I write this before the vid came out. I thought I was being clever actually but I failed. My white room example with 1% counter is actually very easy to debunk. I forgot slimes and zombies exist so anyone with half a brain can exploit their movement very easily. But anyways, even say a creature with 30 speed and you playing a race with 35 or 40 speed, these are not clear counters you can easily take advantage of, the creature will dash every turn and so will you until you get enough distance, it becomes a kite war. Sometimes you slip up the counter. The flight one is a perfect counter because you don't need to kite, all you do is fly up far enough and usually thats like 20 ft. Then theres the dhampirs, They're also basically like flying races but in a very different way with spider climbing needing no hands. I actually think they're also broken too but not as broken as flight.
I wish they were a bit clearer about how dhampirs move - is it normal walking but upside down or scuttling around on all fours like a horror movie monster? A spider climbing lad hanging upside down while wielding a two-handed glaive without difficulties seems perfectly realistic and not unreasonable (edit: imagine a terrifying ceiling fan). I only take issue with them using ranged weapons since aiming Australian style seems silly. Also, why can flying creatures use heavy weapons when they can’t even wear medium armor?
RAW, dhampirs can go probe while standing on a wall/ceiling, meaning even something that can hit it with ranged is at disadvantage with no way to offset it.
I agree with mostly everything that you said and your sentiment throughout the however I do think that solving the problem of flight and finding a way to balance it is the better more interesting option instead of baning it altogether it just feels like your restricting players fun and fantasies its a very cool i don't for such an arbitrary problem
@@alexandrudorries3307Dhampir leaves the PC’s hands free while upside down. The slippers of spider climbing exist and offer that exact same option for anyone that hasn’t been exsanguinated.
I have made a build that can temporarily gain a nearly 100% hit chance against any enemy tarrasque included. However, I feel this is more of a extreme case, and you'd never actually see it in normal play because it requires a lot of levels. The build is a halfling war cleric battle master fighter multiclass with the ranged weapon fighting style, and needs to use bless, maneuvers, and their channel divinity to get a +25 minimum to hit which in theory gives you an accuracy so high it may as well be 100% with the luck feat. It is impossible to get 100% accuracy RAW because you could roll 4 natural 1s in a row which is a 1/160,000 chance of occuring.
@@MN121MN "When you roll a 1 on the d20 for an attack roll, ability check, or saving throw, you can reroll the die and must use the new roll." You must use the new roll, lucky feat does not let you get out of the 2nd natural 1.
"100% to hit is mathematiclly impossible" Marut: *laught in Mechanus* But seriously, this is probably the best videos about calculating damage in dnd on the entire youtube
*but kobald, my Marut Barbarian Can hit with a 100% chance and always has the mean damage* (as is a optional rule in dmg for mechanus, which is quiet interesting)
This is probably my favorite of your videos so far; you've summed up a lot of clever points very neatly about how optimization and the math behind 5e can viewed, and in doing so given me a video resource I'm glad to be able to share in the future.
I only calculate 100% chance to hit when comparing options with the same attack bonus because accuracy affects them the same amount so it's just an extra hoop to jump through.
Even in this situation you still need to consider the chance to hit. An easy example is if you have a 10% chance to hit with either attack, would you rather spend a 1st level spell slot or a 4th level spell slot? The 4th level slot will do more damage, but we can see that it's likely a waste to use a 4th level slot here because it's so unlikely to be effective.
That's like the dnd version of the physics problem "considering normal conditions of temperature and pressure, no air resistance and a perfectly spherical cow..." (What isn't bad, it's necessary)
I blame the weird rule in the dmg about "you can play anything you want" because is prevents us from directly criticising the system or design choices without someone saying "just do it differently". Because their is a point at which if you ignore the base mechanics of a game, it isn't that game anymore
Yeah this always bug me when the provided solution is "homebrew it". I don't WANT to homebrew it, I want something official. I don't know what my DM is going to allow, and I want to be able to share a cool build idea with someone using official rules so they don't have to worry about getting DM approval.
@@grantbaugh2773 at the end of the day we can't say the best design solution to everything is "have the user fix it". I would rather have a good product than a flatpack one i have to fix constantly myself
The closest I can think of is poison immunity from Yuan-Ti. No creatures come to mind that deal exclusively poison damage, but it does significantly reduce the damage and CC from more than 1% of attacks.
@@vinspad3 Flying is broken and needs serious toning down officially IMO. Making encounters where flying can shine and other times where it’s a hindrance gets annoying. Poison immunity is something I hand wave away as “this specific poison/substance was created to counter Yuan-Ti biology, it has no damaging effect on other creatures” and then let them fight monsters etc. with total immunity after taking down some evil Witcher-esque killers for hire.
@@Orudaiken I genuinely think that, without giving a damn GOOD reason for it to be a thing, pulling the rug out from under players on abilities they were allowed to take is very, very silly to do, borderline just being a dick. Just tell them they can't play as that thing, as opposed to penalizing them for it. I know you said it in a hyper-specific scenario, but I feel that it's a better engagement than bringing in the guys that have the "anti supershield laser"
The Yuan-ti race as a whole and the flying ability in general have already been nerfed in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes. A lot of the changes to racial traits from this book are questionnable, but I think those were warented. And I'm saying that as someone who play an Aaracokra in one game, and a Yuan-Ti in another. I actually said to my DMs that I was okay to change my characters with those new, more balanced versions of them. And yeah, always pulling out of nothing random reasons for your players abilities to not work is a terrible move. One of my DM use to do that, and when we were questionning it, he would just say "Yes maybe I don't have a rule or story reason to do that but I'm the DM, I do what I want". We had a serious collective discussion about it, and he accepted to stop doing it. If you think an ability is broken, maybe the player and the DM can decide TOGETHER on a way to fix it BEFOREHAND, not in the middle of a session while the player can't say anything about it. That being said, creating situations which make strong abilities less potent is an acceptable move, if you don't make it an automatism. Like, as an Aaracokra, I can accept that sometimes we might fight indoor, or I can accept that a group of villains who know our abilities and strategies might come prepared to counter my flight. But when every combat take place indoor, or every random bandit group come fully prepared to counter flying opponents for some reason, it feel completely unfair. I might as well have picked a variant human or an elf like everybody else, if I can't ever use one of my defining trait.
