PC hit points vs Monster hit points

[AngryPurpleCyclops]

It certainly did damage - two people were worried, so I was starting to think the cleric and I would have to give up on our personal challenge not to heal. We probably did have both Bastion of Health (9 temp) and Righteous Smite (7 temp) up that fight, but I'm not sure that more than 2 people got the benefit of Righteous since he did it right after I bastioned (so, I got the benefit at least)

It moved twice, so that pretty much nullifies the AP's.

Nullifies the AP's? how/ why? You're shifting your argument in a lot of ways. I'm getting a little disgusted. Now suddenly you're discussing a "bet" to not heal. Seems a little dishonest to introduce this as an example in a discussion about healing and not mention the "bet". We can't make that bet in our game because we would simply die. You also disguised the fact that there was 50 points of temp hit points deployed. This is a lot like healing wouldn't you say? You also have repeatedly said you weren't worried about being taken down. Now you are. Which is it?

Hmm, well the 'good round' would have been something like 10 attacks total from party, 8 of them at +9 damage, and about five of them radiant (2 from cleric, 2 from whoever he WotG-ed... rogue?, 1 from paladin). The crit for around 50 was probably me with Bastion (37+2d12), and I also landed my warlord's strike (2d10+7), so I did about 68. The rogue has whatever feat lets you sneak attack on an AP, so he hit twice for about 2d4+2d8+1d6+5+10+9 (each), so that's about another 83 points. The paladin would have been about 1d10+6+3+5+9 for holy strike and 2d10+6+9 for righteous smite for another 54.5, the warlock did... I want to say Frigid Darkness and Radiant Star, so 2d8+1d6+6+9 and 3d8+6+5+9 or another 61 damage, and the cleric I think just lance of faithed twice (I think he used his divine glow in a previous round and he didn't use his daily 1 that mod, so he probably had beacon of hope) so 1d8 + 6 + 5 + 9 (each), so that's another 49. Which is a total of... 68+83+54.5+61+49 = 315.5 damage.

Now you're simply being openly disingenuous at the least and more likely being dishonest. You failed to mention you had an encounter where your party had 9 attacks in one round and hit every time? If the party has a 70% chance (which really has to be on the high side) to hit do you know what the odds are of this? I'll tell you. It's about 4% You think it's not relevant to mention that you had a string of lucky rolls like this?

That was 1 of the 3 rounds, and I did power jewel and warlord's strike again in the next round. I'd not be surprised if I'm forgetting a miss or two there, but either way it should show you how it was possible. I also know that I forced it to trigger my mark for 12 radiant (7 + vuln) at one point cause I marked, attacked, shifted.

are you a paladin or a warlord, you're using powers from both. You've used an example where you basically never miss (this doesn't show me anything other than it's statistically possible though tremendously unlikely) trust me if I use the math you're using for the bad guys you won't have a chance in any encounter. This is the epitome of anecdotal evidence and you've stacked the deck in a ridiculous manner. your argument is now "we don't need healing because we refuse to use it even if it gets us killed". You burn through half the parties dailies, magic item dailies, get every synergy bonus available and then never miss... and try to make an argument about the worth of dailies?

We knew it was the last fight before we rested and we'd made our wager of seeing if we could get through without healing.

This is flawed in so many ways. First what if you're attacked again? You never KNOW it's the last encounter unless your DM is terrible.

So... no, it made perfect sense. It was a personal challenge and we had _buckets_ of healing. We had a paladin with lay on hands, 4 healing words, stand the fallen, beacon of hope, second winds...

LMAO you've reached the point of hilarity now. Your party is loaded with healing why? because it's super valuable. This is possibly one of the worst arguments I've ever seen on any dnd forum and that's saying a lot. I would say that by the time you get to the point where you're making bets about not using healing your game is so boring and lame that you need to make side bets to liven it up. let me give you a real world analogy and see if it makes sense still. "Once on our way out of somolia back to the ship we threw all our weapons out of the helo on bet because we knew the helo couldn't crash and leave us unarmed in a bad spot".

*shrug* It happened. The critter missed a lot too, but I already said it was inaccurate. I do believe the cleric shield of faithed before we entered the temple, also which I didn't notice til I went looking to see what powers he had (I'd never grouped with him before).

you keep changing the tune. adding more dailies. this is not a valid point. If i only had to face one encounter every day and had ALL My dailies available and ALL my action points available, I would play differently and possibly not need healing. In your example you appear to really suck at strategy beyond the tactics of one encounter and maximizing one round of combat. You're ignoring the impact of using so many resources in one encounter has on the survival of a party.

