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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 4977319" data-attributes="member: 82106">But what other kind of evidence would there be Keterys? The "there's a math bug" crowd can pretty well say "look, you lose 3 points of to-hit over 30 levels!" and its a fairly quantifiable statement. The opposite point might hypothetically be demonstrated, but only by some sort of massive sampling effort of actual combats since we simply cannot point to an equation and demonstrate it.Still, I think its a fairly convincing argument. There are MANY ways in which a party's capabilities increase in non-quantifiable or hard to quantify ways. Not only do buffs and debuffs improve to some extent (and how much is that, its not the quantity of them that matters but how often they actually come up at the table). Players at 30th level have 4 daily powers at their disposal, not to mention 3 ED features which usually amount to a huge power increase. More than that characters gain an enormous amount of flexibility in how they approach challenges. Sure the challenges are harder, but an epic character is much more likely to take them on on his terms, favorable ones obviously, or foil the enemy.Beyond that it is also pretty apparent that the bulk of level 26+ encounters are going to contain a lot of equal or even lower level monsters. There are a total of SEVEN level 30+ monsters in the game, all Solo. There are total of under 2 dozen level 26+ monsters in the 2 MMs, all but one of which is a solo and the last one (Godforged Colossus) is an elite. In most games there simply isn't the quantity of monsters available to build out a suite of encounter containing all higher level monsters. Standard monsters virtually don't exist at all in upper epic. Even in the lower half of epic they're pretty scarce. Ergo a lot of encounters are going to consist of a lot of equal or under level monsters.I have to fall into the camp with DS. Sure you can find someone bitching online about ANYTHING if you look around, but to say that there was some sort of general problem with epic level play pre-PHB2 is hard to support. Some groups have trouble at level 1, but is that sufficient to make a case that level 1 is broken? I don't think so. The game is simply more interesting if the nature of threats and the balance of offense and defense changes somewhat over the course of play. If anything 4e is actually a bit TOO consistent IMHO. Really these discussions kind of amuse me anyway because the game could be exactly the same as it is and they'd vanish entirely if only WotC had just not printed levels on the monsters (well, we wouldn't have encounter budgets, but oh well). Discounting the worthless CR system of 3.x 4e is actually the first time there HAS been any notion of an actual monster power level. There was no such concept at all in 2e and before, none whatsoever. Monsters had hit dice, which sort of roughly approximated to a level and generally appeared on random encounter charts of some level or other (DM dependent). If 4e didn't publish a level for each monster then who would be saying you did or didn't gain what vs Orcus that you did or didn't have vs an Orc Berzerker when you were level 1? Its not that I don't get the argument about the Expertise feats. Sure, its annoying that they published some feats that are out of line with the power level of the other feats. I don't think it was a great idea. What annoys me is that they did it to shut up a bunch of people that were only whining in the first place because WotC stuck a level number on the monsters to begin with!!!! They only did that to make the game more convenient to play. Maybe they should have known better than to give the number crunchers so much ammo! lol.I do appreciate the analysis of the game and I don't honestly have any problem with number crunching, but it seems to be getting a bit out of control these days. There is an "envelope" of play in 4e where the numbers work. The levels of specific monsters that fit within that envelope may be a bit different at epic vs heroic, but remember that monster level is not a very important number. Its purely a number for the DM to use behind the scenes.</blockquote>

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