So, about Expertise...

[AngryPurpleCyclops]

If he doesn't, we could try and do it at some point via something like fantasy grounds. It doesn't have to be this specific encounter in that case, since a power gamer with previous knowledge of the encounter might take advantage of the situation

I'm interested in determining if there's really a problem at epic level or if it's more about encounter concept and soft dm'ing.

 

[ObsidianCrane]

So I go look up the Dragonborn Paladin (the level 25 Elite Soldier).

I read the powers and defences and I shrug.

I have a level 22 Sorcerer stated out, her primary attack is against Ref and is in blasts and bursts, so she will be including the Paladin in her attacks. At level 22 she has a +23 base attack without Implement Expertise (the implement version of expertise) and +24 with fire attacks, +25 if she used an at will last round. So she needs 9-11 to hit the guy with most of her attacks without any special conditions being imposed by another PC.

If she is hanging out with a Chaladin with a 24 Charisma then the Chaladin without feats has a better Divine Challenge than the Death Knight - -2 attack, and does 16 damage if you don't attack the Chaladin, and the Death Knight will take 31 damage if it ignores the mark... guess who the Death Knight will be attacking... The Chaladin at that level also has access to Corona of Radiant Brilliance, Hand of the Gods, Break the Wall (useable if someone else buff's the Paladin's attacks) and whatever else it can do.

Chuck a laser cleric in there with Firestorm (and why wouldn't you have it if you are a laser cleric?), any of the level 13 or 15 Encounters for a Wisdom Cleric.. if they are a Radiant Servant then the Death Knight and his undead budies are in for a world of pain. (And that doesn't even have to be optimised for the undead as its a good PP for laser Clerics anyway.)

Anyway the point is that "good encounter design" means more than looking at what the DMG says should be in an encounter. It means looking at what the party can do and choosing monsters accordingly.

Further working out if encoutners are to hard or whatever also means looking at more than "Character A vs Monster B" and seeing who will win. It means looking at the interaction of a whole party with the whole encounter and figuring out what will happen.

In short game play suggests that raw maths comparison is simply not enough.

What does this have to do with the Expertise feats: it comes back to the fact that they feats are indeed really good. Definately in the top 6 mechanical feats in the game right now. But the straight, and simple math comparisons that people are using to argue that these feats are "must haves" etc are not absolutes. They are arguments based on limiting the view of the game without consideration for the effects of play.

I really hope WotC didn't add these feats because people complained that the "Math" didn't work when their comparisons are often based on either extreme situations, or overly simplified situations. (I mean put a Fighter and a Warlord in the Paladin and Cleric places and the Death Knight is far more dangerous for example, but other combinations its not such an issue (eg Bard or Shaman and Warlord). )

I don't like the feats for what they do in terms of the fact that they seem to be against WotC's claims about what they wanted feat design in 4E to be about: mainly not about widening the gap between combat optimised and non-combat optimised characters. But that said I'm also not of the opinion that they are as necassary as people want to say.

 

[AngryPurpleCyclops]

So I go look up the Dragonborn Paladin (the level 25 Elite Soldier).

I read the powers and defences and I shrug.

I have a level 22 Sorcerer stated out, her primary attack is against Ref and is in blasts and bursts, so she will be including the Paladin in her attacks. At level 22 she has a +23 base attack without Implement Expertise (the implement version of expertise) and +24 with fire attacks, +25 if she used an at will last round. So she needs 9-11 to hit the guy with most of her attacks without any special conditions being imposed by another PC.

But this is a best case pc targeting the specific weakness of that monster. Change the sorcerer to a fighter and it's lights out. This also disregards the fact the the death knight is a powerful creature apt to be leading other undead. In our campaign if one pc is distinguishing themselves as the major threat in an encounter, the monsters target him in the exact same way pc's target a monster who is over performing

If she is hanging out with a Chaladin with a 24 Charisma then the Chaladin without feats has a better Divine Challenge than the Death Knight - -2 attack, and does 16 damage if you don't attack the Chaladin, and the Death Knight will take 31 damage if it ignores the mark... guess who the Death Knight will be attacking... The Chaladin at that level also has access to Corona of Radiant Brilliance, Hand of the Gods, Break the Wall (useable if someone else buff's the Paladin's attacks) and whatever else it can do.