The cleric hit 4 of 4 in his divine glow - I remember that cause there were actually 5 within a 5x5 area at the time and I'd told him I could deal with it by pulling out my +1 lightning javelin and using its ability to kill them all if I hit, but he wanted to give us the +2 attack anyways so tried divine glow and it killed them all. Honestly, I think there were just 3 for my breath to hit and I hit all 3... I'm +7 attack and they're Ref 15 so that's not actually horrible chance.

so now on top of the 4% chance we have you scoring a perfect score of 3 for 3 and the cleric scoring a perfect score for 4 for 4. That's a 27% for you and about a 7-10% for him. Combinatorially this is about a 2% chance. Do you think it's fair to use examples where your taking things that happen less than one time in 20 and presenting them as normal? We're in the 1 time n 12,000 range for these two things to happen back to back not even including the dismal rolling of the bad guys. If i really got down and factored in everything you have said i would be shocked if you weren't talking about 1 in a million or 1 in billion odds.

how do you have +7 at level 5 for your breath?

incidently how many magic items do you have? what are they? I have a feeling you're ahead of the curve for 5th level. you're also discussing using a lightning javelins daily power and using the jewel daily to regain an encounter power (I'm assuming i didn't look up the jewel power but that's what I inferred).

He definitely got all 4. There were 2 hyena and 2 packrunners attacking and they'd just done ~30 damage.

So you have a guy with 30 dmg and probably 42 hp's and he's not scared that the necrotta or huntmaster will target him? gnolls target bloodied creatures.

I suppose he might have elf precision-ed to make that stick, but I don't remember him doing so. He's, what, +6 or +7 to hit too, so he was lucky to hit 4 of 4.

who would possibly use EP with divine glow on a minion?

I think you're underestimating the fire power of a couple of the characters in question - I was giving at least +4 damage to others and possibly +9. The rogue almost must have used his blinding barrage on the huntmaster and Croc, cause I can't really see where else he'd have used it. I know I spent an AP that round and I think 1 other person did (but I'm not sure).

All your arguments center around a childish entitlement version of DnD where you have every AP, every daily available for just one encounter. The dm is terrible if the huntmaster was anywhere near a zap cleric. The huntmaster can kill the cleric without giving the cleric a single attack. Same for the rogue most likely. Why the necrotta and huntmaster who massively out stealth the party were standing together and not one in melee and one at range is kind of beyond me.

Hmm, I had +11 attack at the time (+10 base, +1 bloodied) plus CA, so I'd need a 10 on Warlord's Strike or a 8 for Hammer and Anvil.

and yet you hit both times, again. You apparently never miss.

It got 3 or 4 people in the burst, definitely. I believe it missed with its bite and lost a round when no was in range of it.

if no one was in range of it how did the rogue ever get the huntmaster and the necrotta in one blast? The necrotta can attack if it's less than 18 from a target (how does the warlock get an attack but th necrotta doesn't? warlord? paladin? the huntmaster would not move in when it can attack from 18...

It was on the far side of the camp on fire with halflings and minions - it did not engage in round 1. I'd not be surprised if the encounter was scripted as such or if it ate a halfling or something in its first action.

Eh, I marked it and used a reach weapon on it from across difficult terrain, so it couldn't shift easily. It was likely blind for its 2nd chance to attack. I'm almost positive it didn't get a bite off, but if it did it only got off 1.

how many magic weapons is your pc carrying? why was the necrotta hanging in at range two across difficult terrain? why weren't you flanked by minions? why didn't the necrotta get to attack in the rounds where the party was rolling 100% hits on the minions?

I believe 3 of the party were bloodied (myself, rogue, warlock) and the paladin and cleric were not particularly threatened.

this doesn't add up. Unless someone was dropped than all 5 had to be bloodied unless everyone bloodied had exactly 1hp remaining and everyone not bloodied had bloodied +1.

We set ourselves a tactical challenge - for that matter, we knew we had the APs available, why wouldn't we use them? It's almost always worth burning APs on a round with belligerence + warlord's strike... especially in a game that's half skill challenges and half combats, since you can spend an AP most combats that way.

This is reaching the point of absurdity. You keep introducing new factors and the math borders on the ludicrous.

