Here's the situation. I'm in an urban campaign playing as a recently rolled up Invul Fighter 1/Urban Invul Barbarian 4. I currently have 2 Base DR, which i pump up to 4 with Combat Expertise, and then I can pump it to 7 with fighting defensively (or I can go total defence for 7). so far i'm not broken but we have yet to get in a fight with this guy. All he has is a breastplate and a +1 Bane (All Outsiders) Falchion. We also have:
-Archery focused Ranger
-Calvalier 4/Spy 1 going into MAster Spy PRestige Class
-Staff Magus 5 (optimized for defence)
-Cleric 5 (with Trickery and Luck domains) focused more on stealth and light armor.
My question is this: How powerful is Damage Resistance? I've been told by the Magus that DR 2/-- is huge at level 5, but how huge? I ignore 2 points of damage when I'm hit? Is it really that strong?
Please help me out Pathfinder community!
How strong is Damage Resistance?
Depends. Are you up against lots of stuff that does small amounts of damage per hit, in which case DR is incredible, or are you up against things that do lots and lots of damage in a few big blows, in which case it matters much less?
DR is always helpful, but sometimes it helps more than others. Still, any time you added up the damage and were within 5 or 10 hit points of either unconsciousness or death, DR of any amount probably would have helped put off that status for another round. Which helps.
DR is like saving throw bonuses: largely invisible, it seldom has a single big obvious effect. Except at the end of the fight, when you're still up,or at the end of the day, when your cure wand still has more charges left on it that anybody else's.
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I've never played a character with DR, but I've played an Inquisitor (access to in-combat fast healing) and there were times when 2hp a round were the difference between being up and fighting and being unconscious. And if you're being hit more than once a round DR is better than fast healing.
DR is very handy - though tonyz is right that it partly depends on whether you're getting hit frequently for a little damage each hit or hit occasionally for large amounts of damage.
I currently have 2 Base DR, which i pump up to 4 with Combat Expertise, and then I can pump it to 7 with fighting defensively (or I can go total defence for 7)
I don't understand how this works, though - Combat Expertise and fighting defensively increase your AC, not your DR.
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Well, my DM uses a System to where if you are wearing armor, you gain DR equal to half the AC bonus rounded up.
We found that yes, against smaller points of damages (Full Plate would supply 5/-) we would be awesome, instead of taking 7 we would instead take two. Pretty nice to have.
A while back when we were still using this system, we go through 4/5ths of the Rise of the Runelords campaign. We formed a Triple Death Triangle that were able to take out 300HP Ogres within 2 rounds. And our healer was incredible healing around 50 - 60 points. From this, my DM had to ramp up the damages, what started to happen is the people who were up front had to get Share Pain so that we could still live.
So, it all matters on the DPR that your DM is dishing out. I would say that if the DM is dishing out 25 - 30 points of damage. Then you might want to start picking up Feats like Bolstered Reslience or Stalwart in order to stop the high coming damages. If you're more around 15 points, I would say 4 - 6 is a pretty nice range but you could probably survive off of 2/-.
I've never played a character with DR, but I've played an Inquisitor (access to in-combat fast healing) and there were times when 2hp a round were the difference between being up and fighting and being unconscious. And if you're being hit more than once a round DR is better than fast healing.
DR is very handy - though tonyz is right that it partly depends on whether you're getting hit frequently for a little damage each hit or hit occasionally for large amounts of damage.
I currently have 2 Base DR, which i pump up to 4 with Combat Expertise, and then I can pump it to 7 with fighting defensively (or I can go total defence for 7)I don't understand how this works, though - Combat Expertise and fighting defensively increase your AC, not your DR.
I'm basically playing the Tankbarian proposed by Mercurial, going Beast totem and Reckless Abaddon to counter Combat Expertise and Power Attack penalties, then taking Guarded Life and Come And Get Me later with Combat Reflexes (though maybe going TWF with armor spikes and falchion instead of the extra DR; cascading into battle with giant sword + spikes screams cool to me, even if it's sub-optimal)
CR10-14 creatures usually do about 20-25 damage per hit often less than that and invulnerable rager at 10th could have easily DR8/- at that level.So yeah pretty strong beacause it scales so good.