@@agilemind6241 I agree, as a DM myself I put ranged and/or flying enemies in almost every combat. I was talking about more extreme tactics, spells that stun or reduce movement to 0 cast exclusively at the flying PC, nets, etc... Obviously, even when you let the PC fly more freely, you should still design your encounter to be challenging to everyone.
I used to only talk about damage with assumed success on attack rolls, but now I love doing the DPR calculations in Excel based on accuracy and other factors. This is a great video! I loved Gator's response from the other room, which was probably also a white room.
I feel like a Dhampir's spider climb ability can counter at least over 1% of all creatures in all books combined. You have to wait until 3rd level to do it, but it costs nothing but movement speed.
I never got into the "dnd optimixing" scene so didnt even know that some ppl calculate DPR that way. It always seemed intuitive to me to create a table for all ACs and look at that, then guessing what AC you will oppose
This is really good stuff! Another point to make is that it’s easy to build an ‘optimized’ character, whatever that means, and the player make massively sub-optimal decisions. The weakest link in most characters is the player.
I like the content, but I was expecting the talk about "white room theory" where the environment has important features or enemies have special abilities that the math doesn't account for. In any case, that's still a plus for the classes who have far more options to approach combat than ones with a very limited pool of actions.
Technically the math can account for everything but the average player definitely doesn't have the required statistics background to do the math and/or solve the optimization problem. Whats harder is when you force a DM to use improvised damage because you decided to do something crazy like cast lightning bolt followed by fireball at an underground lake to electrolyze the water and then trigger a hydrogen detonation because all the players are nerds who hate their DM. (Note: IRL physics and D&D don't mix particularly well)
@@jasonreed7522 in highly nerd groups, my experience is that there is an gentlement's agreement to not try to build a nuke and make it too hard for the dm, we are high tier nerds but the dm is not that experienced as a dm.
I always do the "lazy mans" dpr calculation. It's just "yeah, that is the average damage on a hit. Lets say it's about 60% to hit. That seems reasonable. Like 24 dpr then? Sure, sounds good."
I once wrote a big python notebook where I can calculate it super precisely. But for my actual character ideas I really just add the damage dice too unless they have a super different chance to hit.
Only time I really bother with crit damage in dpr calculations is with things like Half Orcs and barbarians with Brutal Critical, or attack rolls with 3+ damage dice
I'll chime in on flight: there's more to encounter design than just pulling X monsters at random out of the book, and I'd argue that a DM that lets the flying character solve every combat encounter is probably doing it wrong (once in a while to let the player flex is probably a good thing though). Of course there are social and exploration encounters, but also fights indoors, or in inclement weather that may make flying less practical (for instance my DM once threw a flying boss at a largely-flightless low-level party, who we beat largely due to catching him indoors during a thunderstorm), or encounters with timers where kiting to conserve resources isn't ideal (simple example: "you have X rounds to stop the ritual, here's what's between you and them, go"). In fact, having made similar observations as Pack Tactics about flight (albeit without counting every published monster to see how big the problem was), I actually want to incorporate the "flight problem" into worldbuilding--it stands to reason that military minds in a fantasy setting that includes fliers would pretty quickly realize how advantageous they are and either come up with countermeasures or get conquered. All that being said: I'm not sure what other racial ability in the game forces the DM to warp their encounter design around it to the same degree. The closest I can think of is damage/condition immunities, but that's much more tailored to specific challenges. So yeah, flight is overpowered in that sense, but that doesn't necessarily mean you should ban it from your table if you are a DM--what it does mean is you'll have to take it into account, and whether you want to do that or not is up to you.
It's honestly not that much of a chore to design flight proof encounters. There are plenty of ranged attackers and drop bears in the monster manual. Just mix them in with the melee monsters. "But what about wolves?" Why are wolves attacking anywhere from half a dozen to two dozen armed humans traveling with mounts, possibly guard dogs, fire, and big noisy wagons? Wild animals don't randomly attack healthy looking large groups. Mix up your encounters in ways that make sense for the setting. Put some saddles on the backs of those wolves and throw pixie cavalry at the party. Have the wolves be scavengers that feed off the left overs from a drop bear type enemy living in the canopy above. What do I mean when I say drop bear? I mean chokers, cloakers, dark mantles, creep vines, giant spiders, and anything that could drop down from above or pull a PC up and away from their party. Put one or more of those in the fight and have them working with the animals either knowingly or unknowingly.
Top tip: for the most part, you don't need to reallywork around a flying PC. Unless majority or all of the party a fliers, all it does is concentrate the damage onto fewer party members, which is mechanically more optimal for enemies. Also in published modules, most combat takes place in relatively confined spaces where flight may be possible but still fairly close to enemies. If your exploration/encounter design is based around physical obstacles, these can often be solved with climbing gear or low level magics anyway. Finally, a flying party member might be scouting out the road ahead and give your party info on the enemy camps, but they just saw a winged person silhouetted against the sun so are now prepping for combat. Rather than remove challenge, I find it mostly just creates alternative ones or changes encounter dynamic. And even if it does entirely mitigate an encounter, there are first level spells and race/class abilities that trivialise a whole host of social, exploration or combat encounters. If you don't want to deal with flight it's your perogative, but practically it's not really as much of an issue as the maths makes it seem (unless you only ever have fights in open fields with melee enemies, in which case you also have the isdue of making combats boring before flight is involved).
