Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5575859" data-attributes="member: 42582">I agree that STR 8 on a fighter is invalid in your sense.I think 14 would be marginal. The fighter in my game had starting strength 16 (but is a dwarf, and so still a good fighter), and also has serious DEX, CON and WIS (to support a polearm-axe build). He is paragon-pathed as a Warpriest, and was happy to be using a WIS that started at 15, but with the newest errata has got his Warpriest powers onto STR.The wizard in my game is multi-class and paragon pathed as an Invoker, with starting stats of INT 20/WIS 14. But he has Action Surge (+3 to hit on action point) plus a reroll paragon path feature to support his WIS attacks.On the other hand, we don't use the Expertise feats in my game and to date play hasn't suffered. So 14 together with Expertise would strike me as perhaps viable. I think that that sort of character would want to bring a lot of other stuff to the table, though - noticeably good skills, or good ways to get combat advantage, etc.In my view, yes - keeping in mind that the play in question may not be suboptimal given the way that a particular PC is built.In the real world, for example, it is suboptimal to get hurt. One of the PCs in my game, though, is a dwarven fighter with Toughness and a Cloak of the Walking Wounded. He can second wind as a minor action, and likes to do so only after being bloodied (because the cloak then lets him spend two healing surges). This leads the PC to take risks and enter situations that, in the real world, would be stupid.The same PC also has a daily, Brazen Assault, that has the effect of granting all enemies combat advantage while granting him Resist all 5. If he uses this daily, it has a further impact on what that PC can do, which can potentially lead to further deviations from real-world optimality.The new monster maths, which is essentially +half level damage to all monsters, doesn't seem to me to have changed the dynamics all that much. It was introduced just at the point in my game where I can see how, without it, I would have been tempted to start using significantly higher level monsters.Bottom line for me on optimality: if you try to build your PC radically against class/role lines (eg the STR 8 fighter, perhaps the 14 STR fighter unless there's a lot of other good stuff your PC is bringing to the table) then you'll be in trouble; and if you try and play your PC against your build then you'll be in trouble; BUT it's not hard to build a PC who has viable options in the game that would not be very viable in real life (Walking Wounded, Brazen Assault etc); AND it's not hard to build a PC who has an interesting and varied range of viable options (even the archer ranger in my game, who is the closest to a one-trick pony, can do stuff with Acrobatics, taking control of Behemoths etc - though the player did hybrid him to cleric once the rules for that came out, in what was dubbed "Operation: Give my PC more to do than Twin Strike!").To me, the game doesn't seem to play in the relentless or monistic way that Imaro is describing. And if it's very different for my players, they haven't communicated that experience to me.</blockquote>

Verification