Dragon Barbarians are amazing but Inventors suck? I don't really get that, fundamentally they're both addressing an issue in similar ways
I don't see any party in need of more AoE taking an inventor over taking a full caster, even at low levels, that's the thing.
So you prefer a party with 3 casters and a single martial instead of 2 casters and 2 martials including an Inventor?
I don't think I'll agree with you.
Dragon Barbarians are amazing but Inventors suck? I don't really get that, fundamentally they're both addressing an issue in similar ways
Think he was just calling then the best barbarian subclass, which tracks.
Inventor is mostly just a barbarian with an accuracy penalty, worse overall feats and no native offensive reaction without archetyping. It's only edge over barbarian is applying its damage booster to ranged combat, but "ranged martial with some AoE" has some better options.
I don't see any party in need of more AoE taking an inventor over taking a full caster, even at low levels, that's the thing.So you prefer a party with 3 casters and a single martial instead of 2 casters and 2 martials including an Inventor?
I don't think I'll agree with you.
Sounds more like he's saying that given a base of 2 martials and 1 caster, he'd rather another caster than an inventor.
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I just played a session of SoT. We had a sorcerer, wizard, druid, monk, and cleric. Among those, the sorcerer was the tankiest by a solid margin.
With some smart builds, I could see a full caster party never needing a martial.
Which gets back to my very initial point, excluding options does not give an accurate view of what a class is truly capable of.
Sounds more like he's saying that given a base of 2 martials and 1 caster, he'd rather another caster than an inventor.
Yeah, I know, but I'm speaking of a base of 2 casters and 1 martials as the Inventor takes a martial slot and not a caster one. If you want an AoE heavy party, you take as much casters as you can. But beyond 2 casters, it becomes a bit hard to maintain a frontline. So after that you have Inventor and Magus, which are the only AoE able martials (the Dragon Barbarian and it's single AoE per hour is hardly a competition).
Inventor is mostly just a barbarian with an accuracy penalty, worse overall feats and no native offensive reaction without archetyping. It's only edge over barbarian is applying its damage booster to ranged combat, but "ranged martial with some AoE" has some better options.
Not at all. The Inventor is the AoE-based martial of the game. It's strength is Mega/Gigavolt (and Devastating Weaponry if you ever get there). At low level, it's just a weaker Barbarian, but at high level, it easily outdamages a Barbarian, mostly because single target damage drops significantly and you nearly compare it 1 to 1 to AoE damage.
Dragon barbarian may provide similar effects to megavolt/gigavolt, while maintaining a better accuracy.
Devastaing weaponry is way better than whirlwind strike, but it comes 4 levels later.
You can only use the Dragon Breath once per hour (using it for half damage is a joke).
On top of that, the Barbarian has to wait 2 extra levels to increase it's class DCs and as it's magic damage it suffers from all the status bonuses to saves against magic that are super common at high level.And once the Inventor gets Gigavolt, the ability to hit roughly all enemies with the crazy range overshadows the Barbarian Breath.
And the Inventor also has Explode that may provide a nice energy type or AoE change.
Whirlwind Attack doesn't work for a Dragon Barbarian, you need a Giant one to get the most of it.
So the Dragon Barbarian doesn't compete in AoE damage with an Inventor at all. At low level, you don't care much as single target damage is king. But at high level, it becomes a significant difference in power.
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Given the fact there's no need to rush, as you stated too, waiting 1 hour between every fight is no issue at all.
A map is mostly 5-8 fights per day, so you'll have to rest 4-7 hours.
It doesn't seem a big deal to me.
If your GM allows you to rest that much at high level I'll say you have a very very very nice GM.
At level 15+, you can rest 10 minutes between fights and its fine (that's the moment you stop relying on Medicine for healing, so it's mostly for Focus spells). If you can rest longer, it's great. But I'd not consider that a given at all.Explode won't ever be used, as it shares the unstable function.
Weakness to fire is extremely common. And lightning immunity also exists. So I disagree on that point even if I agree that it's a niche ability.
Whirlwind attack can be easily used even by a dragon barbarian by the time it has it, with a polearm and the enlarge spell ( the barbarian can easily get access to it and cast it before the rage and, given its length, if the DM allows prebuff, even before the fight ).
