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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AngryPurpleCyclops" data-source="post: 4696470" data-attributes="member: 82732">Came late to this party but it's an interesting read and I thought I would chime in:Armor can kill minions like no other power except possibly sphere.  Coupled with the curse powers (especially fey) you can sometimes run into a clump of minions, cursing the one with the lowest initiative, each minion automatically dies when it's turn comes due and then when the lowest init minion dies you can use the curse power to teleport into another group.  It doesn't happen often, but in one minion heavy encounter my level 2 warlock killed 7 minions and delivered an additional d6+2 dmg to one non minion in a single round.  It also causes automatic curse damage once per round so one creature is taking 2d6+2 which is pretty signifcant automatic damage.  Coupled with eyebite and the temp hitpoints you can frequently hang in adjacent to even a BBEG for several rounds.  In a big battle armor can be a dominating outcome changing power.  Free d6+2-3 adds up.  In paragon levels you can combine armor with winter touched and lasting frost making every creature adjacent to you give up combat advantage and take 5 additional damage from the armor d6+8 and combat advantage against multiple targets is very powerful and other pc's in the party can take winter touched and also gain combat advantage.  If you have a wizard using cold powers or a rogue with wintertouched the benefits only multiply.  it only cuts off flank if your party fails to work in a coordinated manner.  Whenever possible pc's should approach monsters from the corners (this is good defensive and offensive strategy) and it always allows wizards to attack with bursts, blasts, zones and spheres without putting the party in the area of effect.  Kind of sums it up in a nut shell.  No other level 1 power does as much damage as sphere.  It's nearly always the encounter defining power.  I've seen people argue that sleep is it's equal or superior but it's simple not the case, sleep sometimes has almost no impact on an encounter.  Any encounter that sphere appears in is greatly changed by sphere.  I would conservatively say sphere does a minimum of 100 damage in 90% of the encounters I have seen it in.  If you get a good placement with high init you can easily deliver 50dmg on round 1 (my wizard has astral fire and a +1 staff so it's putting out d4+6) but even without that +2 if you drop sphere in a clump of 4-5 critters you get 26-32.5 average automatic damage and an attack that hits for a very respectable 2d6+4. Admittedly after sphere is in play it's hard to get more than 1-2 creatures on any given round because our dm plays the monsters with a fair level of intelligence, but over 8-10 rounds of battle this is still a very impressive amount of damage.  Even though minion removal is not what's expected from the warlock, it still helps achieve battlefield superiority for the party.  It seems unlikely he'll use armor if he's got +2 to hit (or maybe he'll use an action point and get two spells off).  The mistake is in thinking armor is not effective at killing bigger creatures.  Put a curse on a BBEG and move next to him with armor on and they invariably try to retreat from you.  How many creatures want to "hang in there" taking 9+ automatic damge per round.  If you hit him with eyebite before moving adjacent then he's got even more problems as getting rid of you is very hard and you have the bonus temp hit points to offset what ever damage he is dishing out.  You are in effect both doing the striker role (you're probably averaging 15 damage per round vs 1 creature) and also doing some defending in that you're now tying up a bbeg.  If along the way you happen to get next to a minion or two and fry them for free, that's just another bonus.  Saying you have more important targets to heal is just silly if the warlock is dominating a BBEG and killing minions at the same time, healing him is not a waste of resources. People undervalue armor because they feel the damage is minor but it's not only pretty significant it also guarantees curse dmg.  If you assume normally you hit about half the time, armor doubles the impact of curse. how did you come up with average damage of 10 on a miss?  In any event, this is 24 initially and then 5 and 5.  approximately half the time.  So the average expected damage from flames would be 17'ish.In those same 3 rounds armor can pretty reliably do 6d6+6 to that same target (pretty much every time because of no to hit roll) which is 27 dmg almost every time. Armor also adds ~12 temp hit points AND could easily have delivered another 3d6+6 or more to other targets in the same 3 rounds.  Plus it's still active and can continue to deliver more damage.  I understand the reasoning for wanting to concentrate heavy damage on one target but armor actually out performs flames even at that.  