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Message: <blockquote data-quote="eamon" data-source="post: 4801966" data-attributes="member: 51942">I don't have a problem with a wide divergence of defenses, in particular if they represent rarely-targeted NAD defenses.  A weakness in a defense isn't necessarily unplayable, and might be a valid trade-off for a character.  The difference between 40% and 95% is large, but it's not even a factor three - so it's definitely compensateable (the other way around doesn't work - the difference between a 5% and a 50% hit rate is very high - bringing several defenses to the 5% hit rate level would be game-breaking).I do have a problem with lack of scaling.  Eventually NADs simply turn into a very like to sure hit.  At this point, the NADs almost might as well not exist - the balance difference between 65% hit rate and 95% is perilously small, in particular if that's you're best NAD and smart opponents might pick and choose such that they attack those players with those attacks guaranteeing 95% hit rate on almost all NAD-targetting attack's (after all, it's the attacker's choice).The guaranteed effectiveness of any NAD attack makes the game boring.  Similarly, feat-tax's make the game boring.  That's what I'm opposed to - undifferentiated characters that include various statistics that the player might as well never bother looking at since he can't do much about it anyhow.The scaling should be fixed, but the differentiation per se is OK.  4e in any case has rather little differentiation, which is probably part of the reason that "grinds" are a risk.  But this differentiation shouldn't be in player defenses - that turns the game into russian roulette: You can't much do much about having a weak spot, and it's large enough that no amount of preparation can protect you should the next monster happen to target your weak spot.  In the extreme case, the first random encounter that involves your bad NADs and a few monsters with status effects, and you all die - better hope the DM chooses a different monster... That's not fun; that's why 4e should have a decent NAD baseline and probably leave good situational defensive boosts in the hands of the player's - a far cry from the current state of affairs.</blockquote>

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