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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AngryPurpleCyclops" data-source="post: 4708301" data-attributes="member: 82732">If three people are in the zone this but some shifted out for a round or two (really it would likely be at the very least 4 rounds to do 450 dmg with 5 pc's even with exceptional luck) so some melee types would have had to face the zone attack 4 times.  This means that you're either getting amazingly lucky on both offense or defense or some of your 5th level pc's have taken 6d6+8 and 5 ongoing twice(44 dmg avg).  Yet they felt no danger of going down even completely ignoring the fact that their standing in front of a solo with multiple attacks and still standing in the zone? 44 dmg puts most level 5 pc's down. it certainly puts ALL level 5 pc's into a dangerous place.  We're not even looking at the damage from the zombie.  I've never fought an L+1 solo that didn't do some damage to the party. Truthfully this scenario as presented sounds nearly mathematically absurd.  If you're in an encounter and the DM rolls below a 10 on 80% of his die rolls I think you would notice that and probably ought to toss the encounter out as proof of anything.  If the party simultaneously is rolling above average we're getting to a place that isn't statistically supportable.  If the die rolls are normal in the encounter you're presenting it's impossible for at least two of the people int he zone to not be knocked to 0.  The zombie had 2-3 attacks per round (plus action points) and more hit points than is reasonably possible for a 5th level party to do in 4 rounds of combat.  You're talking about avg dpr for the entire party of more than 20 per pc every round.  5 rounds at 20 dmg every round x 5 pc's = 500 dmg.  that's massively above expected even with 100% hits.  I've never seen a party hit 20 times in 4-5 rounds.  Your tactics are also horrible once again as it unless you're burning through every daily the damage simply can't be this high and it would have made a lot more sense for the party to use some healing rather than expend dailies.  Honestly, I simply don't believe this scenario is possible.  That sort of disappoints me because I actually like a lot of your posts but this seems like you're making things up to support your argument.  This implies that you got 6 of them in your blast and the cleric got 8 in a blast 3.  I've never seen anyone get more than 4-5 targets in a blast 3 and I don't think I've ever seen a PC hit 100% with a blast 3 above 3 targets.  It's obviously possible for either to happen but if you got 8 targets the DM is playing the monsters terribly or if you got 80-100% hits with a power on 4 for 4 or 4 for 5 then the example is a little tainted by the fact that your party rolled amazingly well.  Killing the 12 minions in 3 rounds is REALLY unlikely unless you're devoting nearly all of your attacks to this or getting exceptionally lucky.  killing the crocotta with focus fire in one round is nearly impossible unless the entire party rolled off the charts.  you need about a 14-15 to hit it.  the CA from inspired belligerence can certainly help but all your pc's must be in range as well.  If the crocotta hit 3 pc's with the burst that's more than 50 damage right there and it should have gotten multiple other attacks in the combat at a really high chance to hit.  The crocotta getting no attack round one is really weird since it can charge from anywhere inside 17 squares.  While your description of the combat is possible it's either a very significant mathematical anomaly or it's an example of the monsters being dumb brutes waiting to be killed.   once again this isn't a statistically valid argument.  The crocotta does 3d6+4 if it shifts and the huntmaster can focus fire with him pretty much anywhere on the battle field.  Any level 5 bloodied pc has to feel immense danger with so many 10 dmg creatures in play and two BBEG's.  Any reasonably skilled DM should have been able to bloody 2-3 pc's on round 1 with this encounter.  This assumes that monsters spread out and didn't put 5 or more attacks on 2 creatures.  Anyone hit by the crocotta burst and even 1 minion is bloodied.  2 minions and the huntmaster and all but a defender are below 10 hp left.  how can you feel confident that you're not going to get hit once or twice in a round with so many potential attacks?  I have to conclude we're not playing the same game.  Your encounters must be full of monsters who ignore the fact that a pc is bloodied, never use focus fire, attack in uncoordinated ways, never achieve flanking, and roll a d16 to hit while letting the pc's use a d24. This really doesn't make sense.  