paragon path stuff. The 'always on' level 11 and 16 features give your character a very unique twist, and everyone does something cool with action points. So the early/mid paragon is where the PCs are at their 'peak' more or less.

For epic tier, they need to do what they've done for paragon tier in terms of reexamining the monters, updating them, creating support for it, etc, etc, etc. PCs are probably ok (but then, it's hard to really estimate that without knowing legitimate threats to put them up again). I know there are cool powers and epic destinies that make me WANT to play epic tier, but monster/encounter/adventure design for the 'end game' is lacking.

 

[Riastlin]

I definitely feel like heroic tier was pretty good right out of the gate. The monster problems were never really all that prevalent in heroic tier (much more so in paragon and epic) and PCs got a nice little scale up in overall ability. I personally have always felt as though PCs really started to get "comfortable" at level 5. The second daily becomes huge and gives the group a lot more survivability. Almost all of the PC deaths I've seen personally were before the party hit level 5.

The game I am currently running just hit 13th level (which is the highest I've seen in actual play). Paragon tier has definitely brought in a "fresh start" feel to the game and it feels as though it has injected new life into the campaign. Part of this is the multitude of new options for the players, part of it is I've been using more of the updated damage expressions, part of it is just new tricks that the monsters have, and finally, part is that my player roster has finally stabilized into a good group size. Obviously the last part has nothing to do with the tier system.

Looking ahead to epic, the big problem I see is pretty much what [MENTION=78116]Aegeri[/MENTION] mentions. Not enough monsters and not enough advice, samples, for DMs running epic. In particular, there are way too many solos in epic tier. [MENTION=1266]Abraxas[/MENTION] mentions too many "screw you" powers on monsters in epic and I think there is some truth to that. The thing is, most of those powers need to be placed on solos to make them a threat, but they don't need to be placed on standard monsters to make the encounters challenging. After all, stunning a solo is like stunning 4-5 regular monsters. Solos have definitely seen a lot of attention lately, and rightly so, but now we need to start taking a look at standard monsters too.

Overall, I think 4ed starts to hit its sweet spot at level 5. By level 13 it really hasn't left it. The thing that keeps me hopeful is that if they do figure out epic tier, I think that sweet spot might not never go away and in a sense the entire spectrum will feel like a sweet spot because I think a level 1 adventurer should feel a bit fragile.

I do have to agree though that 4ed is hard to start out at anything other than a relatively low level. Players really do need to see how their powers work and interact with each other. Starting at paragon will almost assuredly cause a player some amount of a learning curve. Ironically, as my players just hit 13th, and realized they have to drop an encounter power to get a new one, none of them batted an eye at that. They realize they don't need another encounter power and that more powers would just bog it down that much more. When 4ed first came out most of us thought "that sucks" when we saw you had to drop powers at higher levels. Now, we're glad.

Finally, I just want to add that solos are really in a good spot now if you follow the recent advice in assorted articles, blogs, etc. In our last session, the ranger (and rest of party) chased the fleeing bad guy up to the roof of the tower. The ranger won initiative and opened up with an AP, dealing out 112 damage. "Bloodied?" "Nope" I responded. Then the bad guy acted, the players looked at the map and saw no other critters and went "Oh crap." A year or so ago they wouldn't have even batted an eye. They would have been relieved to see a solo.

 

[Jhaelen]

We only played 4e from level 1 to 4 yet, but I consider each of these levels to be in the sweet spot. I'm certainly looking forward to paragon level play but I'm not sure how much sweeter it can get

For us combat is a lot faster than in 3e so far and I felt my character was powerful right from the start. The number of options is sufficient - the only encounter I ever ran out of every daily/encounter power was against a (level+2) solo. In that fight we also had our first pc death.

I almost think we're leveling too fast, though. If our Dark Sun campaign continues at the current speed we'll probably reach paragon tier when we reach Tyr (starting from Urik!)

 

[Destil]

My problems with paragon and epic is still the same as my biggest (design) problem with 4E in general: feats were carelessly left in it without good consideration for why, what they should do or where their power level should be. And have often been used to fix things instead of properly addressing the actual problems through errata.

High level is only really an issue for me when you have a lot of complex feats, because they're the one aspect of the system that does nothing but increase complexity with level these days (i.e. you never get more than 4 encounters or dailies but you keep getting feats).

Also, utility powers should possibly be capped out at paragon and get replaced at epic, since you start to have a huge stack. Though they're not half the problem feats are.