I don't remember having seen more than a couple Enlarge cast in roughly 200 games. And as it costs 3 actions, Whirlwind attack is super hard to use if you don't have the proper reach. With 30ft of range, Devastating Weaponry is a very functional ability, even if I agree that a level 18 feat is not exactly a feat I'll take into account when comparing classes.
The long range... given how maps are small, even the breath would be able to cover 80% of the map.
Even if uncommon, long range fights exists. And Barbarians are notoriously bad at it. The melee Inventor can use Mega/Gigavolt which is a very strong asset.
But, there's some stuff to consider:
At low level, I agree that the Barbarian breath is very competitive. But once you get to high level, especially with Gigavolt and Unstable Redundancies, it gets hard for the Barbarian to compete. The Inventor will use it twice per fight and hit all enemies up to a higher range. The Barbarian will use it once per hour and be limited to a cone (hard to position but hits lots of enemies) or a line (easy to position but hardly hits more than 2 enemies).
I wouldn't say they have pros and cons. The Barbarian AoE ability is nice to have but limited. The Inventor AoE ability is central to the class and as such competitive to spells. Barbarian and Inventor don't really fill the same roles.| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I say the inventor pulls ahead in terms of burst, and it may be easier for them to position in order not to hit allies, making a good use of the bounce ( but this last one is a white room supposition).
Bounces. You can think in 3D so you can bounce on the ground in the middle of your ray and you can use the ceiling to switch direction, too. And due to the extreme range you will certainly be able to hit all enemies and no allies most of the time.
That's pretty awesome compared to a line.Against a boss, the +1 ( or higher, depends the inventor apex and the barbarian feats) hit would be better than having higher DC.
I fully agree that the Barbarian will be better at single target damage. But as scary as they are at low level, bosses tend to be far closer to a road bump at high level. Mostly because single target debuffs are so easy to pull out: low level evergreen spells (Fear, Slow, Synesthesia) so casters can debuff round after round without using much resources. And martials also bring debuffs, especially when they fight a boss as iterative attacks tend to fail but big debuff attacks are super efficient.
Also bosses don't have much hit points and their increased defense being crippled by debuffs I see them hitting the floor at light speed.| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Dragon Barbarians are amazing but Inventors suck? I don't really get that, fundamentally they're both addressing an issue in similar waysDragon Barbarians have AoE, but unlike Inventors, that it is not at the expense of their single target damage and durability (They also get flight at 12, which is amazing).
I don't see any party in need of more AoE taking an inventor over taking a full caster, even at low levels, that's the thing.So you prefer a party with 3 casters and a single martial instead of 2 casters and 2 martials including an Inventor?
I don't think I'll agree with you.
No? That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying that no party with 2 casters will lack AoE (unless they specifically pick their spells for being bad at that), so in a 2:2 situation inventors are not needed for their AoE. If you have 2 martials and 1 caster and you still have to decide a party member, if what you need is just more AoE, you also add another caster there and go to 2:2 instead of adding an investigator and run 3 martials and 1 caster.
I haven't mentioned at all a party of 3 casters nor I compared it to a party of 2 martials and 2 casters. Do you consider a party with 3 casters "A party in need of more AoE"?
You can only use the Dragon Breath once per hour (using it for half damage is a joke).
Do you really need to use an AoE as a martial every single encounter? I don't think so. Even with multiple enemies you want to drop 1 or 2 enemies ASAP so the encounter gets easier quickly.
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Do you really need to use an AoE as a martial every single encounter? I don't think so. Even with multiple enemies you want to drop 1 or 2 enemies ASAP so the encounter gets easier quickly.
From my high level experience, dropping an enemy or 2 with single target damage is just a pain. Enemies have far too many hit points to be dropped in a round. And they have high intelligence and good to high mobility allowing them to evade your martials once under 50% hit points (when they don't have mobility based defense or offense allowing them to do that all the time).
At high level, you need to AoE like crazy. So, yes, you need more than one AoE on a martial, especially AoEs you can use every encounters multiple times. Now, you may prefer awful slugfests. Personally, I'm quite sick of seeing the Fighter rolling 40 points of damage per hit on enemies featuring a good thousand hit points combined. I love math, but not to that point.| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Do you really need to use an AoE as a martial every single encounter? I don't think so. Even with multiple enemies you want to drop 1 or 2 enemies ASAP so the encounter gets easier quickly.From my high level experience, dropping an enemy or 2 with single target damage is just a pain. Enemies have far too many hit points to be dropped in a round. And they have high intelligence and good to high mobility allowing them to evade your martials once under 50% hit points (when they don't have mobility based defense or offense allowing them to do that all the time).
At high level, you need to AoE like crazy. So, yes, you need more than one AoE on a martial, especially AoEs you can use every encounters multiple times. Now, you may prefer awful slugfests. Personally, I'm quite sick of seeing the Fighter rolling 40 points of damage per hit on enemies featuring a good thousand hit points combined. I love math, but not to that point.
From my experience, dropping enemies with single target damage at high levels is quite easy after they have been softened up by a few spells, the key is being good at both as a group instead of going overboard with one or the other.
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From my experience, dropping enemies with single target damage at high levels is quite easy after they have been softened up by a few spells, the key is being good at both as a group.
Softening the enemies with AoEs need at least 4 spells. If I take the Inventor Megavolt as a base (1d12 per level is quite average for an AoE effect), 4 Megavolts deal 182 points of damage per target on average. Level 14 enemies have 255 hit points on average, level 12 ones 215 (GMG numbers), so 182 damage is still "softening up" as I don't expect many enemies to fail all their saves.
That's what I call AoE heavy parties: a party that can unleash 4 AoEs per fight during the first round(s). But you need a bit more than 2 casters. You also need replenishable AoEs as you can't cast 4 spells from slots per fight without affecting your caster's resources too much. The Inventor is an obvious pick for such parties.
You may dislike this strategy, but in my opinion it's extremely efficient at high level. And way less boring...
I still don't understand this focus on AoE damage. I've had better results with calm emotions removing enemy combatants than trying to DPR race a horde of mooks. I understand having a little in your pocket for when the mooks have high will saves or mental immunity, but what's the rationale behind giving it such high priority?
Yeah I gotta agree with supervisor about use of aoe in higher levels.
Part of my problem with playing a fighter as described above is that our party is the following:
Maestro bard
Staff magus
Fighter
Sniper gunslinger
So our aoe potential is kinda limited. We have phantasmal catastrophe and chromatic wall to pull off some, but they're limited in ressource (no inventor or sorcerer or wizard or even fire/lightning Oracle) which does turn a lot of fights into a slugfest that is just taking so long because even on level -2 ennemies I have to use 5-7 attacks per ennemy, because I'm very unlucky and often roll only under 9 for a whole game.
I'm retrospect, maybe an inventor or dragon barbarian would have been better for this team, but at the beginning the gunslinger was a fire sorcerer and we had a druid on top of everything.
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I still don't understand this focus on AoE damage. I've had better results with calm emotions removing enemy combatants than trying to DPR race a horde of mooks. I understand having a little in your pocket for when the mooks have high will saves or mental immunity, but what's the rationale behind giving it such high priority?
Calm Emotions doesn't kill enemies. Control abilities don't reduce the fight duration, they actually increase it. When the issue is that fights last forever, you want high damaging abilities.
Yeah I gotta agree with supervisor about use of aoe in higher levels.
Your spell checker screwed my name!
Enemies crit fail too, quite often in 4+ enemies scenarios as long as you are hiitting most of them. If you focus those with single target I find that 2-3 AoE is more than enough to drop 1 or 2 quickly.From my experience, dropping enemies with single target damage at high levels is quite easy after they have been softened up by a few spells, the key is being good at both as a group.Softening the enemies with AoEs need at least 4 spells. If I take the Inventor Megavolt as a base (1d12 per level is quite average for an AoE effect), 4 Megavolts deal 182 points of damage per target on average. Level 14 enemies have 255 hit points on average, level 12 ones 215 (GMG numbers), so 182 damage is still "softening up" as I don't expect many enemies to fail all their saves.
That's what I call AoE heavy parties: a party that can unleash 4 AoEs per fight during the first round(s). But you need a bit more than 2 casters. You also need replenishable AoEs as you can't cast 4 spells from slots per fight without affecting your caster's resources too much. The Inventor is an obvious pick for such parties.
