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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alex319" data-source="post: 4677902" data-attributes="member: 45678">Here's a good way of thinking about it.Let's say I sunder an opponent's weapon using your rules, giving them -1 to attacks for the rest of the encounter. Assuming they used to hit 50% of the time, they now hit 45% of the time. Thus I have reduced their damage output by 10%.If I instead hit him with a regular attack and took away 10% of their hit points, that would have reduced his expected survival time by 10%, thus also reducing their expected damage output for the rest of the encounter by 10%.This means that this kind of sunder is essentially worth as much as taking off 10% of their hit points. (Of course, there are other considerations than expected damage output. Monsters can provide benefits to their team other than damage, such as flanking and battlefield control, so killing them might be preferable. But sundering reduces their damage output immediately, while hitting them doesn't reduce their damage output at all until their hit points fall to zero.)You can apply a similar analysis to other abilities like disarm that affect opponents for the rest of the encounter.Now, consider some examples (I just randomly flipped through my MM, so I don't know how representative they are):The Greenscale Darter (Level 5 Lurker, MM p.178) has 50 hit points. At level 5, players will probably be doing around 10-15 points of damage on average with a basic attack (let's say 1d8 for the [W], plus 3-5 attribute bonus, plus 1-2 for weapon enhancement bonus, plus 1-4 more for extra damage based on the at-will used, feats, and such) Now sundering is equivalent to doing about 5 damage, so it is not a useful ability.But suppose that instead of sundering him you disarm him of his blowgun. This forces him to use his club, and let's say it about halves his combat effectiveness. Thus it's equivalent to about 25 damage. Since it usually takes two actions to disarm him, it's about balanced with the other options.Now suppose you're fighting Orcus (Level 33 Solo, p.206). Notice that there are actually very few solos in the MM that actually use held weapons - Orcus is the only one I can find at the moment. Orcus has 1525 HP, and if you can disarm him of his Wand of Orcus then he can't use his main standard action attack. He still has other attacks, but he can't use his main standard action attack. Suppose we rule that he can make an unarmed attack at 2 die sizes below his Wand of Orcus attack, and he doesn't get the necrotic damage because that comes from the wand. So instead of doing 2d12 + 12 + 1d12 necrotic (31.5 average) damage, he does 2d8 + 12 (21 average) damage, reducing the damage output by one-third. Of course he still has other attack powers, but losing the range on the Wand of Orcus means he can't stand back to use his powers and tactics most effectively. So let's take 1/3 as an estimate of how much his power drops.Thus disarming Orcus is worth about 500 points of damage. You'd be hard-pressed to do anywhere near that much damage with any other power, even a 29th level daily.(Note that once Orcus is disarmed, it's easy to pick up his weapon immediately, spending an AP if necessary, so he can't pick it back up.)---------Now, probably what you're shooting for with the disarm power is something that is useful situationally, but not something that you're using every combat. Thus probably it should be calibrated so that sundering or disarming just an ordinary melee weapon is almost never a useful thing to do, but it can be useful if there are special powers that key off the weapon.Obviously you're the one who knows exactly where on this scale you want the disarming and sundering to be, but this type of analysis can help you get to that point.</blockquote>

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