D&D 5E 5e fireballs

[Aenghus]

Wizards have been vulnerable in every edition of D&D. Once their defences go down, they are easy to kill.

Every group settles on a particular style of play. Every DM will have a default targetting style (or range of styles) for their monsters. Every player in the group will inevitably take this into account in their own evolving play style.

My default targetting is based on perceived threat and vulnerability, as well as overall fun. Even if it is logical for lots of monsters to target a particular PC, if it happens too much the PC is likely to be unconscious or dead a lot of the time, which isn't fun for the targetted player and likely the group involved.

In 4e wizards IMO tend to be both less threatening and less vulnerable than they used to be, which makes them much less inviting targets than they used to be.

In 3e and before wizards were so vulnerable their survival rates varied amazingly from group to group, based on targetting, availlabilty of defensive magic and play style.

In 4e overly exposed strikers are the best targets, as dropping them removes a lot of party firepower and they are inefficient to heal. Leaders are a priority as well, as it's difficult to down any PC while they are still active and healing people.


It's always been the case that if a single PC is targetted by all the monsters they will be eventually killed.

 

[Nebulous]

I will say I do miss one facet of AD&D spells that has been gradually reduced with every new edition -- inventive uses for spells. I fondly remember stories of people using spells in unique ways that were locked down tightly later. There's a reason summoned monsters can only be pulled in on flat stable surfaces; that create water can't be summoned into a creature's lungs; that the light spell has no offensive component whatsoever; that lightning bolts don't bounce and fireballs don't fill their full volume; and that spells that make walls aren't as shapeable as they used to be.

I used to say that one good exercise in AD&D was to look at each spell, and think of three ways you can use it that aren't in the spell description. As D&D has progressed, there's exactly ONE way to use most spells, clearly defined, with no wiggle room on effects. While I understand the reasoning (because players are all deviant whackjobs who shouldn't be out of an asylum ) I do miss that trait in D&D players nowadays.

Yeah, i don't know if the 5e designers are going to go retro enough to bring that wiggle room back. I doubt it, but it WOULD be cool if they could build in a few examples of alternative ways spells could be used.

 

[Fanaelialae]

No, I'm just making more sense with my arguments than you are.

To the best of my knowledge, you're the only one holding that opinion.

Sure, the players can change their powers. Course, that doesn't help at the point in time where the squishies are actually getting attacked. It only helps if the PC squishies survive the attacks in order to go off and change their abilities.

The players don't change their powers in response to the encounter. They create their characters in response to the DM. If this is the type of campaign the DM chooses to run, then that's how you create your characters to compensate.

I mean, if the PCs are encountering something like this once per tier, who cares? If they encounter it several times an adventure, then they need to build with that expectation in mind. And that's true of any edition.

Most shielding swordmages decrease the damage, but they don't stop effects from affecting the squishies, nor are most shielding marks affecting more than one NPC at a time. So, have multiple NPCs attack the high AC swordmage at full damage and low chance to hit and put on an effect, or attack the low AC squishy, potentially do less damage to one of them, but increase the chance of doing damage and adding an effect with more of the NPC attacks.

No brainer really.

Most brawling Fighters can only grab one foe at at time, at least at low level. I'm not seeing where your examples here are proving your point. Switching Defender type doesn't really improve your argument much.

Bottom line, Defenders are only truly sticky if the DM allows them to be. Otherwise, they just get some minor benefit or damage, and NPCs are pretty much free to attack whomever they want and increase the NPC overall damage and chance to apply effects.

Sorry, but you are just plain mistaken on this point. Defenders are not very sticky and can rarely force NPCs to attack them.

I've played defenders. You can make it very hard for anyone to escape you. You just have to play smart and pick powers to make you sticky.