That's silly - if we didn't spend dailies or APs, we'd need healing. But what possible reason would we have not to spend dailies or APs? We know we have them, we know when we get them, etc.

only in a monty haul campaign do you know you're not going to have another encounter.

It actually can't, that's not an available resistance for variable resistance (that surpised me too, but check the MM)

point taken, he can use it to block the first hit by the warlock then.

And yet, that's what happened. It definitely got off its burst, it definitely missed with its bite once... it likely was blinded at one point so maybe that's why it missed.

And yet I had a neighbor when I was a kid that fell off the wall behind the green monster into landsdowne street and lived. Is this evidence that falling out of fenway park is safe? You've surreptitiously slipped an absurd anecdotal set of encounters into a discussion in an exceedingly deceitful manner as "evidence". You're simply dishonest either through intent or omission and I'm pretty much done with you.

Fwiw, people _did_ actually heal some during this... 6 whenever they spent an AP, cause I'm an inspiring warlord. Dunno how much that mattered... maybe 36 hp total for the two fights, at most, since it doesn't apply to me and some undamaged people spent AP.

so that's at least two blatant lies you've told. You hid the temp hp's and now you admit there was healing.

Sure, but with 3 sources of healing plus second wind, it was fun to take the risk. The fight against the solo I had actually said we'd have to heal next round, but then we did a ton of damage to it. It was improbable that we'd all hit, and like I said I might have forgotten we missed, but we did only need like 5s to hit it at that point (+2 from CA, +2 from Divine Glow last round, -3 AC and Will from the warlock at different times)

This assumes everything already hit and doesn't take into account everything continuing to hit. The math is progressively getting into lottery numbers.

Yeah, I wouldn't advise it as a normal course of action. We were just seeing if we could get away with it.

and yet you presented it as evidence to the contrary of what you would advise. You're not even making sense now.

Psh, just need to be really cocky.

And really dead. You're obviously playing with soft DM's who fail to challenge the party. These are the minor encounters in our game, if we used all our dailies we would surely die in the N+4 encounters.

 

[keterys]

You may want to look into adjusting your posting style such that it's more compelling to actually respond to you in a reasonable fashion, fwiw... enworld is actually a very polite community with hard working moderators and it's a lot easier when folks aren't rude.

Nullifies the AP's? how/ why? You're shifting your argument in a lot of ways. I'm getting a little disgusted. Now suddenly you're discussing a "bet" to not heal. Seems a little dishonest to introduce this as an example in a discussion about healing and not mention the "bet".

You mean, like in my first post? 'In the other, we had the healing and did two encounters that were in theory hard enough, but we had two leaders, buckets of healing, and the challenge was to see if healing was even necessary...'

We can't make that bet in our game because we would simply die. You also disguised the fact that there was 50 points of temp hit points deployed.

Or perhaps I said several posts ago 'Bastion of Health was used in one of the fights, cause it does 3W damage, but I don't believe anyone fell to 9 hp or lower (ie, that the temp hp mattered that much).'

This is a lot like healing wouldn't you say? You also have repeatedly said you weren't worried about being taken down. Now you are. Which is it?

I wasn't worried about being taken down. I thought that the fight would go on for several more rounds and that we'd have to heal the rogue so he wouldn't drop in the room where the poison was (or at least that he'd complain about being too close enough that it was worth quieting him), not that we'd deal half its hp in one round.

Now you're simply being openly disingenuous at the least and more likely being dishonest. You failed to mention you had an encounter where your party had 9 attacks in one round and hit every time?

Wow, if only I'd said 'We all burned AP and I'm not sure anyone missed with much (especially not with everyone having combat advantage and it having -2 AC and -3 Will) and I gave +9 damage per attack to my allies and the cleric uses WotG on someone.'

If the party has a 70% chance (which really has to be on the high side)

Eh, solo 6 brute, it had AC and Reflex 20 apparently (which matches the expected value fine). So between CA, frigid darkness AC penalty, divine glow, lance of faith, being a rogue with a dagger... it wasn't so bad. I mean, +12 to +14 vs 17 or 18? Just for a round, but hey.

You think it's not relevant to mention that you had a string of lucky rolls like this?

We probably missed once or twice. Beats me. It didn't seem particularly lucky at the time. 10 attacks, only 1 crit, no more than 2 fell in the range of, say, 1-4 where they'd miss?

are you a paladin or a warlord, you're using powers from both.

