D&D 5E How powerfull is a permanent blur item?

[GX.Sigma]

Wow, this whole time I had no idea I had derailed this thread so hard. An @ tag here or there would've been appreciated.

 

[Darkness]

[MENTION=6701872]AaronOfBarbaria[/MENTION] and [MENTION=16814]Ovinomancer[/MENTION] - it's time to stop this bickering. Please don't respond or refer to each other in this thread any more.

 

[discosoc]

I learned to deal with displacement effects the way I dealt with players looking to push really high AC; ignore them in combat. Go for the guys that are easier to hit, because it simply wouldn't be sensible to keep hacking away at someone you can't hope to hit while his/her allies are wailing on you. So although it's possible a permanent blur effect would make that character too defensively powerful, the rest of the group will very likely be the ones to suffer.

Still, with the way 5e power trips into stupid levels, a permanent blur effect will be the least of your balancing problems after about level 8, so I wouldn't lose too much sleep over it.

 

[FrogReaver]

I learned to deal with displacement effects the way I dealt with players looking to push really high AC; ignore them in combat. Go for the guys that are easier to hit, because it simply wouldn't be sensible to keep hacking away at someone you can't hope to hit while his/her allies are wailing on you. So although it's possible a permanent blur effect would make that character too defensively powerful, the rest of the group will very likely be the ones to suffer.

Still, with the way 5e power trips into stupid levels, a permanent blur effect will be the least of your balancing problems after about level 8, so I wouldn't lose too much sleep over it.

I'm still not convinced.

Enemy behavior should be more complex than always target the easiest to kill characters or always target the beefiest. There's a wide range of factors to take into account when an enemy chooses to attack a target.

1. Proximity
2. Damage amount dealt by PC's to said enemy
3. Ease of hitting the said PC
4. hatred of archers
5. hatred of mages
6. Proving the enemy is the strongest on team enemy by taking on the hero they perceive as strongest
etc. (and all of this is just with human level of intelligence enemies enemies)

The point is that some enemies should take into account the high effective AC, many others should not for a variety of in game reasons. In your proposed solution, the solution limits the behaviors my monsters can take and makes them less real and more binary. Intelligent ones always ignore the hard to hit character and dumb ones don't. There's a whole world of intelligent enemies that may have a more overpowering motivation than their intelligence. There's also the occasional dumb enemy that may see that the highest AC character is the only one wearing red and attacks him because he wears red or stands out to him in some other way.

In other words, throw variety at your players. Variety of monsters, variety of enemy tactics, variety of battle conditions. At least that's my opinion. So your solution would never work for me. It directly affects my ability to throw variety at the players.

 

[discosoc]

I'm still not convinced.

Enemy behavior should be more complex than always target the easiest to kill characters or always target the beefiest. There's a wide range of factors to take into account when an enemy chooses to attack a target.

1. Proximity
2. Damage amount dealt by PC's to said enemy
3. Ease of hitting the said PC
4. hatred of archers
5. hatred of mages
6. Proving the enemy is the strongest on team enemy by taking on the hero they perceive as strongest
etc. (and all of this is just with human level of intelligence enemies enemies)

The point is that some enemies should take into account the high effective AC, many others should not for a variety of in game reasons. In your proposed solution, the solution limits the behaviors my monsters can take and makes them less real and more binary. Intelligent ones always ignore the hard to hit character and dumb ones don't. There's a whole world of intelligent enemies that may have a more overpowering motivation than their intelligence. There's also the occasional dumb enemy that may see that the highest AC character is the only one wearing red and attacks him because he wears red or stands out to him in some other way.

In other words, throw variety at your players. Variety of monsters, variety of enemy tactics, variety of battle conditions. At least that's my opinion. So your solution would never work for me. It directly affects my ability to throw variety at the players.

Of course. I'd just add to the top of that list "avoid the guy you have no hope of hitting until after the other threats are down."

Yes, there will be the occasional stupid guy who just can't stop attacking him. Special individual motivations like hatred of X or Y can certainly change things, etc.. But those are all very normal behavioral modifiers regardless of any kind of Blur effect. I'm certainly not going to attempt to elaborate on the various nuanced circumstances under which a creature might deviate from normal behavior.

Since this topic was about the blur effect, and how it plays into balance, I chose to chime in with my take on it being "balance isn't an issue with it because it can be mitigated or worked around" and "here's why." You being convinced of my opinion makes literally zero difference to me.

 

[cmad1977]

+1 armor with blur seems darn powerful. +1 AC plus disadvantage on melee attacks against is nasty. Among things that might mitigate that(many have even mentioned) are things like Kobolds or other creatures with Pack Tactics. Unless I'm mistaken, pack tactics and other things that grant advantage would counter the blur effect.

Environmental effects could help too. Mud,webs,darkness,vines, snow, fog...things like that might mitigate the issue.


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