I'm a Swordmage player (it's my friend who prefers Fighters, though fwiw I'd say he's better at defending than I am). Just for example (since one of your complaints was that CAGI is 7th level), here are the 1st level powers I prefer:

Aegis of Shielding: So what if it allows conditions through? It still takes a large chunk out of that enemy's damage, and gives them a -2 penalty to hit. If they charge to lessen the penalty, they typically can't use their encounter power attacks (because those usually aren't basic). After Aegis penalties are factored in, I wouldn't be surprised if the Wizard can survive longer than the Swordmage can. Seriously, do you expect it to julian fries too? It's one tool in a larger arsenal.

1st level at wills: Booming Blade is an at will that can make it a bad choice for enemies to shift and charge (automatic damage if they move away from you). Luring Strike can allow you to pin an enemy against a wall if you position yourself intelligently, preventing them from leaving you without an OA.

1st level encounter: Foesnare immobilizes a target, negating their option to walk away completely.

1st level daily: Dance of the Sword is a close burst 2 that prevents targets from making OAs or shifting, making it so that they can't shift and charge, and even if they walk away from you, you're teammate can just walk away from them.

And it's not just up to me to keep enemies on me. The wizard can use Grasping Shadows (Burst 1 that creates a slowing zone) or Phantom Chasm (immobilizes and knocks targets prone) to keep targets closer to the Swordmage and further from the Wizard. That's the point of playing a controller. Action denial. Deny them the action to attack you, if your defender fails to do so. If they've slowed and you're standing 6 squares away, I'm pretty sure the creatures will attack the defender rather than just wasting a round moving closer to you.

Strikers and Leaders also have potential options along these lines. Even when they aren't, Strikers kill things so that they can no longer be a threat, and Leaders have good mitigation, making it effectively so that enemy attacks never happened.

Yes, all of these things can (and often are) done. They don't change the fact that the Wizard is pretty much a lame class with limited versatility and power in 4E.



We weren't talking about that. We were merely talking about playing intelligent monsters intelligently. If a DM gets into the arms race, he can easily wipe out any party. I'm just talking about a DM taking an encounter and playing the NPCs smart enough to challenge his PCs. It's not that hard to do.



Agreed on the second count, but the first one is dependent on how tactically capable the DM is in both creating encounters and running them. The DM has typically seen all of the PC powers, tricks, and tactics, but every encounter should have something a little bit new or unique that the players haven't yet seen. Advantage DM, at least for tactically capable DMs.



Actually, the main problem I have with Wizards is the feat tax. The difference between AC 14 and AC 20 of a Paladin at level one is huge. In earlier editions, Wizards had many other ways (e.g. a small percentage of their spells, scrolls, and more permanent magic items) to handle this issue. 3E Wizards didn't have to use a feat, just to not be wiped out in two rounds except at the very lowest of levels.

Every character type has a weakness in 4e. Fighters tend to be poor against either Reflex or Willpower. So on and so forth. So what if the wizard has a weakness too? Is it that some people are too used to layering on spell after spell until they had no weaknesses left? 4e doesn't let anyone do that. The wizard isn't being singled out.

http://www.enworld.org/forum/living...er-most-foul-part-2-judge-evolutionkb-16.html

That was easy. And this was before the damage increase by WotC in the January 2011 errata.

Encounter 3: 1150 XP

400 1 Genasi Stormmaster (level 9)
400 2 Eladrin Arcane Archers (level 5)
350 Hazard, Extremely Long Dark Room (level 5)

5 Level 6 PCs. N+0 is 1250 XP.

Two PCs are over 75% damaged in round 2.

http://www.enworld.org/forum/5370764-post267.html

Three PCs are bloodied, one at 1 hit point and prone in round 3.

http://www.enworld.org/forum/5375381-post279.html

One PC unconscious, one bloodied in round 6.

http://www.enworld.org/forum/5389889-post322.html

A different PC unconscious in round 12.

http://www.enworld.org/forum/5423179-post371.html


Granted, the players didn't realize that a simple sunrod would have negated a lot of this grief until much later in the encounter, but players sometimes make mistakes. This wasn't even an n+0 encounter, it was before the increased damage system, there were only 3 actual foes against the PCs (2 of them lower level), the PCs are tricked out quite a bit (you see this a lot in Living Eberron, especially since the players pick most of the PC magic items and have access to nearly all feats and powers), and two PCs still went unconscious.

