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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 4997488" data-attributes="member: 58197">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. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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