Unless the initial att of 3d10+d6+4 kills the creature outright, there's very little benefit to flames compared to armor.  If the initial att does kill the bbeg I would say he's not much of a bbeg anyway. planting a fighter at the edge of the web can greatly enhance the spells effectiveness.  Thunderwave also works very handily in conjuction with web.  It's still pretty weak compared to other spells but it can be effective.  In 3.5 web could be used to cover an escape but 4e removes the web as soon as the caster is out of range so it's a lot less effective in that regard.If he was too effective the game would be ruined.  His role is not to score the heavy hitter damages like rogues and warlocks, but to grind down the enemy hit points and kill minions.  He's more of the set up man than the closer.  If a wizard gets off a burning hands into a clump of bad guys and kills a minion while putting 13 dmg on a pair of goblin warriors, then the rogue gets flanking on one of the goblins and dishes out a 20dmg attack the goblin is down, there's also a minion gone and the other goblin has been whittled down as well.  Wizards can't "dominate", they just help control.  Zones, AoE, minion removal are all part of control.  I think if you kept a spread sheet of who puts out more damge in the course of a campaign a wizard or any striker the odds are pretty good the wizard will come out on top.  The striker obviously will have done more concentrated damag which has it's benefits but minion removal is critical to parties surviving.  That wimpy minion goblin cutter can be the guy who gives the bugbear strangler flanking and kills a pc.  4e is a pretty tactical game.  The pc's are usually outnumbered and the monsters usually have 2-3 times the hit points of the party at the start of a major encounter.  One of the most important things the pc's must remember is to minimize the number of attacks that bad guys get, in any manner possible.  If a wizard could do 25 dmg to a bbeg or kill 4 minions with stinking cloud on round 1, the stinking cloud is vastly superior.  If you let the 4 minions all get an attack or two, they've added 10-20dmg to the party on average and the game is balanced enough that mistakes that let monsters deliver more damage are how parties get TPK'd.  You're discounting the fact that if you miss with weapon of the gods, ALL the other pc's get no advantage.  Spiritual weapon grants combat advantage to the whole party regardless of the type of power they are using.  There are alot of powers that don't attack AC, for instance warlocks and wizards will get +2 to their ATT vs a SW target but no benefit from the creature hit by weapon of the gods.  SW also grants a pretty significant ATT as a minor.  d10+wis+implement is ~3 times as much damage as d6.  Weapon of the gods can only be used if the cleric moves or starts adjacent to the weilder.  If weapon of the gods is put on a melee weapon that person can be immobilized which would block it's effectiveness.  Weapon of the gods is also more limited by the layout of a battle.  If there's a bbeg in the back row he may have cover or if wotg is on a melee weapon he may be unreachable.  SW can fly unimpeded to the target (speed 10) and attack with no danger to the party + grant combat advantage to every party member.  Obviously the best use for wotg is probably a rangers bow.  What if your party has no ranger?  I saw someone suggest that SW could be avoided by delaying but the cleric could ready an action or delay as well so that's really no defense at all and would actually increase the power of SW since the target is now basically immobilized.  CA is about twice as valuable to a party as -2ac and the -2ac only happens if the weapon weilder hits.  Hard for me to understand how wotg can honestly be compared favorably to SW.This makes a lot of sense, but your party wizard zap cleric also benefit from SW.  It seems to me that only a ranger is truly benefiting from WotG more than from SW as putting the power on a melee weapon increases the chance that it will be ineffective.  Bottom line, everyone in the party benefits as much or more from SW and repeated d10+implement+wis for a minor is much better than d6 for free.  The chance of putting the -2 AC on mulitple targets is greatly offset by the fact that when you miss there is no penalty applied and even -2AC on multiple targets won't help half the party in most cases.I agree that it gets better if you have more people targetting AC, there's also a slight synergy bonus in that sometimes you'll get both the -2AC and CA (though there are other powers that grant -2AC to targets so it's possible to lose some synergy as well) but in the grand scheme of things most parties of 4-5 will have at least 2 characters who are not benefiting at all (wiz, cleric, warlock) from wotg or benefiting far less (rogue).  You're still discounting that frequently there will be no benefit granted because the ATT(s) missed, SW has a far greater chance of helping more attacks per round.</blockquote>

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