Potions of Resistance - bad for the game?

[CapnZapp]

Thank you for replying, Inkmonkeys!

However, first you say

Potions of resistance are not a problem.

Then you say

Naturally, the value of the potion varies by specific situations. Against enemies who all deal a small amount of fire damage followed by ongoing 5 fire damage, potions of fire resistance will make victory trivial.

This suggests you are replying to an argument such as "potions of resistance are always overpowered" or "potions of resistance can never be balanced".

I am not making that argument.

I am making the argument that potions of resistance work the worst exactly when they are expected to play a role in the game.

Against miscellaneous opponents, nobody drinks more than the ocassional potion of resistance. You're right: here the game works fine.

Against themed encounters, however, you agree yourself the potion breaks down the encounter: you say they make victory "trivial".

But this is the exact scenario where the potions are expected to be used. This is precisely where they should (in my opinion) not trivialize the fight.

I guess now that you've confirmed the designer's goals with these potions and that R&D feel these goals have been met (thank you again for that), the discussion needs to shift focus.

Onto "what should the design goals be for potions of resistance?"

As for myself, I believe readily available resistance should - in general - transform an encounter from very difficult to normal.

That is, planning ahead and scouting out your opposition should be rewarded; not by a trivial series of encounters, but by the knowledge "boy we would have been toast without these potions". I envision the following (general) scenario: first they walk up to the monsters, realize they're getting hammered, they retreat, they come up with the proper precaution (=resistance), they go back in, and then the real fight starts (the challenging but not overwhelming one).

But I guess that's a house rules forum discussion.

What I am taking away from your reply (not that you stated this outright) is that heavily themed encounters are no longer feasible in 4E.

In 3E you could have nothing but fire-breathing demons. In 4E, it's expected a simple potion will make all of them "trivial", so my conclusion is that you need to have several damage types, or lots of untyped damage attacks.*

Not saying this is wrong - just that it is (another) departure from 3E which isn't stated explicitly anywhere, so it kind of tripped me up as a GM.

Best Regards,
Zapp

*) Unfortunately, this still does not solve the issue when you fight a single Solo monster whose damage to a large extent depends on typed ongoing damage (i.e. Dragonbreath). In this case; I do not see any immediate solutions that won't allow the party to drink a 40 gp potion and gain almost complete immunity to its attacks. Inside the framework of the rules, that is - I did solve it (by basically doubling its damage output in general), nice to know I wasn't missing a more immediate solution (than to change the monster stat block).

 

[CapnZapp]

Another thought: perhaps the current implementation is a result of an idea along the lines of "potions should, like most items, not be mandatory".

That would then account for the current position, where monsters are indeed playable without the potions.

However, the problem is that when the potions are effective, they're too effective.

Sure, you could still fight a Green Dragon w/o poison resistance. Indeed, that would make for an exciting and fair fight.

You might not want to implement a solution where potions are all-but-required to fight that Dragon, but at least consider a solution where potions aren't so devastatingly effective - especially considering their (relatively) very low price and ready availability (DMs can't easily say "you can't buy that" because then the players simply brew their own).

 

[eamon]

The 3.5 way to solve this would be to realize that in a world where one party can plan ahead, the other probably can too: the dragon might take a feat to change his damage type or whatnot.

Could something like this be doable in 4e?

 

[keterys]

For example, against a Beholder Eye of Flame they prevent 15 damage per turn (ongoing 5 + vulnerable 10 blocked), in addition to the 5 per hit. Against a Lich it blocks 5 per round from aura plus 5 per hit. Against a Pit Fiend potentially 5-15 per round, etc. And poor minions. 5-10 resist destroys energy-based minions entirely.

It doesn't actually prevent the vulnerable condition, so it would block 20 per turn, 10 from the fire ray, then 10 from the ongoing (which would be 15 due to the vulnerable). It costs a surge tho, which is fair considering the other ways to get resistance...

Actually, I was just referring to the resistance 5 version at low level. And it doesn't block the vulnerable 10. It simply negates the 5 damage, turning it into 0, which means that vulnerable doesn't trigger, which means instead of taking 15 you took 0.

