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A simple and perhaps inadequate definition: Offense decreases the average number of rounds that a monster lives. Defense decreases what the monster does to the party in these rounds, either by preventing effects from occurring or removing the effects later. Many powers qualify as both offense...

I said that defensive abilities often aren't that good and gave the example of the Great Fortitude feats: http://www.enworld.org/forum/d-d-4th-edition-rules/267220-invincible-pcs-2.html#post4982412. Clearly I'm not going to make a character with Great Fortitude, Lightning Reflexes, and Iron...

You forgot "increase PC to-hit" (relative to the baseline without the Expertise feats). Under this framework, that's leading to less swingy fights.

This isn't true either. There's no "general superiority of offense over defense." If you want use a different metric, like "chance to win a 1-1 fight", the calculations just become more difficult. That's why I don't do it. It's still easy to think of situations where bonuses to defensive...

There was a good discussion of having three discretional stat raises in this thread: http://www.enworld.org/forum/4e-fan-creations-house-rules/253894-alternatives-feat-tax-solution-hit-f-r-w-defenses.html. Compared to the default, besides the increase in weak FRW defenses, raising all six...

This isn't true. Suppose that you're trying to minimize the average damage you'll take from a monster before killing it (and we assume you'll always kill it before it kills you!), and it gets to go first (for simplicity). The average damage you take equals the average number of rounds it takes...

The premise of nothing but damage is fine. It's the implicit assumption "when you raise your high FRW defense you can ignore attacks on your low defense" that's flawed. If a defense is very low relative to the attacker's attack bonus, a plus to that defense won't give you the same benefit. For...

This isn't true. If a defense is very low relative to the attacker's attack bonus, a plus to that defense won't give you the same benefit. For many characters/opponents, you won't get the full benefit of a FRW-boosting feat because the monster would have hit you on a 1 if not for the auto-miss...

There are certainly people who have been less lucky in the past. Looking backwards, people probably haven't been any unluckier on their die rolls than random chance would suggest. Looking forward, essentially the only way to be "unlucky" is to use a die that isn't fair in a way that hurts the...

This anecdote does not support your conclusion. +1 to hit adds 5 percentage points to your chance of hitting going forward (I'm assuming you don't already have to roll a 20 to hit, and don't already hit on a 2+). Your experience in play with "how much people miss by" makes no difference. This...

Right. Even at level 1, a typical character (when I looked at the WotC pre-gens) has AC about 3.5 higher than average FRW. Then FRW scale significantly worse than AC over time with the base level/attribute/enhancement bonuses.

Having a rules discussions with GMforPowergamers isn't likely to be productive. Here's a post of his from the WotC boards a few months ago, earlier in the exact day of the big Battlerager Vigor update. Bad timing, I guess. As you can see, this incident hasn't changed much. I say this not...

Using MW armor is necessary for the game's math to scale correctly, and you'll want to use the AV heavy armors with minimum +2, +4, and +5 bonuses to ensure it adjusts appropriately along the way.

Given that Masterwork Heavy Armors needing immediate fixing in Adventurer's Vault, WotC clearly wasn't paying much attention to the math. There are a ton of obvious "math fixes" in AV and ph-II in the form of Expertise, Epic Fort/Ref/Will, Robust Defenses, and additional Masterwork Heavy...

There are a lot of potential house rules to fix the game's math problems without the Expertise feats (among others). See this thread for a discussion of many of them: http://www.enworld.org/forum/4e-fan-creations-house-rules/253894-alternatives-feat-tax-solution-hit-f-r-w-defenses.html The...

To give my summary:

Indeed, this is basically the simplest fix (plus ban Expertise feats, Robust Defenses, and the Epic FRW line of feats- maybe paragon defenses becomes an epic feat as well). While I see the necessity for Masterwork Heavy Armors, Masterwork Light Armors seems like an unnecessary kludge. One...

Nice work. Storm Gorgons are a specific example of the general phenomenon that creatures with Auras would often be (much) too strong if their Auras stacked. This is a problem, because it means that a single creature with an Aura is stronger than it should be, even if an encounter with five of...

You can get the average (counting anything below 0 as zero) from a table like that with just addition (and knowing a neat formula that applies in this case). The average is the sum of (the chance the roll is >=1) + (the chance the roll is >=2), and so on. In the 2d6-7 example, it's the last 5...

To quote myself from an earlier thread: