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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elric" data-source="post: 4751412" data-attributes="member: 1139">(Did you mean "can't?")One could do all sorts of calculations to try to get at an answer here.  However, this is a question that it is possible to answer without having done a ton of calculations off of tables in the DMG.  To quote James McMurray, who's on your side of "causing FRW to scale more like AC would be bad", but agrees that "attacks against FRW do not become weaker over time relative to attacks against AC in a way that compensates for the better scaling of FRW attacks"WotC is going to have an article addressing the Expertise feats.   I would be very surprised if they gave this rationale for the feats.  That said, if that was truly their rationale when they designed the feats they'd almost surely lie and come up with something more appealing, like "we needed a math fix and didn't want to issue errata" <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  Still, assuming we take that article at its word, this will be settled in due time.There's no reason to assume the game is shooting for equal effectiveness for monster attacks in average percentage of PC HP across levels.  In the PH it's certainly not the case that PC damage scales as quickly as monster HP, and unlike monsters who gain on to-hit vs. AC and even more so on FRWs, PCs lose on static to-hit against monster defenses as level increases (this isn't to say that the rate at which the number of rounds per combat increases is necessarily fine- see the threads on grind).  I think you also missed the thrust of my argument.  Set aside Brutes; they're just one monster type.  FRW attacks scale by 5 better over 29 levels; AC attacks by 2.  Yet the DMG doesn't tell you to construct monsters any differently at level 28 if they attack FRW instead of AC compared to how you'd do it at level 4.  There is nothing like "use higher damage for all attacks against AC than attacks against FRW if you're building a level 20+ monster, since the FRW attacks hit more often compared to AC attacks than they used to." Using a character's strongest FRW lessens the problems that arise.  In particular, if you compared a character's weak FRW you'd end up with a very different conclusion.  Additionally, the way you've done this with "Cloth/Leather/Hide" armor obscures the fact that level 1 PCs generally have AC 2 or more higher than average FRW.  However, this is a problem relevant from the start, not one intrinsic to the scaling.There are feats that boost AC in the PH as well.  In general, you can get +1 to AC with one feat (+2 if you take Leather Armor Proficiency).  AC is attacked much more than any given FRW.  Is +1 to AC significantly worse than +2 to one FRW in a way that would lead you to conclude that Lightning Reflexes is a "fix", while Armor Specialization is not, or are the FRW bonuses +2 simply as result of AC being more attacked than FRW, so feats that boost FRW should give a larger bonus?  I think it's the latter.I actually edited the part you responded to out of my post before your response was posted because I didn't want to sidetrack the thread.  That said, the PH-II feats are not valuable because of particularly poor scaling; they're valuable because the bonuses are so large.  There was even an entire discussion earlier in this thread about why taking Epic [your weak FRW] alone isn't as valuable because you already get hit on a 2+ and now you might get hit on a 4+ or so (the first two points of the bonus being wasted).In PH going from +5 heavy armor to +6 is worth an astounding +4 AC, while +5 to +6 neck slot is worth +1 FRW.  That's vastly better for Armor than for a Neck-slot.  Even in AV, you're getting +3 AC compared to +2 Fort/+1 Ref/+1 Will for Scale (only +1 FRW for Plate).  This goes back to my point above: if you think that Lightning Reflexes is a "fix" because +2 to a particular FRW is worth more than +1 AC, then you might weight +4 across FRWs higher than +3 to AC.  Similarly, in PH to-hit bonuses are even harder to get from feats than boosts to defenses.  This reflects the fact that +1 to-hit  (not even counting the extra damage) is worth more than +1 to each FRW.  For example, you could take a higher level weapon, and one Great Fort/LR/IW feat and end up close to even on FRW defenses, but there's no feat the fighter could take with a higher neck-slot item that would leave him with a comparable to-hit bonus.</blockquote>

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