Expertise justification?

[Lauberfen]

I may well have misuderstood the first of your 3 posts there, but it looks strongly like nonsense- sure, a bonus here or there may not make it quicker every time to kill a monster, and granted the bonusses are small (at least at heroic).

But the idea of needing X number of rounds of average damage to kill a monster, and therefore extra DPR being wasted, is rubbish- DPR is average, so actual ddamage can be quite a lot more or less. Also you are acting with a whole party, who all have different hit rates and damage rates.

Therefore it's really meaningless to say that you won't drop a monster quicker because of a small increase in DPR- this is a bizarre abstraction. Sometimes it will make little difference, but on average, by increasing DPR by any amount, you will reduce the time taken to kill a monster. Optimised players increase their DPR by a greater amount with either Expertise of Focus, and therefore will kill a monster even quicker, a greater relative increase in DPR and relatively more improvement in the time it takes to kill a monster.

Granted expertise will only actually make a concrete difference every so often. But when it does (about every other encounter at heroic, the way my group plays), you will have just landed one more hit. That could easily lead to taking down a monster one round quicker, or even more.

But the fact remains, than on average you will take down the monsters slightly more quickly, and the improvement for optimised players is absolutely greater than for those that are not optimised.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

ok, you found the problem in my abstaraction

thought you get it... if all of the players play hack on the poor solo monster, yes the absolute damage increase per player counts more to the relative increase of the whole party

edit: my mistake forget the 100hp monster example... DPR when speaking about extra +x to hit is stupid... :/ here you drop a monster 1 round earlier once every 20 turns... see below...

Regarding your second paragraph: I already said averaging damage is not allowed to make a good guess about damage dealt to a single monster... max and min damage can be important.. read my post again... edit: skipping the example

For an exponential distribution, the EV is 1/p and p is 1/20 here... so the average number of rounds to notice the expertise feat is 20 rounds...

tell me how often you hit the same monster for 20 rounds?

 

[UngeheuerLich]

That could easily lead to taking down a monster one round quicker, or even more.

wow, one monster one round quicker... having a higher will defense e.g. could also reduce the damage you would have gotten from this single monster by the same amount... and better... you could have saved yourself from a monsters stunning attack which will result in more damage for the monster...

So i could also argue that iron will is better than expertise...

Is expertise good? check!
Boring? check!
An absolute must for an optimized char? No.
A must have for a leader which gives bonuses on hits for all allies? check!
Having a dramatic impact on your fights? Usually not! But sometimes!

And I will argue that Weapon Fokus is even less usefull overall... but if you have to overcome damage reductions, every point of extra damage counts!

 

[Tilenas]

If all chars take it, it senseless... it just forces the DM to use better monsters, wich are worse to hit and have more hp... so you are actually contributing to grind...

Exactly! At least that's what I'd do as DM. The only time when players may think their characters underpowered is when compared to the other PCs, as the DM can vary monster stats to fit the party.
What this IMO boils down to is the distinction between players who optimize their characters to exceed in the role attributed to them by the RAW, and those who dabble in other areas. If your DMing incourages/rewards both approaches alike, expertise shouldn't be a problem. However, I believe that maintaining a balance between the approaches is difficult, and that oftentimes the "dabblers" may feel left behind.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Be hard in exploiting weaknesses... there is no optimization without drawback...

If you have chars which can shine in many situations, the optimizer will be frustrated very fast...

You just have to make sure you don´t explicitely exploit weaknesses obviously... just vary your encounters and you will automatically create situations in which optimizer will get serous problems...

(once brought a dedicated bow ranger in 3.5 to train in swordplay and to skip increasing dex in favour of constituion...)

Or a different example: who will deal more damage? the player using sword and board and expertise or the twf or thw fighter using power attack?

Offense is not all... really... and the ability to adapt can be much more valuable than killing a monster one round earlier... in many cases...

and in the single case where it really matters, all will be happy if the optimizer scores the point...

 

[KarinsDad]

too bad you are wrong... monsters are killed by relative damage...

Err, no.

Relative damage increase is meaningless.

Given a choice of giving +1 to hit to the (e.g. striker) PC who does big average damage and giving +1 to hit to the PC who does little average damage, give it to the PC who does big average damage every single time. You'll average more overall damage.

still you are wrong...

the real question is: how many turns does the monster last... use a brute force method to test how many turns it takes to kill a monster...

Consider 100hp monster. If you are doing 18.5 Damage on average, you need 6 rounds to kill the monster... if you add 1 damage, you dont save a single turn.

Actually, you sometimes do save a turn.

If you always do average damage on all 6 successful hits, then no you save nothing in this example.

But people do not roll average damage most of the time. If you roll damage all over the place, yes this can and will on occassion be accomplished in 5 successful hits (or even 4 successful hits): e.g. 18, 21, 19, 23, 21 whereas without the +1 damage, it would have still been 6 successful hits: 17, 20, 18, 22, 20.

 

[HardcoreDandDGirl]

so when is this going to end??

is there any way to convince eaither side the other is right?

is this becomeing just the new 'edtion war' a fight noone can win

 

[DrSpunj]

It was a nasty fight (in a good way!). I was convinced by round 2 that we had at least 2 deaths-on-the-way (because of your "Monsters will coup-de-grace" policy), and that without those 2 the rest of us were humped.

This is a misunderstanding and I'll inform the rest of the group to clarify on our website. Only some monsters will attempt to coup-de-grace, usually only evil-smart foes or hungry-dumb ones, but by no means will all monsters attempt to CDG. As I stated last night at the end of the battle, these kobolds made no moves to do so though they could have on several occasions. That's very different than the hobgoblins the party has recently battled. With further investigation on the party's part the differences there may become more apparent, but I have no policy about always CDGing PCs!

The only way we got through that battle is by pulling out absolutely every power we had, using every action point and scrap of healing we had, using every ounce of tactical acumen we had, and then hoping the dice turned our way. By the time we emerged victorious, we were completely and utterly running on fumes. I'm entirely unconvinced that we were "victims of <our> own success".

But that just supports my point, I think. The dice really weren't going your way and you still managed to pull out a victory with absolutely no one in any real danger of actually dying. By that I mean: having failed 2 death saves or within 1 reasonable round of dying by reaching minus bloodied hp. And that was just about the hardest encounter I can reasonably throw at the party and the dice were horribly against you. I know I rolled substantially above average since most all of my rolls were 14 or better, and I don't know how many rounds of combat we had but Nail missed with over half of his attacks (and with your base +11 attack you had a 50% chance of hitting the Defenders and 60% chance of hitting the Skirmishers, I know you weren't doing anywhere near that well!).

I wish we had some way to keep track of all our rolls for combats like this because I believe this combat the aggregate rolls were definitely skewed in my direction.

 

[blargney the second]

How many daily powers were expended during that combat?
-blarg

 

[Nail]

How many daily powers were expended during that combat?

We're all 4th level, so we all have 1 Daily (not including utilities). In the "nasty" battle we used 3 Dailies, IIRC. I have *got* to get a better Daily for my fighter; it's just not as much of a "tide turner" as what the Cleric, Swordmage, and Warlord have. I'd love a Daily like the rogue's "Blinding Barrage". Oh well.