Chuck a laser cleric in there with Firestorm (and why wouldn't you have it if you are a laser cleric?), any of the level 13 or 15 Encounters for a Wisdom Cleric.. if they are a Radiant Servant then the Death Knight and his undead budies are in for a world of pain. (And that doesn't even have to be optimised for the undead as its a good PP for laser Clerics anyway.)

I'm ok with all this too. If a party with a chaladin and cleric runs into undead, I expect the undead to be in huge trouble. I would feel that the divine classes were broken if this wasn't the case. Switch the scenario to a sorrowsworn and your average chaladin is in massive trouble. The swarm has +30 vs reflex attack and can fly 12. The deathlord has an aura that will enable him to mop the floor with a sorcerer or zap cleric. He can keep most ranged attackers constantly struggling to get away from his daze and other debilitating effects like weakness and the -2 penalty on melee and ranged attacks and insubstantial ability coupled with teleport and very substantial defenses make him a serious problem.

Anyway the point is that "good encounter design" means more than looking at what the DMG says should be in an encounter. It means looking at what the party can do and choosing monsters accordingly.

I'm ok with all this too but there's a fine line between intelligent encounter design and either designing specifically to party strengths or weaknesses. Published encounters will neither be designed to help nor hinder any specific build.

Further working out if encoutners are to hard or whatever also means looking at more than "Character A vs Monster B" and seeing who will win. It means looking at the interaction of a whole party with the whole encounter and figuring out what will happen.

In short game play suggests that raw maths comparison is simply not enough.

It's obviously more complex than the raw math, but the math is a great place to start. Arguing that pc synergies outclass monster synergies just implies lazy encounter design to me. The expectation is that N+3 encounters are hard. If they're not hard their's something wrong with one of three things. The game system, the encounter design or the monsters actions/DM's tactics. It can be more than one of these combining to make something less effective than expected. Obviously a great plan by the pc's or a particularly effective build vs encounter type might sometimes change a hard encounter into something less difficult (i.e. if you have a bunch of ranged strikers and there's lots of difficult terrain for the pc's to hide behind you have an optimum situation vs melee creatures. but the inverse should be true just as often, if the pc's are in a foggy swamp with limited visibility suddenly ranged strikers are at a disadvantage)

What does this have to do with the Expertise feats: it comes back to the fact that they feats are indeed really good. Definately in the top 6 mechanical feats in the game right now. But the straight, and simple math comparisons that people are using to argue that these feats are "must haves" etc are not absolutes. They are arguments based on limiting the view of the game without consideration for the effects of play.

this is denying the mathematical reality of the game. "Must have" is the wrong verbiage but "vastly superior effectiveness" is an understatement after level 15.

I really hope WotC didn't add these feats because people complained that the "Math" didn't work when their comparisons are often based on either extreme situations, or overly simplified situations. (I mean put a Fighter and a Warlord in the Paladin and Cleric places and the Death Knight is far more dangerous for example, but other combinations its not such an issue (eg Bard or Shaman and Warlord). )

I doubt they responded to complaints, I think if you were a fly on the wall at WotC you would find that the person who designed the scaling of the game specifically planned for the numbers to ascend symmetrically as a matter of balance. It's a very elegant system factoring, stats + enhancements + level + feats to maintain parity. If you take a look at the rules for adding magic items to creatures, specifically the "magic threshhold" on page 174 of the dmg you can interpolate the scaling model. They put a lot of thought into the balance of this game with regard to combat encounters. They keep getting better and better with each revision. In the earliest versions the DM was somewhat on his own with regard to appropriate encounters(there was no rule for easy, normal, hard). 3.0 and 3.5 really got pretty sharp with the EL system but even this had flaws. 4e has nailed this concept down in a way that maximizes dm's range of choices while ensuring that encounters will not spiral out of control. This is the reason for scaling defenses and attacks. In older versions of DnD 2 monsters of a comparative level could have defense values that were miles apart. This system has a range of about 40 for defenses where as the the thac0 system was about 20 so a difference of 6 in thac0 would be a difference of 12 in 4e. Making things like a will-o-wisp very problematic in terms of balance. This problem is removed by the mathematical model they use in 4e. They probably hired someone with a lot more knowledge of probability, systems and game theory or at least decided that these things needed to be part of the model.