I'd agree that for flight, the degree of warping necessary means that flight as a racial feature is likely OP, but this principle is the biggest counter to the 'white room'. White room maths usually assumes that the enemy is a big dumb sack of hit points, or that a group of enemies are all clumping together in such a way that the guy with Web can immediately turn the fight off. That happens sometimes, and as a DM, I would suggest intentionally making that happen sometimes as a 'shoot your monks' moment. But web shutting down half an encounter only applies if all your enemies are together in a convenient, 4X4 square, and in many actual situations, this is not the case. The mathematics of an encounter is at most half of its design.
Personally, I think that maximum, minimum non-zero, and expected damage values should all be calculated for the purposes of analysis 'cause it gives a fuller picture, though the emphasis should definitely be on the expected value.
^^ This. I like doing something like this for characters that have burst damage, or have a limited resource that they use to increase their damage (like monks). A monks DPR can look either a Lot higher or lower depending on how many rounds of combat they go through in a day.
Seems like fullest picture would need a graph. Calculating min, max, expected(mean, mode, median) etc could certainly be great. mean+ std_dev or median+Interquartile range
I have successfully thought of a racial trait that invalidates "some percentage of the monster manual." Speed is a racial trait, and if your speed is more than double your enemy's, you can never lose to them assuming you have equal or better range. Flight is still OP and I am definitely just splitting hairs for the sake of a challenge posed.
There is another thing to consider: how the tables play X how the system is designed. There is a lot of conversation about how the game is designed and how most tables play the game, especially from people who point out the problems with 5e. The system demands 8 encounters per day, with 2 to 3 short rests and 1 long rest at the end. With this metric, certain classes like Monks, Fighters and Warlocks shoot up in their usability since you will get your resources more as the days go by. A Sorcerer or Wizard won't have a 24 AC everytime, just a few spikes that allow them to reach this AC metric, while the 18 and up AC user will have it constantly, only requiring either a Fighting Style, a shield or a heavy armor. Sure, casters *can* reach similar values with multiclass, but it will be lower than the others unless you have *very* specific settings. This does bleed into conversations like "Martials in 5e suck" or "You only need casters and half casters in a party" because they gain a lot more power in the way 5e DMs usually DM the game: 2 to 3 encounters per day, no short rests and a long rest after that. Even some modules are getting closer to this metric, with campaigns like Dragon Heist, Descent into Avernus and Wild Beyond the Witchlight having plenty of places for the group to Long Rest up. There isn't a clear answer for no question in 5e. Even the examples you chose aren't straight answers. A Barbarian dealing more damage, but taking the damage, may be good to maintain the health of your party (unless you are doing the Ancestral Guardians ordeal). Someone with consistent 17 AC may be better than someone who can spike 24 AC, but has a starting point of 14. Even flying, the thing considered OP, depends of a lot of conditions to be considered a Hard Counter against creatures. And that is where I think "White Room" comes from: trying to seek a straight answer on a game with so many variables and options, instead of seeking something that works decently well on most situations, that has counters, but can contribute on most situations. Being aware that TTRPGs in general are something complex, with many variables on different situations, will bring the conversation to a higher point.
Even in an 8 encounter day, you will get far more use out of a full caster than any other class, bar a gloomstalker perhaps. Concentration spells like conjure animals, and to a slightly lesser extent animate objects, allow for constant dpr throughout many rounds. Hell even if all they were doing were dropping big aoe damage rolls every round a party of fullcasters would probably steamroll hard enough to get through the adventuring day without much of an issue.
The problem with martials isn't that they are bad in combat. They're actually great at it. The problem is that casters get to be great at everything else, and also be great at combat too.
The point about adventuring days is one I rarely see adressed, which is a big issue. As you hinted at some classes, generally martials, are designed to have a relatively stable performance throughout the day. Fighters might have small peaks with Action Surge or Combat Maneuvers, or a Paladin might have the occasional Smite, but overall they'll perform roughly the same whether it's their 3rd encounter for the day or their 12th. Rogues even more so, having next to no features that have any risk of running out except for a couple of subclasses like Arcane Trickster. Meanwhile casters tend to be more balanced about having higher peaks but deeper valleys. Depending on how they manage their spell slots they might massively outperform the martials in one encounter, but be next to useless in the next. Of course in a campaign with many (expected) encounters during per day, a smart caster will slightly lower their peaks in order to fill up their valleys and get a somewhat more consistent performance throughout the day. But in a campaign with very few encounters per adventuring day, the casters are free to cast their higher level spells with abandon, reaching for their highest peaks and then just take a long rest before they ever reach their valley. Meaning they'll consistently perform well above the martials for the entire adventuring day.
