Forked Thread: So, about Expertise...

[AngryPurpleCyclops]

Wow! Thanks for doing this and posting the results. The PC's are clearly weaker than one might expect for their level played by power gamer types. The number of magic items seems excessive when you think about the career of a pc (though a lot of what you get will become obsolete over the course of a career) and since each pc will be carrying only 1/5th of the items it's not over the top.

I'm very surprised the ravager and archons were killed so easily. Doresian was supposed to be converted to a flame creature was well (fire lord) so that the archons could teleport to him.

Did the room have a low ceiling? The ravager needs to be able to escape melee by vertical movement to maximize his effectiveness (I would probably never have him drop below 15' the entire encounter)

This encounter is weakened by the uniform damage type. Any kind of resistance to fire would obviously prevent the monsters from being as effective.

I do feel that half the dailies, and some daily magic item powers being used up is a significant encounter. I'm not at all convinced that epic is too easy given this example and results. The encounter clearly could be a lot tougher. The terrain wasn't such that the monsters had any real advantage and the level of synergy between the monsters was somewhat limited to the teleport feature. I also didn't really add any auras to the encounter.

Did Doresians power recharge more than once? Was he left alone in the early rounds? His high exp point cost and relatively low effectiveness might hurt this encounters design. Perhaps when modifying the creatures to make them fire creatures I would have modified doresian to give him an aura and or a ranged attack (he's pretty wimpy offensively for a level 27 elite). If we switch doresian out for 3 efreet flame striders and an efreet pyresinger I think it might make a better encounter. This drops the highest level threat down to a L+3 (lvl 25) controller but the fire teleport ability is now shared by all but the ravager and the pyresinger and now we have 4 creatures with aura's, lots of ongoing damage, ranged 20 immobilizing attacks... not to mention 8 combatants instead of 5 (vastly increasing focus fire opportunities for the bad guys).

really cool that you took the time to do this, hopefully encounters won't go over 2-3 hours at epic with pc's each running one guy etc.

 

[AngryPurpleCyclops]

But on the other hand, this test group was entirely unoptimised, and had zero experience at synergising their respective abilities. A group of players who have worked together through several combats on the way up to that level would be far deadlier, even with exactly the same character features.

Great point. The encounter wasn't at all optimized either though. The monsters could have had some significant tactical advantages or better terrain to fight in.

They mesh completely.

If a group has 3-4 easier encounters and uses up half of their dailies and then uses up the other half in the tough BBEG encounter as the last encounter of the day, how is that different than having the tough BBEG encounter as the first encounter of the day and using up half of the dailies then?

I think that this is the same problem at lower levels too. If you have 2-3 easy (n-2 to N) level encounters at 3rd level your pc's will walk all over those as well. I don't think the easy encounters actually test anything. If the rogue hadn't had the magic item he had there might have been 2 pc's put down and that's not an awful encounter by any stretch. The more I think about what you wrote the more I think Doresian is a lot of the problem(I was wondering how his defenses might make the party struggle). Especially since one of the keys to the encounter was to have doresian run around in an area where the party was weakest and then have the 3 archons teleport to him to gang up on one pc. This would have made it a lot harder for the party to concentrate on the ravager. The efreets immobilizing powers would also make chasing down the ravager quite difficult.

The real point is that the 5 level higher BBEG fight was not a threat. Sure, my friend used up a lot of dailies, but he didn't have to against the BBEG. Many of those dailies never hit the BBEG. He could have used lesser powers and still the BBEG would not have been a threat. Just grindy.

Not a threat is too strong verbiage wise. He wasn't a huge threat, but ultimately I think this is my fault. Doresian is too ineffective offensively. His one strong attack recharges way too rarely and he has no aura (the efreets auras dish out automatic damage and stack with the ongoing fire damage attacks of the archons and each other). The pyresinger's fiery chains attack and sheets of flame attack are a lot better than doresian and recharge a lot easier. Couple the chains attack with some lava pits or fires and things could get nasty for the pc's. The pyresinger doesn't have doresians defenses but it still has 233HP's and his defenses are not bad. The ongoing 20dmg coupled with all the efreet aura's could mean 15-35 free damage on multiple pc's per round.

