D&D 5E Fighting Style Balance: Offense vs. Defense

[Garthanos]

Consider an ability that gives you 7.5 extra temp hp. An enemy that does 10 damage and has a 25% chance to hit will take 3 rounds on average to deplete the temp hp.

25 percent is warping things a bit isnt it?

An extra attack ability probably kills the enemy a round - maybe 2 earlier. Which essentially spares 1-2 attacks from that enemy. In this scenario the temp hp was a more efficient resource than one that gave an extra attack.

Are those 1 or 2 attacks better than 7.5 damage total...

 

[FrogReaver]

25 percent is warping things a bit isnt it?

not necessarily for an enemy targeting a high ac fighter. But even if you lower it to 35% the comparison still demonstrates the poin

Are those 1 or 2 attacks better than 7.5 damage total...

after ac? Doubtful.

 

[Garthanos]

not necessarily for an enemy targeting a high ac fighter. But even if you lower it to 35% the comparison still demonstrates the poin

Sounds like a minion character has to roll 4 times on average in fights lasting 3 rounds and never gets in a hit in almost every battle before going down. Can't even deliver 7.5 damage in 2 attacks even if those actually hit.

 

[FrogReaver]

Sounds like a minion character has to roll 4 times on average in fights lasting 3 rounds and never gets in a hit in almost every battle before going down. Can't even deliver 7.5 damage in 2 attacks even if those actually hit.

2 attacks is 2 dice which is 15 temp hp

 

[Stoutstien]

I've actually been working on the question of, "how much EHP does a spell need to recover to be worth the action spent?" Or in other words is it ever worth casting a healing spell when the target is not at zero?

This inevitably led to me comparing shield of faith to cure wounds. It takes a surprisingly low level of incoming attacks for SoF to over take cure wounds even if the caster is a life cleric.

 

[Garthanos]

Sounds like a minion character has to roll 4 times on average in fights lasting 3 rounds and never gets in a hit

To be clear I think this whole scenario sounds like an inadequate strawman adversary not sure I design a game around fighting a single enemy who will probably go down in one attack and who typically fail to get a hit in during the entire fight

 

[FrogReaver]

To be clear I think this whole scenario sounds like an inadequate strawman adversary not sure I design a game around fighting a single enemy who will probably go down in one attack and who typically fail to get a hit in during the entire fight

Really? Strawman? Just when I think you might actually be taking a discussion seriously...

 

[Garthanos]

Really? Strawman? Just when I think you might actually be taking a discussion seriously...

You presented an adversary that seems really really inadequate offensively to the task of challenging the pc to show that defense against them is situationally optimal so in this case I thought it a bit funny to compare him to strawman arguments ... guess that doesnt work.

Let me see another take when he is at 25 percent against the fighter how good is he against the wizard he is likely to be facing? if he ignores the fighter and goes to them like monsters usually did in every edition til 4e brought in defender mechanics.

 

[Garthanos]

If a monster is already virtually unable to do anything offensively and you can push it all the way by defenses against them it seems an extreme case an atypical one.

 

[FrogReaver]

I've actually been working on the question of, "how much EHP does a spell need to recover to be worth the action spent?" Or in other words is it ever worth casting a healing spell when the target is not at zero?

This inevitably led to me comparing shield of faith to cure wounds. It takes a surprisingly low level of incoming attacks for SoF to over take cure wounds even if the caster is a life cleric.

Shield of faith prevents 10% of all incoming damage on a single target. If it was 10% of all incoming damage prevented on the whole party it would be pretty good. But as it stands enemies can react to it and attack a different party member - which is what makes most defensive buffs soo weak.

Healing doesn't have that issue as it's purely reactionary. So take a healing word and compare 5.5 healing on average to a target that was already injured. That's actually alot of effective hp added as a character's AC and resistance applies to it as well. The downside is that healing word doesn't scale much which at later levels makes it a pretty bad cast.