* In the paragon tier, you can get magic items that have 10 resistance to 1-2 types as properties.
* You can take a heroic item that lets you pick an energy type to gain 5 resistance to for the entire encounter when you spend an action point. * There's a background in Forgotten Realms that gives you minor energy resistance to several different energy types.

There's plenty more ways too, that don't cost healing surges.

These actually make the problem more acute, rather than helping it. One of the most common answers for potion of resistance 'problems' is to just use more energy types. If those are already covered... and this is particularly common for necrotic, fire, cold, and poison in my experience.

 

[Ryujin]

Not to go too far off topic, but where are you folks getting this "ongiong doesn't trigger" thing from? The way we play it is that the initial 5 might not be enough to get through the resistance, but that ongoing 10 only gets reduced by 5. I don't recall anything saying that the ongoing is contigent upon receiving the initial damage. After all it's resistance, not immunity.

 

[abyssaldeath]

Actually, I was just referring to the resistance 5 version at low level. And it doesn't block the vulnerable 10. It simply negates the 5 damage, turning it into 0, which means that vulnerable doesn't trigger, which means instead of taking 15 you took 0.

That is incorrect.

7. If a creature has both resistance and vulnerability to a single type of damage, like cold, which one do you apply first?

Both the resistance and the vulnerability are applied and one can not negate the other.

 

[keterys]

Interesting, because I've had an FAQ produced before that refutes that. I suppose it's possible the player screwed up the copy/paste but... now to go do some research for me.

Edit: That's definitely the only FAQ I see. I'll have to poke the other guy - he had researched it and had it ready for when he was running an encounter with a beholder of flame. Good to know I'm wrong on that one.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think that's a false assumption. Infinity? Why doesn't that assumption fall under the bag o' rats rule?

Does everyone here just let the players keep clicking "Add" on the character builder?

At 50gp each (or even at 1000gp each for a paragon version) the cost to a 25th level PC is so negligible as to be not even worth assessing. Maybe 1000gp will limit you to a SMALL number, but 5 or 10 is sufficient to guarantee you have more than one of each type. Carrying them is trivial, at most it means you have a Bag of Holding (5000gp and what epic character won't want one at that price?). Given that the PCs can brew their own potions trivially all that's required is an hour or two now and then to brew replacements for whatever has been used. Perhaps not possible in the midst of an adventure, but often feasible when a long rest is called and CERTAINLY feasible on a periodic basis. Thus it is trivial for an epic party to arrange to have a stock of potions extensive enough that they will never run out in any practical sense.

Potions of resistance are not a problem. Ignoring the action cost, what the potion allows you to do is decide that one of your healing surges is worth less than reducing each [typed] hit by 5 for the rest of the encounter. The math on the healing surge depends on spending one not shortening your adventuring day: spending a healing surge to deal more damage is usually unacceptable, while spending one to reduce the damage you take is good, when balanced, because it translates directly into hit points reserved to be spent on fighting a later encounter.

The math looks something as follows: The game anticipates 15-25 monster attacks in a given fight. Equally spread over all the PCs, this is 3-5 attacks on each PC, or 1.5-2.5 hits. A heroic-tier potion is worth, then, 7.5-12.5 hit points (5 per hit) for that PC when all damage is of the right type. In practice, some PCs (such as defenders) take more attacks, which could inflate the value of a heroic-tier potion to 20-25 hit points. This is still far below the value of an epic character's healing surge. It increases present effectiveness at a cost of long-term effectiveness - it is the DM's responsibility to make this trade matter if he or she choose.

Naturally, the value of the potion varies by specific situations. Against enemies who all deal a small amount of fire damage followed by ongoing 5 fire damage, potions of fire resistance will make victory trivial. In a combat where the creatures dealing necrotic damage are artillery with good soldiers keeping you off their backs, there might be many more necrotic monster attacks, increasing the value of your potion. There are also fights where only one monster fights with typed damage, or where the monsters have multiple types at their disposal.

