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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chzbro" data-source="post: 5171707" data-attributes="member: 83964">While I wouldn't say my group is super-optimized, it is a party of epic level characters.Two of us were stunned in round 1. That sucked, but on round 2 my bard dropped Fragment of the Song (which is part of his epic destiny) and allows anyone who spends an action point to gain 2 extra standard actions instead of 1--this is what facilitated the 300 damage round from the rogue. Edit: And as keterys said, when I spent my action point, not only did I get 2 extra attacks (which also gave my allies extra attacks), I also gave all my allies +7 to hit and +7 damage to each of their attacks until the end of my next turn. Sadly, I had already used the attack that grants an ally 4 basic attacks, but we made out alright that round anyway.Now admittedly this isn't us dropping at-wills, but at epic, it's not really that crazy of a round. It does skew the averages though. But then again, it seems like at epic everyone does something that skews the averages. Our wizard has no stun-lock cheese, but he did manage to knock the elite out of the fight on round 1, and we had Yeenoghu dazed or stunned from round 2 on.And as for the two minute turns...well, I admit that does seem fast. I might have been off by 5 minutes or so, I guess, but I know we started the fight at 5 (we end the game at 6) and finished the fight at about a quarter of.I'm very aware that this particular example is somewhat extreme, but I also DM a 4-5th level game with 6 players and (barring some extra time due to extra players/opponents), we don't see excessively long fights in that game either. We can very easily get 4 combat encounters + skill challenges + roleplay in a 6 hour session (we are, admittedly, a more combat-heavy group than many others, but it's far from our lone game activity).But of course none of this proves anything. These are just anecdotal examples, and I don't expect them to change your mind. I'm not sure anything I can say will. But I don't think extrapolating the base math of the game into an argument about how long a fight will take proves grind either. Whether anyone's game plays out like mine did or not is irrelevant; it's a near certainty that it won't play out with everyone missing half the time and dealing average damage for at-wills either.I find it kind of odd that I have to defend that I don't experience grind. I've played with a lot of people, and while I know that my group and I are more organized and prepared than some my GenCon LFR experiences lead me to believe we're not "better players" than most. Perhaps we just define grind differently. I know to some, ANY combat in 4E is a grind. However, I like 4E and I like the combats. It's only grind to me if the combat drags on with no real threat to the players--and threatening to eat up a couple more resources doesn't count as a threat; you ought to wonder if someone might go down.(Quick aside: our heroic tier games tend to be pretty dangerous for PCs, but this slowly goes away as we advance in level. One of my dissatisfactions with 4E is that so far at epic nothing's even come close to putting a serious scare into us. But then, we've only played a few sessions of epic from a published adventure. As a DM, I'm not happy with a 4E encounter until I look at it and say, "Dang, I probably overdid it on this one...I hope I don't kill anyone." But that's really a lot harder to judge at epic; every tier needs a new evaluation rubric for how dangerous it is, I think. Demon lords should be scary and should not die in four rounds.)</blockquote>

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