Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AngryPurpleCyclops" data-source="post: 4708783" data-attributes="member: 82732">I've tried adjusting my posting style but I get tired of explaining the same thing to someone who just keeps reiterating the same response.  I find it hard to believe you can't understand that anecdotal evidence such as encounter where your pc's won the dice roll lottery are not indicative of much.  You don't base a mathematical model on the outliers.  this game is a mathematical model.  It's based upon keeping the encounters close to the middle of the bell and attempting to keep swingyness to a minimum.  By not having so much riding on any single die roll they've made the game "safer" for pc's and a lot of people would say "more fun" for players.  No one enjoys playing a pc for 5 months and having him disintegrated by a bad die roll.  If I seem to be getting more and more direct I can assure you it's in response to goading and circular arguments.  You've made a lot of arguments like "but in this situation it's not" which while valid, doesn't really help because I can comeback with "well in this situation it is" or "but in situation x daze is less effective".  I would happily say "they're both situational" in fact I did say that repeatedly but you keep coming back around in a circle and saying "but x is situational" when in fact, both x and y are situational. We've already agreed to that stipulation and the process is to move forward from there trying to analyze them without repeatedly circling back. I apologize.  We got a long way from that post and I didn't remember it verbatim.  On the other hand, the point you were arguing was that healing was less important.  You didn't give the details of you encounter and presented it in a disingenuous way.  First, your party used massive amounts of temp hit points as a substitute.Second you did use some healingThird you used dailies and AP's at a pace most pc's can't afford to mirror or they will die.Fourth you omitted the 1st three.It would be a lot more helpful and honest (and would have prevented 15 posts) if you said we set out to see if we could get by without healing but to offset this we used all our AP's, several dailies and several daily magic items.  We also statistically rolled more than 3 std deviations above the mean in back to back encounters.  This speaks more to my position than to the opposite that healing can preserve dailies, AP's and daily use magic items.  This ups the value of healing not degrades it.  You can't honestly expect me to remember every detail over days of posts when you're withholding most of the information.  When you present your case if you mention a power it's not always obvious to everyone what that power does.  I've never played a warlord, I don't know the powers by heart.   details help. we're having a discussion, how can I respond with no details.  That's one round for one pc.  a lot of those modifiers are not relevant after that single round.  The bonus sneak attack on action points is probably over powered but not going to break the game.  making elven accuracy reliable for rogues is also not a particularly well considered feat.  this blows away elven precision and almost guarantees to turn one sneak attack per encounter from a miss into a hit.  There's already a lot of power creep going on in the splat books. well that ties up a lot of feats to have spent 1 on multiclass and at least one on exchanging a power. your paladin mark almost no factor to a creature with 450 hp's.  he clearly should have been pounding the rogue into the ground.  The paladin warlord also should have been getting pounded into the ground by the poison as neither warlords nor paladins can be expected to have a good reflex.  If the monsters had even average luck that's 2-3 hits on you.  5 ongoing is average of 10 dmg.  If the zombie was worried about your mark he should have been firing his 3-4 attacks per round at you.  It only takes 1-2 hits over 4 rounds to eliminate you, even considering the temp hit points because you should be getting pounded by the poison.  Not very often for a warlord.  You don;t think 300= dmg is a lot for 5 level 5 pc's in one round?  This didn't seem exceptional to you?  avg dpr for pc's is about 4 + 1.4/level per round.  that's about 55 per round usually for 5 level 5's.  This is a rough number and might only work in epic but the average damage per round for 5 level 5's can't really be above 60-65.  You're taking a lot of liberties with the benefits from the warlock.  does he also always hit?  those are one use powers so the effects are permanent and aren't guaranteed.  WotG's is good and I totally missed the radiant vs undead at first but that's another daily spent and it's a party with both a cleric and a paladin vs undead which seems pretty advantageous.  People already complain about the ghoul example because the party has a cleric but you're doubling up on that problem which seems to be taking a really bad example.  and abusing it.  Is a party of 5 warlocks good?  they probably are against an encounter of 100 minion skeletons.  that's all well and good but you chimed in on a topic and presented evidence to suggest that healing doesn't matter but when we look more closely at the evidence there's a lot of problems with your position.  Why does your party have 2 healers and a healer multiclass?  Why did you burn a ridiculous amount of dailies and use temp hit points and still gain some healing?  Why did you fail to mention that mth being so dreadfully skewed against the monsters?me too, and yet here we are.  you're poisoning the sample.  Those are outside forces that detract from your point because most pc's don't have that kind of meta-game info.  There's a big difference between a long fly ball in the bottom of the ninth with the bases loaded if there's one out or two and the game is tied.  One is extra innings and one is game over.  you have to consider that you were abusing the system based upon metagame knowledge.  You also have to consider how much or little enjoyment you're getting from the game your playing.  You also might want to consider how much time you're spending on DnD and WoW but that's a different story all together.   