Sanity Checking some Monster Damages

[Markn]

PCs tend to have on the order of 20+5*lvl hp, give or take, so a basic stab is that a monster should do about 10+2.5*lvl (*2 elite, *5 solo, *.5 minion) over about 3 (4 elite, 5 solo) rounds of activity. With some heavy variation. The critters listed are ones that do less than 2/3 of that or more than 3/2 of that. Cause having a critter that does 9 damage the same level as one that does 51 seems off.QUOTE]

Just so I'm clear on what you are saying - Is your premise that a monster should do about 1/2 PC hps in damage over 3 rounds (with adjustments for elites, solos and minions?

Edit - With basic stabs that is...

 

[Markn]

I mean, if someone has 180 hp, what's actually too much damage? 60 is less than a healing power (surge+15) at that level, 90 or less ensures death does not occur unless it's via ongoing or hitting someone already down / coup de grace... very few creatures even remotely come close. So I hadn't enabled that check yet.

I think this sentence has real merit but my guess (and i could be wrong) is that you will find that most monsters will do proper damage to the classes that are scraping the bottom in terms of HPs/level, which then puts the high HP classess way out of wack.

Again, I think the variable is the number of monsters. If 5 hit the tank, its fine, if 5 hit the wizard, splat. Either way, its not fun in 4e to gang up on 1 player. Its far more fun to split damage up but I think therein lies the issue. Split damage is a resource waster and is low threat.

One other things is, I would assume most DM's that use same multiple creature types that act on the same initiative point still treat them as seperate initiatives. That is, if 3 deathjump spiders all go on init point 20 and the first two knock down the PC, the 3rd isn't necessarily forced to attack the downed PC. It can decide at that point. Playing this way keeps the death threat level low, while the other way inflates that level quite a bit and means that dice play a much larger role in character deaths. I only point this out due to Lancelot's deathjump example and your rebuttal that based on a crit the PC is more likely to live, which by the way, I completely agree with you on.

 

[OakwoodDM]

Dire Rats do have a special ability - they infect whatever they bite with Filth Fever. That's a lost healing surge right there. Their accuracy is bad, but in three rounds they'll probably hit once, which means some player effectively lost at least 5 hp on top of the actual bite damage. I suspect this puts Dire Rats firmly out of the "Low" damage category.

There is a big caveat on this. The player has to fail a save at the end of combat to contract Filth Fever, so there's only a 45% chance of that lost surge.

 

[keterys]

I hadn't factored in the filth fever for the dire rat... if I do, at its best (ie, if I give every bite a chance to infect even though they might all be on the same person and ignore that filth fever doesn't stack across multiple encounters) that would up it to 9.98 80%... that's still not that good, but would slide it out of consideration.

I will admit that filth fever is very unlikely to feel threatening to the party, so I do suspect I should downgrade it some.

 

[keterys]

Just so I'm clear on what you are saying - Is your premise that a monster should do about 1/2 PC hps in damage over 3 rounds (with adjustments for elites, solos and minions?

Well, 2 surges worth of damage before considering what healing or mitigation (shield, temp, etc) abilities the party has. At a certain point, you need a certain level of threat or there's just no reason to have the fight. As it is, if you had a party of 4 face a group of 4 monsters that triggered LOW, you would not be surprised if a party might not have to expend any healing triggers whatsoever to win the combat (no chance of anyone dropping), that it's possible that no one would even get bloodied depending on how the damage was spread or mitigated (battlerager, bard, or barbarian temp hp).

Edit - With basic stabs that is...

Well, using every single ability they had that seemed to affect damage. I probably should give a stronger weighting to dazing someone, in terms of improving the damage output of other monsters, but that's so very fuzzy.

It is built on a lot of assumptions - for example, if you have 5 normal monsters and kill 1 each round through focus fire, then they might get off 5 attacks the first round, 4 the second, 3, 2, 1 for a total of 15 attacks... which averages out to 3. Of course, some critters are just going to get priority attacking over others (why, hello, goblin hexer) and others are just going to cheat that amount of time (why, hello, wraith). But that's okay, cause you need to account for what happens if something is not focus fired. Some fights the creatures use their daze/immobilize/stun abilities over their damage ones, but that can wash out between lost player damage and lost monster damage frankly.