What I found difficult about flight is that shitters on the ground die. It's also SUPER easy to fix. Just hide in rope trick while the flier makes DM add 120 ft range attacks only to realise that your effective range is 180
You don't even have to spend the resources on rope trick. Is the enemy's move speed 30 feet or less? The party just... runs away from the encounter and lets the flying PC deal with it. Unless the party is actively trying to protect something that they can't carry with them or are up against a monster with a higher land speed than 55 (Else they have to dash to chase people who are dashing) there's nothing stopping the party from just leaving until the enemy is dead. Sure, a faster enemy will get attacks of opportunity, but that's hardly the full force of the monster bearing down on you. Hell, any intelligent monster will likely decide that certain death by flying PC just isn't worth it and will flee for cover in a cave or dense forest. Naturally, this might be optimal but it's *really not fun*, and has a bad habit of turning the game into "flying PC and the people he hangs out with"
@@ninnusridhar you don't even need flying to do it, a riding horse can easily outpace a tarrasque. A commoner with a +1 bow and enough ammo can kill a tarrasque like this
@@agilemind6241 Oh 100%. Some of the worst sessions I've run were because I couldn't find a good way to just let combat end (Zombies. Go figure). I will say that in the case of most creatures vs a flying character, they'll need to try to find some dense treetops or a cave to hide in, as most flying characters will have more than enough speed to keep up with most intelligent enemies and chase them to the ends of the earth.
I do think the 100% hit chance calculation has a place, and that's when you are comparing two options that have exactly the same hit chance. For example should you get the greataxe that does 1d12 damage or the greatsword that does 2d6 damage? It doesn't matter what you are fighting or what your attack bonus is because all of that is going to be canceled out anyways in your comparison, the only factor changing is the damage die so that's the only factor you need to consider. The only time this symmetry is broken in this example is if you have barbarian Brutal Criticals or Half-Orc Savage Attack, since these only use one damage die which benefits the greataxe over the greatsword. Only if you have those features do you need to start taking into account stuff like your chance to crit, otherwise it's just a waste of time even if it's technically more correct.
Yeah, this is why whenever i talk about the mathematics of damage, I immediately use 0.5+(X 0.5) = Hit percentage | X - (Y 0.5) X is a function of your hit bonus, while Y is a function of the enemy's ability to not be hit. every +1 is 5% effectively. So then when you calc your average damage, take your DPR and then factor in your hit chance (Let's say it's 100 DPR) and use that to reduce your DPR. We don't factor in crits or crit misses since crits effectively double damage while crit misses eliminate damage and when I calculate DPR, I calculate per attack. 75% chance to hit in this example would mean that you get an even 75 damage since 25% of the time you will deal no damage. The point of running the mathematics behind this hilariously enough isn't to minmax, but instead what I have been using for about 10 years now to run games where I can sufficiently challenge players based on their individualized stats due to CR being a terrible measurement. Sometimes I will intentionally raise the stakes and have a counter in m head knowing full well that if the enemies get their DPR for 10 rounds, they will kill at least one party member with split damage or 3-4 rounds with targeted damage. This means that the party will have to actually understand their magic items, spells and remember that there's alternative ways to do combat. It's not often I kill characters. Maim, smash and incapacitate them though? I do a lot of that. The game runs smoother when characters are somewhat afraid of the possibility of dropping dead in an effort to save what they hold dear.
I played MTG at a high level. Exact math matters in the realm of probability, which DnD is definitely in. Thank you for pointing this out. I enjoy my white room, lots of wall space for calculations.
This is why I view damage as a range, lowest to highest assuming to hit, and then dealing with attack chance separately. So optimize your chance to hit.
Love your breakdown of why most DPR calculations are nonsense. This is a great video for dnd meta commentary. I still contend that flight, while definitely OP, is not nearly as bad as most people think it is in actual games. I'm running a game with an Aarakocra and an Aasimar (Protector) and all I've had to do is ensure most enemies have a ranged attack. If the party runs from a fight, then the enemy gets away with murdering that innocent person or running off with the macguffin! In our campaign, the players are incentivized to engage with fights. They're pursuing a story or moral obligation, not just surviving in the wilderness. Even if they were surviving, players aren't selfish enough to leave the rest of their non-flying party behind to die. If they are, that's a player problem, not a balance problem. Plus, we're playing in a city, so the usefulness of flight is negated in the sewers and some buildings (would be better in the wilderness for sure). It's amazing for scouting, but the Aarakocra takes all perception checks at disadvantage in dim light, which has been most of our sessions. Our Thief Rogue's Second Story Work feature is almost as useful when buildings are everywhere. TL;DR: Yes, flying is op. But there's no need to ban it in the vast majority of non-survival campaigns, imo. Party dynamics and incentives to fight are more than enough to keep a flying character from leaving half your encounters, and that's if you ignore your job as a DM to build encounters around your players.
You have no idea how convenient this video is. Yesterday I had an argument with my table in which a spell worked on the party without saving throws. When the caster's concentration was broken, all enemy units suddenly knew this no-save spell to trap the party in a 120-foot bubble. I tried to talk to the dm about this and his response was "shut up or I'll kick you off the table"... Everyone reacted with the argument that I don't like games with good stories because I'm a guy who thinks mechanics are more important... I have never been more convinced in my life that this table was not for me.
Any dungeon master that counters discussion with shut up or I'm kicking you from the table is not a good dungeon master in the first place. Any person however who wants to ruin Fun by proving they are right by sticking math in there is a killjoy. (There is nothing wrong with using math to make a point and I am not saying you were doing the second point of course I'm just loading this up for all those people who are always having to be right by using math to prove their ridiculous what if theories.) All the above written, any person who uses math to show how things *can* work is an optimizer.
I kinda don't think racial flight is OP. I think it's just bad balancing to place every encounter in an open field with no ranged enemies when you know there's a flying character among the PCs. As for pits, a flying PC can fly over them but... can they carry the whole party over it? What happens when monsters ambush them when half the party is on one side of the pit while the other is on the other side?
