How good is the new MM? (Thread split)

[Neonchameleon]

Storm Pillar doesn't block anything except for its origin square. Sure, your DM might play the NPCs as if it's going to kill them, but he shouldn't. An NPC should rarely touch more than one square of it. Granted, it will stop minion reinforcements one way or the other.

And one of the tenants of 4E is to have larger areas to fight in and not cramped spaces. If your DM is giving you a lot of cramped areas and 5 foot wide corridors to fight in, then yes, Storm Pillar becomes a lot more useful.

I don't remember fighting in 5 foot wide corridors. But a Storm Pillar can utterly dominate a 15 foot wide corridor. Three automatic lightning strikes to get past it - by which point the monsters are feeling more than slightly singed. I work in a hospital - we have 10 foot wide corridors because we need to get beds down them and have room for them to pass. 15 foot is massive in an urban environment - it's wide enough for two carts to pass side by side which means it's wide enough for a road in any but the most upscale environments. (In a rural one, Storm Pillar isn't so good).

Why would you need to give up the 20 Int for that?

Int 20 costs 16 (with a +2 racial boost)
Wis 13 costs 3

A first level Int 20 Wizard PC can easily get a Wisdom of 13.

I also want a dex of 12 for Dual Implement Spellcaster when I hit Paragon and have +3 implements. And then some constitution (although that's more optional - I'll take a pounding if anyone catches me, whatever). Although I suppose Int 20/Wis 12/Con 12/Dex 12/Cha 10/Str 8 is viable. You bump wis at 4th and use that for the feat. I prefer 19/14/13/12/10/8 if I'm planning on going high level.

 

[MrMyth]

This is an 11 hit point example where the Wizard does not know that it is an unfavorable situation for him and the Cleric.

...

When it is advantageous for Phantom Bolt, it's pretty close to a tie because the DPR is pretty close to even. When it is advantageous for MM, MM wins by almost an entire round and saves 0.9 of a standard action.

But again, you are picking and choosing ideal situations. What about when we are at 8 hp? 15? What about when the wizard has Combat Advantage? Or any sort of bonuses to hit and damage? Choosing only the situations where MM is good, and ignoring the ones where it isn't... well, that doesn't seem a reasonable comparison.

And note: I've been saying all along that the player of the Wizard has to pick and choose when to use MM. You think 1 in 3 rounds is too high. I don't. I see a lot of scenarios where the Fighter is surrounded by foes and an area effect doesn't help (unless it is an enemy only area effect). Giving a foe -2 to hit helps very little.

Just to clarify, once more: I'm not saying that "Magic Missile is reasonable to use 1 in every 3 rounds" is too high. I'm saying that "Magic Missile is the best option to use 1 in every 3 rounds" is the inaccurate statement. I can absolutely see using it as your favored at-will and having it as a decent option that often.

It is presenting it as the only option - as other choices being "mistakes", made by those who don't know how to play a wizard well... that's where I object.

Even the example you give - you really think that, when the fighter is surrounded by foes, it isn't worthwhile to try and give the enemies penalties to hit?? Or, say, slide the enemies to a less advantageous position - such as by breaking their flanking? (Which they can't get back into with triggering Combat Challenge?)

There are also times when the dice are cold and the dice are hot. We've all seen this. When the dice are hot, sure, use Phantom Bolt. You're in the zone.

When the dice are cold, doing even a small amount of damage automatically is better than doing nothing.

I'm sorry, no, math doesn't work that way. Your chance to hit is your chance to hit, and basing strategies on whether the dice are hot or cold is just silly. If the average damage of Phantom Bolt is about the same as the average damage of Magic Missile, then either one is just as good a choice for the purposes of dealing damage. Doing less damage automatically is better than doing nothing, yes. Doing less damage automatically is about the same as risking doing nothing in order to have the chance to do more.

For example, if one NPC dropped after taking 35 points of damage and another of the same type of NPC has taken 25 points of damage, there's a good chance that MM will kill that foe with 32 points. Phantom Bolt might hit for 10, but then again, it might hit for 6 or for 0.

Yes. And the chance to kill in one hit, vs the chance to miss entirely, is what balanced them against each other. Unless you can pinpoint for certain that an enemy has 7 or less hp - which is hard to do, and a relatively rare occurence - than the At-Wills are about equal. MM is an acceptable choice, sure - just not the only choice.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

CoD in this example is DPR 1d6+4 = 7.5 = 3.75 + 2 = 5.75.

Technically, the DPR is 6.25 due to crits with a 55% chance to hit. But, the Wizard is giving up +1 to hit and damage from a 20 Int for his more important area powers.