I'm not too familiar with LFR but my general understanding is it's a way to play with the same pc with multiple dm's and various players.  basically one shot modules not really very campaign like and probably suffering massively from under powered encounters because the business model is to keep everyone alive.and yet you were defending the encounter as challenging... Can we at least agree that the overall effectiveness of powers doesn't really matter until your tested?  For the most part, a 6d6 fireball is just as effective as a 20d6 fireball vs orcs.  it's not until you get near the edge of the pc's capabilities that the differences shine through.  If I'm only hit once per encounter how effective is shield?  does it even matter?this is anecdotal and based upon a relatively bad framework created by the business model of LFRGood analogy, this doesn't change the fact that the other player still had little or no chance to actually beat you sans handicap.  I'm not going to go play dnd vs level N encounters all day and use some self imposed restriction (how about, I won't use encounter powers) to balance things.  If I did do this on a bet, and then I posted that encounter powers aren't that important in the forum would you agree?  If I said I handled XYZ encounter without the use of encounter powers therefore they're only important when you use them (but maybe I burned up all my dailies) would you think I was making a statistically valid argument or would you maybe be a bit frustrated by the tenth iteration of this circular argument and simply think I was being an ugly forum troll?  Would you accept that this was a good tactic because I knew the day was probably over?  (which is an insulting defense incidentally since it corrupts the data and makes the playing field unbalanced) would you accept that this was a good tactic or would you maybe suggest that if you face another major encounter and now have no dailies or action points you've obviously increased your exposure?  How about if we only threw the claymores and night vision out of the helo? would that be a valid tactic? God this is painfully repetitive.  could there have been a secret door?  let me try to explain:Are you familiar with the observer effect?  When measuring/observing anything you impact the thing you're measuring.  Putting a thermometer in hot liquid changes the temp by a small degree as the thermometer absorbs some thermal energy.  The point being even small things have an impact.  Metagaming that the encounter is weak and the adventure is over make your empirical data corrupt.  You took information from outside the system and used it in your measurements.  Even without the serious math issues in your example and hidden temp hit points you didn't disclose you should not have presented this as an example to support anything.   and if this was the only math that favored you I wouldn't have said a word.  +5 str, +4 cha, = 13-14 reflex? maybe 15? did the poison hit you 3 times?  The 9 for 9 or 9 for 10 on the "good round" is the biggest math issue.  Also when I suggested that you had a party designed to eat minions you said no wiz, no armor but you substituted a 3 for 3 dragon breath and a 4 for 4 divine glow.  The poison had a 30% chance to hit you 4 times.  about a 75% chance to hit you 3 times.  The zombie also must have had chances to hit you.  It gets 3-4 attacks per round and has AP's, even if these ATT were bad, you're still looking at a ton of chances.  If the poison hit you 3 times, you're pretty much done.  You can pretty easily see how it appears the pc's rolled abnormally high and the dm was using a d16 for ATT's</blockquote>+2 vicious greatspear, +1 lightning javelin, power jewel, +1 healer's brooch, +1 eladrin chain (so 7th, 5th, 5th, 4th, 3rd)So not that atypical distribution.[/quote]but pretty strong.  I have no idea of what they do, I assume the jewel has a daily that lets you get back an encounter.  My experience with 5th level pc's is that having a single bonus weapon is pretty normal, having both a ranged and melee weapon, one of them a +2 seems extremely strong.  And you wonder why I seem to be getting so blunt...  LOOK AT WHAT YOU JUST SAID.  I said this days ago.  This encounter can't be used to measure ANYTHING.  Until you get near the top of performance you simply can't measure which is better.  If you take two guys who play professional baseball and put them in little league and they both bat 1000 and hit a home run every time they bat, which is better?  You can't tell.  There's no way to compare relative difference until you challenge their skill set.  Move them up to the majors and one bats 300 but the other bats 220.  I know a guy with a 188 IQ., we both got an 800 on the math portion of the SAT's can I conclude from this my IQ is as high as his?  No, because the test wasn't hard enough to challenge our skill sets.  His IQ is much higher than mine but you can't tell in this example.  Admittedly I didn't get an 800 the first time I took it and he probably did which might be differentiation enough and his verbal was higher too, but the point remains the same.   we don't have that many skill challenges, they sort of seem boring exercises in dice rolling mostly and they're either too hard or too easy depending on the optimization of the pc's.  I didn't know you get AP's for skill challenges.  Kind of seems broken to be earning miles stones and thus AP's in skill challenges.  You can't burn AP's in a skill challenge can you?Or in a wide variety of terrains where the gnoll might have an advantage.  rolling fields for instance.  but the huntmaster was unable to exploit that same terrain? You're defending these anecdotal points even though they're simply not relevant AND horrible examples for numerous reasons.  Like you said "who cares, there's absolutely no chance of getting killed.  I'm going to stop I'm tired of trying to explain simple concepts to you, if you can't see that you can't measure anything with these examples I'll never convince you and you're probably not worth me trying to help you understand.  psst the entire encounter was trivial, you completely fail to recognize that. You've acknowledged that it's a foregone conclusion you'll win and you'r so bored you have to handicap yourselves to get any enjoyment.  Sounds like fun, enjoy yourself.[/QUOTE]

Verification