I don't like the feats for what they do in terms of the fact that they seem to be against WotC's claims about what they wanted feat design in 4E to be about: mainly not about widening the gap between combat optimised and non-combat optimised characters. But that said I'm also not of the opinion that they are as necassary as people want to say.

The problem is that instead of just adding errata to the level advancement table they made this a feat. It's a horrible choice mechanically (effectively a feat tax) and they're clearly not "necessary" in a literal sense. Obviously the DM can adjust the encounters as needed (maxing encounters at N+2 instead of N+4 and/or cutting the L+5 to L+7 monsters out of the mix at epic) but denying that this was not the intent of the design is a little silly. The rules don't say "when you get to epic level, make the range of foes smaller because the math doesn't scale". The rules for designing encounters remain constant.

Bottom line: If you want to maintain the scaling model and encounter design system the correction of 1 per tier is indeed necessary. PC's are going to struggle massively against L+6 monsters in epic. L+6 monsters in heroic are challenging but not overwhelming, something changed between tiers since facing L+6 monsters is part of the game. Anecdotal scenarios of how some pc's can still compete with L+3 monsters isn't a valid argument to the contrary. L+3 is not L+7 and for every situation where a pc is strong against a monster there's a monster that is too powerful for them to deal with. The sorrowsworn level 28 leader can conceivably be in a battle with level 21 or 22 pc's.

 

[tiornys]

I've been following the discussion here and elsewhere and I haven't seen a really convincing argument supporting the idea that increased power selection compensates for the lost base to hit, nor have I seen a really convincing argument against the idea. However, I think the following is an excellent point, and I wanted to give posters here a chance to rebut it:

<I can't believe I'm stepping into this, but...>

The only problem with the argument is that at higher levels the additional effects of encounter/daily powers make the character more effective, overall. I agree this is a nice to have feat, not a need to have.

I disagree with this statement. I do not believe that more powerful encounter/daily powers make up for reduced to hit chances. More powerful encounter/daily powers make up for stronger enemies, which require more powerful attacks to take down.

The baseline for the game is that when fighting monsters of your level you should hit a little over half the time AND it should take four hits to take out a standard monster. (One hit to take out a minion, eight to take out an elite and around 20 to take out a solo). Increasingly potent powers are designed to keep up your damage with monsters higher hp and also serve as a counter to the monster's powers which also grow in potency.

The degree to which a character's chance to hit decreases is highly significant because not all monsters are at the PCs level. Let's say the average boss has defenses 5 higher than a monster of the party's level. This could be because it's 5 levels higher, or just a few levels higher and a solo or elite monster. This means that at first level you have between a 55%-30% chance to hit. At thirtieth level you have a 35%-10% chance to hit. Basically you go from having a range of hitting monsters from one half to one third of the time to a range of hitting them one third to one tenth of the time.

No amount of power makes up for only having a 1 in 10 chance to hit an enemy, except automatic instant kills, which everyone pretty much agrees are broken anyway and those get errata'd or house ruled out pretty quick. Besides which, it simply isn't fun to play in a game where you only hit 1 out of every 10 times.

Personally, I'm not a power gamer and I'd prefer to not need to pay attention to make sure that I'm picking the right combination of feats/magic items/paragon paths/epic destinies to allow my attacks and defenses to scale properly with monsters. The game is supposed to do that on its own and my character advancement selection should be based on my decisions, not struggling to keep up with baseline.

t~

 

[ObsidianCrane]

Firstly if you are going to pull out specific monsters as examples I have every right to pull out examples of PCs who make them not a problem. That is part of the point - DM discretion is important, and chosing the right mosnters for the party is important, even if that means changing a pre-written module (which seem to have "pick a monster" approach all to often so its not like it matters).

