So, about defenses aka. PHB2 defenses feats

[Elric]

Regarding the stun at wills of the githzerai cenobites:
Yep, I did notice them, but how do you include these in a dpr calculation?

I would calculate damage using that power rather than their other at-will since it's much better against most characters than their power that targets AC and does 1d8 extra, but doesn't stun (not sure what you did here). Once I did that, I definitely wouldn't say

This leaves one question open: what about non-numeric affects, like the daze powers that are involved in some of these encounters?

I actually think they don't matter a lot. I'd rather say the odds are stacked in the pcs' favour when you're looking at paragon or even epic tiers:

At level 14, unless the PCs start uncorking all of their dailies (and they shouldn't have to do this, it's an even level encounter), having four +14 vs. Fort at-will stun attacks among the opposition will be much better than the status conditions the PCs churn out. This is somewhat mitigated by the fact this is a level 14 encounter, so the Cenobites are lower level and thus less likely to hit than they would be if they were used in a lower level encounter; remove the Zerth and make this a lower level encounter and it should get comparatively tougher for its level.

When you campare Flameskull attack to Wyvern attack you can see that they are the same but Flameskull gives also an effect! My question is:

Why attacks that give the same amount of damage + effects are fine to you? You can easily see that the gap is too huge to simply say "this what it suppose to be!". Monsters that hit AC are so... useless, becouse they hit chance is lower and they do the same amount of damage. If hitting on 2-5 was what 4E designers have in they minds, why they did AC targeting of monsters attacks on Epic tier? They should just do all attacks target NADs or scall AC the same as NADs. The fact they didn't... Bingo. They just forget about NADs and then PHB2 comes out and we have defense feats to fix this issue.

This idea is what I've been trying to get at. FRW attacks scale relatively better in chance to hit than AC attacks, but there's no indication that the effects on a hit are weaker to compensate. However, I specifically didn't want to make monster comparisons of this sort because monsters of different roles should have different offensive abilities, FRW vs. AC scaling issues aside. In particular, Artillery, which tends to target FRW more often than Skirmishers, should have stronger attacks (and ranged attacks) to compensate for worse defenses and lower HP.

 

[KarinsDad]

Regarding the stun at wills of the githzerai cenobites:
Yep, I did notice them, but how do you include these in a dpr calculation?

For something like Stun which prevents Actions, you estimate how often they will be used, figure out how often they hit, and then lower the DPR of the PCs by how many rounds they are stunned (based on their chance to get out of stun as well) * the average DPR of the PCs during those rounds.

Conditions like Stun can be estimated. Conditions like Slow, not so much.

 

[DracoSuave]

Err, wrong.

There is one piece of designer evidence that has been presented, but has been totally ignored by people who do not believe that WotC is creating a feat math fix.


WotC stated on multiple occasions before the 4E release that they wanted the sweet spot to work at all levels.

Not just heroic levels, all levels.

PCs do not get hit on a 2 in the heroic tier. PCs do not need a 17 to hit in the heroic tier. It's extremely unlikely that the designers think that getting hit on a 2 is fun. It's extremely unlikely that the designers think that 20+ round encounters are fun.

The sweet spot claims by the designers is solid evidence of designer intent and goes against the claim that there "is no math problem".


They did not want 8 round encounters at low level and 20 round encounters at high level. They said that problems like these caused the lack of sweet spot below level 7 and above level 14 in the 3.5 game.

Listen to the GenCon announcements and interviews to find out designer intent.

This information is straight from the designers.

I'm not going to dispute this information at all. I agree with it. What I disagree with is the idea that the '50/50' hit rate creates that sweet spot. In fact, given the damage presented by monsters according to all sources, a 50/50 attack rate would -not- present that sweet spot, and cannot.

I fully agree with the 'sweet spot' theory, and the math shows it cannot happen with a solid 50/50 attack rate. The mistake is thinking that the hit rate must remain constant over all levels. That is simply -not true- and cannot be true when player resources are constantly improving.

If they wanted 50/50, then monster damage would scale with healing power (it doesn't), or at very least, with party hp (it doesn't).

Summary: The 'Sweet Spot' isn't referring to having the same to-hit rate for monsters and players, and insinuating that it does when the very same math uses the term 'math and complexity.' Complexity. That implies that it's not reduced to one number.

