Light Yagami's page

Changing names is funny.

Now the original topic here was characters with high AC don't wear armor. This was proven invalid because 'high' AC or not, you still get auto hit by anything that cares about melee, and attacked in other ways by things that don't. You just lose around 70% of your HP instead of 90% every round. Which sounds great until you realize you still die unless you either win in one round, or make the Cleric waste every action casting Heal on you.

Does anyone else have anything to say regarding this subject, or can we call this thread a wrap?

My post got eaten. Let's try this again.

You cast a Time Stop, 4 Blade Barriers, and a Quickened Solid Fog. That is a lot of resources for a little gain. Were you trying to finish the fight quickly you would need to be doing something a bit more potent than xd6, save for half. It would also need to be a bit more likely to work than expecting a... epic dragon I believe you said to not have access to 4th level spell effects such as Freedom of Movement or Dimension Door. I'm fighting a dragon in a game that is not epic but close. Someone threw a DC 30 effect at it. DM rolls a 3 and announces the dragon passed. So I am not particularly optimistic about the chances of you getting that Blade Barrier to do much, at least not without some softening up first via save reducing effects. I am simply not seeing how what you say can ever actually happen barring tactical failure on the DM's part.

It proves that Solid Fog works great on those that lack Freedom of Movement or Teleportation. It says nothing about direct damage or says something negative about it depending on your point of view as it did take 4 castings that required a Time Stop to set up to even get that much mileage out of it. This topic is about the effectiveness of direct damage, not Solid Fog and other crowd control effects.

Light Yagami wrote:

If you spend half of your overall wealth on one type of defense when many different types exist your capabilities in that field should be unsurpassed as you are a focused specialist.

A very good point and one that bears repeating. If you spend over half your entire wealth on AC, then it should be more than 30-40% effective against the same CR as your level melee brute.

30-40% is a very generous estimate. Going strictly by creature advancement rules nearly every monster type in the game gains 2 or 3 BAB per point of CR in addition to what they stand to gain from Strength, size increases, items, feats, and anything else that improves their ability to fight. The creatures with potent special abilities grow in HD and thereby grow in mundane power more slowly. However they can simply use those special abilities and attack some sort of defense that is not AC.

To block the true melee brutes even 30-40% of the time would require even more extensive fixes than those proposed by Crusader of Logic because their melee stats scale so quickly that you'd need to top out around AC 65 to qualify for this. The changes in the OP brings it a lot closer to that point, but you would still end up with AC 59 on a dedicated AC specialist who has went a great deal out of their way for the sole purpose of boosting their AC and less than this with a character who better balanced their stats.

That same character would get missed a fairly large percentage of the time by just about everything else though. It's a good start.

In the interests of comparison I present a parallel. A character who has not went out of their way at all to boost AC. They have normal full plate, a normal heavy shield, and a Dexterity of 12 for an end AC of 21. That's it. They also have a Displacement effect always active on their person. This actually is possible via Reach and Persist, however it is intended to illustrate a concept, not to be a literal example. No nitpicking the details. That's AC 21, 50% miss chance. That is the full extent of their defenses against mundane attacks. This costs well under 2,000 gold which is less than 1% of the cost to max out those defensive items. Even if you assign a gold cost to the concept illustration Displacement effect, I think we all can agree no contest it comes out to far less than 300,000.

Through the magic of reverse engineering, let's put this guy up against the same creatures the OP devised.

The first one was 'auto hitting AC 49' on a charge, which means it has a +45 to hit normally. Add 2 from the charge and you get 1d20+47 = hits AC 49 on a 2 or better. I own the MM3 and have checked. Those numbers are accurate.

The Rage Drake could Power Attack for 28 points and still hit on a 2 or better with that charge. However, half of those attacks automatically miss.

Instead of doing 17-27/17-27/10-25 it is doing 45-55/45-55/38-53. The weighted average after the single miss chance defense becomes 22.5-27.5/22.5-27.5/19-26.5. This is a bit higher as it is averaging 3 points higher on each of the two claw attacks and 5.25 points higher on the bite attack for a net result of 11.25 points more. If the bite misses though it does not get to Improved Grab so it cannot grapple and rake. Naturally this means all of the rake damage is avoided.

The AC guy goes on to get hit with both rake attacks, taking additional damage. The Displacement guy either lucks out in avoiding the bite and automatically avoids the rakes, or still gets to luck out in avoiding the rakes. Displacement guy takes a weighted average of 120.25 if the bite connects, much lower if it does not and he also avoids the grapple and stun. AC guy gets another 16-23 twice on top of his 17-27/17-27/10-25. His weighted average is 100.5, but he cannot reduce this and cannot avoid the grapple and stun.

If the character is good aligned the AC guy is taking another 17.5 average for an end result of 118. The Displacement guy is taking an 8.75 weighted average for an end result of 129. The Displacement guy will take less if the bite misses because it cannot rake and doesn't get the 7 average added from that.