You may dislike this strategy, but in my opinion it's extremely efficient at high level. And way less boring...
Yeah I gotta agree with supervisor about use of aoe in higher levels.
Part of my problem with playing a fighter as described above is that our party is the following:
Maestro bard
Staff magus
Fighter
Sniper gunslingerSo our aoe potential is kinda limited. We have phantasmal catastrophe and chromatic wall to pull off some, but they're limited in ressource (no inventor or sorcerer or wizard or even fire/lightning Oracle) which does turn a lot of fights into a slugfest that is just taking so long because even on level -2 ennemies I have to use 5-7 attacks per ennemy, because I'm very unlucky and often roll only under 9 for a whole game.
I'm retrospect, maybe an inventor or dragon barbarian would have been better for this team, but at the beginning the gunslinger was a fire sorcerer and we had a druid on top of everything.
Bard + 3 martials is strong early on but falls off a lot late game. In general I think half caster half martial parties tend to do best from 1 to 20. In that case, inventor is better than any of the martials for sure, but it is also worse than just having another caster.
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Enemies crit fail too, quite often in 4+ enemies scenarios as long as you are hiitting most of them. If you focus those with single target I find that 2-3 AoE is more than enough to drop 1 or 2 quickly.
It hasn't been my experience. 2-3 AoE tend to smoothen them, but the job isn't done.
Now, you say 4+ enemies, when I was focusing on level 12 and 14 enemies, so closer to 3-4 enemies. I find that a lot of groups contain 3-4 enemies. More than that starts to be rare.
Enemies crit fail too, quite often in 4+ enemies scenarios as long as you are hiitting most of them. If you focus those with single target I find that 2-3 AoE is more than enough to drop 1 or 2 quickly.It hasn't been my experience. 2-3 AoE tend to smoothen them, but the job isn't done.
Now, you say 4+ enemies, when I was focusing on level 12 and 14 enemies, so closer to 3-4 enemies. I find that a lot of groups contain 3-4 enemies. More than that starts to be rare.
I think I had more 3 enemies encounters than any other number too, mentioned 4+ because those are the ones that are atrocious for single target focused parties at those levels.
Just to clarify, I didn't meant that 2-3 AoE was enough to kill the enemies, just that it was enough for single target damage to be effective afterwards.
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I think I had more 3 enemies encounters than any other number too, mentioned 4+ because those are the ones that are atrocious for single target focused parties at those levels.
Just to clarify, I didn't meant that 2-3 AoE was enough to kill the enemies, just that it was enough for single target damage to be effective afterwards.
After 2-3 AoEs, you shouldn't have a dead enemy. If no enemy is dead, then continuing with AoEs is more efficient than using single target abilities.
Now, you have all the right in the world to dislike the Inventor, but you can't say you can replace it with whatever martial when it's actually a core component of a very effective high level strategy.
I think I had more 3 enemies encounters than any other number too, mentioned 4+ because those are the ones that are atrocious for single target focused parties at those levels.
Just to clarify, I didn't meant that 2-3 AoE was enough to kill the enemies, just that it was enough for single target damage to be effective afterwards.
After 2-3 AoEs, you shouldn't have a dead enemy. If no enemy is dead, then continuing with AoEs is more efficient than using single target abilities.
Now, you have all the right in the world to dislike the Inventor, but you can't say you can replace it with whatever martial when it's actually a core component of a very effective high level strategy.
More efficient damage-wise? Surely. A better strategy? Debatable. If I can ensure the encounter goes from severe to moderate in 1 turn, I would take that over anything else knowing how swingy combat can get in this game. Specially if there is a chance that 1 enemy doesn't get to act at all during the encounter. Also, that's just one type of encounter. Personally, I find double higher level enemies to be the hardest encounters at those levels. AoE is important but not equally valuable in all fights. Also, not al fights happen at high level.
Besides, I want to remind you that I have nothing against Inventor, as I said earlier I think individually it is an OK class. My point is that with the current line-up of classes it is hard for it to fit in a party that you want to use from level 1 to 20. If they ever release another martial with good AoE potential I can see a party of that martial, Inventor, Dragon Barb and Bard being extremely strong.
