At-Will damage scaling too slow?

[babinro]

I've recently started DMing paragon tier with my party and it seems that when a battle lasts long enough to resort to at wills...that the combat really starts to drag. While there are things I can do to help with this (monster fleeing, adjusting HP of monsters in favor of damage...etc)

I was thinking about just having at-wills scale to 2(W) at Paragon, then 3(W) at Epic. This saves me the work of modding all the monsters and ideally gives the players the feeling that their at-wills aren't falling behind.

What I want to avoid is at-wills becoming better than encounter/daily's as a result. I don't see why it wouldn't work, but I'm sure the designers did the increase at level 21 for a good reason.... any thoughts? Foreseeable problems before I actually implement such a change?

 

[DracoSuave]

Believe it or not, part of the problem is character design. I'm not saying that you need to build uber characters in order to succeed, but I mean that you'll have 'damage dealers' do nothing but pick the high damage encounter/daily powers, but not the ones that make the fight go faster, swing the battle, etc.

Thing is, 2[w]+attribute+enhancement+feat is usually in the ballpark of 2[W]+17 damage per hit. So a minimum of 19 damage, let's round that to 20. Now if you have a monster with 228 hit points, that thing'll go down in 11 hits without damage enhancements, or counting damage powers, etc...

...of course then you realise you're adding in the dice damage itself and it's not so bad at all. a 1d8 weapon will on average roll 26 damage, which makes that about 9 hits, which is easily attained so long as the dailies used make you hit more or lower the enemy's defenses, or what not.

Of course, critical hits happen fairly often, so one of those will be a huge swing, the fight won't last as long as you'd think.

But remember: Use powers to swing battles and make the fight go quicker, not to pile a small damage bonus on one guy.

 

[Cadfan]

Can you give us an idea of the at will damage expressions for your pcs? Because it may not be a problem with the game.

 

[keterys]

Personally I'd prefer to see powers (all of them, really) bumped up a little in a lot of cases, but... yeah, what damage numbers are you seeing?

In one level 12 party, the low damage guy does 1d8+9 with his at-wills and we've been working on him to step up, and the high damage person does about 1d4+3d8+16...

In another party I'm in, the low damage is 1d10+14 (and an ally gets +6 to hit!) and high damage is either 5d6+26 or alternating 3d6+21/4d6+42 hits.

Needless to say, that's a whole different standard of damage between those games.

 

[babinro]

Level 12 Characters:
Miracle Worker Cleric does 1d8+7 damage with Lance of Faith, 1d6+7 Sacred Flame

Sky Hunter Druid: 1d8+8 with savage rend, 1d8+8 storm spike

Sorc: 1d10+14 Chaos Bolt, 1d8+16 storm walk

Feylock: 1d6+10 eyebite, 1d10+10 eldritch blast

Paladin (dragonborn paragon path): 1d10+9 bolstering/virtuous strike

Rogue Daggermaster: 1d6+13 sly flourish, 1d6+9 deft strike.


Admittedly, the three strikers can deal out good damage regardless of power when they meet their qualifiers...still, the combat can tend to drag on as enemies get more and more hp. I should note, my party puts a great deal of emphasis on powers that debilitate creatures as opposed to just going damage. I should also note that my players don't really go for equipment that adds bonus damage, they prefer effects to protect themselves or otherwise have fun. As such, nearly all these damage values are strictly from weapon bonus+ enhancement bonus + maybe 1 feat or one magical item.

 

[Markn]

I concur with the other posters. It's definately possible to produce a lot of damage with at-wills. I have a dwarf battlerager/pit fighter and he deals close to 30 points on an average roll. Hell, the wizard in my group can deal close to 20 on average and thats using an AoE spell.

I'd say one of three things is likely without knowing your numbers or game. First, a bit more planning may be necessary with characters. We've found that its worth planning a character for the tier your are playing on. You may makes some changes but at least getting the idea into your head the direction you want to go will make you more effective. Once you reach the next tier, plan that tier out. Second, it might be your encounters are too long or have too many creatures. Large numbers of creatures cause players to use more powers than usual. I've found its best to be close to a 1 enemy for 1 PC ratio (excluding minions of course). Third, maybe the players need to adjust tactics to take enemies down quicker preventing them from resorting to at-will as often. Gang up on enemies, work in tandem, that sort of thing.

Point is, players CAN significantly bump up at will damages with the right planning.

If all else fails, use your house rule but I don't think its necessary.

 

[Markn]

Admittedly, the three strikers can deal out good damage regardless of power when they meet their qualifiers...still, the combat can tend to drag on as enemies get more and more hp. I should note, my party puts a great deal of emphasis on powers that debilitate creatures as opposed to just going damage.

What you are experiencing is not necessarily weak at-wills, just monster HP scaling too much. Many people are house ruling monster hps so I would encourage looking at the house rule threads to see what they are doing. I use 20% less monster HP and + 1/2 monster level to damage and this works just fine.
To each their own though.

 

[keterys]

Level 12 Characters:
Miracle Worker Cleric does 1d8+7 damage with Lance of Faith, 1d6+7 Sacred Flame

Sky Hunter Druid: 1d8+8 with savage rend, 1d8+8 storm spike

Sorc: 1d10+14 Chaos Bolt, 1d8+16 storm walk

Feylock: 1d6+10 eyebite, 1d10+10 eldritch blast

Paladin (dragonborn paragon path): 1d10+9 bolstering/virtuous strike

Rogue Daggermaster: 1d6+13 sly flourish, 1d6+9 deft strike.


Admittedly, the three strikers can deal out good damage regardless of power when they meet their qualifiers...still, the combat can tend to drag on as enemies get more and more hp. I should note, my party puts a great deal of emphasis on powers that debilitate creatures as opposed to just going damage. I should also note that my players don't really go for equipment that adds bonus damage, they prefer effects to protect themselves or otherwise have fun. As such, nearly all these damage values are strictly from weapon bonus+ enhancement bonus + maybe 1 feat or one magical item.

Well, your players could really use learning that the absolute best condition is 'dead' and damage is the most surefire way of getting there... but barring that, I'd suggest cutting down monster hp by 1/3 and increasing monster damage by a similar amount (half level is probably close enough of a bonus for most purposes). You could also just give the PCs a bonus to damage, like half level. You could even make it not stack with bonuses to damage from items other than enhancement, to avoid any dual-wielded staff of ruin with embedded shards of the mage or reckless/bloodclaw silliness later on.

The problem with just increasing the dice is that you hedge out their encounter powers to a certain extent - of which they still have level 1 and 3 powers at that level - and don't get the combats to get done faster when they still have encounters and dailies. But you could do it.

I actually went three adventures without running out of encounter or daily powers on my warlord, though (who deals 1d10+22 damage with his at-will at level 12 fwiw) - it is _very_ possible to deal more damage and finish combats within the rules.

 

[Stalker0]

One design decision I disagree with in 4e is that a good bulk of your damage is dependent on encounter and daily powers. This means that your damage tends to drop as the fight goes on.

In 3rd edition, a fighter swing delivered constant pain throughout the fight. Even in the B09S delivered the notion that your damage goes from your basic attack, the powers are there to add conditions, and the occasional attack and damage boost.

 

[KarinsDad]

I concur with the other posters. It's definately possible to produce a lot of damage with at-wills. I have a dwarf battlerager/pit fighter and he deals close to 30 points on an average roll.

Could you post the specifics of this?