Sorry, but still the point stands, 14 is about the lowest Wisdom you typically see in most Wizards. I'm also picking a pretty mediocre at-will and we're not even counting any of its potential control aspect. That may not be vast, but it exists and I've found numerous situations where a wizard can simply maintain a CoD for more damage, the CoD can deny easy access by minions, other PCs can push monsters through the CoD and add more damage, etc. And as you point out, EVEN WITHOUT any of those considerations CoD is still doing 0.25 DPR more than MM. MM has a few minor advantages too, 20 range and the fact that if you happen to be facing a substantial attack penalty it may be the optimum choices, but those are at least as much 'corner cases' as those where CoD benefits.

I've never been in the 'MM is totally useless' camp, but I would not even consider it as a choice for an at-will. I wouldn't even pick it as the 3rd at-will for a human Wizard, though there was a time before some of the nastier at-wills in AP and Dragon (and now the even BETTER Essentials ones) showed up. With something like Arc Lightning (still usually not the best) MM is far outstripped.

The real icing on the cake though is the total non-existence of any control effect with MM. You can discount at-will control if you want to, but in fact it IS important because it is always available. In many fights it may be marginal but you can almost always find some melee round where you can drop in an at-will and cause some sort of issue for the enemy. It doesn't have to be much. Control is not always about spectacular effects. Sometimes it is just about preventing a couple minions from causing trouble, denying a monster an OA, or blocking them from using a specific movement path. Dropping a CoD or a Storm Pillar near a fighter for instance can force the enemy into a choice of provoking the fighter, taking damage, or simply not being able to move into position to attack. Given any kind of common situation like a doorway or 10' wide hallway or just a few bits of difficult terrain here or there and the benefits can be quite substantial. When combined with push, pull, slide, prone, etc which even low level allies normally have some of it gets even better. You probably won't WIN fights with at-will control, but in most encounters you can spare your allies a hit, cause the monster to use a less effective tactic, or hasten the demise of an enemy at least once with a good mix of at-will control effects. At worst you force the enemy to change tactics or suffer.

Does MM add much to a Mage? Meh, a little bit. You may use it now and then. Probably not every encounter. There may even be that encounter once in a blue moon where it stands out, but you could probably get by with your other at-wills and hardly notice the difference. The main thing you're getting is an RBA with 20 range that at least does SOMETHING. As a modest class feature it is fine, certainly not earth shaking and I would guess it would be hardly missed if it weren't there.

 

[KarinsDad]

Yes. And the chance to kill in one hit, vs the chance to miss entirely, is what balanced them against each other. Unless you can pinpoint for certain that an enemy has 7 or less hp - which is hard to do, and a relatively rare occurence - than the At-Wills are about equal. MM is an acceptable choice, sure - just not the only choice.

Several people keep claiming that a) pinpointing that the foe has 7 or fewer hit points is hard to do and b) the enemy rarely has 7 or fewer hit points.

Are these true?

At first level, non-Strikers tend to do about 7 to 10 points of damage on a successful hit.

Strikers tend to do 15 to 20.

Standard first level foes have about 28 hit points (some a little more, some less).

Is it really that hard to know that if a Striker and a non-Striker has hit a given foe, that one more good hit will probably do him in at first level?

Yeah, he might once in a while have 8 hit points at that point in time because he is higher level or the PCs rolled low damage, and MM takes him down to 1. But, he's not typically going to have 15 hit points remaining.

Standard second level foe? 35 hit points. Standard third level foe? 43 hit points.

This is not rocket science stuff here. Yes, the player will not typically know what level the foe is or necessarily if he is standard or elite, but then again, most encounters have multiple foes of the same type. It doesn't take much to realize that if the group has done ~50 hit points of damage to dead foe #1, and ~40 hit points to merely bloodied foe #2, that foe #2 is on his last legs.


As to how often a foe will be in the 1 to 7 range, that's more common at low level than people seem to think.

Every NPC that dies has some number of hit points before he is killed. And, the NPC tends to get bloodied first before this happens (unless he gets killed outright by a Striker while still not bloodied).

So, a first level standard NPC has 1 to 14 points remaining when first bloodied. From a probability standpoint, that means that your average first level bloodied foe is probably in the 1 to 7 range about half of the time before he dies.

A second level standard NPC has 1 to 18 points remaining when first bloodied. From a probability standpoint, that means that your average second level bloodied foe is probably in the 1 to 7 range about 40% of the time before he dies.

A third level standard NPC has 1 to 21 points remaining when first bloodied. From a probability standpoint, that means that your average second level bloodied foe is probably in the 1 to 8 (Wizard has +1 implement by then) range is still about 40% of the time before he dies.


So, an easy rule of thumb is: If a foe is bloodied at low level and one of my allies has hit but not killed him after he got bloodied, there's a fairly high chance that a magic missile will finish him off. If a foe is hit hard three times by non-strikers, or hit hard once by a striker and also hit by a non-striker, he's probably in or close to single digits.