Let me introduce you to a fair and balanced weapon called Net. There's literally zero reason why low level enemies like kobolds, goblins, hobgoblins, bandits and other enemies wouldn't have nets. By the time your party can fly with magic in game is around the same time where you don't have to worry about enemies carrying nets since the game will have plenty built in options to counter flight. But yeah, if the party member goes really high in the air and is using a ranged attack, any spell or weapon that can drop their movement speed to 0 works. Keep in mind also, a hero that's becoming more well known will eventually have groups of baddies aware that one of the group flies. Also, assume hostile NPCs are smart enough to build buildings and hide in them or have watch towers that make it really easy to get high up enough to bait the flying target into getting close enough to be netted or targeted with a snare type spell. If a player takes a flying character at level 1, let them. Mostly because as soon as they start falling and taking damage, they're not going to be as confident seeing as how it's easy to immediately have the NPCs alpha strike the now proned, snared PC.
@@Zulk_RS A good DM will adjust the encounters to ensure that the flying PC feels at least a little threatened, however there is a (very common) place in D&D where the encounters aren't designed with flying PCs in mind... Pre-written adventures. If a PC picks a naturally flying ancestry for Curse of Strahd, or Storm King's Thunder, or Princes of the Apocalypse then suddenly the DM now has to put in extra work to make sure that the game doesn't turn into "Flying PC and the people they hang out with"... kinda defeats the purpose of using a pre-written adventure. In the example you gave: Instead of carrying the party over the pit, how about using rope? The flying PC can secure the rope to something on the other side (Like a piton) and let the party navigate it while the flyer plays lookout in case something is coming. Don't get me wrong, I'm 100% the kind of DM that makes sure that flying isn't overpowered *in my own game* but this requires a lot of consideration in encounter design to make it so and not a lot of DMs have the time to bird-proof their dungeons and encounters.
@@kevingriffith6011 My own DMing style is "You do a thing and the world will rubber-band" If the flying PC uses a rope, let him! He gets to feel special for being able to pull that stunt off. Maybe send in a goblin squad while the rest of the party is halfway done crossing the pit. That would be an interesting encounter. As for pre-written stuff, I think the easiest solution is to just give enemies more than one weapon. Goblin: In the stat box they have both short bows and swords so they can fight the flying PC. There are also probably low ceiling dungeons in many of the Prewritten stuff. There are also probably enemy spell casters that can cast anti-flight things. There are also probably traps. Pressure plate or trip wire traps can still be effective because I highly doubt a flying PC will be flying 24/7.
@@Zulk_RS That does account for intelligent creatures like orcs and goblins, but not wolves, or zombies, or Bulettes or a huge number of other D&D monsters that tend to be the centerpieces of these encounters. Don't get me wrong, flight isn't *hard* to consider for encounters, but it adds yet another layer on top of encounter prep which can in itself be a significant investment of prep time... and having to assess and modify the encounters in a module kind of defeats the intended "pick up and play" aspect that they have. (Not that I recommend running a module without reading it and modifying it. You're just asking for trouble there)
Re; 100% chance to hit DPR calculation, like you said, it's easier, and I think it works sufficiently well when you're comparing two options. If option A has higher DPR than option B with 100% chance to hit, often the DPR ratio will remain the same if the chance to hit is only 65%. It's only when you start figuring in things that manipulate the chance to hit that it matters. Re; flying being overpowered, it's definitely strong, but I'm okay with it. I think it's fine for singular PCs to hard counter a limited selection of enemies. There are still plenty of enemies that are a threat to them, and that protection doesn't extend to their party members (unless _everyone_ is a flying race). It would be like saying you, as the DM, shouldn't ever throw flying enemies at the party, because there are some PC builds that can't deal with flying enemies. Now, if the party is ill-equipped to fight flying enemies, then you should probably go a little easy on them at first, but the onus is on them to figure out something to deal with flying enemies. (If needed, you could provide them with a magic item, but at least make it not a straightforward solution, so they still have to work to make it solve whatever problem they're dealing with, flying enemies in this case.) But it's okay for the players to have an easy win sometimes. If every time a player gets/uses a cool ability, your reaction is to counter it to make it useless, I don't think that's good DMing. Whether or not any or all of the players took a flying race, you should be throwing a mix of monsters at them, some of which will be hard countered by flying, and some of which won't be. If _all_ you're throwing at them are enemies hard countered by flight, that's a DM issue. If the current campaign makes it difficult to introduce new monsters that can handle flying PCs, then consider raising the stakes, e.g. introducing alternate objectives, such as protecting a specific NPC or location. Flight is really only OP in the white room, as there are many ways a DM can diminish its value or nullify it completely. But again, you shouldn't do that all the time, just some of the time. Let the players feel like a badass sometimes. I feel like there's a very fine balance between tailoring the campaign to suit the players but also remaining unbiased and not making changes, either to make an easy encounter harder or to make a hard encounter easier. If you've already created a scenario that the players can steamroll if they have a particular ability, and they do indeed have said ability, let them steamroll that scenario. "Easy" doesn't mean "boring", because often the players are cognizant of the hypothetical challenge a scenario poses. Slaying an ancient dragon without rolling a single attack might feel anti-climactic, but the players are still aware of the difficulty that an ancient dragon poses, and feel clever or badass for bringing it down in such a manner. It's also worth pointing out that as the party becomes more renowned, people will hear of their exploits. This includes their enemies. Sure, random wolves or gobbos or whathaveyou will still fall prey to whatever broken tactics the party is using, but more intelligent and knowledgeable enemies will adapt to those tactics and actively counter them. And again, this shouldn't be all the time, which is why you still occasionally throw randos at them who have no idea about their tactics. But it does mean that the BBEG and his underlings are prepared, and those will be the more important battles.
