It helps to read
Surgoshan said:
Not for the purpose of stealth.
"When you make a ranged attack against an enemy and other enemies are in the way, your target has cover. Your allies never grant cover to your enemies and neither allies nor enemies give cover against melee, close, or area attacks."
By my reading, creatures provide cover only for ranged attack rolls. I've not heard of anything from wizards to confirm or deny that, though.
I found the key point in this post as to be the word READING. It seems a lot of people haven't fully read the books. Xorn being one of them who tends to be more reactionary then fact based responses. Please cite all your book references, the whole comment about rogues gaining CA behind Allies is not true, its only cover in terms of ranged attacks if there are multiple enemies, not allies. RANGED attacks only. Please read pages 280 and 281 to refresh yourself on what is considered Cover and Concealment.
Back in post 55, Sanzuo made a great post with official response from WotC.
"...Once the rogue has revealed himself from stealth via attack, he cannot restealth again unless he performs another "non attack" action such as moving to a different set of cover/concealment and then making another successful stealth check. Any enemy who perceives him using a Perception roll at the DC of his stealth roll will see him and thus negate Combat Advantage."
I think the key point in that statement is 'different set of cover/concealment'. Because later on in the post Sanzuo says why not just stay in the one bush in the middle of the battlefield, pick your nose as a minor action stealthly, then gain CA and attack... Simply because if you see a rogue pop out of the ONE bush and attack you, revealing him and no longer CA if/when he regains stealth, its not going to be hard to tell where he is at. Sure you can't seem him, but its not like he is going anywhere, be like a guy popping out of a barrel taking a shot and ducking back in, pretty sure after he reveals himself once, you know where he is, because he didn't move from that spot, at all. Sure he might have stealth, and you don't know when the next time he will do a jack-in-the-box attack is (those things still catch me by suprise, how about you?) but you can easily approach it and find yourself whatever is hidding within.
I would also like to reference pg. 279. COMBAT ADVANTAGE. If you read the very first line states "One of the most common attack modifiers is Combat Advantage." Followed by the line "Combat Advantage represents a situation in which the defender can't give full attention to defense." I will let you read the rest, but reference things like "caught off guard". Meaning someone that is hidden in a barrel or a bush, unless you are directly upon them or directly paying attention to them (standard action, searching: top of page 187, and all of Perception pg 186) they will be hard to keep track of and defend properly. Keep in mind WotC expects CA to be easily achieved since first off they said it was one of the most common modifiers and secondly because of a whole class, subset of abilities, and various other feats all depend on whether or not one has CA. This all binds together when you read the section at the bottom of page 281 "Targeting What You Can't See" it treats invisible creatures as using stealth, bold text even. It references mechanics that deal with finding creatures you can't see. Again this is back to Sanzuos statement about the ONE bush in the middle of a battle field, or the condensed barrel anology.
But clearly this original post wasn't about any of these tangents like how easily CA should be achieved, which class has better damage, who's making personal attacks, or any such things. It was about using the rules that stand and managing the number of dice rolled. Personally I don't see what the big fuss is. I roll my attacks and damage dice at the same time to speed things up. I am sure most players and DMs have multiple sets of Dice, so if you know what the elites Perception is, make that the blue d20, and then the rest can be minons. And with one fist full of dice rolled, see who passes/fails. Or what I have seen a lot of DMs do, is with large numbers of stuff like minons, just role one d20, so that elite gets his own roll, then the 5 minons get only 1 roll as a group. Another mechanic to use is reverse Stealth Perception, since Xorn was complaining each turn he rolled 6 dice, 1 player 5 creatures, rolled each time a player when. Why not just Roll the Creatures Perception once for the full round, and thats the stealth DC players have to get... wow that makes it fast. Instead of having to roll those creatures 5 dice every players turn for their stealth, now its just once, and saving you from rolling (players-1)*5 rolls each full round of combat. I mean their are countless ways to work it out so it flows much faster. Because having the DM roll 1 d20 5 times each players turn really slows down a game, try multiples, or Perception DC for the round. Or just stick with passive Perception, because maybe that lvl 1 Kobold isn't suppose to see someone who specializes in stealth, for god sake its a lvl 1 kobold versus a person that has trained exstensively in how to be stealthy. I think their are plenty of ways to figure out how to speed things up. Personally I would like whichever group is larger, players or baddies, to just roll once for the full round for their respective skill, and have that as a DC the opposed skill needs to beat. That way the larger group needs to make the least rolls, speeding up things. Or for the lazy DM, just roll once per full round for the NPCs and have that be the DC the players need to beat, make them do all the rolling. I think the rules on this read fine the way they stand, the problem seems to be with people not being able to find ways to properly manage play.
