Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="tiornys" data-source="post: 5558911" data-attributes="member: 17633">As noted above, looking at only the attack rate ignores half of the scaling issue.  The other half is:  how many hits does it take to drop a monster?  At 1st level, a skirmisher has about 30 HP (exactly 30 with 14 Con).  A first level non-striker with no investment is going to average somewhere between 8 and 10 damage per hit, with higher damage values tending to occur on lower accuracy attacks.  Strikers will average about 4 more damage.  So, first level skirmishers are dying in somewhere between 2 and 4 hits.  Increase the levels and you start to see some decay in the rate of monster kill, depending on how generous you are with increasing PC damage.  Looking at 3rd level PCs and 3rd level skirmishers, it's taking more like 3-5 hits, although it rapidly becomes much more difficult to make reasonable assumptions about player damage values.  Still, let's lowball it.  Non-striker: 16 stat, 1d8 weapon/power: 7.5 average damage.  At third level, we'll add 1 damage for a magic weapon.  That's 4 hits to kill the 1st level skirmisher, and 5.4 hits to kill the 3rd level one.Now let's look at 21st level (where PC damage just got a boost due to doubling the dice on at-will attacks).  A 21st level skirmisher with the same 14 Con has 190 HP.  Let's take a PC with a 20 starting stat, boosted to 28 (max possible).  A 1d12 weapon (and remember, 2[W] now).  +5 enhancement.  +4 item bonus from Iron Armbands or similar.  And heck, why not a +3 feat bonus from Weapon Focus or similar.  That's an average of 32 damage per hit.  Which means it takes almost 6 hits to kill the skirmisher.That's right.  It takes MORE HITS for the 21st level PC with higher than baseline stats and every "normal" damage boost to kill an even level skirmisher than it does for a 3rd level PC with almost no damage investment whatsoever.  And 21st level is the zenith of Epic tier for this comparison.  By 30th level, the above PC has gained 4 damage (+6 enhancement, +6 IAoP, 30 stat).  The monster has gained 72 HP.  It now takes 7.28 hits for a kill. (edit: by comparison, a PC build more along the lines of the 3rd level example is taking 9.5 hits to kill the 21st level monster, and more than 11 to kill the 30th.)Of course, since the number of attacks it takes to kill a monster is the number of hits divided by the hit percentage, when player hit rate also decays, you wind up with a rapid increase in the number of rounds required for combat.So, easier combat advantage?  Encounter/daily powers?  They're compensating for the decay in PC damage vs. monster HP.  The PC is expected to pick up 1 point of direct attack bonus somewhere.  The other 3 come from Expertise.t~</blockquote>

Verification