Conclusion: A single 50% miss chance is enough to make a character who has not updated their mundane defenses since level 3 or 4 be comparable to or better than an AC specialist who devoted over one hundred fifty times more resources to the task against this creature. A less extreme example such as a character who had a few AC items and this Displacement would fare better, while still saving hundreds of thousands of gold. I see why the OP refers to miss chances as real defenses.

I forgot what stats were posted for the other creature, however I would expect very similar results were it tested.

I've read through this, and I believe the OP has a very good point. I'm not sure how buff magic, fighter vs wizard, and all these other side topics got into it but the OP does address the main topic here very well. If you spend half of your overall wealth on one type of defense when many different types exist your capabilities in that field should be unsurpassed as you are a focused specialist. Instead you still get hit nearly all of the time, just not hit as hard. The video game defense analogy is a very creative way of putting it because it is exactly like Chrono Trigger or some other game that uses that mechanic. The only difference is that in Chrono Trigger you do not have a cap on the amount of money you can use to buy stuff and if you equip say... a Prism Helm and some Nova Armor the enemies are not going to do that much damage to you with their physical attacks. Certainly not so much damage that someone is having to cast a full heal every turn so that you can survive a second round of attacks provided that the first did not kill you outright. Being that this is a video game, potent healing items and reviving items are extremely common place. In D&D, this doesn't happen so losing most of your HP in one round means a lot more.

While I believe the OP made this analogy as a neutral point of comparison I contend that is another factor that reflects negatively upon the current nature of D&D defense. This is because if you mess up and someone dies in D&D it is a lot more serious than having someone use a storebought cheap Revive and someone else use your best storebought cheap Tonic to render them again fighting fit. Therefore, defensive stats should mean a lot more than they do in a video game because death in D&D is nowhere near as cheap and meaningless as it is there. Even True Res which is the best spell for correcting these sorts of mistakes costs 20,000 gold to cast when you only have at most thirty nine times that amount and a gold cap so it is a permanent penalty. If you have to sell something to afford it it is actually costing 40,000, or perhaps more than that because you are only getting half market value.

Psychic Robot is correct. Once the Solid Fog lands, and the target cannot escape easily via teleportation or freedom of movement it is already removed from the fight. Blade Barriers are unnecessary and result in expending multiple spell slots for no effect. You are not helping, you are looking busy. The problem with looking busy is you get to show off in Fight 1, but now in Fight 4 you don't have any good magic left because you did not pace yourself. Half the party dies as a result of your showboating. This is not teamwork in action. This is foolishness.

If it could not simply teleport out of the Solid Fog it could not have been especially powerful since it does not even possess 4th level spells. Between a round of actions from all sides and potential readied actions a single creature will drop if it is within your ability to kill simply because it can be ganged up on and you get four or more turns to its one. I have personally witnessed this in many different games under many different scenarios. The Blade Barriers are extratenous because it is not necessary to cast them. It is either taken out long enough by the Fog, or can ignore the Fog and thereby ignore the hazards you place within the Fog.

Mister Nelson - in the example you present it is the Solid Fog that is doing all of the work by removing the enemy from combat for several rounds so that the party can easily kill the other enemies, then focus all of their attacks upon that single foe when it escapes to kill it before it can react. The Fog is acting as crowd control, and is effective enough so that the creature within is as good as dead already. The Blade Barrier is simply extratenous. It is not necessary at all to produce the desired effect. This is not a positive factor of the direct damage spell.

Lich-Loved, this level of moderate buffing is entirely within the purview of any character, though. While it is absolutely within my assumptions that a potion or other use of blur and barkskin is presumed as necessary, haste or other movement enhancers are likely a part of most melees who are confined to the ground, and fly or air walk become assumptions at certain points, and protection from evil becomes almost too good to ever want to go down, the real issue is that when CRs start getting wonky around about CR10, particularly with creature advancement, AC plays a greatly reduced actual role in a character's defense.

Yes, non-AC boosters are good, but relative to actual AC, they play a greatly enhanced role as opponents advance against the PCs. At a certain point, the best AC you can get isn't good enough to mean anything, and you are constantly fighting off the effects of improved grab or swallow whole if AC is all you have. Assuming buff time is dangerous, because it assumes the players have the actions available to be buffing. Since resources are finite, especially when generating high level challenges, such things are finite options.

An opponent who has been slowed, and otherwised de-fanged, is a threat which can be engaged by cohorts, summons or other minion level characters, and should pose a minimal threat to PC-level opponents. If the only way for a melee to have a chance against a CR even opponent is to have that opponent debuffed by magic, then there is a problem with the assumptions which placed the opponent at that CR, since the melee has no resources to deliver that debuffing.

Mister TreeLynx - You seem like a very reasonable man with many good ideas. Would you by any chance be willing to present off site contact info to me so that we can discuss some gaming matters?