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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gnfnrf" data-source="post: 3897922" data-attributes="member: 2373">I think you'll see vastly different outputs based on the peculiarities of party structure.  Rather than make up plausible parties, I'm using a roughly ECL 17 party I have from an old game.  Note that these characters are excessively weird. That was the point of the game they were from, so they may not be terribly helpful.  However, unlike the theoretical parties discussed above, these are fully constructed characters made for actual play.Windtalker the half-fiend voidmind bralani deals an expected damage of about 22 to 24 with her bow, depending on the current energy protections of the dragon.Wrye the shadow shadow dragon (wrymling) warlock has trouble, since he can barely penetrate SR.  This keeps his eldritch blasts down to an expected damage of 4.2 a round.Caliban the evolved lich wizard is a bit harder to judge.  He only has 11 levels of spellcasting, but his spellbooks contain every spell from the PHB and Complete Arcane.  It all comes down to what he prepped that day.  His orbs would average 38.5 damage, 35 for force (missing and critical exactly cancel out in the math, amusingly).He also might try a prismatic ray.  What with penetrating and saves, plus fire immunity, this only deals 13.2 "damage" on average (some of that is actually Con damage, converted to hp lost).  However, it has a 2 percent chance of getting an instant kill, and a 6 percent chance of causing insanity, forcing the mask to expend a heal.Other useful spells might be acid fog (though exactly how it works is up for debate), feeblemind (again, forces a heal), and so on.  However, the orbs will never be beat for damage in this scenario.Circus the cave troll barbarian isn't much for ranged combat.  His javelins only hit on a natural 20, and aren't magic, so his damage/round is negligible.Johnny Applebough the treant fighter also does not have much to do against a flying dragon, though his 30' reach might make his melee come up on occasion.  Also he wouldn't be so happy in the fire, and would probably just run and hide.Reza the half-lung dragon zakya rakshasa... has no ranged weapons of note either.So, as it turns out, three of the six members of this party are useless.In melee, on the other hand, Circus alone can do 113.775 damage on an average charge against the dragon.--gnfnrf</blockquote>

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