Those ratios mostly look better IMO. I don't know what the exact sweet spot should be but my gut says that's probably okay.
I'm going off a similar gut level and, as shown in the CR 17 dragon encounter, it looks like it lines up with expectations -fairly- well...
I was assuming you would set the x in damage to whatever made sense. I'm not sure if your damage is DPR or before accuracy adjusted here.
Ah, yeah. The X is 1d8. So average of 4.5. Of course not every roll will use d8s, and there's also weapon variation to consider (Rogues with Daggers or Shortswords instead of Rapiers, Cantrips that deal 3d4 damage instead of 1d8+4, Spells that drop 8d6 instead of 6d8, etc)
I'd have to work through the precise numbers here based on your X for damage, but sounds reasonable enough.
I would note that 'output' to me entails more than just damage output, it was a catch all around healing/control/damage/etc.
Yup yup! It's further down in the breakdown.
Based on the number spreads you are getting I have concerns about any encounter building guidelines working for such large variance in parties. In such a tightly tuned system, if the DM cannot adequately set the appropriate encounter difficulty then you run serious risks of bad things happening to the PCs as they have very limited levers to pull to change the outcome of the encounter once it begins.
There's always "Catch your Breath" to pull out more encounter powers, a much more powerful late game utility than early game utility.
In normal 5e those levers are more more daily and short rest resources into such encounters. Allowing the players to significantly increase their output as needed to match threats.
S'truth. But it leads to the 5MWD problem to use that lever much, if at all, as resources are burnt to get through a given fight faster, even though they're not needed to end the encounter successfully. The goal is for most encounters to -just- use up your Encounter Powers, so that when you need to pull out a daily it's a pretty big swing.
And even if you use one of your dailies, that's 11 dailies left across the group for the rest of the day. Not -everyone- has to do it, after all.
I dunno. IMO, if the players start expecting the fights to be over quickly and they aren't because they lack resources then they will rest to get the resources so the fights match their expectations.
It's a definite possibility. But at least we'll have pushed the 5MWD into a 15MWD if everyone's just burning through their daily slots really quickly and then diving into the sack.
I mean having the lower ceiling and floor variance helps, but having some variance is required IMO, and as long as that's the case then we aren't systemically solving for 5MWD, we are just designing the game so psycologically the player hopefully doesn't engage in that kind of loop anymore and it's not quite as bad on gameplay if they do, but there's no guarantees here.
The only guarantees are death and taxes. And I haven't died, yet, so I must be immortal.
And will, thus, pay taxes forever.
Given Paladin's predominate playstyles, I have no faith that people will generally not use their resources nearly as quickly as they can. Some will, but I cannot say that will be the general case.
It's definitely a possibility, yes!
But if someone drops a level 5 daily and kills the level 1 goblin the rest of the party doesn't have a chance to drop theirs, so the group at least has dailies, left!
That helps, but that covers 3 encounters, which ideally would be about the top end for an adventuring day in my book.
Really? I was looking at 6-7. How big are your dungeons? 'Cause we've seen how big the dragons are!
Sure. I like the more options than slots. Though that can always lead a bit to output creep. More often having the perfect tool for the job is an implicit output increase. We didn't take this into account, but it's basically caster optimization 101.
It is an thing, yup. Which is why we have the throughput guidelines above!