(Btw the War Chanter Bard PP can easily generate +9 attack bonus for every ally for a turn at 20th level... talk about situational changes to the balance of the game.)

Bottom line: If you want to maintain the scaling model and encounter design system the correction of 1 per tier is indeed necessary. PC's are going to struggle massively against L+6 monsters in epic. L+6 monsters in heroic are challenging but not overwhelming, something changed between tiers since facing L+6 monsters is part of the game. Anecdotal scenarios of how some pc's can still compete with L+3 monsters isn't a valid argument to the contrary. L+3 is not L+7 and for every situation where a pc is strong against a monster there's a monster that is too powerful for them to deal with. The sorrowsworn level 28 leader can conceivably be in a battle with level 21 or 22 pc's.

See you are assuming that the Encounter Design guidelines in the DMG are without flaws. I would suggest that the first DMG has many flaws in it wrt mechanical matters. I would go so far as to suggest that problems are seen in high paragon and epic when following the guidelines presented in the DMG because the guidelines that went to print were simply not tested rigourously enough to detect the flaws; because good DMs were making good encounters for their PCs - the bit that isn't covered by the crunchy stuff.

Just think of the problems with Skill Challenges, and still existing problems with Skill Check DCs in 4E created by the gap between Trained and Untrained being potentially huge (+10 or more in some situations). I have a character whose response to skill challenges is to largely do nothing for example (though that's more an issue with LFR skill challenges and DMs).

In essence the Encounter Design rules work well in Heroic Tier and early Paragon, after that they start running into problems.

Further to this you keep holding up the math of monster design as if it is ideal as well, yet few of the monsters in MM1 conform to the math we are given in the DMG - most having lower defences than the DMG predicts in at least one area, and the DMG is terrible at predicting AC, which is usually higher in the MM.

So what you have is an argument about the math of the game using systems (that is the ones in the DMG not the ones WotC actually used) that are flawed as its foundation. Not a good place to start tbh... much better off looking at game play and seeing how things really work.

In encounter design you should be taking your XP budget and looking at monsters that have defences around +10 on the typical attack of the party. Selecting monsters that the party needs to roll 7-8 to hit without effects will lead to an easy fight. Selecting 9-11 will lead to a moderate challenge, and selecting 12-14 will lead to a tough fight. (Those are "most of the party" ranges, individual PCs may need higher or lower values.). Grindspace, as its called, is something to be avoided, and following the DMG guidelines on encounter allocation of monsters is a good way to create it. As a rule you should be using monsters that are +/- up to 2 on PC level. Elites should be typically PC level, maybe up to Level +1, and Solos should be from Level-2 with buddies up to level +2 at most and alone depending on their defences. Similar evaluations on the to-hit chance of the monsters can be done as well.

None of this is well discussed in the DMG it just makes wild statements with little to no guidance on the application - reinforcing my belief that it was heavily tested for Heroic tier, but basically not tested for Paragon or Epic.

It will be interesting to see what DMG2 has to say about encounter design if anything.

 

[hong]

There sure are a lot of ppl thinking too hard about Expertise.

 

[keterys]

They'd argue less, but everyone's arguments keep missing.

 

[tiornys]

See you are assuming that the Encounter Design guidelines in the DMG are without flaws. I would suggest that the first DMG has many flaws in it wrt mechanical matters. I would go so far as to suggest that problems are seen in high paragon and epic when following the guidelines presented in the DMG because the guidelines that went to print were simply not tested rigourously enough to detect the flaws; because good DMs were making good encounters for their PCs - the bit that isn't covered by the crunchy stuff.

I'll agree that problems occur at high paragon and at epic, but I don't agree that the guidelines in the DMG are at fault. I think your argument unintentionally supports what you're attempting to argue against.

In essence the Encounter Design rules work well in Heroic Tier and early Paragon, after that they start running into problems.