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Damn you spell check, say supervisor superbidi's name right !
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More efficient damage-wise? Surely. A better strategy? Debatable. If I can ensure the encounter goes from severe to moderate in 1 turn, I would take that over anything else knowing how swingy combat can get in this game.
You can't ensure that at high level. With 300 hit points enemies, you need a lot of luck to down an enemy in one turn. If it was common, there would be no high level slugfests.
Besides, I want to remind you that I have nothing against Inventor, as I said earlier I think individually it is an OK class. My point is that with the current line-up of classes it is hard for it to fit in a party that you want to use from level 1 to 20.
I don't see the issue. You can replace any martial by an Inventor. Actually, with the extra skill increases and the focus on intelligence, the Inventor makes also an excellent skill monkey, you can replace a Rogue with an Inventor just fine. So you don't lose much in toughness, you should deal similar damage (depending on the Rogue Racket), and you are ok skill wise. It seems like a good fit to me.
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Not to mention that reverse engineer allows you to use Crafting instead of Thievery to disable a device or Open a lock, making you incredibly skill efficient...
... As long as someone else is searching for traps.
More efficient damage-wise? Surely. A better strategy? Debatable. If I can ensure the encounter goes from severe to moderate in 1 turn, I would take that over anything else knowing how swingy combat can get in this game.You can't ensure that at high level. With 300 hit points enemies, you need a lot of luck to down an enemy in one turn. If it was common, there would be no high level slugfests.
Besides, I want to remind you that I have nothing against Inventor, as I said earlier I think individually it is an OK class. My point is that with the current line-up of classes it is hard for it to fit in a party that you want to use from level 1 to 20.I don't see the issue. You can replace any martial by an Inventor. Actually, with the extra skill increases and the focus on intelligence, the Inventor makes also an excellent skill monkey, you can replace a Rogue with an Inventor just fine. So you don't lose much in toughness, you should deal similar damage (depending on the Rogue Racket), and you are ok skill wise. It seems like a good fit to me.
You are jumping numbers from different levels so making an useful comparison is a bit difficult. Let's use some concrete numbers.
For example, we are a 13th level party facing 12th level monsters. The average HP of a level 12 monster with moderate HP is 215. Since they are level -1 there are 4 of them, placing the encounter at severe. Let's say our 2 casters use Level 7 Frigid Flurry and level 6 Vampiric Exanguination during their first turn. Let's also say spells hit a target that gets one success and one failure. On average that would roll for 52'5 damage total on failure, so 78'75 points of damage. 2 martials hitting the same target can perfectly deal the remaining 127'25 points of damage with some half decent rolls. And that's for one enemy that got a success. If an enemy gets a Crit failure and a crit success, or 2 failures, the number goes down to 110 hp remaining on average. if one enemy Crit fails and succeeds it goes to 83'75 hp remaining.
1 enemy dropping there in the first turn puts the encounter slighly above average. With 4 targets, it is pretty common that after the spells hit at least 1 of them is low enough for the martials to get the job done. That's with 4 enemies, the least enemies, the worst AoE gets, so I don't really see your point of needing more AoE than that, honestly.
Long battles are only a problem if they feel tedious to players. In my experience, this is usually more often a result of players feeling like the only clear objective of the encounter is to kill the enemies as fast as possible and nothing interesting happens to change the context of the encounter.
This is unfortunately a common default state of encounters written with "enemies fight to the death" as a standard, nonsensical default, and where the enemies don't know that they have clear avenues of changing the tide of the encounter by doing something other than attack 3 times and then die.
As a Gm, I have had encounters reach round 20 with players on the edge of their seat for most of the time because each round the party had specific goals to accomplish until the big bad finally revealed themselves (actually only a level +2 monster, but one fought after 8 level -4 monsters, 3 level -1 monsters and 2 on level monsters. The key is that they never had to face all of it in any one round, and there were hostages to free, environmental advantages to significantly level against the enemy and for the enemy to level against the party, and an absolutely massive battle map where tactical situations can develop before the party steps into it. Seriously, we've had one encounter span two 2 and half hour sessions and the players like it so much that they pretty much want more of that and less of social encounters and exploration stuff that I love to try to run, but am still trying to figure out how to make it as much fun as my combat encounters.
