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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Carpe DM" data-source="post: 4373906" data-attributes="member: 677">After playing through and running a few games, I'm discovering that monsters still find it in their best interest to ignore the tanking paladin, and tear into the strikers.  In our game (which I am not DMing, for the first time in 25 years) the paladin does his best: piercing smites every encounter, etc, divine challenges galore.  And, the Chaladin damage on the challenge is not all that bad.  But it's still in the mob's best interest to drop the striker.  Given that 14 or 15 is standard AC for a first level squishy, the -2 AC isn't enough to deter the monster from wanting to shut down the low-HP, high-damage party members.What this does is force the paladin into a very crappy role: that of peeler.  He is throwing Enfeebling Strikes (often considered the worst at-will) in an attempt to decrease the damage output of the mob on the strikers.  And, of course, his damage is quite high given that his marked target is eating his challenge every round. But the monster's better damage output on the strikers, combined with the damage loss that the loss of a striker entails means that it is entirely rational from the monster's point of view that a wizard or warlock ends up tanking every single fight.  It's getting pretty old.Note: this is *not* a DM complaint.  The DM is quite right: monsters fight to win, and don't hammer uselessly on the shiny armor-plated guy.  This is, IMO, a design tweak problem.  The damage-incentive system is simply insufficient to incentivize monsters--even challenged monsters--to stay on the tank.We've tried to increase the damage, but since Astral Fire only adds to "damage rolls," and because there is no feat upgrade to Divine Challenge, there's not a whole lot to be done.   This leads to my current inquiry.  Enfeebling Strike is commonly considered the worst Paladin at-will.  It is a major downer for the paladin to continually use his worst power in a vain attempt to perform the role of tank (now starring the Wizard).  So, the current question: at what damage value, and at what estimated level of monster hitpoints would Holy Strike (or Valiant, if the Paladin is sufficiently surrounded) outperform Enfeebling Strike as a peel--that is, the extra damage would drop the monsters enough rounds early that it would be worth more defensively than the -10% damage of Enfeelbling.It's complicated, of course, because for minions, any attack will do, and Enfeebling is +Cha (so, for a protecting paladin, is better).  At the mid-range, though, either Valiant or Holy is likely to drop a standard creature some fraction of a round early.Of course, due to bloodied values, we get a good view of the hitpoints of a creature.  So I'm hoping that by discussing things here, we can work out a metric to tell the paladin -- "hey, it took 20 points to get the thing to bloodied.  Best switch to Valiant strike and try to drop it early."Math on this is particularly welcome.  Please, no discretionary gameplay-based remarks (OMGz ur DM shud onlee attak the tnak!).  I'm fully aware the DM could fix this if he decided the monsters were idiots.  I find that if the DM must compensate for poor rules by deciding to not use an ability (OMGz ur DM shud not attak pipl on the ground!) that that is merely apologetics for bad game design.best,Carpe</blockquote>

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