These PCs could have taken on another 3 or 4 more standard encounters in a day. Easily. Just using At Will and Encounter powers for the most part. The limiting factor is the healing surges, not the Daily powers.

std encounters are too easy at every level so this can't really be used to validate the argument epic is easy.

 

[KarinsDad]

This is part of why I support altering the background math, even if it winds up making a "standard challenge" a bit on the easy side for a well-made party.

I'm coming to this conclusion myself.

But, I think that +1 at 5, 15, and 25 is too much of a gain considering the synergies that can be there.

I will probably be adding a house rule of +1 for all attacks at Paragon and another +1 for all attacks at Epic.

 

[KarinsDad]

Great point. The encounter wasn't at all optimized either though. The monsters could have had some significant tactical advantages or better terrain to fight in.

Adding terrain difficulties adds to the XP of the encounter. I was testing a hard encounter 3 levels higher, not 3+ levels higher.

The terrain was fine. The Ash Disciples could move to the middle and explode and all three of them did that at opportune times when they could catch at least 4 of the PCs in the area effect. Every monster used up every single one of their powers in this fight.

Without having a larger area for the Ash Disciples, they could not use their Cinder Burst and Death Embers as effectively. I purposely set up the terrain to maximize their area effects to catch as many PCs as they could.

The larger area also prevented the PCs from creating a choke point so that Doresian could always attack the most PCs with his Ravenous Frenzy.

This was a test case. The fact that the PCs were vastly under-optimized more than makes up for any addition difficulties that you think were needed to create a fair test.

If the rogue hadn't had the magic item he had there might have been 2 pc's put down and that's not an awful encounter by any stretch.

In our campaigns, the players purposely go out of their ways to acquire resist items, even if they have to disenchant other items and enchant new items themselves.

In a real campaign with real PCs, they would have MORE fire resistance items and spells (this group had one item) and would have taken less damage.

Like I said, even the Wizard shouldn't have gone down. But, after playing the game at that point for nearly 8 hours, my friend probably wasn't making the best choices anymore.

In a real campaign with real PCs, it would have been unlikely that the PCs would have taken as much damage as they did.

The more I think about what you wrote the more I think Doresian is a lot of the problem(I was wondering how his defenses might make the party struggle). Especially since one of the keys to the encounter was to have doresian run around in an area where the party was weakest and then have the 3 archons teleport to him to gang up on one pc. This would have made it a lot harder for the party to concentrate on the ravager. The efreets immobilizing powers would also make chasing down the ravager quite difficult.

The Ravager could not teleport. He was actually pretty easy to keep pinned down.

Not a threat is too strong verbiage wise. He wasn't a huge threat, but ultimately I think this is my fault. Doresian is too ineffective offensively. His one strong attack recharges way too rarely and he has no aura (the efreets auras dish out automatic damage and stack with the ongoing fire damage attacks of the archons and each other). The pyresinger's fiery chains attack and sheets of flame attack are a lot better than doresian and recharge a lot easier. Couple the chains attack with some lava pits or fires and things could get nasty for the pc's. The pyresinger doesn't have doresians defenses but it still has 233HP's and his defenses are not bad. The ongoing 20dmg coupled with all the efreet aura's could mean 15-35 free damage on multiple pc's per round.

Doresian did a lot of damage though. His chances to hit are high. He could hit on a 4 in a lot of cases. His ongoing 10 was on one to two PCs most of the encounter and on as many as three PCs for a few rounds. That's probably 300+ points of damage just from his staff. In the 19 rounds, he probably dished out over 500 points of damage. He did more damage than the other four combined.

std encounters are too easy at every level so this can't really be used to validate the argument epic is easy.