If only I'd said "and my multiclass paladin mark really made that difficult."

You've used an example where you basically never miss

I certainly miss - but I don't know which attacks missed anymore. Hence not knowing if my warlord's strike hit the Croc or not when I said 'I was giving at least +4 damage to others and possibly +9'

Let me be really clear here. Within the last two weeks I've played three games of D&D with three different characters in three different groups and I've DMed three different games for another three different groups, though there is some crossover (like I DMed for one of the guys that DMed me, etc). In addition to that I played World of Warcraft (Sartharion, Malygos, and all of Naxxramas, all on 25-man, fwiw. Also cleared some mail. I used different chars for Sarth + Mal than Naxx), watched a few dozen episodes of TV (Witch Hunter Robin, Smallville, House, Daily Show, Colbert Report, South Park, mostly), I designed an adventure including 3 new monsters and revised versions of 5 others, and reworked 7 older monsters I did. I also plugged in all of the daily 15s and half of the daily 19s into a spreadsheet to get a feel for their damage ranges under various conditions and attack values so that I could grade them. I'm pretty sure I also worked. What does all of that matter? That it was _entirely_ unimportant to me who rolled what when during the combat so I don't know the precise details. I just know I played a game, no one freaked out about lucky rolls except for our surprise at the cleric's divine glow, and that's that.

I am sure I have better things to do than respond more on this thread, though.

This is flawed in so many ways. First what if you're attacked again? You never KNOW it's the last encounter unless your DM is terrible.

Or you're playing a published module and know roughly how long it is? Not that we didn't have _some_ dailies left. Or weren't getting an AP each at the end of the fight we each spent one in...

LMAO you've reached the point of hilarity now. Your party is loaded with healing why?

Because it was an LFR game and that's who happened to show up to the table? It was waaaaay more than we needed, but I often solo heal with others who have no healing, so I have to have resources available. I didn't take a healing option at 6th though as I felt I had enough.

I would say that by the time you get to the point where you're making bets about not using healing your game is so boring and lame that you need to make side bets to liven it up.

If we hadn't made the bet it would have been a lot safer, and hence less exciting, yes. We clearly overmatched that particular module, in all kinds of ways.

So, less healing was good there. If we'd been able to bring a fighter instead of a paladin and a striker instead of the cleric, we'd have killed things faster and I'd have had a use for my healing powers.

"Once on our way out of somolia back to the ship we threw all our weapons out of the helo on bet because we knew the helo couldn't crash and leave us unarmed in a bad spot".

Or how about 'Once, when playing a round of golf, I took a handicap when playing against someone less skilled, so that it would still be a challenge'. I hear that happens.

you keep changing the tune. adding more dailies. this is not a valid point. If i only had to face one encounter every day and had ALL My dailies available and ALL my action points available

2 encounters - it's always 2 to 4 combat encounters, but after the RP and 3 skill challenges and such, and having killed everything we were looking after and the room having no exits, yeah, we felt fine unloading on the solo.

You're ignoring the impact of using so many resources in one encounter has on the survival of a party.

Ensuring it survives with ease? Guess so.

so now on top of the 4% chance we have you scoring a perfect score of 3 for 3 and the cleric scoring a perfect score for 4 for 4. That's a 27% for you and about a 7-10% for him. how do you have +7 at level 5 for your breath?

Ends up I'm actually +9 with breath weapon. +5 str, +2 from level 5, +2 from breath just getting a +2. So I apparently needed a 6. So, 1/4 chance of missing, or a 42% chance I'd kill all 3 if there were 3. If there were 4 and I got 3, then it's quite a bit likely but 42% is already pretty darn likely.

incidently how many magic items do you have? what are they? I have a feeling you're ahead of the curve for 5th level. you're also discussing using a lightning javelins daily power and using the jewel daily to regain an encounter power (I'm assuming i didn't look up the jewel power but that's what I inferred).

+2 vicious greatspear, +1 lightning javelin, power jewel, +1 healer's brooch, +1 eladrin chain (so 7th, 5th, 5th, 4th, 3rd)

So not that atypical distribution.

So you have a guy with 30 dmg and probably 42 hp's and he's not scared that the necrotta or huntmaster will target him? gnolls target bloodied creatures.

Sure, but so what? Literally 0% chance of the person dying if they did fall down.

who would possibly use EP with divine glow on a minion?

