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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MrMyth" data-source="post: 5687934" data-attributes="member: 61155">The changes to monsters definitely changed things, but... in my experience, it meant that you could actually run at-level encounters as average encounters, rather than having them just being speedbumps, and needing Level+2 or Level+3 in order to be a standard encounter (and even higher for actually challenging fights). So... yes, the Expertise feats are needed for a group that only fights encounters 3 or 4 levels above them. I don't feel they are needed to 'keep up' with the normal expected challenge of the game, however.  The simple math does show that a PC will 'lose' 3-4 points of attack bonus over the course of 30 levels. However, that is entirely absent of the rest of the context of the game - such as the fact that they quadruple the number of encounter powers and daily powers they have, and gain even more encounter powers, items, along with special abilities from paragon paths and epic destinies (and now themes as well). I've found that you'll make up about half that bonus based on different builds and conditional feats, and the other half tends to be made up for in the increased potency offered by your greater array of powers and options.  Now, others disagree, and... fair enough. But with the Expertise in play, by Epic levels, my experience was that PCs almost never missed. It didn't mean they hit 'as often' as they did at level 1 - it meant they hit nearly all the time.  This was, admittedly, with a somewhat optimized group (though certainly not at the very extreme of such things.) And I do get that the balance needs to be aimed at the 'average' PC. But the math that Expertise is supposedly based on isn't aimed at an average PC, it is aimed at a PC who completely lacks a Paragon Path, Epic Destiny, Theme, feats, items, powers. It only really works in the absolute void of every other relevant aspect of the game, and once those other elements are added in, I think it unbalances the math too far in the other direction.  In my opinion and experience, at least.   Is this something that has only just developed? I'm not saying I haven't seen such behavior - I definitely play with one group that often takes that approach - but it was just as true at the start of 4E as now.  It is true that the challenge tends to adapt to the PCs - I view the boost in monster damage as getting monsters 'back in line', though, so that the proper challenge level they provide is actually as expected.   Hmm, I'm not sure all that is as 'cause and effect' as you feel. Even before expertise, the feeling was that monsters were low-damage; it wasn't that this made them 'too easy', just as the supposed math gap didn't actually make them 'too hard' - they both were just seen as contributing to the dreaded 'grind'.  Surgeless healing actually got toned down, after monster damage had gone up. I don't know if temps have actually become more plentiful, so much as the result of newer classes needing new design space to fill out, rather than retreading the design areas we've seen before.  The change in magic items - removing daily powers and adding a rarity system - happened simultaneously. One wasn't an attempt to boost PCs, and the other an attempt to tone them down. They were both rooted in completely seperate issues from balance - the perceived flavor of items, and their use in the game.  Similarly, Essentials characters are not by default any better or worse than existing PCs (despite that many folks have made both claims). They have their differences, but I don't think they've shifted any fundamental power level - aside from, and this is one genuine change, the shift in power level for feats, which did definitely rise with Essentials. (And, largely, ties back into the entire expertise issue.)  Honestly, I haven't seen any fundamental back and forth rebalancing as you have described. Changes have definitely been made, but I think they have had a variety of causes and reasons behind them, rather than each one being somehow a direct response to the change exactly prior to them.    I'd say that the lack of need for leaders may be a good example that balance has been compromised. I'm not saying the game should require a group to have every role covered in order to succeed. But Expertise has made it so easy to focus on damage and Strikers, and simply assume you can kill the opposition first.  At this point, I'm not sure there is any easy way to remove the expertise feats from the game (though I have been having success in my current campaign doing just that). But everything I've seen still tells me that they were put in place to fix a perceived problem that was not actually the issue they thought it was, and they've instead ended up unbalancing the math more than balancing it.</blockquote>

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