I wasn't validating that, I was stating that his assumption that using up half of the dailies somehow weakened the party to the point that they could not do 3-4 more encounters. Obviously, they could not do 3-4 more hard encounters, but that is not the game design.

The game design is set up in reality for x XP over a given day (on average). Throwing a hard encounter first just eats up a larger portion of x than a different order, but the encounter order really doesn't matter.

 

[Goumindong]

But on the other hand, this test group was entirely unoptimised, and had zero experience at synergising their respective abilities. A group of players who have worked together through several combats on the way up to that level would be far deadlier, even with exactly the same character features.

The test group was also played by a single player and not a group of players. Any single player vastly for the party increases the ability of the group to coordinate.

They mesh completely.

If a group has 3-4 easier encounters and uses up half of their dailies and then uses up the other half in the tough BBEG encounter as the last encounter of the day, how is that different than having the tough BBEG encounter as the first encounter of the day and using up half of the dailies then?

You're not using the "proper" encounter mesh. IIRC. What do your players do when they run up against the L+4 encounter that ends this day?

 

[KarinsDad]

Wow! Thanks for doing this and posting the results. The PC's are clearly weaker than one might expect for their level played by power gamer types. The number of magic items seems excessive when you think about the career of a pc (though a lot of what you get will become obsolete over the course of a career) and since each pc will be carrying only 1/5th of the items it's not over the top.

Actually as explained above, if one goes to the DMG, I handed out fewer items (and some of lower level) than the PCs would have actually acquired in real game play if following the DMG guidelines. The PCs had slots left over where even lower level items could have helped.

I'm very surprised the ravager and archons were killed so easily. Doresian was supposed to be converted to a flame creature was well (fire lord) so that the archons could teleport to him.

Easily killed? It took 6 rounds to kill even one of them. And when the Ravager was killed in round 6, all of the others were wounded, just not enough to be bloodied. It took 11 rounds to kill all four. You consider 11 rounds quick?

I thought you were an anti-grind kind of guy.

Did the room have a low ceiling? The ravager needs to be able to escape melee by vertical movement to maximize his effectiveness (I would probably never have him drop below 15' the entire encounter)

Actually, it needs to stay 10 feet off the ground since it only has a 2 reach to use Slam. But 10 feet is too far away for Whirlwind which averages more damage if it can use it on two foes. Buffeting Blast has better range, but that has a 5 6 recharge. I honestly did not think to keep it out of reach for part of the battle. Thanks for the suggestion. Something to remember for the future.

This encounter is weakened by the uniform damage type. Any kind of resistance to fire would obviously prevent the monsters from being as effective.

Only the Rogue had a resistance here. That’s pretty minor considering how a player designed group would more likely have many resistances.

I do feel that half the dailies, and some daily magic item powers being used up is a significant encounter. I'm not at all convinced that epic is too easy given this example and results. The encounter clearly could be a lot tougher. The terrain wasn't such that the monsters had any real advantage and the level of synergy between the monsters was somewhat limited to the teleport feature. I also didn't really add any auras to the encounter.

It was a significant encounter. It just was not a threatening encounter. The player did not get the thrill of victory since it did not feel scary. It took 18 rounds to get one PC down to 20 hit points. Three levels higher EL and it felt grindy, not scary. PCs got bloodied and then got healed. Ho hum.

It did use up a lot of resources, but you expected something different from an Elite 5 levels higher than the PCs? I think the player used two or three dailies total previous to taking on the Ghoul King. He used them then because he was low on encounter powers and was hoping for a big hit.

I do not equate using up resources as threatening, especially not in a case like this. Resources are there to be used. When the encounter is tougher, the bigger guns will be pulled out. That's to be expected.

But, there was no real threat of a single PC going down in a real game scenario with real players and real PCs, even though the encounter was considered hard.

There are just too many options for each PC at those levels to allow for that.

And just think. If the original designers would have added bonuses to hit for all PCs to balance out the math at Epic levels, this hard encounter would have been even less threatening.