Course, your definition of a typical encounter might be different than mine. For me, a typical encounter at my table is an encounter with cool unusual elements to challenge players, not one that they've seen a bunch of times. In your parlance, that's boring.

Look man, I'm not going to dig through all those posts to figure out the specifics, but from what I could gather this is an atypical fight if I ever saw one. This sort of thing is exactly why I specified a typical fight. It's not that there's anything wrong with the challenge that an atypical fight provides, except that those types of fights don't often accurately correspond to their supposed difficulty level.

(This reminds me a bit of the time I was trying to explain to an old DM that the wealth guidelines in 3e were what the system assumed. His response was to create a pair of goblin rogues with our level in wealth of consumable potions. Hence, when we came upon the tree where they were hiding, they were invisible and buffed out the wazoo. They then proceeded to one shot a party member each, and took the rest of us down without much trouble. He then tried to use that to explain to me that the wealth guidelines were completely broken, and became quite irate when I explained to him that WpL was not intended to be used that way. A +1 sword is not the same as half a dozen potions.)

It consists (as far as I can tell) of 1 high level controller, 2 artillery, and a long dark corridor. That's pretty nonstandard when compared to a straight up fight (which the majority of combats fall into).

Firstly, ranged enemies are the hardest for a defender to manage, because they can't reach them. Secondly, it sounds like the party was suffering significant impairment from darkness penalties, yet it took them a long time to think to bring out a light source. Mistakes are one thing but come on! Even on a slow day my group would have had a light source out by round two.

Also, what the heck caused the fight to continue for 12 rounds when the monsters were outnumbered 2 to 1!? As I said, I didn't read through the whole thing, but that alone is a pretty big "something is amiss" flag for me.

 

[Jack99]

I am starting to think that I am a GM who pulls my punches, or who is not tactically capable. Or perhaps my players are very competent (I know from their dice rolls that they're not especially lucky!) But I run plenty of level + 3 encounters (using MM3 damage numbers) - typically in waves, though, or some other dynamic set up - and rarely come close to TPKing.

I get the feeling that there may be a lot of diversity in 4e play.

Obviously there are a great many variables. As KD also mentioned, AP's and Dailies can somewhat affect things a lot. With that said, waves does a lot to bring down the difficulty of a combat, since you spread out the damage the players take, over more rounds.

Also, how much you focus fire matters a lot

TBH I wouldn't think in terms of tactically capable or pulling punches. Instead think of it as adapting to whatever suits you and your group. I am a rat bastard DM that kills my players and take pleasure in it, because that's how they like to play DND.

 

[KarinsDad]

To the best of my knowledge, you're the only one holding that opinion.

Well, UngeheuerLich gave me XP for it, so maybe not the only one.

I've played defenders. You can make it very hard for anyone to escape you. You just have to play smart and pick powers to make you sticky.

Yeah, been there, done that as both a DM and a player. There are scenarios where Defenders are stickier, but it's usually closer to sticky notes than concrete.

I'm a Swordmage player (it's my friend who prefers Fighters, though fwiw I'd say he's better at defending than I am). Just for example (since one of your complaints was that CAGI is 7th level), here are the 1st level powers I prefer:

Aegis of Shielding
Booming Blade
Luring Strike
Foesnare
Dance of the Sword

Aegis of Shielding does nothing to stop an NPC from attacking someone else. It lowers the damage and gives a -2 to hit. And, it's usually one foe. Sorry, but that is not stickiness. That's debuffing and even the -2 doesn't do much compared to a lower AC PC that can be attacked.