If only for the purpouse of mental excercise, Dhampir probably get bypass a solid 1+% of creatures with his perma spider climb but then again they can just get wings who cares about dhampirs
Dhampirs are cool and there are people who care about them. Permanent spider climb is basically fight and you're more likely to get away with it than flight at a table
some tactical consideration about fly : You cannot count on the entire party being able to fly unless you work it with them beforehand. Meaning that if you're flying there will probably be other pcs around and enemies will target them. This can be great if you're a squishy wizard, but is actually a drawback if you're a tank trying to prevent said monsters from attacking other party members. Though if the whole party is flying you can expect the DM to put a higher amount of flying or ranged enemies too. That doesn't mean that you are wrong about flying though but it's important to keep things in perspective. Plus the higher level you go the higher chance of meeting flying enemies you get, leaning that to remain efficient melee characters should invest in getting flight too. Ultimatly it all balances out. You also probably not going to fly if you intend to use mounts. Mounts allows hit and run tactics which is almost as good as flight at keeping away from enemies. And unlike flight, there are a lot more ways to give the party mounts as needed than flight. You just need someone who can ritually cast phantom steed. or to spend some gold on horses. And yeah they are impractical in dungeons, or tight quarters, but if you have tight quarters then you can just have the tank stand in the front. And prevent enemies from reaching you that way. I think you called it doorway dodging. heck even if they are two handers or archers, I think most martial should carry a shield in case they need to do some doorway dodging. Shields are cheap and it's +2 AC. Funnily enough you can tank as an archer. Well it depends on the archer, but crossbow expert remove the drawback of firing into melee and rangers and fighters are tough enough to handle the frontline. So they can act as backup tanks. That means that in practice if you have one of such characters in your party you don't need a tank. You can take every opportunity to fight at range using positioning and battlefield control, and whenever you actually need someone for doorway dodging or to cover the frontline you can send the crossbow guy
i love your video. I especially love how it's mostly about what I like to call "bare minimum flexing". ways to make powerful character and powerful moves by investing little resource, but leverage them cleverly using teamwork and tactics and preparation.
Re: What racial feature can counter 1% of all creatures. Changeling's Shapechange? Maybe? Obviously not the point of your question, but I really feel like that feature is super overpowered, as it feels unreasonable for most creatures to be aware and constantly paranoid for their existance.
I...can't really agree with flying argument. Yes, you can counter most of the encounters with flying, that's totally true. But it's almost impossible to find all-flying party. That means, the enemy that can't attack you, attacks whoever left on the ground. So, his attack still hits, and he still deals damage. It's worse than high AC or damage resistance, because you can negate that damage, even against ranged attacks. Also, I would really love to see your thought on the Net. Yes, you forgo your action, but you give your whole team advantage, disadvantage to your target, 0 speed, and disadvantage to dex saves. And unless it's dealing slashing damage, it has to use whole action to escape! And you don't waste your whole action, necessarily. Dragonborn can use a breath weapon if he has multiattack, ascendant dragon monk can too, beast master can command his beast to attack, etc. There are possibility for interesting, and actually working build.
Honestly that's my same thought on fly. Ya your dude is up in the air but now you're putting a lot more pressure on the squishes. Dropping to 0 sucks A LOT more if you're flying since hitting the ground causes an auto failed death save. Also quite frankly, more often than not players are inside of enclosed spaces where flying won't even work.... Like you know... Dungeons?
I think the problem is he used a barbarian as the example, the classic ‘I want to be taking all the hits’ class. If it’s say a ranged fighter, or like… just anything that doesn’t want to get hit the argument holds up imo
@@GrimHeaperThe that's one of two build-around (first one being one attack only). You can ignore net range penalty with sharpshooter/Crossbow Expert, or by being unseen by your target(short range disadvantage happens when the creature sees you). Or you can get advantage, to make a straight role
@@Raghetiel (You also need martial weapon prof) That's the thing though. I'd rather prone them then net them. Then lock the target in an inescapable loop of being prone whilst having the advantages of them being prone. It's like making something have zero movement and proning.
Eldritch knight can reach AC of 24. - Full plate = 18 (Expensive) - Shield = 2 - Defence fighting style = 1 (Other fighting styles probably more viable, but eh for fun) - Shield of faith from magic initiate = 2 (Concentration though) - Shield spell = 5 (1 until start of your next turn) Total 28 AC. Granted the last 7 points of AC are temporary and its probably not very well optimized character, but its reachable.
Honestly, reaching 24 AC as a caster is mostly temporary, since it's using Shield and maybe Mage Armor (if they aren't dipping into Artificer, Cleric or something else)
Everyone forgets about cover when they talk about AC. Give yourself a +2 or a +4 depending on how much you take. Plate. Shield. Defensive. Cover. 18+2+1+2 or 4. Add warforged and you're at 24. Heck you could do it with medium armor. 14 + 2 (dex), warforged +1, medium armor master +1, defensive fighting style +1, dual wielder +1. Cover gets you 22 or 24. And that COULD be a ranged character since you could be using Throwing Daggers, so taking cover behind things shouldn't be too hard. Much more reliable than Shield spell which you get max 4 of per day. Also, if you take Battle Master you'd get 4 uses of superiority die to increase your AC while moving or if you get to level 7 a hunter with Multi-Attack Defense, or a Kensei Monk getting +2 when they use an unarmed attack. Generally, you can get a higher AC more consistently with a melee character, but yes, you can get wildly higher ACs if you dip into casting classes, and that's his point.
both as a DM and a player i care more on having fun than having the optimal math, flying is only op if you follow prewritten campaigns in a homebrew campaign I can just add crossbows to my bandits or make the spiders acid spit, or flying enemies, or cave combat a lot of option are in the books to counter flying. some sub-optimal spell or classes are just fun. doing more damage could be fun but maybe you ave way more fun casting hex and pot shooting a enemy, or summoning a beast I described the form of. i don't really mind the new UA Kobold I am happy that they fix the negative modifiers and no longer need to cower or beg.