I thought I said 'he might have elf precision-ed to make that stick, but I don't remember him doing so' which implies I don't think he did. That said I don't recall when he did, so beats me.

All your arguments center around a childish entitlement version of DnD where you have every AP, every daily available for just one encounter.

Two encounters, in this particular instance. And if you have skill challenges a lot, or a mix of hard and easy combats, you end up having an AP for almost any combat you want. That's actually just the way the game is designed pretty much.

The dm is terrible if the huntmaster was anywhere near a zap cleric. The huntmaster can kill the cleric without giving the cleric a single attack.

In a void in which they fought on a treadmill and the cleric didn't use his bow, sure.

if no one was in range of it how did the rogue ever get the huntmaster and the necrotta in one blast?

If only I'd said 'It was on the far side of the camp on fire with halflings and minions - it did not engage in round 1.' implying that there was a single round in which it was not in range, but that perhaps after that we fought it in melee.

why was the necrotta hanging in at range two across difficult terrain?

Because there was a fair amount of difficult terrain and it was next to a square, so I set myself up to exploit that terrain?

why weren't you flanked by minions?

Because the cleric just killed the 4 on me?

why didn't the necrotta get to attack in the rounds where the party was rolling 100% hits on the minions?

Cause it didn't attack in round 1...

this doesn't add up. Unless someone was dropped than all 5 had to be bloodied unless everyone bloodied had exactly 1hp remaining and everyone not bloodied had bloodied +1.

I'm sure your math, and reading skills, are infallible in this regard.

Except, three people were bloodied. The paladin and cleric were not particularly hurt. As was covered, already.

This is reaching the point of absurdity. You keep introducing new factors and the math borders on the ludicrous.

No, you're just forgetting things.

only in a monty haul campaign do you know you're not going to have another encounter.

I think you're actually unclear on what the definition of a monty haul campaign is - you may want to look it up. If it helps any, we didn't get to kill a goblin to open a door for a +5 Vorpal Greataxe (always pick a new door, though!)

You've surreptitiously slipped an absurd anecdotal set of encounters into a discussion in an exceedingly deceitful manner as "evidence". You're simply dishonest either through intent or omission and I'm pretty much done with you.

At least we can agree on something. Fwiw, I've actually been considering removing some of the healing from my warlord based on how much better damage appears to work at clearing through encounters quickly and efficiently in published adventures.

so that's at least two blatant lies you've told. You hid the temp hp's and now you admit there was healing.

Psst - I said I was an inspiring warlord several posts ago. I also said there was temp hp. I _even_ said 'the challenge was to see if healing was even necessary... and ends up it wasn't. Sure, people took damage, but no one fell down' which means the 6 hp and even the 9 temp were _completely trivial_ because they wouldn't have changed the outcome of the fights.

and yet you presented it as evidence to the contrary of what you would advise. You're not even making sense now.

Reading every other thing certainly doesn't help, but it's all pretty immaterial. It's very possible to play without a leader. It's very possible to win an encounter if one or more people drop below 0 hp, without those people being in any danger of dying. If the group is able to, _however they do it_, avoid the threat of characters dying without healing, then healing was not necessary for that combat and might possibly not have even been useful, implying that the group might have been better off with a source of greater damage instead.

 

[AngryPurpleCyclops]

You may want to look into adjusting your posting style such that it's more compelling to actually respond to you in a reasonable fashion, fwiw... enworld is actually a very polite community with hard working moderators and it's a lot easier when folks aren't rude.

I've tried adjusting my posting style but I get tired of explaining the same thing to someone who just keeps reiterating the same response. I find it hard to believe you can't understand that anecdotal evidence such as encounter where your pc's won the dice roll lottery are not indicative of much. You don't base a mathematical model on the outliers. this game is a mathematical model. It's based upon keeping the encounters close to the middle of the bell and attempting to keep swingyness to a minimum. By not having so much riding on any single die roll they've made the game "safer" for pc's and a lot of people would say "more fun" for players. No one enjoys playing a pc for 5 months and having him disintegrated by a bad die roll. If I seem to be getting more and more direct I can assure you it's in response to goading and circular arguments. You've made a lot of arguments like "but in this situation it's not" which while valid, doesn't really help because I can comeback with "well in this situation it is" or "but in situation x daze is less effective". I would happily say "they're both situational" in fact I did say that repeatedly but you keep coming back around in a circle and saying "but x is situational" when in fact, both x and y are situational. We've already agreed to that stipulation and the process is to move forward from there trying to analyze them without repeatedly circling back.

