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Message: <blockquote data-quote="karaethon" data-source="post: 4365698" data-attributes="member: 72013">My 4e campaign recently started and I'm not sure if this is mainly the DM's fault or of it's more of a problem with the 4e combat system in general. My party is level 2 and contains a cleric, fighter, paladin, rogue, warlock, and wizard, and our DM matched us up against the low-level black dragon solo monster in the monster manual (I don't have it on hand, but I think he's a 4th level solo and counts as an ECL3). The DMG classifies ECL3 to be "standard" difficulty, but it was incredibly frustrating to be fighting the dragon.The dragon had something like 22AC, 20 Ref, 17 will, 16 fort and it was simply too difficult to consistently hit the dragon. The highest +hit that our party had was the rogue with a +11 to hit (4dex, 3 prof, 1 enh, 2 combat advantage, 1 nimble blade) and he was targeting reflex, so he had to roll a 9 or higher to get a hit. In comparison, the paladin and fighter had something like +8 or +9 to hit and they kept missing because they had to target AC, so they would have to roll a 14 or 15 to hit. The wizard and warlock had about +5 to hit (+4 from stat and +1 from implement), so they also had to roll greater than 10 to hit. The cleric was just completely screwed in every way possible because trying to hit AC or reflex had pretty much no way of working except on rolls of 15 or greater.I guess the frustration that the group has stems from the fact that since we need to be rolling 10+ every time to hit, when someone rolls low 2-3 turns in a row, they feel absolutely useless.  3.xe seemed to counteract this by the fact that misses to DC still do half damage and BAB was designed to give you a hit on your highest roll and you would get multiple attacks.My questions are:- Is the combat system really designed to be like this where you have a 50% chance to miss every time or is our DM just not designing the encounters well?- Are other people frustated by "blowing" the daily and either missing with no effect or missing for the half effect consistently?- Is there something that we're missing as players that would make the combat easier?We were able to beat the encounter, but that's largely due to the fact that the wizard was able to cast sleep and the dragon luckily missed his save to fall asleep. Without that, we would have been annihilated by the dragon.Thanks</blockquote>

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