It has me really thinking about wanting to run bloodlords instead of my homebrew, just to get some more experience seeing how the pros better utilize the other modes of the game.
TBD late game you have access to spells that both control and blast on a wide zone so it's a "have your cake and eat it too" situation.
I remember against the final fight of book 6 of AoE the group opened against the BBEG and 4 level 18 astrademons with level 10 weird followed by level 10 chain lightning. I think two of the astrademons Crit failed agaisnt weird and we're saved only by their immunity to death effects but still took massive damage and high frightened, which in turn made them Crit fail their save agaisnt the chained lightning.
That opening salvo almost single handedly reduced an extreme encounter to a severe one because then all they had to do was handle the level 24 BBEG and she was kinda weak sauce.
I'm learning from this next time I build an ultimate endgame fight and I'm just going to have a mechanic with infinite level -3 mooks with a maximum of them on the field at once.
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2 martials hitting the same target can perfectly deal the remaining 127'25 points of damage with some half decent rolls.
Average damage of a fully runed level 13 Greatsword Fighter doing 2 attacks on a level 12 enemy: 62.48. So less than 50% chance to succeed in killing the monster with 2 of them. And that's the highest damage dealer in the game.
That's also considering monsters that don't have a single defensive ability, reaction or whatever, that the whole party gets first in initiative, that you easily get to the monsters so they don't fly or anything else, that they don't have auras messing up with your damage, etc... At these levels, the rarity.No, on average, a high level party doesn't kill a threatening monster in one round. They need quite some luck. That's why I say you need 4 AoEs to soften enemies at high level, because that's actually what you need.
Basically Control = Longer fight but less danger
Blasting = Shorter fight but you are more likely to lose
Any proof of that? Blasting makes fight shorter and as such less threatening. Control makes fight easier and as such less threatening. Which one is better, I can't tell you, but I think your preference for control comes from a lack of experience with blasting.
2 martials hitting the same target can perfectly deal the remaining 127'25 points of damage with some half decent rolls.Average damage of a fully runed level 13 Greatsword Fighter doing 2 attacks on a level 12 enemy: 62.48. So less than 50% chance to succeed in killing the monster with 2 of them. And that's the highest damage dealer in the game.
That's also considering monsters that don't have a single defensive ability, reaction or whatever, that the whole party gets first in initiative, that you easily get to the monsters so they don't fly or anything else, that they don't have auras messing up with your damage, etc... At these levels, the rarity.No, on average, a high level party doesn't kill a threatening monster in one round. They need quite some luck. That's why I say you need 4 AoEs to soften enemies at high level, because that's actually what you need.
I'm doing white room analysis because figuring out potential monster abilities is pointless. They can also have weaknesses, you can be pre-buffed, casters can do more with the action they have left, martials can flank, crit specs exist...
Ignoring you took the worst of the situations I posted and ignored the rest, you didn't even bother to account for flanking, the easiest modifier to get. A fully runned d12 weapon fighter does 60'35 average damage vs a high AC level 12th creature with 2 attacks. Same fighter does 74'55 when flanking with the other fighter. Other martials are behind, but not that much.
The whole party doesn't need to get first in initiative too, as long as none of the creatures hinder the party in excess (which sure, can and will happen, but more often than not, when dealing with lower level creatures, it won't matter).
From my personal experience, at those levels 2 AoE during the first turn, maybe a 3rd one during the 2nd, is usually more than enough to deal with most groups of enemies. The amount of AoE you are proposing seems way excesive and unnecesary.
I'm doing white room analysis because figuring out potential monster abilities is pointless.
But then you are in the best case scenario, not in the average one.
On average, monsters have either defensive abilities, auras or special movement that will screw with your white room theory calculation. If you were doing way more damage than the monster hit point, I'd be ok, but when you need the best case scenario to have just 50% chance to kill a monster, then we can be sure that you need luck to kill a monster.And no, you won't have as many bonuses as enemies will have. I've nearly never seen prebuff, flanking is only possible for the second Fighter and doesn't increase the damage much, weaknesses happen but so does resistances, casters can do more actions but you have used only their highest and second highest damaging spells so you are actually using quite the resources into the fight, and level 13 is also a strong one for most martials, a level 15 Fighter against a level 14 enemy still does the same amount of damage despite the increase in monster hp.
