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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cadfan" data-source="post: 3822379" data-attributes="member: 40961">You are assuming facts not in evidence.  First, that a dragon's breath is an area effect at all times.  Review the dragon combat article, and you will see that at one point the dragon breathes fire on just one character.  This implies that a dragon's breath weapon is, at the very least, not always an area effect.Second, that a dragon's breath weapon in 4e does the same very high damage that it does in 3e.  If the damage is lower, then doubling it is less of a concern.Third, that an area of effect attack can critical everyone it hits.  If criticals are considered in 4e to work similarly to how precision damage works in 3e, this will not be the case.  A single "official" target will be chosen, and critical hits will only count versus that foe.If your assumptions are correct, and dragon breath weapons do huge amounts of damage to an area of effect that can cover the whole party, and can obtain critical hits against everyone in the area of effect, then yeah.  It will be a problem.But given that 1) other options are possible, 2) the designers are apparently aware of the problem, as they know about it in SWS, and 3) the one thing the designers of 4e seem exceptionally good at is a logical, mathematical approach to game design, I'm not going to get upset yet.</blockquote>