Without keeping track of how much damage a foe has taken, how much damage other similar foes in the same encounter took before being bloodied or dying, these simple rules of thumb could allow a Wizard player good odds on picking off single digit NPCs.

Like counting cards at a casino, how much does the Wizard player's odds increase if he does pay attention to how often foes are hit and how hard to some minimal level. And as levels go up (with ~7 or 8 or so combat encounters per level, depending on how many skill challenges and how tough encounters are), wouldn't the Wizard player get better at guestimating when it's a good time to use MM and when it is not?


I'm thinking that the claims that this is hard to do and infrequent have no real data to back them up. I know that my in game experience allowed me to do it frequently. Not that I choose to do so every time, I almost always choose to do an area effect if I could (sometimes even knowing that one guy in the area was on the cusp).

 

[KarinsDad]

Sorry, but still the point stands, 14 is about the lowest Wisdom you typically see in most Wizards.

Lowest???

The problem with this type of POV is that you start with the faulty premise and then conclude that it is true, hence, the rest of your statements must be true.

I went to the LEB character page and looked at every single Wizard there:

3 fourth level Wizards with Wisdoms of: 12, 13, and 14
1 sixth level Wizard with Wisdom of: 12
1 fifth level hybrid Swordmage|Wizard with Wisdom of: 13
1 seventh level Wizard with Wisdom of: 10

I've also run two Wizards myself and neither of them had a starting 14 Wisdom either.

Granted, a small sample set, but 7 out of 8 of these Wizards do not have 14 Wisdom and none have 15 or higher.

My first Wizard when 4E came out had Wisdom 12 and Cloud of Daggers and used it as a minion killer (he also had Thunderwave to push them back one square). The game has changed a lot since then, but boosting Wisdom real high for a Wizard is only good for certain builds, not most Wizards. In fact, with so many different types of Wizards now, Wisdom tends to be a back burner type of thing, especially since Wizards tend to revolve around Int for the most part and can bump up different secondary ability scores depending on preference.

 

[BobTheNob]

Several people keep claiming that a) pinpointing that the foe has 7 or fewer hit points is hard to do

My software, which does the mapping and runs the battles, has hit point bars over all participants on the map. My players know...

b) the enemy rarely has 7 or fewer hit points.

Last game session we had, in a single encounter, 3 creatures on single digit hit points in a level 15 adventure...and that is not uncommon.

But then again, thats what makes this whole debate so ridiculous. Everyones game is different, and given MM is so different from other powers (auto hit makes it a VERY different beast), how effective that makes it comes down to the nature of the game you are playing.

This thread really is the most pointless exercise in comparing apples to oranges I have ever read.

 

[Locutus Zero]

As a DM, I know there is a very blurry line between a) a player studying all his options, doing some research, and coming up with the optimal power and b) a player doing too much research and keeping up too well with monster HP. KarinsDad, you sound like you are at least on the far side of that blurry line, if not all the way across it.

If I heard a player at my table say "Standard 2nd level enemies have 35 hit points" I'd be like "dude, don't do that".

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Lowest???

The problem with this type of POV is that you start with the faulty premise and then conclude that it is true, hence, the rest of your statements must be true.

I went to the LEB character page and looked at every single Wizard there:

3 fourth level Wizards with Wisdoms of: 12, 13, and 14
1 sixth level Wizard with Wisdom of: 12
1 fifth level hybrid Swordmage|Wizard with Wisdom of: 13
1 seventh level Wizard with Wisdom of: 10

I've also run two Wizards myself and neither of them had a starting 14 Wisdom either.

Granted, a small sample set, but 7 out of 8 of these Wizards do not have 14 Wisdom and none have 15 or higher.

My first Wizard when 4E came out had Wisdom 12 and Cloud of Daggers and used it as a minion killer (he also had Thunderwave to push them back one square). The game has changed a lot since then, but boosting Wisdom real high for a Wizard is only good for certain builds, not most Wizards. In fact, with so many different types of Wizards now, Wisdom tends to be a back burner type of thing, especially since Wizards tend to revolve around Int for the most part and can bump up different secondary ability scores depending on preference.

Yeah, this isn't my experience at all. Generalist Wizards are almost always WIS secondary. STR and CON provide little benefit for them. DEX is of little or no use to this kind of character either. CHA may be handy for skill reasons, but otherwise provides no real benefit that WIS doesn't do better. Thus 95% of all generalist wizards in my experience have a WIS secondary. Even if the character has a 20 INT you can easily have a 14 WIS. You're also better off dropping a secondary stat boost into say DEX, CHA, or CON when it is actually useful for a specific feat you need, which is going to be paragon, so why would you waste the points at level 1 in a stat that is not yet relevant? WIS is a rider on a number of pretty useful spells. It also obviously meshes well with Orb of Imposition, which is far and away the best choice for a generalist Wizard.