Once I've got this output spreadsheet going reasonably I intend to make an input one to measure creatures that are excessively easy or hard to kill. So, wraiths that have in theory (and more actuality than I care to think about) infinite hp can go on there. Some creatures who have defenses way too low will show up too. I actually figured at some point in this I'd adjust the factor for things like artillery and lurkers that are a bit more fragile, giving them more leeway to do higher damage (and more stringent on low damage) as a result.

I wanted to do this mostly so I could have somewhere to sanity check my own stuff so I could tool around more comfortably with the monster builder, and because I'm thinking of redoing the monster manual (or possibly just its most broken parts) for fun.

 

[Markn]

How are you making out? I'm eagerly awaiting the higher level results.

 

[keterys]

Heh, I fooled around with it a little bit - I think I did four or so high epic ones. Some are just hard - like the Pit Fiend. Storm Gorgon did plenty of damage. Efreet Karadjin did too little _unless_ it can get at people easy to hit. It also had a single action max burst of like 200 damage (requires 2 crits back to back, mind you, but its crits are immense damage and it gets immediate action attacks) Lich Vestige way too little. I forget how the sorrowsworn were...

I actually think I'm going to adjust my formula to assume not fighting against level appropriate, but fighting a couple lower though... it's pretty common to throw monsters of n+3 at a party, for example, so the fact that the efreet only has like a 10-15% chance to hit level appropriate is too swingy if it's used against folks a few levels lower (where it could might double in effectiveness).

But, like I said earlier, I didn't expect to do too much until after the weekend. Running D&D, trying out a new computer game, _and_ my anniversary. Busy weekend.

 

[Benimoto]

the fact that the efreet only has like a 10-15% chance to hit level appropriate...

Very interesting thread. But, I seem to remember an official update for the Efreet that corrected its to-hit number by about 9-10 points. The updates also increase a few brutes' damage by a die or two. Did you include that in your numbers?

 

[keterys]

Very interesting thread. But, I seem to remember an official update for the Efreet that corrected its to-hit number by about 9-10 points. The updates also increase a few brutes' damage by a die or two. Did you include that in your numbers?

In general, I've been using the DDI Compendium, which is _usually_ up to date. In that example, the compendium entry is wrong (there are actually several cases where the entry is just flat out wrong, in the first ~120 monsters I've looked at) - it completely lacked a to-hit line, so I looked in the monster manual. I'll track down that errata, or see if the monster builder is more correct - I was doing this on a laptop during commute (just doing a mass-open to all tabs of a level's worth of monsters at a time) and I don't/can't have monster builder installed on it.

If its attack bonus _is_ in range for a soldier of its level (ie, like 8 more), it will likely do too much damage, though possibly not enough to trigger a warning flag. If I assume no fire resist, almost certainly though. It'll likely last 5 rounds at epic (instead of 3 on the heroics) and its ongoing fire damage is just mean. OTOH, assume fire resist 15 and it's tame. Not sure on the best approach there... I think assume no resist, but make a special column for 5*lvl resist so I can see creatures that are completely nerfed by resist (like the Pit Fiend)

 

[keterys]

If anyone is holding their breath - please don't. I'm going to completely redo the spreadsheet before I do anything further. My thinking is to gradually increase the number of expected rounds, factor in crits, check not just at level, but at level -2 and level +5 (the range of use suggested for a creature) which should bring to light somethings like the deathjump, as well as institute the checks for excessive damage. I don't intend to have this done anytime remotely soon, I just wanted the initial feedback so I could shape how I was doing this.

Thanks once again to everyone who responded and helped.

P.S. Storm Gorgons and Efreet Karadjin can do _serious_ damage unless folks have resistance gear. Sorrowsworn Deathlords and Reapers are fairly anemic in comparison, even without resistance gear.