Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5351385" data-attributes="member: 82106">Pre-nerf is was inarguably the way to go. Post-nerf the increased to-hit of the rest of the party generally doesn't make up for the loss of damage output, and remember that the alternative is something like Righteous Brand, which also has a buffing effect (admittedly not as general a one, but applied properly it is a pretty handy boost). Astral Seal still has to HIT to give the bonus, which means it is only up around 50% of the time. Same is true for other powers of course, but the average of a couple extra hit points a round healing you get out of it doesn't really negate even one attack by most monsters over the course of an encounter.There was some pretty good number crunching on this a while back. The upshot was that even pre-nerf it really depended on the makeup of the party, etc. Post-nerf there are a few edge-cases where Astral Seal still makes sense, but they are like epic tier high damage output enemies that are close to impossible to hit or something like that. For the vast bulk of situations you'll encounter Righteous Brand will result in lower overall damage to the party and thus more hit points coming out the other side of the encounter. All of this is pretty much in the realm of min/maxing though. The one observation beyond that I have to make is a healing focused group will endure a lot of LONG encounters. They may well come out of them in good shape, but against opponents that already take a good while to kill it can be a pretty boring strategy where you just chip away at the enemy and negate most of the damage coming back at you.</blockquote>

Verification