Booming Blade does nothing if it misses. It does extra damage if it hits. At higher levels, that damage is relatively minor (4 to maybe 8 damage) when compared to what can be done by the monsters to other PCs. And, it's one foe. This is not even in the sticky category.

Luring Strike does nothing for stickiness unless you hit and unless you move the foe up against a wall or maybe against difficult terrain. So, maybe a 50% chance to be close enough to a wall in a smaller room and a 60% chance to hit your foe. So maybe one round in three against one foe in a small room or one round in ten against a foe in a larger room, this stickier solution might work. Might. This doesn't sound very sticky if it rarely works and is only against one foe.

The At Will powers you listed here do very little for stickiness. It's illusory.

Foesnare is the only one of the bunch that is reasonably sticky. Even it won't necessarily stop something like a Close Blast (or a Ranged attack, but that provokes), but it does reasonably well for melee attacks.

Dance of the Sword is semi-ok with regard to stickiness for any foes standing next to the Swordmage, but it too doesn't actually stop the foe from moving, just OAs and shifting. So NPCs further away in the burst aren't necessarily hindered in any way.

Except for Foesnare, none of these attacks actually stop a foe from moving away from the Swordmage and attacking someone else. Soft stickiness, not hard stickiness. Some of them will result in an OA if the Swordmage uses them, again, assuming that a different NPC doesn't move the Swordmage first. The game is not played in a bubble. Most of this is not forcing in any way. The DM can have the NPCs do whatever he wants for the most part. That's the part of this equation that you appear to be missing. Defenders penalize foes for attacking someone else, they typically do not prevent it.

Every character type has a weakness in 4e. Fighters tend to be poor against either Reflex or Willpower. So on and so forth. So what if the wizard has a weakness too? Is it that some people are too used to layering on spell after spell until they had no weaknesses left? 4e doesn't let anyone do that. The wizard isn't being singled out.

One has to look at the odds of each of these being used. Let's assume AC is attacked half of the time and the other 3 are each attacked 1 time in 6.

Yes, Fighters can be poor against Reflex or Will. But, they have AC (50% of most attacks) and Fort (16%) locked up. Typically, they have either Reflex or Will covered, so they only have a defense weakness against about 16% of all attacks.

Wizards typically have 2 of the 4 covered (Reflex and something else) and the often used AC isn't usually one of them (shy of feat/power tax). So instead of being low defense for 16% of attacks, he's low defense on 66% of attacks. Plus he has fewer hit points. Lose lose. His non-Daily powers (the vast majority of his attacks) really don't make up for this because they are not that much more potent than attacks from other PCs.

Seriously, have you actually played a Wizard against a DM who doesn't hold the player's hands and has intelligent foes go for the jugular, and a DM who creates unique unexpected or rarely seen challenges?

Look man, I'm not going to dig through all those posts to figure out the specifics, but from what I could gather this is an atypical fight if I ever saw one. This sort of thing is exactly why I specified a typical fight. It's not that there's anything wrong with the challenge that an atypical fight provides, except that those types of fights don't often accurately correspond to their supposed difficulty level.

Like I said, in my games, having unusual terrain features is pretty typical. In this case, the size of the room was part of the XP handed out, the foes themselves were pretty wimpy but used terrain INTELLIGENTLY (the thing we have been talking about the entire time, intelligent foes). This particular map came from one of the WotC modules. So if you consider small 6x6 rooms where the Swordmage can sometimes push a foe up against the wall as typical and the monsters in the next room over don't come and investigate when a fight is going on, whatever. To me, there is no such thing as typical or atypical. PCs have to be able to adapt to all situations.

You cannot have it both ways. If the PCs are in a large room, the Defender will require time to get to each foe and the foes can spread out. Sure, the Wizard can be at the far side of the room, but the attackers can mostly ignore the Defender and use ranged or melee attacks against whomever they want.

If the PCs are in a small room, then the Wizard doesn't have room to get away. Sure, the Defender might be able to more easily partially lock down one or two foes, but the squishier PCs have nowhere to go to avoid bursts and blasts and if foes get in their faces, they'll have a harder time running away. If they run out of the room the way they came in, nothing usually stops a monster or two from chasing after them.

