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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AngryPurpleCyclops" data-source="post: 4691913" data-attributes="member: 82732">I normally just read enworld but after reading this thread I felt compelled/annoyed enough to join and reply.  First there's a lot of logical fallacies being applied in this thread some even by the people referencing logical fallacies as part of their argument.  This example above is just one example of some really questionable parallels being drawn.First the halflings power can impact ANY attack.  Even remove a critical hit 95% of the time.  The re-roll makes it roughly 50% likely to turn any hit into a miss.  The shield power can only block 50% of the attack types (though reflex and AC seem much more prevalent at lower levels so it will frequently be more useful than 50%) but it also is restricted to impacting EXACTLY 20% of attacks.  Which means the shield spell is useful 20% of the time against 50% of the attack types.  This works out to blocking 10% of attacks (once per encounter) with a residual effect of +4 to those defenses for another round.  If you skew the results based upon reflex and AC attacks being ~75% of all attacks that percentage goes to 15%.  Now compare this to the halflings power.  Roughly 50% of all attacks hit.  The halfling can therefore impact 50% of 50% of attacks.  This is a 25% overall effectiveness for the halfling power.  That's 10% more effective than shield for the math challenged.  The shield has a residual effect that it might save you from another attack in the next round.  The halfling power has a bonus effect that 95% of the time it blocks a critical hit.  We could argue all day about the residual or the critical block being more important but for my purposes I'll call it a wash so we can compare the math heads up.  If you make the shield spell into a "guess" by not informing your players, you basically cut it's effectiveness by more than half.  If you also make the pc guess if it's even an attack that can be blocked (i.e. vs reflex/ac) you're reducing it by nearly half again.  Even skewing the numbers in favor of making better than average choices as to what attacks "are of a type that shield an impact" you're basically reducing shield to in the neighborhood of 5% effective compared to ~25% the halflings power.</blockquote>

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