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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5574568" data-attributes="member: 82106">I think it goes deeper than that. A 16 prime stat is not 'suboptimal'. You can't make that kind of generalization. It certainly could be suboptimal for certain builds, it could be highly optimal for others. Beyond that it costs a LOT more points to jack a stat beyond 16. Those points have to come from somewhere. A less highly focused stat allocation means you have overall better stats. Those better numbers are obviously going into other stats, presumably useful ones. It is even hard to say that any stat is really useless to any given character. It may or may not be highly useful in the narrow context of primary combat optimization, but there ARE compensating rewards. The character may perform well in a wider range of combat situations and have less severe weaknesses in worst-case scenarios. This last is something that optimization generally overlooks, worst case situations are the ones you really need to worry about. It is nice to be able to curb stomp the encounters that you're good at, but if you die hard in the bad scenarios sooner or later your luck will run out. It won't help you at all that you breezed through the first 5 encounters if you're useless in the 6th one and die. Thus often a less focused character actually works better in practice because he'll make it through whatever the DM throws at him. The super focused character ends up laid out.So, really the dimensions of what is 'optimal' are hard to define.</blockquote>

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