And just imagine how easy a standard encounter would be at Epic levels if a hard encounter is grindy, not threatening.

Did Doresians power recharge more than once?

He used his power in round one and then it recharged twice more after that. On average, it should have recharged 3 times instead of 2. Course, even if it had recharged once more, that would have only been another 30 or 40 points of damage to the group. The Slow was a bit problematic, but not overly. It didn't take long to surround him again to get flank. And, I often had him next to a pillar so that only two PCs could get flank and would have him teleport away to attack non-melee foes (especially the Wizard) once the teleport recharged.

Was he left alone in the early rounds?

For the most part. The Cleric did Turn Undead on him in round two and it hit. But in round one, the Rogue and Fighter both had readied actions to attack anyone who came near and when Doresian used Ravenous Frenzy on them and the Wizard, the Rogue rolled a 16 on the dice and still missed and the player went "Oh oh, he's hard to hit" and immediately had most of the PCs ignore him for the most part. Not completely. The Wizard and Cleric tried to smack him a few times in the first 10 rounds, but for the most part, they tried more to concentrate on the other four.

His high exp point cost and relatively low effectiveness might hurt this encounters design. Perhaps when modifying the creatures to make them fire creatures I would have modified doresian to give him an aura and or a ranged attack (he's pretty wimpy offensively for a level 27 elite). If we switch doresian out for 3 efreet flame striders and an efreet pyresinger I think it might make a better encounter. This drops the highest level threat down to a L+3 (lvl 25) controller but the fire teleport ability is now shared by all but the ravager and the pyresinger and now we have 4 creatures with aura's, lots of ongoing damage, ranged 20 immobilizing attacks... not to mention 8 combatants instead of 5 (vastly increasing focus fire opportunities for the bad guys).

But, he was not ineffective. He gave the lesser NPCs flank, he did more than 500 points of damage, he did a lot.

really cool that you took the time to do this, hopefully encounters won't go over 2-3 hours at epic with pc's each running one guy etc.

That was unusual, but not totally unexpected. I was hoping for 4 hours. 8 hours was a bit much.

 

[keterys]

I will say... this thread really makes me wonder about challenging actually optimized characters out of the base books... and worries me about time required for combat.

 

[DrSpunj]

Ditto, keterys. And here I was worried about the 2-3 hours my group of 7 now 3rd level PCs were taking!

Oh well, at least by the time we actually get to Epic years from now (assuming it even happens) hopefully all these issues will be addressed with 4.5 or even 5th edition.

 

[outsider]

I think something to ponder is what the designers of 4th ed consider to be a challenging fight. I think the intent is for character death to be pretty rare, so I don't think character death is neccessarily a part of a challenging fight. I am quite sure encounter length has little to do what they are going for in a challenging fight either. I'm sure they have no intent on hard fights taking 10 hours to play out. I highly suspect that resources expended is intended to be a very important metric on the challenge of a fight.

Also, perhaps the intent of the Expertise feats isn't actually to make hard fights easier. Perhaps it is to make long fights shorter. Your player group had that fight won, by the sound of it. How much faster would they have won if they all had +3 to hit? How much less resources would they have expended? It sounds like you've got alot of notes. If you noted the attack rolls, add +3 to all the misses and if they now hit, assume that the attack did average damage. From there, you can answer those questions.

It's noted in this thread that inability to hit was one of the primary reasons that this fight got so grindy. It's also presumed that a grindy fight is a bad thing. One would think these new bonuses to hit would actually go towards solving the grindiness problem, and thus should be welcomed.

 

[Plane Sailing]

I think something to ponder is what the designers of 4th ed consider to be a challenging fight. I think the intent is for character death to be pretty rare, so I don't think character death is neccessarily a part of a challenging fight.

I don't know about that - I'm sure that most of the epic destinies have a "I'm not dead yet" ability for a reason, and that is that they are expected to be killed then come back on a relatively regular basis.