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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nymrohd" data-source="post: 5109591" data-attributes="member: 59126">Honestly the importance of increasing or decreasing returns leads to two conclusions:Because your defenses face increasing returns, then if they are naturally high, every time you increase them you get more out of the increase. If I can only be hit if the enemy rolls a 16 or higher and suddently I get a +3 bonus on my defense, the enemy will need to roll 19 or higher to hit me. The return I got from that +3 bonus is not 15% (I had a 25% chance to be missed and now I have a 10% chance to be missed) but 60% (25-15/25). This means that feats or powers that provide bonuses to defenses are more valuable when you can stack them together. Inversely if your natural defenses were very low, it would not really be worthwhile to invest in increasing them because the returns would take some time to trump the sacrifice you'd make in getting an offensive advantage. This does not often happen in 4E because most classes have at least decent defenses by default.Conversely, the return of a bonus in your chance to hit is great the higher your original chance to miss was. Take for instance the expertise feat at say the paragon tier, which gives you a +2 bonus. Let's say we have two characters, a dagger rogue with a very high original chance to hit who could get a hit at a roll as low as 6 against the average monster, and a battleraging fighter using a +2 prof weapon with a 16 starting Str who can only hit on rolls of 12 or higher on average. The +2 bonus from the expertise feat would be good for either ofc, but it would be a lot better for the fighter who gets a (55-45/45)=22% return against the rogue's return of (85-75/75)=13%. This means that if you have a class designed to get a significant bonus on damage dealt when it hits, that was balanced with a low hit chance, and you add some cheese like righteous brand, that class gets far more out of it than the low damage/high precision class.Why is this useful to know? Well unless you are interested in optimization, it really isn't. If you want to optimize though, you need to understand that when you make a choice, you need to compare your options based on the return they will give you and not the face value. This can even be an argument for the expertise feats for instance; in an optimized group that can produce high hit chances naturally (and likely has methods of producing rerolls for critical powers) the expertise feats do not have amazing returns as feats (they are arguably still better than average). In a different group that can produce huge damage when it hits but keeps getting missing streaks, those feats are golden. At the same time, a scaling bonus to attack rolls, particularly one that can be made available easily like the one from righteous brand, is simply very broken when combined with low hit characters.This nature of the d20 system forces the necessity of rolls of 20 always hitting (otherways you could potentialy cap defenses and be unhittable). At the same time we see how it breaks down in the monster system. Brutes have high damage combined with low chance to hit and low defenses. A player could handle this with synergies and make an effective character who can capitalize on the tradeoffs but monsters do not have access to those in general making brutes crappy NPCs.</blockquote>

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