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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 4703567" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, there are more factors involved. In order to do a complete battle analysis you would have to consider both the damage taking and damage dealing capabilities of each force OVER TIME. You will quickly find out there is actually no 'set' ratio of value you can put on healing vs damage dealing.Just as a general observation: if the monsters are small in number and have lots of hit points, then healing becomes more of a premium because damage done to the monsters will have little immediate impact on their ability to do damage in return. Thus if you are say taking on a solo monster then healing is generally going to be at its maximum premium since the monster will still be dishing it out until the last round of the fight.At the other extreme waves of low level monsters attacking the party will maximize the overall ability to do damage since each monster that is wiped out is one less monster that can hit back. Overkill DOES work against that to some extent and as you observed minions are the extreme example. What that tells me is that it is more valuable to have a lower damage and higher hit percentage attack which does more DPR on average. That attack will suffer less 'overkill penalty' and the most precious of all are those attacks which can hit multiple opponents. This is why wizards are so incredibly effective against large numbers of opponents.Defensive strengths will obviously also factor into the equation, but defense can essentially be modeled like extra hit points, considering only basic damage and not other effects anyway. Which of course brings us to the next part of the question, which is how good are all these stuns and dazes and etc?Obviously there is a good deal of tactical variation when it comes to effects, but in essence they are going to factor in like extra hit points for your side. If a monster cannot attack, then it cannot hit, and that will reduce its DPR. Thus it makes a certain amount of sense to trade hit points or healing for the ability to put a useful condition on a monster. Again this is subject in essence to the 'overkill tax', it is pretty much valueless to stun a minion in terms of overall enemy effectiveness.I would also like to point out that the 'test' point is a factor. Overall it is not too important from a campaign character survival perspective to talk about individual encounters. Which is more dangerous, a monster that does a guaranteed 5 points per round to your 1st level party, or one that hits 5% of the time and does 45 points per hit? Obviously the latter monster is more of an actual threat to the party overall. It can on average kill off a PC in a single blow, even though on average it does less damage. It may well be that this high damage monster is less of a threat in a given ENCOUNTER, but a party which constantly faces this sort of brute monster will eventually run out of luck and perish, whereas the party facing mostly the low damage monster type is likely to dish out more overall than it takes and since they know exactly what they're being hit by every round they should be able to easily guage their success or failure right from the start. This is one advantage of minions and other weak damage monsters, they offer a fairly predictable battle outcome.One can also draw various conclusions about tactics from all of this. Overall a party will have greater chances of long term success when they adopt tactics which minimize the monsters ability to dish out lots of damage in big chunks, thus making it more predictable. Bottlenecking monsters in a corridor for instance is overall smarter than rushing into rooms and taking them all on at once because in that case a lucky group of monsters could simply crush the party. One monster attacking at a time can get just as lucky overall, but the party has a lot more control of that situation (and a lot more easy access to its healing powers).The ironic thing about leaders, especially the warlord which does a lot of 'party control' style stuff is that they are at their most effective when the party overall is at its LEAST effective. One might almost say having a warlord in the group is a band-aide for the healing bad party tactics. Thus in terms of building an 'optimum' overall party I would say that for a group with good tactics and designing their party for maximum damage and survivability potential they would be better off skipping the warlord. They might even be better off skipping ANY leaders, but that will really be pretty dependent on the nature of the encounters they are going to have.</blockquote>

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