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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KarinsDad" data-source="post: 5096345" data-attributes="member: 2011">80% or more of the D&D rules revolve around combat. For many groups, it's a large percentage of their gaming time. Because of this, players will get turned off if their PC sucks (e.g. I have a player of a 14th level 21 Str/22 Wis Cleric who I am trying to convince to take fewer healing feats/powers and a few more melee feats/powers because I see that she gets slightly frustrated when other players hit more often and for a lot more damage when she does have the PC go into melee).It's cool (but anecdotal) that your player is having fun without being overly optimized, but the entire game system balance has to work for all groups, not just yours.The problem with the Expertise feat is that it takes that balance out of the hands of the core game mechanics and puts it into the hands of individual players and DMs. What this means is that when the DM balances an encounter with a few overly optimized Expertise PCs in the same group with some low optimized without Expertise PCs, the to hit delta can be 3+ different in mid-Paragon and 5+ different in mid-Epic. On a D20, that's huge because the math does not come from the core mechanics, it comes from feat/ability selection.I see it already at 14th level in my game. The Fighter (optimized for to hit) is +22 to hit, +24 with her best to hit power, and the Cleric is +18 to hit versus AC. That to hit delta of 4 or 6 is already large enough to frustrate the player of the Cleric, especially if I ever throw an encounter in with foes with high AC to challenge the Fighter.It would be worse if we played in a game where the feat was not handed out for free and the Fighter took it but the Cleric never did (the Ranger in the group is +19 so he is in a similar situation and the Swordmage is +21).Plus, although the Cleric is a Shifter Cleric with both good Str and good Wis, it would be 2 feats instead of 1 for her to even attempt to stay at the 4/6 delta with the Fighter. She might as well blow off Str at that point and never take melee powers cause it basically sucks to just hit one time in three.If you are good at looking at monster capabilities, total monster hit points, and understand approximately how much dpr your PCs dish out, you should be fine without Expertise. Don't just take the DMG encounter balance equations verbatim though. There are a lot of auras and conditions and synergies that monsters get and if the PCs do not have Expertise, they will need to use up more resources to accomplish similar goals as they had at lower levels.The removal of Expertise means that encounters will drag out on average for about an extra round or so, which in turn means more resources used. If your group never goes into "dungeon setting" mode of 5 to 7 encounters per day and you are good at balancing encounters, that's probably not an issue.For example, a simple solution to the math issue (if you believe one exists) is to just throw lower level encounters at your group. Instead of an N, N+1, and N+2 encounter at Paragon (or whatever difficulty is comfortable for the makeup of your group), you can easily throw an N, an N, and an N+1 and Expertise is not an issue.</blockquote>

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