D&D General The Beautiful Mess of 5e

[FrogReaver]

It's a really good point and in a lot of ways was right in front of us the whole time. Focus fire is better than spreading out damage in the short run, and combats tend to be all in the short run.

IMO. Focus fire is great, but you are generally much better off ensuring your team isn't being focus fired (or if they are that it's an exceptionally defensive character that it's being done to). Any character death is a setback/loss in my book.

A few ways to accomplish this.

• Spreading party members out and relying on move distances and OA's to incentivize enemies to attack different PC's.
• Control spells/effects
• Being able to really buff defense/mobility so that if you are swarmed it benefits the party.
• Kiting lower range/speed enemies with movespeed and range. If they cannot consistently get to you to attack they cannot focus fire you.

The typical tactical concept would be that you want to ensure that not all enemies can attack any 1 PC (or that if they try/do that the PC in question is really defensive/mobile).

AOE damage can generally be compared to single target by adding at least half the damage per additional target. That's the floor, but it can also approach double for each. I think the I think 70% damage for additional target is very reasonable to compare against. This is due to the math on how many enemy rounds it will reduce as compared to single target damage.