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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elric" data-source="post: 4694400" data-attributes="member: 1139">I wasn't proposing "save second chance for a critical" the entire encounter.  That's a losing strategy compared to only saving it for a critical initially.As I mention in my post, assuming that the player knows the number of attacks left against him leads to a more effective solution for how long to save Second Chance for (than if he only knows a distribution of times he'll be attacked again).  The player doesn't have to be sure he'll be hit again- it's enough to know he'll be attacked a decent number of times.  With n=8, and optimal k=4, the player faces 8 attacks for the encounter, and reserves Second Chance for crits on the first (8-4)=4 attacks.  As I indicated above, that change in strategy makes Second Chance 13% more effective under my assumptions.Edit- if you believe that it's important to use a defensive power in the first half of an encounter in general, and we apply this requirement equally strictly to both Shield and Second Chance (instead of just raising it as an objection to saving Second Chance), this will favor Second Chance, because even with the "save it for a critical initially" Second Chance strategy, the rate of increase in expected damage blocked as a function of the number of attacks is higher for Shield.  So anything that effectively shortens the time you have to use the defensive powers favors Second Chance.</blockquote>