Invincible PC's

[keterys]

Sorry, but I'm having trouble reconciling this post with your comments in the other thread, in which you say that going from a 4 to a 7 is significant. Perhaps I'm just not seeing your point? The issue, as I see it, is that several points of the weak defence are effectively 'lost' through the levels, creating a situation where the weakest defence is essentially automatically hit.

Several points of weak defense are effectively lost through the levels. This does not make them automatically hit, except in rare circumstances. It still sucks.

But people will still associate 'hit with on a 5' as automatically hit, despite the 20% miss chance.

 

[Ryujin]

Several points of weak defense are effectively lost through the levels. This does not make them automatically hit, except in rare circumstances. It still sucks.

But people will still associate 'hit with on a 5' as automatically hit, despite the 20% miss chance.

I don't make that association. At 16th I'm facing opponents who hit me on a 4. At Epic low that will be a 1; effectively automatic.

 

[KarinsDad]

My worry with houserule 'fixes' is that they can snowball into houserule 'disasters'.

Agreed. That is why people need to adjust their houserules based on their experiences in the game.

In our group, we have removed several houserules, just because they were not actually used in play, or were more of a hassle then worth, or whatever.

I don't think that the houserules that have been suggested (+1 at 5/15/25, +1 to an additional ability score) can be anywhere near game breaking, but only playing the game will tell.

 

[Elric]

I don't want to derail the thread; but when it comes to defenses, the fundamental d20 mechanic favors the specialist over the generalist: raising a high defense helps more than raising a low defense (in terms of rounds-before-death). Strategy might mitigate that a bit; were it not that most creatures (even PC's, and certainly monsters) don't really have much choice on which defense they want to target.

This isn't true. If a defense is very low relative to the attacker's attack bonus, a plus to that defense won't give you the same benefit. For many characters/opponents, you won't get the full benefit of a FRW-boosting feat because the monster would have hit you on a 1 if not for the auto-miss rule, pre-feat (e.g., "it hits on a -1 or better"), so some of the benefit of a bonus (e.g., that from a feat) will be lost. I'll set that possibility aside.

If you have two enemies, one of whom needs an 18 to hit you, and the other of whom needs a 2 to hit you, and they do equal damage, the average damage you take if both attack you once is the same whether you get a +2 bonus to the defense where you're hit on an 18 or the defense where you're hit on a 2. Just because you chose to take a +2 to your stronger defense doesn't mean you can ignore the attacks on your weak defense!

As you mention, to the extent that monsters target characters' weak spots, boosting weaknesses will look even better. Since fights aren't solo affairs and different characters have different weak FRWs, even if each monster can only target one FRW defense, between a group of monsters they might still be able to target weak spots effectively (though doing this might lose the benefits of focus fire; complications abound).

Edit: this discussion feels more relevant to the other thread on this topic, so it's probably better to continue it there: http://www.enworld.org/forum/d-d-4th-edition-rules/267173-non-ac-defenses-5.html#post4982384

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Well, its also just generally worth stating, since nobody has so far, that increasing your offense ALWAYS trumps increasing your defense at least up to some point where more offense is unproductive. No matter how good your defenses are you need offense to win. Enough offense reduces the need for defense, which means N amount of resources put into offense yields both the offensive gain AND some N/X amount of effective gain in defense. OTOH the same resources put into defense gains you just N amount of extra defense.

Defense is really only a good buy in any combat system when the lethality of attacks is very high already. This is not generally the case in 4e, which in fact has a pretty low lethality and thus doesn't favor added defense. It is quite possible defensive boosts should simply be a lot cheaper in 4e than they are currently. The fact that there are 4 defenses to worry about just compounds the problem even more.

 

[keterys]

I don't make that association. At 16th I'm facing opponents who hit me on a 4. At Epic low that will be a 1; effectively automatic.

At epic low, it'll be a 4 still. +1 at 21st ability bump, +1 from enhancement, +2 or +3 from level, it all works out.

By 30th, you'll fall behind another 3 though (5 from level, another +1 from enhancement, over 9 levels) which would bring you to the 1. Yep, definitely.

Also if your DM throws lots of higher level things at you. Level +5 soldiers are bad for their defense _and_ their offense. Course, they also need low numbers to hit your best defenses.

There is definitely a problem, and I do support fixing it.

 

[Elric]

Well, its also just generally worth stating, since nobody has so far, that increasing your offense ALWAYS trumps increasing your defense at least up to some point where more offense is unproductive. No matter how good your defenses are you need offense to win. Enough offense reduces the need for defense, which means N amount of resources put into offense yields both the offensive gain AND some N/X amount of effective gain in defense. OTOH the same resources put into defense gains you just N amount of extra defense.

This isn't true. Suppose that you're trying to minimize the average damage you'll take from a monster before killing it (and we assume you'll always kill it before it kills you!), and it gets to go first (for simplicity). The average damage you take equals the average number of rounds it takes you to kill it, times the average damage it deals to you each round.

