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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6968152" data-attributes="member: 6787650">But you shouldn't simultaneously be running your scenario with nothing but gargoyles in it, because you know that will skew your results and make magical builds look more attractive than they really are. It's fine for a solo campaign to feature a Champion without a magic weapon (Conan), but it should have a mix of Giant Crocodiles and Cave Bears and Drow Warriors and Minotaurs in it as well as Fire Elementals and Gargoyles. If you're creating a simplistic scenario for an illustrative analysis, you either neglect weapon resistance by assuming a +0 weapon (as I did) or you pick a non-weapon-resistant creature as your testbed, because both scenarios are believable.I chose a different scenario--gargoyles with a +0 magic weapon. You chose gargoyles with a non-magical weapon.I'm AFB but there are a number of +0 magical weapons in the game, from the Bladelock's pact weapon to the DMG's Sword of Lifestealing, and of course anything homebrewed (e.g. the Summer Sword, a sword which can be planted in the ground and grows food after an hour). I'm sure I've seen others in the DMG, I just can't find mine at the moment.And remember that Pathological with a magic weapon and sneak attack damage still wound up only 60% as effective as Champion Without A Magic Weapon (your scenario), and 35% as effective as Champion With A Magic Weapon (my original scenario), as shown by Monte Carlo sim with public source code, even using the behavior you yourself specified (Armor of Agathys, False Life, Shield only on first hit). The original BOTE calculation was surprisingly close to the more detailed simulation result.Edit: although on further consideration, to be fair to Pathological, he should always be Raging when he is fighting under Armor of Agathys. And though it's not clear what type of Warlock he is, if he were a Fiendlock that would help eke out his HP even more, possibly to the point where he'd approach being 50% as effective as Bog-standard Unimaginative Champion, and perhaps 30% as effective as Bog-standard Tactically-Innovative Champion.Here's a Grapple/Prone Champion (bog-standard build but more innovative tactics) who shield bashes the gargoyle once it's prone: <a href="https://repl.it/EnVv/2" target="_blank">https://repl.it/EnVv/4</a> He tends to do around 30% better than Champion With A Magic Weapon (about 21-22 gargoyles before dying--most of the damage he takes happens in the first round before he gets a chance to grapple/prone the gargoyle) despite not actually having a magic weapon.Huh. Must have been the other guy I was responding to directly who picked it, then. I know I was specifically addressing a build that factored in Dueling style on both the regular attack and the Martial Arts attack (which doesn't exist, as I pointed out). I haven't been keeping close track of who said what.I don't think it's unplayably bad. I just think it's quite bad, less than 50% as useful as a normal PC. Sometimes playing mechanically-bad PCs can be fun because it means you have to do more in-play to make up for the bad mechanics. I think it is possible to build worse PCs, but it's quite hard to make a PC that's a complete waste of space--as in, it's hard for me to make a PC that I wouldn't have fun playing under any conditions. (It requires a multitude of not just bad class choices but also bad spell, feat and equipment choices.)I don't buy that interpretation of Greenflame Blade, and it doesn't matter because in that case you could just switch to using Booming Blade (ugh, horrible name--I prefer False Fetters) without changing any of the math.</blockquote>

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