Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Stalker0" data-source="post: 4450738" data-attributes="member: 5889">A lot of good discussion here.The current debate about THW vs S&B relies heavily on the question of how often is the S&B user going to get hit? Its easy to gauge a human reaction from a THW offense perspective. After all, its in a players best interested to strike often and kill monsters as quickly as possible, so they will strike in a way that best accomplishes that goal. And you don't need a lot of math to know that if a creature is really wounded, you want to take it out so it doesn't hurt you.However, things get a little fuzzier on the defense side. For the pcs, defense boils down not on their choices, but the choices of the dm. As stated earlier, if the DM uses a lot of monsters that focus on will defense for example (perhaps a mind flayer campaign) then a shield has a weaker benefit. If a DM determines in his mind that the fighter and paladin's marks are very strong, and therefore will have his monsters hit the defenders frequently, then the utility of a shield greatly increases. If he has decided that the incentive isn't that strong, then the shield becomes an even greater deterrent not to hit the defender, and so its utility is very weak.Further, the number of monsters makes a difference. If the party faces lots of solo's, then the number of attacks a party member receives vs how many attack he dishes out changes compared to if he's fighting hoards of minions, and that can have an impact on how important defense is.And lastly, how important are skills in 4e? Remember that +2 AC/reflex defense costs a -2 to several skills. How useful are these skills in any given game?So ultimately, while I appreciate the math being done to compare THW and S&B, there is one very large variable that must be taken into consideration, and that is how many attacks a shield user will actually take where his shield will be useful. Until people can agree on a general baseline for that, then any math equation done is meaningless.Now there are some assumptions you can make. You can use the standard 5 monsters vs 5 PCs as a baseline, as that seems to be the standard given to use by the dmg. You could say that general 2 of them will attack the defender, or 3 or 4, but pick a general number. This of course is influenced by the difference in AC between the defender and the rest of the party. Further, you can look at the monster's manual, choose monsters that most people are going to use, and therefore get a guage of how many AC or reflex attacks the party will endure.With all of that, you can guage a rough estimate, and from there do a true comparison. I'm not going to do it, but I encourage someone to take on the challenge<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

Verification