They're in the right place.

There are 2 considerations here. 1 is the overall resource consideration in which it may or may not turn out to be worth it in a given fight. A 25th level fighter has around 180 HP. Surge value is 45. Imagine this character taking on an Elder Red Dragon. He will CERTAINLY be subjected to 1 fire attack per round worth more than 5 damage, and 2 on some rounds, potentially 3 (and this doesn't count any environmental effects, etc). Clearly even the 50gp heroic potion is well worth the cost of an HS even in terms of overall economy. Beyond that it is likely to be worthwhile also in terms of the instantaneous situation. If the character is prevented from going down for 1 round of the fight the payback was clearly huge and that would be true regardless of HP saved vs HS burned. If you consider a paragon potion the equation is even more favorable.

Note that this is actually a pretty TAME example. In practice there would almost certainly be multiple creatures and many of them would logically be fire themed. Every extra incoming attack multiplies the value of the resistance.

Clearly, hands down, a one tier lower resistance potion is worthwhile almost by default if there are enemies deploying anything beyond trivial amounts of damage of that type.

The issue is that in a lot of cases these are capstone encounters. In these cases the party WILL naturally use the highest tier version of resistance available. They will almost certainly be well aware of what sort of threat they face (certainly well enough to anticipate that fighting Sgaum the Elder Red Dragon is going to involve plenty of fire). With a 15 resist fire Sgaum goes from very challenging to negligible damage output.

Sure its possible to argue that the DM should provide alternative damage types, but no argument can do away with the fact that the dragon has a lot of fire damage output and thus we're in the situation where without the potion the threat is unbeatable and with it now its a reasonable threat. That isn't so bad, but it can be, and is, plot constraining.

What we WANT ideally is for party forthought to be worthwhile but not quite so key a factor that it makes all the difference. I tend to think overall, given the low per attack damage output of monsters, that right now its a bit overly effective. Not a huge amount, but somewhat. Given that the potions themselves are practically free when you use a lower tier one, its a bit jarring.

 

[eamon]

Issues:
- If you commonly have "themed" encounters in which one damage type prevails, typed resistance is powerful.
- If you want encounters to be winnable without requiring potions, damage must not be too high; in particular, just raising the damage to overcome the resistance is not a realistic systematic option (You could do this on an ad-hoc basis; but you're cheating players of their foresight and risk making their actions irrelevant to their success - why bother planning if the DM will compensate for their stupidity or brilliance anyhow?)
- if you want themed encounters that are winnable without resistance, potions of resistance will make them trivial.

- to have encounters that are neither trivial nor overwhelming, typed resistance must be minor (though, if that's the case, what's the point of damage types in the first place?)

Options:
- don't use themed encounters (or, not predictably or commonly).
- when you use themed encounters, do so only where opponents may retreat and attack later. This limits the places they can be used in a campaign.
- ban potions of resistance and all other easy sources of resistance
- raise the damage to TPK-levels and ensure that players must use potions and foreknowledge sometimes (ala 3.5 scry+buff+teleport).
- make the cost scale with the characters. You can do this explicitly by changing gp cost, but that's non-sensical in-game. Or, represent the cost by something relevant to the characters: make the potions cost healing surges, change the potion-use action to be a standard action; reduce the duration of the potion's effect or limit the maximum damage absorbed to require more actions over the course of combat (ala 3.5 stoneskin).
- give heavily themed sources ways to punch through resistance (like sorcerer's do or as the gloves of piercing do/or some mixture). This works well because it forces players to use more effective, more expensive options.

Are there other solutions I'm missing? I think the simplest solution is probably to avoid commonly using themed encounters, and let the hassle + minor action cost prevent overuse in mixed-theme encounters. A compromise is workable too, I think: you can occasionally use themed combats if you (1) reduce the amount of typed damage in them (or make sources more commonly multi-typed and avoid only using the same combo), (2) increase the damage of typed sources a little, (3) give heavily typed creatures (i.e. dragons) ways to punch through some resistance (i.e. ignore the first 5-10 points of resistance).