NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="eamon" data-source="post: 4981626" data-attributes="member: 51942">When analyzing these things, it's worth keeping in mind that an improvement to a low defense matters less than an improvement to a high defense.  Roughly speaking, raising your defense by 10 from hit-on-2+ to hit-on-12+ halves your damage and thus doubles your life expectancy.  Then raising your defenses by just 4 or 5 again halves your damage and doubles your life expectancy.Assuming a monster crit is about 50% more powerful than a hit, eventually, raising your defense from hit-on 19 [expected damage: 5% * a hit + 5% a crit ~ 12.5% a hit] to hit on twenty [7.5% of a hit] is a 40% damage reduction for just one point.  Raising it to miss-on twenty [5% of a hit] decreases damage taken by another 33% for one point of defense.Basically, it just doesn't matter all that much whether a monster hits you on a 4 or a 7 - and it matters even less whether he'll hit you on a 2 or a 3, or, worse yet, on a 1(effectively 2) or a 2 which is truly no change.In short, there's no point in bothering with the lowest defense unless you can somehow manage to raise it by enough to make it competitive.The House RuleWhat does this mean about the house-rule which raises FRW at 5/15/25?  Well, that house rule is good and works well for your strongest two defenses, which thus remain competitive.  It doesn't hurt your weakest defense either, but it won't be significant; that would require even further raises.Fixing the lowest defenseThere's three choices here.  (1) don't fix it.  (2) use feats. (3) use stat raises.  WotC basically does (1).  The feat fixes (without above house-rule) are needed to just keep the highest defenses competitive - they're not enough for the lowest defense, and in fact, a player would be wasting a feat if he tried raising his lowest defense with such a feat (so the feats are both overpowered and underpowered simultaneously - great).Using (2) is hard - and some might object to a feat tax.  It's hard because any feat you make will be much much more attractive to use on the high defenses - where such a feat would be overpowered.  I don't think that's a good idea.Using stat raises is comparatively easy; just raise all stats on levels 4/8 and (in combination with the general 5/15/25 raise) players will lose only 1 point vs. the monsters over their career, which looks OK to me.  Such house rules have other nice properties as well.  Earlier in this thread, there was some dislike of 18/14/11 builds.  Well, if you raise all three stats, all of the sudden your other stats actually have a chance of remaining relevant.  After the change, it might actually be worth it to consider raising a tertiary stat to help your weakest defense (and skills, and maybe init or hitpoints).  Right now, stat levelling rules basically mean that you never ever should bother investing in non-core stats unless you absolutely need to for feat prereqs.  That's pretty lame, and it's a nice side effect that that's no longer the case when you raise all stats.  I'm also not too thrilled about the way feat-prerequisites really punish people that don't pre-plan their character 20 levels in advance.  Getting rid of those stat prerequisites is probably a good thing - unless it breaks game balance (I can't, off the top of my head, think of any examples thereof, however).It also ameliorates the need for "fixer" feats like heavy armor for Str/Wis Rangers (still attractive, but no longer absolutely required) or like the primal con-to-AC feat (also still attractive for a non-Dex/Int build, but again, not absolutely required).That's a bunch of nice side effects, IMNSHO <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":-)" title="Smile    :-)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":-)" />.</blockquote>

Verification