You mean, like in my first post? 'In the other, we had the healing and did two encounters that were in theory hard enough, but we had two leaders, buckets of healing, and the challenge was to see if healing was even necessary...'

I apologize. We got a long way from that post and I didn't remember it verbatim. On the other hand, the point you were arguing was that healing was less important. You didn't give the details of you encounter and presented it in a disingenuous way.
First, your party used massive amounts of temp hit points as a substitute.
Second you did use some healing
Third you used dailies and AP's at a pace most pc's can't afford to mirror or they will die.
Fourth you omitted the 1st three.

It would be a lot more helpful and honest (and would have prevented 15 posts) if you said we set out to see if we could get by without healing but to offset this we used all our AP's, several dailies and several daily magic items. We also statistically rolled more than 3 std deviations above the mean in back to back encounters. This speaks more to my position than to the opposite that healing can preserve dailies, AP's and daily use magic items. This ups the value of healing not degrades it.

Or perhaps I said several posts ago 'Bastion of Health was used in one of the fights, cause it does 3W damage, but I don't believe anyone fell to 9 hp or lower (ie, that the temp hp mattered that much).'

You can't honestly expect me to remember every detail over days of posts when you're withholding most of the information. When you present your case if you mention a power it's not always obvious to everyone what that power does. I've never played a warlord, I don't know the powers by heart.

Wow, if only I'd said 'We all burned AP and I'm not sure anyone missed with much (especially not with everyone having combat advantage and it having -2 AC and -3 Will) and I gave +9 damage per attack to my allies and the cleric uses WotG on someone.'

details help. we're having a discussion, how can I respond with no details.

Eh, solo 6 brute, it had AC and Reflex 20 apparently (which matches the expected value fine). So between CA, frigid darkness AC penalty, divine glow, lance of faith, being a rogue with a dagger... it wasn't so bad. I mean, +12 to +14 vs 17 or 18? Just for a round, but hey.

That's one round for one pc. a lot of those modifiers are not relevant after that single round. The bonus sneak attack on action points is probably over powered but not going to break the game. making elven accuracy reliable for rogues is also not a particularly well considered feat. this blows away elven precision and almost guarantees to turn one sneak attack per encounter from a miss into a hit. There's already a lot of power creep going on in the splat books.

If only I'd said "and my multiclass paladin mark really made that difficult."

well that ties up a lot of feats to have spent 1 on multiclass and at least one on exchanging a power. your paladin mark almost no factor to a creature with 450 hp's. he clearly should have been pounding the rogue into the ground. The paladin warlord also should have been getting pounded into the ground by the poison as neither warlords nor paladins can be expected to have a good reflex. If the monsters had even average luck that's 2-3 hits on you. 5 ongoing is average of 10 dmg. If the zombie was worried about your mark he should have been firing his 3-4 attacks per round at you. It only takes 1-2 hits over 4 rounds to eliminate you, even considering the temp hit points because you should be getting pounded by the poison.

I certainly miss - but I don't know which attacks missed anymore. Hence not knowing if my warlord's strike hit the Croc or not when I said 'I was giving at least +4 damage to others and possibly +9'

Not very often for a warlord. You don;t think 300= dmg is a lot for 5 level 5 pc's in one round? This didn't seem exceptional to you? avg dpr for pc's is about 4 + 1.4/level per round. that's about 55 per round usually for 5 level 5's. This is a rough number and might only work in epic but the average damage per round for 5 level 5's can't really be above 60-65. You're taking a lot of liberties with the benefits from the warlock. does he also always hit? those are one use powers so the effects are permanent and aren't guaranteed. WotG's is good and I totally missed the radiant vs undead at first but that's another daily spent and it's a party with both a cleric and a paladin vs undead which seems pretty advantageous. People already complain about the ghoul example because the party has a cleric but you're doubling up on that problem which seems to be taking a really bad example. and abusing it. Is a party of 5 warlocks good? they probably are against an encounter of 100 minion skeletons.