I also note your comment on Wizards just running away a bit as a viable Wizard solution to attacks. That can make it tough for the Leader to come heal the Wizard if the Wizard is far away when he gets knocked unconscious. These types of generic tactics like running away usually don't work well for one reason or another in many encounters against intelligent foes. For example, Wizard runs out of a room, monster closes door to the room, the Wizard is cut off from the fight. Seriously, do you consider running away a GOOD defensive tactic for the party as a whole?

One other note. Most monsters have really good initiative modifiers (a Wizard, not so much, even with Improved Initiative unless he is a Dex Wizard which makes his other defenses weaker). Unless the PCs have ways to boost their initiatives, on average, monsters tend to often go early. Intelligent monsters should use this to put PCs at a tactical disadvantage, right from the start.

 

[pemerton]

waves does a lot to bring down the difficulty of a combat, since you spread out the damage the players take, over more rounds.

Also, how much you focus fire matters a lot

Yes - waves obviously dilutes focus fire.

I'm a moderate focus-firer. I like to focus on the party sorcerer, because the player is the most tactically minded (so best suited for the challenge) and the PC is the most dangerous in terms of output (he's the closest we have to a maximised build).

But with brutes, soldiers and melee controllers it can often turn into a collection of mini-battles, superhero comic style.

I wouldn't think in terms of tactically capable or pulling punches. Instead think of it as adapting to whatever suits you and your group.

My group is fairly tactically savvy - quite a few experienced wargamers, and although the championship M:TG players are no longer in the group, having moved to England, their impact on group playstyle remains.

But they're not always tactical in their play, because they will happily let passions, or their conception of the story situation, lead them away from what might be tactically optimal. I've personally found the 4e mechanics to be very robust in support of this (ie you don't get hosed for playing your PC). But I play my monsters in a similar way, and am not as tacticall savvy as my best players (and my sorcerer player will always beat me at bridge, M:TG, boardgames etc).

So I think we have a settled set of table norms which suit our group well - like you said!

 

[pemerton]

Even on a slow day my group would have had a light source out by round two.

Especially if there is a wizard PC!

 

[Dausuul]

Something that most DMs forget is that it's only the first NPC that might take damage when going off to attack other PCs. He shifts away, gets hit or not, and charges another lesser armored PC.

The rest of the marked NPCs can then shift away on their turns and charge different PCs, typically without retaliation from the Fighter.

Depends on the fighter. What you say is true of a weaponmaster, but a knight puts every creature adjacent to her on permanent lockdown.

 

[Cybit]

As someone who has DM'd 4th 2x a week (at least) for four years...

If I'm chasing down the wizard, any remotely tactical group of players is going to eat me alive with Opportunity attacks and combat advantage based attacks. Slowing, dazing, knocking enemies prone, immobilizing, on top of a most likely teleporting wizard...they are hard to get.

This is one of those things that, while on paper, seems like it wouldn't be bad, doesn't ever actually work in practice. Too many varying abilities from everyone in the party to try to hunt one person down.

 

[KarinsDad]

As someone who has DM'd 4th 2x a week (at least) for four years...

If I'm chasing down the wizard, any remotely tactical group of players is going to eat me alive with Opportunity attacks and combat advantage based attacks. Slowing, dazing, knocking enemies prone, immobilizing, on top of a most likely teleporting wizard...they are hard to get.

This is one of those things that, while on paper, seems like it wouldn't be bad, doesn't ever actually work in practice. Too many varying abilities from everyone in the party to try to hunt one person down.

Come play in my game.

Your experience will change.

Bwa ha ha ....

Err, yes.