In general, if you get hit a lot(like being a frontline fighter with low AC) then DR is massively powerful.If you are a Towershield fighter with AC38 then it doesn't really make a difference.
I'm playing an unarmed fighter at level 14 right now, and the DR/- while grappling is very strong. Having it just be a static 15/- being a invulnerable rager is even better, there are a lot of creatures out there that rely on "rider" effects like poison and such that do low damage you can prevent with damage reduction.
you cant prevent poison/bleed with DR, but if you can stop the initial damage so you take nothing...
Fighting Defensively is borderline rude
Yea sorry. I know it's kind of cheesy but as I have little experiance having DR (a lot more fighting against it, when HP's are unknown and the DM likes to fudge things) I wasn't so sure my original intention of just using Combat Expertise for 4/-- was going to be enough. I do only have 19 AC at level 5. I'm not sure it's enough yet for the build to completely rely on it for tanking.
Already did that. We have yet to see him in combat so I'm looking forward to seeing how he performs (I also have a bit of confusion on the Lesser Beast totem power but that's for another thread).
I played an Invulnerable Rager/Urban Barbarian from level 1 to 7 and I recorded every point of damage that my DR prevented. The total was 191.
As others have already pointed out, against mooks it is awesome but either way 191 damage prevented is pretty good.
We were running through an AP, so the game had a high level of combat.
DR is a good defense.
Against creatures or mobs that have multiple small-dmg attacks, you are god.
Against mobs that do one or two huge damage attacks, it can still help you.
Against magic spells and effects, you are like anybody else with your saves.
This is how you do itHow did I not know about that feat? That's going in my back pocket.
Probably due to the high prerequisites. At it's core it isn't that great(Let's spend 3 feats for a -4 to hit and 2 DR) but it gets better if you combine it with Combat Expertise or Crane Style(though 5 feats for a -2 to hit and 4 DR isn't what I would call game-breaking either).
I would even say it's probably not worth it unless you can grab the prerequisites as bonus feats(From Unbreakable Fighter, as the OP did, or from Monk of Many Styles).
In general, if you get hit a lot(like being a frontline fighter with low AC) then DR is massively powerful.If you are a Towershield fighter with AC38 then it doesn't really make a difference.
Maybe this is a bit nitpicky, but this isn't really true. There is an important distinction between powerful and necessary.
As your AC improves, DR actually gets more and more powerful since the frequency you're getting hit goes down. That means there will be an effective synergy between your AC and DR in that you get hit less often, and when you DO get hit, you take less damage. Your effective "time to live" is increased substantially.
However, as your AC gets worse, DR gets more and more necessary. If you don't have AC, you'd better have something keeping you alive (like lots of HP and DR). If you've got an AC low enough that monsters virtually auto hit you, you're going to need things like DR (and maybe things like miss chance from concealment) just to stay alive. If your AC isn't particularly high, you're effectively using DR in lieu of AC. It won't necessarily be any better or worse than just focusing on AC, but that will depend on what you're fighting (see below).
With a low AC, DR is still going to be useful all the time, but as others have said, it'll be much more powerful when fighting things that do lots of attacks for smaller chunks of damage. Against those types of enemies, good DR can actually be more useful than high AC. If you're fighting something that only attacks once or twice for high amounts of damage though, DR still helps, but is less useful. Against that type of threat, high AC is going to generally be a better defense.
Actually, the OP might want to keep that in mind when using fighting defensively and/or combat expertise with stalwart to pump DR rather than AC. If your AC is so low that the extra points from FD/CE won't help you get to a point where the threat has a reasonable chance to miss you, its likely best to always boost DR rather than AC. OTOH, if your AC is at a reasonable enough level that boosting it can give you a reasonable chance to be missed, you might want to consider boosting AC rather than DR against heavy hitters where your DR would be less effective.
TL;DR - DR is a good layer of defense, and it can be powerful, but its situational to what you're fighting, as well as your AC. I wouldn't worry about being "overpowered" unless you start stacking high AC AND high DR.