This is true precisely because the background math underpinning the game changes significantly past early Paragon.

Further to this you keep holding up the math of monster design as if it is ideal as well, yet few of the monsters in MM1 conform to the math we are given in the DMG - most having lower defences than the DMG predicts in at least one area, and the DMG is terrible at predicting AC, which is usually higher in the MM.

Quickly checking on monsters starting from L30, I found general agreement between MM guidelines and AC of creatures. In a couple of cases where AC was lower than I would have expected, the creatures had defensive abilities that made up the difference.

I don't doubt that some creatures violate the guidelines; mistakes happen. However, I'd need overwhelming evidence that "few monsters conform to the math..." since my experience directly contradicts that claim.

So what you have is an argument about the math of the game using systems (that is the ones in the DMG not the ones WotC actually used) that are flawed as its foundation. Not a good place to start tbh... much better off looking at game play and seeing how things really work.

The systems in the DMG are based on an assumption that the background math remains constant throughout 30 levels of play. Since the background math changes, those systems falter at higher levels.

In encounter design you should be taking your XP budget and looking at monsters that have defences around +10 on the typical attack of the party. Selecting monsters that the party needs to roll 7-8 to hit without effects will lead to an easy fight. Selecting 9-11 will lead to a moderate challenge, and selecting 12-14 will lead to a tough fight. (Those are "most of the party" ranges, individual PCs may need higher or lower values.). Grindspace, as its called, is something to be avoided, and following the DMG guidelines on encounter allocation of monsters is a good way to create it. As a rule you should be using monsters that are +/- up to 2 on PC level. Elites should be typically PC level, maybe up to Level +1, and Solos should be from Level-2 with buddies up to level +2 at most and alone depending on their defences. Similar evaluations on the to-hit chance of the monsters can be done as well.

Correct the background math, and the encounter guidelines will generally create encounters where this is true. One of the aims of 4E was to reduce the preparation time necessary for DM'ing, and if the background math worked as intended, there'd be no need to be as thorough as you suggest.

t~

edit: keterys, I <3 you

 

[WalterKovacs]

The DMGII is apparently focused on paragon play. Perhaps they'll be addressing encounter design at levels above heroic. They've definitely learned a lot since the first books came out, seeing as how PHBII and other books with player options seem quite different (they've pinned down the controller role; they figured out how to reintroduce summoning, familiars, animal companions and the like; they are avoiding making new classes like the paladin, cleric or warlock that are two classes in one by keeping primary attack stats for each class) so it's possible that DMGII will address some of what they've learned about encounter design. They initially believed the skill challenges were balanced, but they were using some assumptions that apparently didn't translate into actual play. It's possible that what they interpreted as balanced encounters didn't necessarily translate in terms of "fun factor".

If the assumption is that you want to hit the monster regularly (close to 50/50) to avoid swinginess. If you increase the range where you can hit the monster (by increasing the PCs ability to hit), you are also having higher level monsters that can hit the PCs easier. The difficulty coming more from surviving the monsters than from having a hard time to hit it.

 

[grickherder]

My favorite thing about expertise is that it's here. I opened my PHB2 and there it was. Nice and published in a core rulebook.

I'm already used to designing encounters for parties with very high variance in both the to-hit bonus and level of optimization. Even if the least optimized characters don't take it and the most optimized do (widening the gap), my nicely lethal and dramatic encounters will continue to work fine. The rogue who hits all the time will continue to do so.

I expect that everything will work fine with this feat. It's here and it's not going any place and people will take it and their games won't fall apart. Other people will opt not to take it and will continue to have no problem compensating for scaling differences just like they do right now-- situational modifiers, powers granting bonuses to hit and all that stuff.

People can feel my position is unsupported and dismiss my points if they like, but the feat is still here and here to stay and I imagine many people will enjoy it. I feel a little bit sorry for those who's priorities in play are rigid such that they feel forced to take it and feel it's a feat tax. If that ruins/reduces their fun, but somehow doesn't for others, I'd sugggest they examine the variable-- themselves and their priorities.