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!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 5533160" data-attributes="member: 996">Another way to look at the problem of Expertise as a 'gap narrower' feat is that it only narrows the gap if the higher-bonus character /doesn't/ take it.  That puts the effectiveness of a choice for a less-optimized character in the hands of the optimizer, which isn't that great an idea.  While it might be painting with a broad brush, the examples are still valid.  It might not be true of every pair of gamers who bring 16/+2 and 20/+3 characters to the table, but it'll certainly be true of some of them, and balance isn't something that's only a problem if everyone abuses something, it's a problem that at it's worst when some do, and some don't.If you really want a 'gap narrowing' feat, you will, indeed, need to come up with feats that reward an attack bonus with race/class or multiple-secondary-stat preqs.  Plus, of course, choosing to have an 18 or 20 stat is a major sacrifice in secondary stats, and a +2 weapon has bigger damage, and typically something like high crit or other advantages going for it over a +3 weapon.  So gap-narrowing, if enforced, is just erroding the advantage that a player may have sacrificed quite a bit to get.So, on the one hand, 'gap narrowing' may not be such a great idea.  OTOH, Expertise allows for /greater/ gaps.  So it's a bad idea either way you slice it, it just adds yet another way one PC can have an attack bonus higher than another.  Add up enough of those - weapon, stat, class, feat bonus, stacking bonuses - and you'll get more situations where it's hard to reasonably challenge everyone in the party.FREX:  pre-Expertise, a character could take a 20 primary stat, a +3 prof weapon, fighter to get weapon talent, then Kensai to get another +1 on top of that at paragon.  Compared to a 16-STR, +2 prof weapon, no weapon-talent class, that's an already problematic 5-point spread in AB.  3 point spreads were actually quite common at Heroic, too.  Adding Expertise makes the spread in the above example potentially as high as 7.  Which means if one character hits on a 10 the other hits on a 3 (or, worse, one hits on a 10, and the other needs a 17).  Just not workable.  Sure, it could, instead, narrow the gap, but the gap is already potentially 0, anyway, so if anyone was up for some restraint, the problem doesn't exist, to begin with.</blockquote>

Verification