I am homebrewing some stuff right now for my campaign, and wanted to check if removing concentration in Favored Foe for our ranger will break the game in half or something... These calculations helps me a lot! You couldn't pick a better moment to upload this, Thanks man!!
This is a very common mistake, annoyingly common. The flying barbarian could be more optimal, but almost always wont be. HP are not a precious commodity to be protected, they are an expendable resource. if you don't spend your HP that is money left on the table. Never expend resources to avoid damage that is less than what you can restore on a short rest. A barbarian gets half their level x (1d12+con) for free every day. At 6th level that is 33hp on average. If they aren't using it they are wasting it. Throw in whatever you had to spend to make them fly and it is almost always better to spend that resource on something else. Remember the barbarian flying does not stop the enemy doing damage. It just means that damage will happen to a different target, one that probably doesn't have resistance and a massive pool of hit dice.
The reason that first comes to mind for why the people may ignore hit rate for most to hit attacks is that the hit rate in most cases is the same from attack to attack. unless it scales separately from your character like with conjure animals, it applies a bonus/penalty like bless or bane, or it ignores ac like magic missile, the percent reduction remains the same and as a result isn't very important when comparing to one another. with all that being said i agree with the overall point of the video, if a specific situation doesn't already exist then you assume average conditions and work from there.
Running with 100% to hit makes sense sometimes! If you're comparing builds that have the same to hit, for example. A fighter with a longsword and a fighter with a rapier for example. But yeah overall agreed. The really telling thing is that as soon as you start making the room less "white" aka adding things like terrain and doorways and trees and whatnot, the people who scream 'whiteroom' get angrier (especially as it usually reinforces points like the one about flight speed) The only thing I will say with respect to your last point is that even within the "meeting point" that is the books, there's still a lot of variance in terms of experience. Some DMs think running 12 encounter days is normal, others think 2-3 is "more than enough." This does drastically change the balance of a lot of features.
But, But.. Kobold! If you go this UA called Mystic and do this thing with this [Insert some ability]. You don't need to hit! and.. and... your DPR calc won't account that! so... the other DPR is totally correct!
As a DM, when I'm making encounters I usually go with the basic calculation (100% hit) for understanding the basics of how much damage my players will put out a round and how much damage the monsters will put out a round. Since this number is always high, it means that any encounter I create with these basics in mind will run a little longer than expected when it comes to PCs winning, and a lower chance of a TPK should things go sideways. Easy math for easy encounter creation. With that in mind, I believe the full math is best when trying to make systemic changes, add new feats, classes, abilities and the like. For anything system related, use the better math. For quick checks to make sure an encounter will go well? Fast math works fine.
Generally, if you are comparing a basic build with GWM to another, or if you are comparing two without, the exact to hit comes out in the wash. Problems arise when you are comparing between them, or if you expect damage to accurate. Same goes for ranged attacks, since the Archery fighting style throws everything off.
One of the factors in 5e that I feel a lot of people dismiss is the lack of in game economy. This issue normally comes up when talking about resistances to non magical weapons because the general response to mid tier up is that "the party will probably have magical weapons at that point," but there is no mechanical thing backing that claim up. In game if you have a magic item for the most part its meant to count as a bonus and not something you are always going to get. This has also lead to an issue with in game rewards not really having a meaning outside of magic gear, encounters that make assumptions that are wrong, or character expectations that do not happen. I appreciate that this channel does not count magic weapons as a part of dpr and expected progression, but I see a lot of builds that depend on at a minimum of a +1 weapon past a certain level. When talking about the way the games mechanics work together the assumption must be that no magic items are given or the discussion is about a specific magic item. This just leads to non magic resistance being way stronger then it should in balancing discussions until a way of getting a consistent way of gaining items is available.
Love this video and all your others finally had to say it. As a person who doesn't get or like math a lot, it's a big deal for me when someone can explain it in an entertaining and digestible way! So thanks!
In german there's a nice word for those kinds of words/phrases like white room. They're called "Totschlagargument" (lit. murder argument) and basically nullify anything else someone might tell you.
Then a 1 hitting is a table thing we do, cuz we've played against creatures where rolling a 1 with modifiers makes it where we hit cuz the AC of a creature is that low.
adjusting for AC is more accurate but it doesn't matter if all you want to know is one weapon combo more effective than another because they all are equally effected by the AC. It would only matter if you are comparing to hit attack to something like saving throw or if there is a to hit modifier involved.
Hey Kobolt, I have a question? Where can I find the statistic for the percentage avarage of each dices, since there are spells that can modify what you roll on a d20 like bless and bane. It would be a totally useful to have those type of percentages. But by far my most concern percentage is the avarage number rolled for each dice. This a good skill to know as a DM for planing encounter that are fair and possible to overcome without fustrating the players. As player this is okay so that way they can feel that they are making the right desicion for a effective character, because that's something that all players want. On the other hand this can turn to be something super meta where the player is just obsessed with making the most powerful build. But I think we both agree on the power gamer problem. Anyways great video super Insight full.
I've been trying to explain the average DPR thing to a couple of the players at my table and they still just don't care lol That said, I'm never sure what the best AC to assume when calculating actual average DPR. Anybody have a suggest for this?