Not only that but if you are focusing on Save Ends effects (a true 'orbizard') OR using the Illusionist tome you are definitely wanting to have a good WIS, maybe even equal to your INT.

What is left? We have basically summoning specialists, who will of course want to have a high CON. Then there are potentially DEX based Wand of Accuracy users, which is an OK specialization but is these days almost entirely relegated to the likes of Genasi Blaster Wizards, who really could care less about control but who are also not going to bother with MM at all since there's little they can do to optimize it. In fact ANY WoA DEX build has no use for MM.

Now, we can ask about Staff of Defense based wizards. The thing here is these are all going to be generalists. Either they're basically a variation of the OoI build or maybe designed to be more of a get in their faces type of build. These guys are all about Thunderwave, and Thunderwave is guess what, a WIS secondary based power. They don't have a HUGE reason to pick a different secondary. They sure don't want to be picking DEX as it hurts their defenses something terrible. They COULD pick CON, but even so are likely to want WIS.

Thus actually the case is that having a 14+ wisdom is precisely very common and beyond that is the most likely character that MIGHT get some benefit from MM, yet as I've already shown, they have at a minimum a slightly better choice with CoD.

I really haven't built any Mages or seen much of them in action personally. Maybe they're less prone to using WIS as a strong secondary, I'm not sure, but from the look at them I have had I would say WIS is STILL the most common secondary.

I mean any question of what sorts of builds are more common than others is mostly going to be pure speculation. I know that ALL of the Wizards that have been run in my game were WIS secondary. Every single one. I don't pretend that is much of a sample of anything, but every time I poke around with optimizing a wizard WIS is always coming to the top as a desirable thing to keep high.

 

[Mapache]

I don't remember fighting in 5 foot wide corridors. But a Storm Pillar can utterly dominate a 15 foot wide corridor. Three automatic lightning strikes to get past it - by which point the monsters are feeling more than slightly singed. I work in a hospital - we have 10 foot wide corridors because we need to get beds down them and have room for them to pass. 15 foot is massive in an urban environment - it's wide enough for two carts to pass side by side which means it's wide enough for a road in any but the most upscale environments. (In a rural one, Storm Pillar isn't so good).

Storm Pillar, as written, doesn't really work right. Since it only goes off on the monster's turn, they can ready an action to charge past the pillar and take no damage from it because it's not their turn. Of course, you can also ready an action to force-move them next to it on their turn (but not on the readied charge, because that's not their turn). It just leads to all sorts of stupid readied-action shenanigans. If it just went off on voluntary movement regardless of turn, it'd be much less dumb.

 

[MrMyth]

Standard first level foes have about 28 hit points (some a little more, some less).

Is it really that hard to know that if a Striker and a non-Striker has hit a given foe, that one more good hit will probably do him in at first level?

Standard 1st level monsters from the Monster Vault - the most recent monster manual product - have between 22 and 38 hitpoints. 2nd level monsters from it have between 32 and 48 hitpoints. 3rd level monsters have between 35 and 55 hitpoints.

The possibility to get a general sense of a monster's hp is certainly there, especially if you pay attention to when you fight or him, or when similar monsters have dropped in the past. But I still don't think it is as trivial a matter as you make it out to be, nor is it a requisite ability for a skilled player of a wizard.

And, again, even if you can perfectly predict it, even at level 1, I don't think monsters will be ending up in that range that often in every encounter.

So, an easy rule of thumb is: If a foe is bloodied at low level and one of my allies has hit but not killed him after he got bloodied, there's a fairly high chance that a magic missile will finish him off. If a foe is hit hard three times by non-strikers, or hit hard once by a striker and also hit by a non-striker, he's probably in or close to single digits.

To be honest, the first of those is not a half-bad guideline. The others doesn't really acknowledge the differences in enemy hp, but can probably still be put to use. But there are enough variances in play that I still think you'll often end up with hp amounts that favor other options than MM. Between that, and the fact that when enemies hit this 'ideal level', the wizard isn't guaranteed to be the one coming up in initiative order, is why I think MM is only really holding its own with other options, rather than being a guaranteed 'better choice'.

Like counting cards at a casino, how much does the Wizard player's odds increase if he does pay attention to how often foes are hit and how hard to some minimal level. And as levels go up (with ~7 or 8 or so combat encounters per level, depending on how many skill challenges and how tough encounters are), wouldn't the Wizard player get better at guestimating when it's a good time to use MM and when it is not?

Except that every time you level, your range of potential hp for each monster shifts, and the differences get more and more extreme as you get higher level. This discussion about MM is really only relevant at level 1 - it doesn't take long before it definitively falls behind on the damage scale, while simultaneously the opportunities for enemies to be in instant kill range grow fewer.