 

[Bayuer]

Summary: The 'Sweet Spot' isn't referring to having the same to-hit rate for monsters and players, and insinuating that it does when the very same math uses the term 'math and complexity.' Complexity. That implies that it's not reduced to one number.

If this is true, then monsters attacking NADs are much stronger than monsters attacking AC. This makes a situation where "balance" of monsters overall power isn't achieved at all. So if this was a intentional move, then designers should at least mention about this in section about making encounters and XP. They didn't say even one word about monsters hitting NADs being stronger. Why?

And don't looka at NADs attacks as "effects" attacks, becouse they make both and as I posted above, damage of NADs attacks is good and offten NADs attacks place also effects. So what is the sens of making some monsters more strong, withou saying about this and giving them the same XP value?

 

[keterys]

Just so I'm clear... damage being screwed up as too low would justify the attack bonus being too high?

The game being broken in more than one area doesn't justify it being broken in the one being talked about - it being 4 times as easy to land a stun effect on a PC from heroic to epic tier isn't a feature, it's a bug.

 

[James McMurray]

The game being broken in more than one area doesn't justify it being broken in the one being talked about - it being 4 times as easy to land a stun effect on a PC from heroic to epic tier isn't a feature, it's a bug.

But is it a bug of the hit rate or the stun effect?

 

[Bayuer]

But is it a bug of the hit rate or the stun effect?

Hit rate. When you compare damage dealt by NAD targeting powers and the AC targeting powers you can see that damage is the same, but NAD attacks also gives nasty effects.

I don't see the "feature" of epic play as a one monster makes his at-will stunn/dominate attack and exclude one character from game, so the other have more challanging fight. I think it's ok when some players will lose one turn once couple rounds, but not almost every round.

 

[Tellerve]

Yeaaaaah... Well in the case of "worst paladin in the world" they'll obviously want to use a different tactic.



Those are interesting house rules. Marks overwrite.

Whaa? Have you not read the multiple times it is stated that a new Mark supersedes a mark that was already in place? phb 77 In the Combat Challenge paragraph and then read phb 91 in Divine Challenge power.

You're the one using house rules letting them stack.

 

[keterys]

But is it a bug of the hit rate or the stun effect?

It is a bug of the hit rate that it hit in the first place. As I stated earlier, it is not a design feature for PCs to be hit on 2s.

Which is not to say that it's bad to have automatic hit effects, damage shields auras, damage on Miss effects, etc... those are all good. At least if you include major status effects you know what you're doing there

But the d20 roll has to be meaningful. Much like save DCs in the 40s was bad in 3e (sure, maybe I'll luck out and get the 20 and not fail) as were save DCs in the low teens later (So, my magic weapon triggers and he has to make a DC 13 Will save for it to do anything... I mean, really, this is what makes it special?)

Now, I'm also fine with less stun effects in the game, sure, but there are people who find stun effects preferable and miss instant death effects - so to each their own there.

*sigh* All of these talks are making me think I may have to do an awful lot of math before I go much further on some monster things. Though we do certainly have plenty of monsters already that are all over the place.

 

[eprieur]

They already tell us in the DM guide what the "expected" balance is. When you design defenses AC is always 2 points higher then NAD defenses for most types. Soldiers have AC 4 pts higher then NAD and Brute and Artillery have lower AC equal to their nads.

The basic NAD defense of every monster is lvl +12.

For PCs it is actually more complicated but if you look at monsters again in the DM guide, you see they all have attacks that are 2 points higher for AC then NAD except for controllers who have 1 more atk vs NADS then the other roles.

That's how you should balanced the monster. If you look at the platinum dragon you see exactly that.

A lvl 21 soldier should have +28 atk vs AC and +26 atk vs NADs. (lvl +7).

Then to that, NAD and AC attacks are lowered by 2 if you attack multiple creatures:
*Reduce the attack bonus by 2 for powers that affect multiple creatures.

Which give +26 vs NAD for single target attacks and +24 vs NAD for multiple target attacks for a lvl 21 soldier.

This can only be remotely balanced if PC defenses are somewhat in the range of -2 for NAD vs AC. If this is not the case then balance failed. When you are in the range of NAD being 10 lower then AC it's in the range of broken.

It's also totally mess with the balance in the monster manual. Like some other people mentionned, any monster that target NAD instead of AC will be greatly overpowered vs their counterpart that target ACs even if the DM guide tells us that they should be somewhat balanced.