Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="doctorbadwolf" data-source="post: 8262647" data-attributes="member: 6704184">ignore me I'm gonna calculate some stuff.Let's find out what percentage of full casting a Rogue's sneak attack is worth!Assume a world where a wizard has a spell every level that just does the recomended damage from the DMG for that spell level to a single target.Assume as well, that the the Rogue's weapon damage is taken into account for the purposes of balancing Sneak Attack, since SA adds to an attack, and they didn't give the rogue extra attack. I'll treat each weapon die + modifier damage as 2d6 at lower levels and 2d8 at higher levels, because those will get us very close without making it complicated.Lastly, we are assuming every attack hits, no one crits, and the rogue is making 1 attack per round.[spoiler]A level 5 wizard can do 27d10 (148.5) over 9 rounds in a day, in this model.Converting to d6s, we get roughly the same damage with 42d6 (147). Rounding up gets 150.5, which might be a safer bet since I'm treating the modifer to damage as either 3 or 4, and thus putting it at 3.5, but lets run with the lower average for now.A rogue's round at level 5 will average 17.5, which means it will take 8.4 rounds to deal 147 damage. So at level 5, we're even, or close enough. We can call it 8.5, since the higher average of 150.5 takes 8.6 rounds.Let's jump up to level 11.Wizard jumps up to 76d10 (418) over 16 rounds.That is roughly 120d6 (420).The Rogue is doing 6d6 per SA. We will keep the attack damage at 2d6 so we don't have to try to split things. 8d6 is 28, which can reach 420 in 15 rounds.Level 17, wizard does 114d10 (627) in 19 rounds. 179d6 is 626.5. Call it the same damage. Rogue is doing 38.5 per hit (9d6+2d6=11d6). 16 rounds for the rogue.If we don't count the weapon damage, it takes 20 rounds for the rogue to get as much from Sneak Attack as the Wizard does from spellcasting.[/spoiler]It seems like sneak attack plus weapon attacks is worth about the same as full casting, and by itself is worth about 3/4. That actually feels about right, to me, considering all the rogue gets, and the fact he can keep that damage rate up all day, no matter how many rounds. The wizard's backup option is around 4d10 (22) per round at 17th level, which is well behind the rogue's 31.5 from just sneak attack, or roughly 39+ total, without taking chance to crit into account (the rogue should be criting more often, but I don't want to try and calculate how much more often and then factor it in).Now, obviously the rogue gets a lot to make up for not having the versatility that the wizard has, and this ignores the power of stuff like banishment, polymorph, and spells that punch about their level.Interesting.</blockquote>

Verification