Actually, I do agree with you as the players start getting higher in level. There seems to be a break even point where any tactics that "normal encounter" monsters do, the PCs have a counter for it (as an example, minons become a total joke at some point in time for most PC groups). For most standard monsters, this break even point is usually somewhere around early Paragon once PCs start getting their Paragon level special abilities. At Heroic, however, it's pretty much a piece of cake for a DM to target whomever he wants as often as he wants.

PCs have approximately 20 to 30 hits points at level 1. Foes do 9 points of damage. So, 2+ to 3+ successful hits to knock someone out (not taking into account healing, etc.). At level 30, it's 140 to 250 hit points. Same level foes do 38 damage (maybe a bit more since everyone is an Elite or Solo and WotC doesn't follow its own monster guideline rules). So, 4 to 6.5 successful hits. Granted, higher level monsters have a ton of abilities to boost this, but even so, the PCs have so many abilities by level 30 (like coming back from unconsciousness on their own) that the monsters just don't have enough time, even in a single round with multiple monsters, to really take out a PC quickly anymore.


Granted, the difficulty of the encounter and the synergy of the monsters makes a huge difference as well and I think this is where many DMs don't realize just how much encounter difficulty power (with the same amount of XP) DMs really have in their toolkit. I don't care what makeup of PCs is in a group, there are some DMs on this board (who have posted monster encounter design in the past and I'm looking at [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] as one of them) that will just shred PCs with certain monsters.

PCs have three edges in combat. Healing, a slightly better chance to hit (and throw effects on) monsters, and doing more damage (with striker and AoE powers) than monsters do on them. But, this advantage is not actually enough for a crafty DM. DMs who really know what they are doing, even with an N encounter, can put PCs at a serious disadvantage. This is done by monster selection (good arrangement and synergy of monster abilities), selective terrain (and starting location for monsters, including traps or hazards), and one thing that the vast majority of DMs rarely if ever do (at least IME), functional and class templates for monsters (and even picking lower or higher level monsters and adjusting their level, attacks and hit points accordingly, just to get certain effects into play in the encounter). Many DMs just use monsters straight out of the game system and rarely modify them. Nasty DMs do more. They modify the monsters (according to the XP rules and template rules) to throw surprises at their players.

But, this takes time to design and put together these types of challenging encounters.

So yes, for many DMs in many encounters, pulling monsters out of the sack is sufficient (myself included, I'm pretty lazy on this most of the time). Although the players fine tune their PCs to the nth degree, the DM does not do the same for his disposable monsters (not even just designing monsters, but designing monsters as a well rounded NPC party for an encounter). It's too much effort. They're disposable.

Rat bastard DMs do sometimes (or even often) fine tune both the encounters, and the monster groups and I opine that most players and DMs have very little actual clue as to how nasty encounters can really get for a DM who sits down and actually designs his encounters to significantly challenge his players. This is why I am somewhat unimpressed with Lair Assault so far. For the most part, the monsters are straight out of the book and that means that PCs can handle them. Not enough thought is put into nasty encounter design for LA.


I think my experience with 4E is pretty much the same as everyone else's. A well designed PC party can pretty much handle everything thrown at it as long as the DM just grabs Dungeon adventures or just grabs semi-random monsters out of the Compendium. And, these gets easier for the players as the levels get higher. But, I've seen some pretty nasty encounters because the monsters do a lot more than just damage and inconvenience the PCs: separating the party, blinding/stunning/weakening them, trapping them, buffing monsters, debuffing PCs, changing PC action economy (Beholders are good at this) and a whole lot more. Even something as simple as flight can create serious problems for melee PCs, and total concealment can make most well designed spellcasters have to come in closer in order to use area or close attacks. Have phasing undead range attack, then walk through a wall in a maze-like area. The undead can move through the terrain at ease, the PCs cannot.

Combat is only easy for the players and monsters are only really locked down every encounter if the DM is not due diligent. IME. Granted, these types of tougher well designed challenges (even at lower N or N+1 level) should not occur every encounter, but it's not hard to seriously hinder the PCs at any level just by using the proper tools in the DM's toolkit.