NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Arlough" data-source="post: 5537569" data-attributes="member: 79335">Of course, to counter balance the weak damage delivery, they had higher defenses.  Well, actually we just had lower attacks, but it comes out to the same thing.  A +1 per tier to attacks effectively increases our damage output which, in turn, makes them die sooner resulting in a lower damage output on their side.Then, when you come up with all sorts of ways for us to no longer have a weakness, especially strikers (Hide Armor Expertise allowing Barbarians to add Con to AC instead of Dex, Battle Caster Defense allowing an Archer Ranger to use Shimmering Armor to make point blank ranged attacks with no consequence).  And to top it off, we can now use weapons as implements, allowing us to create multi-typed damage by casting fireball through a frost-axe, therefore making sure that any resistance they have is void (per the resistance errata).There are many ways for us to, as one of my players so humorously puts it, preemptively heal by killing crap so fast it can't really hurt us.  It used to be a long process of grinding each side down, but now it is just "He who hits the nuke button first, wins!" except that in the case of pre-MM3 monsters, their nuke is really just a cannon with infinite rounds.This doesn't mean the pre-MM3 monsters scaled well.  In fact, I had a rule of thumb stating that I would add one encounter level for every demi-tier.Level 1 to 5: L-3 to L+1 Level 6 to 10: L-2 to L+2 Level 11 to 15: L-1 to L+3 Etc.This compensated for the fact that at low levels there was very little difference between NPCs and PCs except that NPCs had a lot more HP, and that at higher levels the party was wiping stuff out.So there was a gap, but I just don't think it was as bad as everyone is making it out to be.  Hell, before the taxpertise feats, you were only hitting epic level monsters about 25% of the time.  And they were, early on, hitting you 70% of the time.  It just lead to long and grinding fights.</blockquote>

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