Let me be really clear here. Within the last two weeks I've played three games of D&D with three different characters in three different groups and I've DMed three different games for another three different groups, though there is some crossover (like I DMed for one of the guys that DMed me, etc). In addition to that I played World of Warcraft (Sartharion, Malygos, and all of Naxxramas, all on 25-man, fwiw. Also cleared some mail. I used different chars for Sarth + Mal than Naxx), watched a few dozen episodes of TV (Witch Hunter Robin, Smallville, House, Daily Show, Colbert Report, South Park, mostly), I designed an adventure including 3 new monsters and revised versions of 5 others, and reworked 7 older monsters I did. I also plugged in all of the daily 15s and half of the daily 19s into a spreadsheet to get a feel for their damage ranges under various conditions and attack values so that I could grade them. I'm pretty sure I also worked. What does all of that matter? That it was _entirely_ unimportant to me who rolled what when during the combat so I don't know the precise details. I just know I played a game, no one freaked out about lucky rolls except for our surprise at the cleric's divine glow, and that's that.

that's all well and good but you chimed in on a topic and presented evidence to suggest that healing doesn't matter but when we look more closely at the evidence there's a lot of problems with your position. Why does your party have 2 healers and a healer multiclass? Why did you burn a ridiculous amount of dailies and use temp hit points and still gain some healing? Why did you fail to mention that mth being so dreadfully skewed against the monsters?

I am sure I have better things to do than respond more on this thread, though.

me too, and yet here we are.

Or you're playing a published module and know roughly how long it is? Not that we didn't have _some_ dailies left. Or weren't getting an AP each at the end of the fight we each spent one in...

you're poisoning the sample. Those are outside forces that detract from your point because most pc's don't have that kind of meta-game info. There's a big difference between a long fly ball in the bottom of the ninth with the bases loaded if there's one out or two and the game is tied. One is extra innings and one is game over. you have to consider that you were abusing the system based upon metagame knowledge. You also have to consider how much or little enjoyment you're getting from the game your playing. You also might want to consider how much time you're spending on DnD and WoW but that's a different story all together.

Because it was an LFR game and that's who happened to show up to the table? It was waaaaay more than we needed, but I often solo heal with others who have no healing, so I have to have resources available. I didn't take a healing option at 6th though as I felt I had enough.

I'm not too familiar with LFR but my general understanding is it's a way to play with the same pc with multiple dm's and various players. basically one shot modules not really very campaign like and probably suffering massively from under powered encounters because the business model is to keep everyone alive.

If we hadn't made the bet it would have been a lot safer, and hence less exciting, yes. We clearly overmatched that particular module, in all kinds of ways.

and yet you were defending the encounter as challenging...

Can we at least agree that the overall effectiveness of powers doesn't really matter until your tested? For the most part, a 6d6 fireball is just as effective as a 20d6 fireball vs orcs. it's not until you get near the edge of the pc's capabilities that the differences shine through. If I'm only hit once per encounter how effective is shield? does it even matter?

So, less healing was good there.

this is anecdotal and based upon a relatively bad framework created by the business model of LFR

Or how about 'Once, when playing a round of golf, I took a handicap when playing against someone less skilled, so that it would still be a challenge'. I hear that happens.

Good analogy, this doesn't change the fact that the other player still had little or no chance to actually beat you sans handicap. I'm not going to go play dnd vs level N encounters all day and use some self imposed restriction (how about, I won't use encounter powers) to balance things. If I did do this on a bet, and then I posted that encounter powers aren't that important in the forum would you agree? If I said I handled XYZ encounter without the use of encounter powers therefore they're only important when you use them (but maybe I burned up all my dailies) would you think I was making a statistically valid argument or would you maybe be a bit frustrated by the tenth iteration of this circular argument and simply think I was being an ugly forum troll? Would you accept that this was a good tactic because I knew the day was probably over? (which is an insulting defense incidentally since it corrupts the data and makes the playing field unbalanced) would you accept that this was a good tactic or would you maybe suggest that if you face another major encounter and now have no dailies or action points you've obviously increased your exposure? How about if we only threw the claymores and night vision out of the helo? would that be a valid tactic?

2 encounters - it's always 2 to 4 combat encounters, but after the RP and 3 skill challenges and such, and having killed everything we were looking after and the room having no exits, yeah, we felt fine unloading on the solo.

God this is painfully repetitive. could there have been a secret door?

let me try to explain:
Are you familiar with the observer effect? When measuring/observing anything you impact the thing you're measuring. Putting a thermometer in hot liquid changes the temp by a small degree as the thermometer absorbs some thermal energy. The point being even small things have an impact. Metagaming that the encounter is weak and the adventure is over make your empirical data corrupt. You took information from outside the system and used it in your measurements. Even without the serious math issues in your example and hidden temp hit points you didn't disclose you should not have presented this as an example to support anything.