We occasionally drop a 80 or so on a monster in one round(this usually means the rogue hit for a big dmg sneak and the fighter landed a 3w daily plus a solid hit from the cleric or wizard) but that happens rarely as it requires 3 hits on the same target, the rogue to have CA, good rolls and a significant expenditure of power in terms of dailies/encounter powers.  Your party apparently drops a 100 every round on some target or another.  This isn't anywhere near the expected outcome of 5th level pc's.  For every round we hang 80 dmg we have a round where we hang 25-30 or less.    These powers don't come anywhere near explaining the staggering math required to create your encounters.  Everyone likes putting creatures down rapidly.  Warlord's strike should miss half the time, and belligerence is worth about +10-20 dmg for a single round plus getting CA for the rogue assuming he doesn't already have it. AP's can double this.  It's a horrible tactic to burn AP's instead of using encounter power healing.  If you're in control of an encounter (and not needing any healing is dominating an encounter) why would you burn a daily or an AP? You would pay for such horrible misuse of resources in our campaign with a tpk.   The math to make this happen is staggering.  The huntmaster is a ranged 20 attacker who can back pedal at speed 8 a warlock or zap cleric can pretty much never catch him and the paladin needs to move + move, move+charge.  If the paladin does move+move, the huntmaster can keep moving back until it's got a 19 square gap and then fire with impunity.  A huntmaster is a terribly dangerous foe in the same way the huns were.  This is the same situation experienced by Iraqi armor vs American armor.  If one side has both a speed advantage and a range advantage and an accuracy advantage, the other side is pretty much dead without any hope.  Massive mobility and massive range spells big problems for a party.  This is another reason for the fast runner feat.  A party doesn't have a lot of options for ranged 20 combat.  The zap cleric/ranger might have a long bow.  A wizard might have MM.  A huntmaster can make a lot of classes completely combat ineffective.  speed 5 guys are nothing but a pin cushion.  pretty horrible math for them. expected round 1 dmg was 40-50 even if you kill 2-4 before they attack.  After that the dice roll scenario rapidly moves to statistically unsupportable.   missed with it's bite all 3-4 rounds? it's +14 vs AC and it can take resist radiant with it's flexible resistance and completely hose the paladin mark.  our level 5 party has ac's in the 17 to 21 range.  this creature shouldn't be missing every attack and it definitely shouldn't be dieing in 1 round of focus fire.  It also should be getting CA for many of it's attacks since it has 12 minions scurrying about and a rechargeable CA power.  Once again either horribly unlucky or horribly misused.  even so this is 35 dmg and the crocotta should have done 50-70 with just the burst and another 40-50 from minions and we're talking about about 145 dmg (with the worst luck imaginable for the bad guys) and this was spread so evenly through the party that no one was down to 10 hps?  No one was worried that another 15dmg arrow from the huntmaster was going to put it down?  and while your party was employing all these tactics what tactics did the monsters employ?  I'm not trying to beat up on you here but you are presenting giant statistical anomalies as evidence.  One person wins the lottery but this doesn't mean it's a good investment.  ahh we're getting somewhere now.  being killed in 4e means you drop prone and lose at least 1-3 actions.  We try to keep all the pc's on their feat because you lose massive efficiency if a pc is down and you make it possible for combats to spiral out of control.  If you save healing until a pc is down there is a chance that a healer will go down and then your other healer will suffer a debilitating effect like stun.  If the defender goes down the attackers run right past him and he loses his marks and stickiness.  He's also prone when he gets healed and sometimes he gets pounded with CA before he can get up.  I can see a couple valid point for waiting until someone is down but I can make a lot of point why that's a bad idea.  Just losing a round of actions can hurt a party massively (you're effectively offering the bad guys an extra round of stun). I'm from RI, I live in AZ, I play in a campaign with guys who I played face to face with 25 yrs ago and we now live in ma, ri, ny, az, co, coupled with voice chat like ventrillo it absolutely rocks.  It's got some bad design elements but overall it's a very sweet system and it keeps track of a lot of the bookkeeping for you.  Burning AP's and dailies rather than healing?  sounds like a recipe to get you killed.  I'm not trying to beat you up here but you're presenting major statistical anomalies as evidence.  One person wins big in the lottery but that doesn't mean it's a good investment.</blockquote>

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