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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Saeviomagy" data-source="post: 4773056" data-attributes="member: 5890">But if the fighter has the extra points of AC because the cleric doesn't, then the fighter would have been hit more and the cleric less, which is an improvement.The 5000 to one example was merely to illustrate the concept, and even then you seem to have missed my point: the two guys with 5000 hp and 1 damage vs 5000 damage and 1 hp are more representing "someone big and tough and offensively weak" and "someone small and squishy and offensively strong". As you reduce the numbers and difference, the conclusion stays the same: kill the squishy dangerous guy first. Everything that a defender does should be aimed at making that a bad choice.Real numbers? By not using a shield, using dual strike as your at-will, choosing a PP, ED and multiclass that focus on damage, and boosting wisdom and strength (and a bunch of other things), you end up with an average damage per round of at least 150 points. Fighter A does around 30 points of damage in a round, while optimised-for-damage fighter B does 180. If you want breakdowns, just go visit the WoTC optimisation forum.On a more practical level, you can trade +2 ac and +2 reflex to boost your [w] from an average of 5.5 to 7 (or from 4.5 to 5.5, depending on what weapons you like). You can trade 4 hitpoints and 1 hit point per surge for +2 to hit with opportunity attacks. You can trade +1 ac for +1 damage (per tier).It seems bizarre to insist that there is no way to tell that fighter A is wielding a warhammer and a shield while fighter B is wielding the larger maul.I'll admit that there may be some game statistics that are not so easy to quantify, but it's not an across the board thing. And, of course, once the NPC has been hit, he can make a decent judgement.You can of course argue that a given NPC can't get an accurate reading from a single hit: but that's irrelevant. The responses of NPCs to being hit will average out over time (ie - if each NPC bases his behaviour off of the first time the fighter strikes him, then less NPCs will provoke subsequent attacks from the more powerful fighter on average)So it's never possible to guess at a foe's defenses from observable parameters?The fighter does... But as I pointed out, it doesn't matter: on average the fighter who hits harder will have foes less likely to provoke.Which doesn't matter: a monster who gets hit hard will be less likely to provoke in future.Do you, as a player, get hit by a foe for, say, 30% of your hitpoints and then go "oh well, I have insufficient data to decide that I shouldn't provoke an AoO". Or, for that matter, get hit for 3 points and hold off on provoking next round, just in case the monster rolls a d100 for damage?You don't say "oh well, this monster has only hit me very hard twice, but that's an insufficiently large sample to make any tactical decisions off of". You work with what you know so far.Criticals don't get announced in your games? At every table I've ever played at, in any system, criticals have always been out-of-the ordinary attack with extra visuals, and everyone involved knows that they've happened.</blockquote>

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