Ends up I'm actually +9 with breath weapon. +5 str, +2 from level 5, +2 from breath just getting a +2. So I apparently needed a 6. So, 1/4 chance of missing, or a 42% chance I'd kill all 3 if there were 3. If there were 4 and I got 3, then it's quite a bit likely but 42% is already pretty darn likely.

and if this was the only math that favored you I wouldn't have said a word. +5 str, +4 cha, = 13-14 reflex? maybe 15? did the poison hit you 3 times? The 9 for 9 or 9 for 10 on the "good round" is the biggest math issue. Also when I suggested that you had a party designed to eat minions you said no wiz, no armor but you substituted a 3 for 3 dragon breath and a 4 for 4 divine glow. The poison had a 30% chance to hit you 4 times. about a 75% chance to hit you 3 times. The zombie also must have had chances to hit you. It gets 3-4 attacks per round and has AP's, even if these ATT were bad, you're still looking at a ton of chances. If the poison hit you 3 times, you're pretty much done. You can pretty easily see how it appears the pc's rolled abnormally high and the dm was using a d16 for ATT's


[/quote]+2 vicious greatspear, +1 lightning javelin, power jewel, +1 healer's brooch, +1 eladrin chain (so 7th, 5th, 5th, 4th, 3rd)

So not that atypical distribution.[/quote]but pretty strong. I have no idea of what they do, I assume the jewel has a daily that lets you get back an encounter. My experience with 5th level pc's is that having a single bonus weapon is pretty normal, having both a ranged and melee weapon, one of them a +2 seems extremely strong.

Sure, but so what? Literally 0% chance of the person dying if they did fall down.

And you wonder why I seem to be getting so blunt... LOOK AT WHAT YOU JUST SAID. I said this days ago. This encounter can't be used to measure ANYTHING. Until you get near the top of performance you simply can't measure which is better. If you take two guys who play professional baseball and put them in little league and they both bat 1000 and hit a home run every time they bat, which is better? You can't tell. There's no way to compare relative difference until you challenge their skill set. Move them up to the majors and one bats 300 but the other bats 220. I know a guy with a 188 IQ., we both got an 800 on the math portion of the SAT's can I conclude from this my IQ is as high as his? No, because the test wasn't hard enough to challenge our skill sets. His IQ is much higher than mine but you can't tell in this example. Admittedly I didn't get an 800 the first time I took it and he probably did which might be differentiation enough and his verbal was higher too, but the point remains the same.

Two encounters, in this particular instance. And if you have skill challenges a lot, or a mix of hard and easy combats, you end up having an AP for almost any combat you want. That's actually just the way the game is designed pretty much.

we don't have that many skill challenges, they sort of seem boring exercises in dice rolling mostly and they're either too hard or too easy depending on the optimization of the pc's. I didn't know you get AP's for skill challenges. Kind of seems broken to be earning miles stones and thus AP's in skill challenges. You can't burn AP's in a skill challenge can you?

In a void in which they fought on a treadmill and the cleric didn't use his bow, sure.

Or in a wide variety of terrains where the gnoll might have an advantage. rolling fields for instance.

Because there was a fair amount of difficult terrain and it was next to a square, so I set myself up to exploit that terrain?

but the huntmaster was unable to exploit that same terrain? You're defending these anecdotal points even though they're simply not relevant AND horrible examples for numerous reasons. Like you said "who cares, there's absolutely no chance of getting killed. I'm going to stop I'm tired of trying to explain simple concepts to you, if you can't see that you can't measure anything with these examples I'll never convince you and you're probably not worth me trying to help you understand.

Psst - I said I was an inspiring warlord several posts ago. I also said there was temp hp. I _even_ said 'the challenge was to see if healing was even necessary... and ends up it wasn't. Sure, people took damage, but no one fell down' which means the 6 hp and even the 9 temp were _completely trivial_ because they wouldn't have changed the outcome of the fights.

psst the entire encounter was trivial, you completely fail to recognize that. You've acknowledged that it's a foregone conclusion you'll win and you'r so bored you have to handicap yourselves to get any enjoyment. Sounds like fun, enjoy yourself.