Is a +3 good enough to hit stuff?

[Nail]

Weren't the PCs in KoTS fairly unoptimized as well? That might account for their less than stellar performance against the enemies...

FWIW:

I ran a group playing the pre-gen PCs. Straight-up, no modifications or errata.

They did fine against the foes in KotS. ...And the cleric, with the +3 attacks did "okay". Not "great", just "okay".

 

[Stalker0]

you should be better of with a 16 in your main score than in previous editions. It´s just +1 to hit and +1 damage. having high strength to compensate will do wonders IF an enemy comes too close to you^^

To get a true gadge of that, you would have to run 3.5 1st level wizard DCs vs low level encounters.

With 3.5, you had the dichotomy of a fighter who had infinite attack rolls, so while a miss is always disappointing its not the end of the world vs the wizard where missing with a spell was a very big deal. But on the other hand wizard spells tended to do more.

In 4e, everyone has a bit of the wizard phenomena. A character that misses with his encounter or daily can never get that back, no matter how many more rolls he has in the fight. That makes to hit rolls very important. The question ultimately becomes...how important?

A +1 to hit in 4e is certainly more important than a 3.5 fighter's +1 to hit, but is it as important as a 3.5 wizard's +1 to Spell DCs? That's a question that would take a bit more digging to create a useful comparison.

 

[Plane Sailing]

I would argue that if a 16 in a primary stat wasn't good enough to be fun and effective, then the 4e design has failed in a pretty sad way.

I don't know when I'll get to go as a player, but the character I'm planning has a 16 in his primary ability to kind of check this out.

 

[Runestar]

Not quite.

The game assumes you will have items of the appropriate levels. It does NOT assume those items are exactly what the PC needs.

Where is this stated?

It just doesn't make sense, IMO.

 

[Staffan]

I haven't had problems with my Wizard and an Int of 16, though I am a Wand-wizard.

A wizard with Int 16 is a little better off than a devoted cleric with Wis 16, because the wizard can choose at-wills targeting either Ref or Fort, while the cleric's only target Ref. Most of the kobolds (minions and skirmishers) have a Ref defense that's 2-3 points higher than their Fort defense.

 

[AllisterH]

I would argue that if a 16 in a primary stat wasn't good enough to be fun and effective, then the 4e design has failed in a pretty sad way.

I don't know when I'll get to go as a player, but the character I'm planning has a 16 in his primary ability to kind of check this out.

This is what I would love to see.

I've been tracking the issue myself in our games. One player has a 20 str fighter (after racials) and what I've been doing is getting them to note the number of times they would've missed if they had a 16 STR (after racials).

In about a month of gaming, once a week, 5-6 hours, what I've noticed is that the ATTACK value doesn't matter.

What I mean by that is if they were fighting, the number of healing surges needed to recover after battle fluctuated around 1. They would still "win" battles and the resources expended were roughly the same thanks to the non-granular nature of healing surges.

What I found was a bigger issue was that the fighter really paid for it in all other aspects namely, his other defenses and skills.

16 and 18 (after racials) from my limited playtesting are both superior than going for a 20.

 

[Nifft]

A character that misses with his encounter or daily can never get that back, no matter how many more rolls he has in the fight.

Fighters with Reliable powers can. That's part of why it's perfectly fine for a Dwarf Fighter to have a mere 16 Strength.

Cheers, -- N

 

[Runestar]

Fighters with Reliable powers can. That's part of why it's perfectly fine for a Dwarf Fighter to have a mere 16 Strength.

Cheers, -- N

But is it advisable? While you retain a reliable power if you miss, you will still have wasted a standard action, and still need to spend a standard action next round to use it. Conversely, a fighter who hit with said power can use that extra action to make another attack in the following round.

Seems like reliable is there only to make a bad scenario somewhat better. But wouldn't it be better if said scenario (ie: you miss) never occurred? I am wondering if reliable is simply some sort of "feel good" ability which may turn out to be overrated...?

 

[Cadfan]

At the end of the day, its only on approximately every 20 rolls that you'll notice a concrete difference. You can crunch the numbers lots of different ways, some of which make that look very large in terms of overall damage output. But no matter how you do it, its still 1 in 20 rolls of the die.

And also -1 damage versus the 18, of course.

 

[Mengu]

Fighters with Reliable powers can. That's part of why it's perfectly fine for a Dwarf Fighter to have a mere 16 Strength.

Cheers, -- N

So is it not fine for a dwarf two-weapon ranger to have 16 strength, or a dwarf protecting paladin to have 16 charisma, or a dwarf wizard to have 16 intelligence? None of them have reliable powers.

16 whatever works fine. If you can grab an 18 great. If not, it's still quite workable, as long as you have some other benefit from racial stat bonuses.

There are few races that don't work very well for a couple classes, but out of 64 possibilities, the number of combinations that are questionable are very few.