So you are in the best case scenario, not the average one at all. And even in that scenario you need luck, so I don't believe you when you say that you easily kill a monster in 1 round at that level.
The whole party doesn't need to get first in initiative too, as long as none of the creatures hinder the party in excess (which sure, can and will happen, but more often than not, when dealing with lower level creatures, it won't matter).
Which, if the GM plays the monsters properly, will happen often. If you don't manage to kill a monster before it gets its initiative, and considering that you are fighting intelligent monsters (the most common ones at high level) with in general good movement abilities, the enemy you focus fire will just move away from your martials and you are back to square one. I've been in such fights, where after 3 rounds there's no enemy dead despite all of them being low in hit points because they properly share the damage among themselves. If we had more AoEs, they wouldn't have been able to do that.
From my personal experience, at those levels 2 AoE during the first turn, maybe a 3rd one during the 2nd, is usually more than enough to deal with most groups of enemies. The amount of AoE you are proposing seems way excesive and unnecesary.
But I'm not targetting enough, I'm targetting optimized. The amount of AoE I'm proposing is just the one you will deal if all of your characters were having the choice between single target and AoE. It's the optimum one. After 4 AoEs, single target damage starts to be optimized, but before that it's better to deal more AoE damage as the enemies are all still in good shape.
You start dealing single target damage when you are sure to drop an enemy per round. Before being sure, it's definitely not a valid strategy. And as shown by your calculation, 2 AoEs are not enough. 3 are just enough but if the enemies have good defensive abilities or if something screwed with one of your AoEs (like an unexpected resistance/immunity) or if they are just high in hit points you'll need a 4th one. That's why I consider 4 AoEs in 2 rounds (because it's hard to have that in one round) for a good AoE-based party.
I still don't understand this focus on AoE damage. I've had better results with calm emotions removing enemy combatants than trying to DPR race a horde of mooks. I understand having a little in your pocket for when the mooks have high will saves or mental immunity, but what's the rationale behind giving it such high priority?Calm Emotions doesn't kill enemies. Control abilities don't reduce the fight duration, they actually increase it. When the issue is that fights last forever, you want high damaging abilities.
Null turns don't take up much real world time.
In that sense Calm Emotions does shorten combat.
I don't see problems with long running encounters unless you are talking about a party where there are zero strikers, and several players don't even have a reasonable basic attack.
I like to have a bit of everything in a party. AoE doesn't always set up well and sometimes you need control. Sometimes control doesn't work too well, so you blast things down. Or you need to control in a different way like a wall. It depends on what you're fighting and the terrain.
High level fights are definitely slogs. Long back and forth damage fights that often get boring fight after fight after fight. Even with AoE they can be a long slog when room after room is filled with high hit point creatures that take a while to kill.
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Null turns don't take up much real world time.
In that sense Calm Emotions does shorten combat.
Calm Emotions doesn't generate null turns, enemies are just limited in their actions but they can still act. Also, you have to use actions both to cast the spell and to maintain it, so it costs real time. Overall, control extends the real time duration as well as the in game duration (maybe not in the same proportion, though).
I don't see problems with long running encounters
I see 2 problems with them:
- Fun. If the encounter is long just to be long it's just no fun. That's why over defensive parties are awful to play even if they are efficient.- Efficiency. First, the longer the encounter and the more the chances for an unexpected event. Be it a monster scoring a ton of natural 20s in a row, or just monsters from the nearby room that finally arrive to investigate the noise. Also, every character has a bunch of hit points at the start of combat, and this hit point pool takes roughly 2 rounds to get depleted. After that, you have to use healing. During long encounters, you very often deplete the characters hit point pool and survive through healing. If you can win through sheer firepower you won't use a single heal spell. So it's an economy of resources.
For the second point, I agree that there can be disagreement, it's hard to exactly determine what amount of resources and what actual danger each type of approach bring.
But the first point is a sure one, and it's taxing to go through 2 hours of fight just to get rid of a moderate encounter. I play for fun, when the fun is no more there I question why I play.