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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elric" data-source="post: 4752142" data-attributes="member: 1139">No, my position on this has been quite consistent.  Let me try to summarize my views: The preponderance of the evidence suggests that the PH-II feats are intended to fix the scaling of FRW being so poor in the PH.  Using overpowered epic feats in PH-II to do this is bad.  Taking Epic [your weakest FRW] before Robust Defenses isn't necessarily that good compared to taking Epic [stronger FRWs] because you're so far behind that +4 won't help as much as you think.  For many characters/opponents you won't get the full benefit of the feat because the monster would have hit you on a 1 if not for the auto-miss rule, pre-feat, so some of the benefit of the +4 from the feat will be lost.  This is even more true of smaller bonuses, like a marginal +1 to your weakest FRW from a higher level neck-slot item at epic, if going by PH-alone.Robust Defenses improves your weakest FRW without having this problem (since it also provides +4 to your stronger FRWs), and once you take it, chances are that taking Epic [your weakest FRW] is nearly as good as the others Epic FRWs, and could even be better depending on the degree of selective targeting of your weak FRW.  +4 AC is going to be much better than +1 to each FRW, whether your FRWs scale reasonably well or not.  AC is attacked far more than each FRW, so despite the generally worse status conditions that FRW attacks inflict, +1 to one FRW isn't as good as +1 AC.I never claimed this.  I did claim that PC defenses tend to have AC more than 2 above FRW at level 1.  For example, looking at WotC's KotS pregens gives an average of 3.7 higher AC than FRW at level.  Excluding the two outliers, the Dragonborn Paladin and Human Wizard, leaves this essentially unchanged at a 3.8 average.  This average is made a little higher by only having one striker among these PCs, but including, say, an Elf Archery Ranger and Tiefling Feylock wouldn't substantially alter this general conclusion.AC goes up by 27 from level 1 to 30.  FRW goes up by an average of 24 from level 1 to 30 (22, 25, 25 in particular if you spread stat bonuses to two stats that affect different FRWs).  Monster to-hit goes up by 29 from level 1 to 30.  That is where I am getting the 'FRW is 5 better and AC is 2 better' statement from.  Monsters gain an average of 5 more to-hit against FRW and 2 more to-hit against AC than the players gain in defensive bonuses.  It looks like you thought that my scaling argument was based on monster to-hit going up faster for FRW attacks than AC attacks, rather than monster to-hit going up relatively faster for FRW attacks relative to PC defenses than for AC attacks relative to PC defenses.  I spelled this out on page 1 in my first post in the thread.  Your first post was on page 1 of this thread.  I'm not sure why you didn't have this in mind; this is the essential analytical framework that people who say that FRW scales poorly are working with.Looking at your previous post makes it pretty clear you had this misconception in mind:</blockquote>

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