NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9099669" data-attributes="member: 6877472">When the guy with 8 Dexterity wearing full plate is attacked in melee, it's hard to say that an attack "missed" them.  They are most assuredly being hit, it's simply that the armor protected them.  "Damage on a miss" could be an armor-piercing attack; certainly there are things that one could imagine as being able to pierce armor.  That one would rather have such an attack modeled by either granting a high bonus to the attack roll or ignoring AC entirely as opposed to dealing a small amount of damage on a miss is ultimately the same thing-You're still looking at how many attacks it takes to kill someone.  Anything that increases the average damage you deal over time kills them faster, regardless of the mechanics used to get there.Consider that you have a 60% chance to hit an opponent.  Your attacks deal, on average, 8.5 damage.  You have an ability like the proposed Graze weapon mastery that lets you deal 4 damage that 40% of the time you would "miss".  This increases your average damage from (55% to deal 8.5 damage [4.675] and 5% chance to deal 13 damage [0.65 for a total of 5.325]) to 7.125.  You could get roughly the same benefit by increasing your chance to hit by 3-4 points.  Advantage, which the game hands out like candy, would provide an even larger boost.Bottom line, dead is dead, so if there's a mechanic that models killing a foe faster, does it really matter how it goes about doing it?I would say no, but obviously there are people who feel that there are certain assumptions in how the end goal should be achieved.  They would reject Graze out of hand, because they visualize combat is literally being hits and misses, but might not bat an eye at a magic sword that has an enchantment that causes it to fire a single magic missile at any foe it fails to connect with.</blockquote>

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