If we then make the approximation that the average rounds to kill the monster equals its hit points divided by the average damage you deal to it per round, the average damage you take from it is proportional to (Average damage it deals you per round)/(Average damage you deal to it per round). As you can see, this doesn't imply that offense is better than defense in general, or even that offense is better than defense until offense is really good.

It is quite possible defensive boosts should simply be a lot cheaper in 4e than they are currently. The fact that there are 4 defenses to worry about just compounds the problem even more.

This is more sensible. The Great Fortitude line of feats isn't that good because +2 to one FRW defense that doesn't get targeted much (figure ~50% attacks target AC, ~17% of attacks target each FRW, and this might be too high for FRWs, particularly at low levels) isn't great. Still, Robust Defenses (+2 to each FRW) seems way over the top. This is why I don't think the paragon defenses feat (+1 to each FRW) is a big deal; a typed bonus for +3 combined to FRW is a reasonable power level for a feat.

 

[KarinsDad]

Well, its also just generally worth stating, since nobody has so far, that increasing your offense ALWAYS trumps increasing your defense at least up to some point where more offense is unproductive. No matter how good your defenses are you need offense to win. Enough offense reduces the need for defense, which means N amount of resources put into offense yields both the offensive gain AND some N/X amount of effective gain in defense. OTOH the same resources put into defense gains you just N amount of extra defense.

Hmmm.

I'm not sure about this.

Yes, offense can decrease the number of rounds of combat, hence, the number of rounds not requiring defense.

However, defense can decrease the amount of damage taken, hence, freeing up healing resources that can be used on other PCs in order to maintain the action economy.

Personally, I think a balanced approach to both might be preferable, but I can easily see an Iron Wizard who almost never gets hit and almost never has conditions on himself, hence, he can constantly be putting conditions on foes and he frees up the Leader for healing and assisting the other PCs. And in the case of a Wizard, his Int increases offense, and 2 of the 4 defenses.


Enemy attacks are not just about hit point damage either. Having high defenses means that a given PC is not slid a lot, not weakened a lot, not stunned a lot, etc.

I have always been a big proponent of defense over offense for my personal PCs, but I also see the need for balance in a party where some PCs might go gung ho on offense.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This isn't true. Suppose that you're trying to minimize the average damage you'll take from a monster before killing it (and we assume you'll always kill it before it kills you!), and it gets to go first (for simplicity).

No, because this very assumption that you WILL win invalidates the rest of your logic. You won't always win. In any realistic sense offense is primary over defense. Only the very most simplistic case of an "offense bonus" and a "defense bonus" which are exactly symmetrical and where N damage taken by you is as good as N damage delivered yields the result that defense and offense are equally good. 4e violates these conditions at every single turn.

There is a more subtle reason why offense trumps defense as well, which is the general tactical argument. A high offense force can deploy itself more easily to greater advantage, take better advantage of mobility, probably gains more advantage from terrain, etc.

In practically every sense defense is inferior to offense both as a general tactical principle and specifically in the context of 4e combat.

Now, that doesn't mean it can't be even more advantageous to have the tactical flexibility of say having one very high defense unit and a number of high offense units to back it up. However this will depend on the mix of tactical situations you face and the skill of the opposing commanders, as well as factors like how spread out the units are relative to their effective engagement ranges, etc.

SOD-like, or even just the common generally degrading 4e conditions, effects also militate more towards offense. You want to DEPLOY these effects and disable the enemy quickly vs hoping to resist his employment of them. Again this mostly devolves down to tactical advantage. When you get yourself into a good position you want to strike a decisive blow, not nibble a bit on the other guy and then let him react. His first mistake should be his last mistake.

In any case my point stands. Defense is significantly less valuable than offense and in 4e offensive boosts are actually cheaper than defensive ones. Its no wonder that in general by epic tier most characters are doing crushing amounts of damage and hitting on low numbers yet their opponents hit them in return on equally low numbers, usually. There isn't exact symmetry between PCs and monsters of course, but close enough to draw reasonable conclusions which I've validated pretty well in actual play.

 

[kieza]

What I'd like to see in whatever edition comes out next (hopefully, not for a while) is math that actually works. For all that 4th edition claimed to kill sacred cows, it kept stat increases, which made it necessary to add in masterwork armor, and the math didn't work right anyways.

I've actually found something that works fairly well; remove all the stat boosts. This gives players an increase of ~21 over 30 levels. If you also give players a single +1 Magic weapon, cloak, or armor at level 1, it gives +20 over 30 levels. Then, give monsters defenses of Level + whatever + 2/3 level. The gap between FRWs doesn't increase at all, either.

The other thing that ticks me off is that player health increases by 4-7 per level, and monster health by 6-10...but damage, for both monsters and players, increases by maybe 1-2 per level. The number of hits it takes to down a monster increases over time, which makes combat at higher levels take longer, even discounting the increased options. I've started decreasing monster health a bit, and I'm toying with giving +1/2 level to damage.