Is the math off?
- Thread starter Kzach
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What level do you play at?
To quote a friend of mine from WoW.
"What's the point of getting all powerful if you can't go back and blow s*** away every once in awhile?"
If I grow stronger, and my adversaries continue progressing past me, I would likely curse the gods for hacking life to smite me, given all the trials and tribulations I'd be facing. If every fight as I get stronger becomes subjectively HARDER, meaning it becomes more difficult to win as I get stronger, it seems counterintuitive to me.
Then again, I like to be able to go in and slaughter things every once in awhile.
AdmundfortGeographer
Getting lost in fantasy maps
Can someone who understands the "4e math", and who sees just how off this "math is off" is, explain this situation as if to someone who doesn't play 4e? Which I consider myself to be . . . I've only lightly read through the basics.
- Are there inflection points in the progression, and where are they? Or . . .
- Is it a steady, even progression in the "off" quality?
- What has been the 4e developmental history of the status of this "math off"ness. i.e. has it always been there, or have recent innovations created it?
- What are the ultimate improvements/detriments in the game of the fixes?
- Is there room for more quick and dirty fixes from WotC (not house rules) that would fall short of wholesale rebuilding?
- Would the discussion have been different if WotC never tried patching the math?
Your way off on your leader bonus. Most of the tiem, the bonus is the leaders primary stat. At that level, the bonus will be much higher, probably around +6 or more.
I expect Epic level to be harder. I am glad that it is that way.
1) A few points during each tier
2) More or less steady
3) Always been there
4) A few feats called Expertise that gives characters +1/+2/+3 to hit at each tier.
5) No more improvements are necessary, although the fact that players have to spend a single feat to take Expertise drives some players in a tizzy.
6) The discussion would be different only as much as we wouldn't hear the complaints from certain people that WotC tried to "fix the math". They are all offended by that. They would have prefered WotC ignored the problem by not creating the Expertise feats, than what they did do by creating them. Since they are min-maxers (or "optimizers" if you'd prefer to more PC-term), they feel like they have to take Expertise since it's available to them, but don't like the fact that they lose a feat slot to do it.
The irony of course being that they complain about losing a feat slot to a so-called "required" feat which prohibits them from taking a more "interesting" one... and yet when they go over all their builds they are always taking feats for optimization anyway. So they are really losing nothing when you get right down to it. It's not as though they would have taken Linguist had WotC not been so evil enough to put Expertise in front of them.
Long story short... people like to complain.
Sure. The core issue is this: Monster defenses are calculated according to a certain simple formula. Player attack bonuses are calculated according to another, somewhat more complex formula.
As the PCs advance, their attack bonuses gradually fall behind the defenses of monsters of the same level. (It's about a 4-point difference over all 30 levels.) It is thus significantly harder for a 30th-level character to hit a 30th-level monster than it is for a 1st-level character to hit a 1st-level monster.
Neither, exactly. Monster defenses advance at a flat rate: 1 point per level. Player attack bonuses advance unevenly. At one level, your PC's attack bonus won't go up at all. The next level, it could go up 2 points or even 3, depending on when you find a new magic sword and whether your attack stat is even or odd.
So, the "offness" - the discrepancy between attack bonus and defense - increases progressively over the course of 30 levels. There's no single inflection point. But it's not a steady and even progression, either. It's jerky.
It has been there since the release of the game. Player's Handbook 2 contained the Expertise feats, which are regarded by many as a "feat-fix" to address the problem. (Expertise gives you an attack bonus of +1, increasing to +2 at 15th level and +3 at 25th.)
The improvement of Expertise is that it compensates for the discrepancy. Not entirely, but enough to make the game run reasonably well. The detriment is that you have to pay a "feat tax" to get the benefit of the fix, and less rules-savvy players may not realize how much it's going to affect gameplay if they don't take it.
I can think of a few other ways they could have done it. For instance, the masterwork armor rules could be extended to weapons. The problem is, they'd need a way to ensure that any other fix they introduced could not be combined with Expertise. Otherwise they'd end up with the opposite problem.
Sure. Instead of complaining about the shortcomings of the fix, we'd be complaining about the original problem.
What game are you playing? Most of the time it's nowhere near that big. You might get that to one attack, maybe even to all attacks for a round, but not for the whole party for the whole encounter.
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An earlier poster (Stalker0) mentioned how it worked in 3e but it was totally different in 1e/2e.
Fighters (and other melee guys that had a good THACO) at low levels had a devil of a time hitting.
Assuming you had a 16 STR (and with the random rolls of 1e/2e definitely not a sure thing), at 1st level you're looking at rolling 13+ to hit a lowly goblin (and there aren't as many modifiers to increase this) and a 15+ to hit a gnoll or a bugbear.
Just like 3e though, it got progressively easier to hit since few creatures actually had an AC lower than 0 (equivalent of 20 in 3e/4e)
The weird thing was that magic was reversed. Magic at low levels was a sure thing againt a PC but by the time you hit name level, a fighter was likely failing a saving throw only on a roll of 4 or lower.
Fighters (and other melee guys that had a good THACO) at low levels had a devil of a time hitting.
Assuming you had a 16 STR (and with the random rolls of 1e/2e definitely not a sure thing), at 1st level you're looking at rolling 13+ to hit a lowly goblin (and there aren't as many modifiers to increase this) and a 15+ to hit a gnoll or a bugbear.
Just like 3e though, it got progressively easier to hit since few creatures actually had an AC lower than 0 (equivalent of 20 in 3e/4e)
The weird thing was that magic was reversed. Magic at low levels was a sure thing againt a PC but by the time you hit name level, a fighter was likely failing a saving throw only on a roll of 4 or lower.
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