OperationMaximumBear
First Post
I was going to go with acid splash, but after some thought I decided daze was the better choice. I know, I know; let me explain:
With acid splash, Emily has a ranged touch attack at +2 dealing an average of 2 damage. That gives her a 50% or 60% chance to hit (or 30% to 40% if she's firing into melee), for expected damage of 1 or so. The crossbow is a bit better on average, but higher-variance. Both become much worse if Emily has to fire into melee.
With daze, Emily has a spell that forces a DC 15 Will save. Essentially, she trades her attack for a chance to cancel her opponent's attack. It only works once per foe. Consider a standard Orc: has a will save of -1, attacks at +5 for an average of 9 damage (well, slightly more because they crit a lot, but never mind). Here, daze gives Emily a 4-in-5 chance of preventing the Orc from having a 1-in-2ish chance of of inflicting 9 damage. Multiplying that through, we get an EV of 3.6 damage prevented.
Well, maybe that's an unfair example. Normal Orcs suck, after all. So I did the math again for an Orc shaman: better Will and worse attacks, so the EV comes out to about 1. I put it to you that even that is better than a 50% chance to deal 2 damage, especially if the party outnumbers its enemies (which is otherwise the worst case for daze).
In any case, the effective difference between the two is not very great; Emily will always prefer to summon 1 of her 8 monsters or throw one of her 3 grease spells. Her choice of last resort only matters if she has a monster out (in which case she's contributing anyway) or if she's completely tapped.
tl;dr daze is pretty terrible, but its potential replacements are not so great either, and anyway it only matters on the margin.
With acid splash, Emily has a ranged touch attack at +2 dealing an average of 2 damage. That gives her a 50% or 60% chance to hit (or 30% to 40% if she's firing into melee), for expected damage of 1 or so. The crossbow is a bit better on average, but higher-variance. Both become much worse if Emily has to fire into melee.
With daze, Emily has a spell that forces a DC 15 Will save. Essentially, she trades her attack for a chance to cancel her opponent's attack. It only works once per foe. Consider a standard Orc: has a will save of -1, attacks at +5 for an average of 9 damage (well, slightly more because they crit a lot, but never mind). Here, daze gives Emily a 4-in-5 chance of preventing the Orc from having a 1-in-2ish chance of of inflicting 9 damage. Multiplying that through, we get an EV of 3.6 damage prevented.
Well, maybe that's an unfair example. Normal Orcs suck, after all. So I did the math again for an Orc shaman: better Will and worse attacks, so the EV comes out to about 1. I put it to you that even that is better than a 50% chance to deal 2 damage, especially if the party outnumbers its enemies (which is otherwise the worst case for daze).
In any case, the effective difference between the two is not very great; Emily will always prefer to summon 1 of her 8 monsters or throw one of her 3 grease spells. Her choice of last resort only matters if she has a monster out (in which case she's contributing anyway) or if she's completely tapped.
tl;dr daze is pretty terrible, but its potential replacements are not so great either, and anyway it only matters on the margin.