NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ECMO3" data-source="post: 8396788" data-attributes="member: 7030563">It is useful.  PAM is the one I don't think is very useful.I don't see it.  While you can do a lot of damage you are going to get slaughtered in melee, disadvantage and all.   You have a 15-ish AC, even with disadvantage that is not close to being good enough to survive.  If you use shield to boost it to 20 with disadvantage you are on the fringe of being survivable in melee with d6 hp, but you are using your reaction so you won't be able to use shield very often.Here is some raw math:  A group of 4 8th level characters fighting 4 CR8 Assasins.  You run to the front darkness and hound out, so one of the Assasins is engaged with the hound.  The other 3 attack you.  We will assume those guys are going to wade in and attack you with disadvantage.  Since they are at  disadvantage they are severely nerfed and can't sneak attack, but all of them still can and do make 2 attacks against you.  You hit one of them with and OA scorching ray for 34 ... so that one only has 44 hit points left.  They each make 2 attacks against you at disadvantage needing a 9 with disadvantage to hit.  Each individual attack has a 36% chance of hitting (while your concentration survives), meaning on average you will get hit twice in the first turn.  Each time you are hit you take 6 plus need to make a constitution save against DC15 or take 24 more poison damage.  On an average turn you are going to take over 32 points of damage (mean) or slightly lower 30 points (median) with a standard deviation of 25 hit points.   There is a 24% chance you will lose concentration on your darkness during the first turn (assuming a 12 constitution) and a 23% chance you will be downed in the first turn.  Your chance of taking no damage at all is a scant 7%. These numbers do not consider crits and assume hits are for average damage.  They also do not include sneak attack if concentration on darkness drops early in the turn.So in an average single turn of melee you have 14 hps left and have spent 75% of your sorcery points for the entire day.  That assumes average rolls.  Poor rolls and you have 2 hps left.  Good rolls and you have 32 hps left.  (Poor and good defined as the 30th and 70th percentile respectively)I did not pick assassin because it is some super monster it is the first alphabetical CR8 monster on the SRD list and it actually nerfed because it does not get sneak attack (the numbers above do not include sneak  damage)There are two areas that make this objectively not true:1. You are using your concentration.  This makes you better at things that require an attack roll but it takes most spells completely off the table.  If you want to use fear or hypnotic pattern or hold person or a host of other spells you can't because you are concentrating on darkness.2. You have used a TON of your abilities in the first turn by using sorcery points.  Other casters, including both sorcerers and others still have a lot of their features available to them.</blockquote>

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