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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AngryPurpleCyclops" data-source="post: 4694799" data-attributes="member: 82732">If you read further in my post I went back and read what he was saying more carefully and I figured out what he meant.  I was just too lazy to go back and edit the first half of my post.  See my post above, where I do account for this.  If you are targeted by 8 attacks with a 50% chance to hit (as in my example above), and crits=1.5 regular hits, optimal use of Second Chance reserving it for crits initially makes it block 13% more damage than a myopic “use Second Chance on the first hit” strategy.more favorable yes, but not at all minor.  If you have played a wizard with shield you'll be well aware that a significant percentage of encounters shield does not get employed.  This is partly because the attacks might not be vs ac and partly because the attack rolls might not fall in the window.  If you take out minion attacks this becomes even more likely.  In a recent encounter with howling hags and bugbears I was only attacked vs reflex/ac 3 times out of about 9 attacks.  None of them fell in the range I could affect.  Trust me I would have really liked to have had second chance when the hag critical'd me for 27 with her bloodied shriek.  If you take out minions, for argument sake I assume minions are about 10% of the attacks. The percentage that shield will impact an attack drops from 14.6% to 11.4%. I'll do the math if someone disputes this but that is the right number based upon 10% minions and not using shield against them.This means that 88.6 percent of attacks will not be impacted by shield.  If your wizard gets attacked 6 times in an encounter 48.3% of the time you will not be able to use shield.  If he gets attacked 10 times in an encounter the percentage is still 29.8% that he will NOT get to use shield.  That's a pretty significant chance in my opinion and one backed up by both personal experience and the anecdotal evidence presented in this thread by several other players.  Even at 15 attacks in an encounter it's still 16.3% likely shield did not get a chance to be used.  That's still 1 in 6 in an encounter which is probably at the high end of attacks on the wizard and thus pretty important that you get to use your defenses.  Hardly "minor".this totally misses the point. again.you're making my case not yours here.  Second chance will always get to be played or it won't matter (i.e. the combat reached a successful outcome).  These are both pretty minuscule probabilities.  If you have 3hp remaining the battle field will pretty likely not have any minions remaining on it.  There are lots of times where it's preferable to hold shield in reserve.  If a kobold hits me with a shortsword or spear but there's a kobold slinger or 3 hurling gluepots or firepots I'll probably hold off on usuing it and take my d6+3 or d8 dmg.  I agree that waiting is generally not a good idea for shield (one more weakness compared to second chance) but there are numerous times where waiting is a good idea with shield which hurts it's overall effectiveness.  Waiting with second chance is pretty much NEVER going to hurt you.  You'll almost always get to use it since you can use it on ANY attack and if you don't it's because you already won the encounter.I initially skipped this because there's just no way to know the number of future attacks you'll face.  Your math is a lot better than KD's but a lot of your assumptions are at least a little circumspect and ignore real world application. expectation of what?  There are way too many variables in this equation to put a good number to it.  Bottom line, it's very easy to save second chance until you receive a crit unless you reach a point in the combat that you feel a normal hit has a significant chance of putting you down.  It will almost never be wasted and in the cases where it is wasted it's moot because by default you must have won the battle.   The odds that you block a crit in any major battle with second chance (by major I mean you receive 10 or more attacks) is probably in the neighborhood of 35-65% and the rest of the time you'll still have a 50% chance of blocking a normal hit.  There is almost no chance of wasting it unless you're simply not paying attention.  In shorter encounters, it probably doesn't even matter (though you still have a decent chance to block a crit). 13% is greatly undervalued for crit blocking.  The real number is probably about an additional 40% in damage reduction.If a crit is 150% damage and a regular hit is 100%, then we assume that 45% of that time you turn the crit into a hit and 50% into a miss.45 x .50 = .09and 50% of the time you turn it into no dmg at all.50 x 1.5 = .75and .5 of the time you have no effect .09 + .75 = .84 or 84% average damage reduction on crits.if you block a crit in only 20% of encounters (a very low number almost guaranteed to not be accurate) then the .84 x .2 would be 16.8% damage reduction value.  If you change this to blocking a crit in 35% of encounters the value of second chance jumps by 29.4% additional damage reduction.  In the encounters where it really matters (i.e. the 'hard" encounters where the party is severely challenged) then you can likely expect upwards of 8-10 attacks and the added value of second chance rises toward 50%.  This is somewhat reduced by the concept that you might feel pressed to use it before you take 10-12 attacks because you hp's are getting low but you might also get a healing word from the cleric and hang in for 12-15 ATT's before you use it.  The more I look at these numbers the more obvious it becomes that second chance is at least twice as effective as shield.</blockquote>

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