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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mad_Jack" data-source="post: 7056781" data-attributes="member: 6750306">One thing I always feel compelled to point out is that a lot of people (particularly people who attach negative connotations to the terms we're discussing in this thread) assume that "min/maxing" means pumping their primary scores to the max and then dumping everything else...However, particularly in previous editions, this was pretty much a guarantee that you'd just built a one-trick glass cannon and pretty much missed the entire point of the Min/Max exercise..."Min/Maxing", as the term was used in the old WotC CharOp forum by the CharOp wizards, meant maximizing your strengths... While minimizing your weaknesses. Shoring up your weak spots, not dumping your stats.The whole point is to create a character who is as effective at what they were designed to do as possible while not actively gimping yourself in other areas.The classic example of the all-smashing idiot barbarian who can one-shot a troll at first level? He's all-powerful... Until he meets anything that calls for a non-physical saving throw.The Hulk just got punked by a cloud of pixies.To focus the concept on the two clerics in the original post, and as mentioned above, you need to ask yourself several questions when shuffling around ability scores and other stats. Unless the cleric is going to be a big part of the party's melee capability, you need to ask yourself, how much Strength is too much? If he's not going to be depended on to bring big damage every round and his armor feat helps him mitigate some big hits, does he really need to max his Strength score to get an occasional +1 damage, will those few extra hit points from his maxed-out Con score matter often enough that they're worth sacrificing something else for? Or could those few extra buy points be better used to shore up one of his other abilities? Does somebody else in the party have a decent Charisma score to deal with social encounters, or should you pop some extra points into Charisma and take Persuasion as a skill? What sorts of things require saves against his "tanked" abilities and how common are they?It's all about assigning priorities and values to your limited set of character resources, and then making choices designed to balance the overall positives and negatives.</blockquote>

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