You start with 13 AC at level 1, 14 AC at level 4, 15 AC at level 5, 16 AC at level 6, 17 AC at level 9, 18 AC at level 13, 19 AC at level 17. As for your players not caring, I mean. Thats fine. I wouldn't press it unless they talk damage with me.
two options for deciding what AC to go up against 15 flat is a common one that people use, and it lets you keep track of how your character gets more powerful over time. Or, average of proficiency bonus to CR. Basically, the average AC of all creatures whose CR is equal to your proficiency bonus at any given level. It's more work, but more likely to give a number that's applicable to your table. That being said, AC varies wildly at all levels of play, so 15 flat is probably your best bet.
Yuanti with magic res and poison immunity is fairly busted, but with an average campaign flight is busted. That being said, it's not in my campaign because my dm doesn't like how weak most creatures are at range and almost all of his creatures have some sort of counter to it. But like you said, everything I just said is in various white rooms.
4:35 That reminds me, how do you determine what range of enemy AC is most relevant to a given level? Do you just go with what gives a 60% or 65% chance to hit given the "baseline" attack roll modifier for that level's proficiency bonus and expected ability score modifier? Refer to one of those resources which averages out the AC of WORC published creatures in a given tier? Something completely different?
There's a place for 100% hit chance calculation. Simplification. So long as you know it's inaccurate, and you you judge everything by the same metric. (Of course, great weapon can mess this up, but again, Simplification.) It also helps to determine worst/best case scenarios for a particular instance, so you know how far things can swing. Besides, you can always input into a accuracy calc to really figure it out.
Flying is pretty broken when playing with other optimized groups, but its almost worse when you arnt. Now everyone BUT the flyer is getting hit and taking the bad stuff. Its like the teacher caught 3/4 of the group and gave them detention, but since johnny flappers was on the ceiling she missed him. Hes getting dirty looks while the rest of the group get led away to clean the toilets or whatever detention is nowdays. Either everyone is in the flappy family or no one is.
I'd say it's fairly easy to counter a flying race with something entirely in the book. A net. That's all, net or a web ability like a giant spider's. It's reasonable to say a massive portion of the monster manual has a net or will be paired with creatures capable of having a net. Sure, it requires a little bit of fiat but in a world where some people can fly at will I imagine people are prepared to stop flying creatures.
It's amusing how basically everything is a "muh whiteroom" assumption unless it has enough upvotes on Reddit. More funnies: - Remember the clickbait/dumb builds that assume 100% chance to hit with a GWM martial? At level 5, they have +1 to hit(16 Str, 3+3-5). "But Conjure Animals has a low attack bonus so will never hit" is especially amusing when you consider that a wolf has +4, and a cow or horse has +6. - If someone throws some stupid DPR calc assuming 100% hit chance, you are legally allowed to respond with damage calcs for a commoner assuming 1 000 000% hit chance. Bonus updoots for miscalculating too. Another annoying assumption is having an arbitrary amount of set-up time. I cast Spirit Shroud round 1, Hexblade's Curse round 2, Vow of Enmity(vengeance paladin, eww) round 3, round 4 I actually attack, assume everything hits and all crits because obviously the other casters in the party are my slaves who only cast Hold Person on my command(100% chance for target to fail its save, Legendary Resistance only exists when I'm gaslighting myself into disbelieving the martial-caster disparity) or HASTE(I snort spite each time I hear of the OPness of this spell). The resulting numbers are taken out of context and called my DPR. Or how about the whole Resource Expenditure Fallacy? Comes in two variants. Variant one, I say your DPR is actually very bad because whatever thing you do requires resources and therefore is obviously worse than my rogue, who is totally not trash because I can go on all day(rituals, cantrips, fighter being better than rogue anyway, expected resource allocation over a finite-length adventuring day and hit points are all myths made by some mad cultists to oppose the Holy Hivemind). Variant two, my fighter's DPR is enormous because I have action surge, so I do 1d6+5+10 five times, so like 90 DPR. Yes, I action surge every round at level 5 and rolled 21s for all my stats. Anyone who disagrees is obviously an evil enemy of fun, also something is not RAI but I don't know what.
I'm stupid. I'm a dense person who became an art major because she didn't wanna do math so I ask in all genuineness. Why is rogue considered trash? While my own pov is a limited one, I've never felt lacking for feeling useful in any given combat scenario when I've played rogue. I've reread your statement multiple times to try and make sense of it but the sarcasm is making it really difficult to parse for me. So you're either saying rogue is trash or you're not and I'd just like some clarification.
Technically 5lvl wizard can deal 2400 dmg to your enemies. Max density of enemies in 20ft sphere (50 enemies) and all of them dont make save and we applied max dmg. What is dumb and extreamly incorect :)
@@BubblingBrooke The problem with the rogue class is that it's weak even for a martial. Its defensive capabilities are lacking, needing Moderately armored to catch up with the others. However, ad a martial, it needs two feats to keep up damage-wise already, so right away its defenses are hindered for a very long time. Additionally, and perhaps even more importantly, the class struggles offensively, and the average DPR of a rogue(over a day of 8 encounters, 32 rounds total) is the second lowest damage output of any class in 5e, with only a paladin that uses all its slots on smites falling lower. It barely surpasses the warlock baseline, and before accounting for subclass an optimized level 20 rogue gets to 44-45 DPR. A fighter at the same level dishes out damage in the high fifties before adding in a subclass, and benefits more from its good subclasses than rogues do. So it's weak on both the offensive front and the defensive front, and all it gets for its troubles is very late Wis prof, expertise and reliable talent - the last two are only situationally useful, the third comes very late and its usefulness is offset by the fact you'll need Resilient Con anyway to have prof in both important saving throws. To summarize, rogues are really bad all around, and are pretty much the jack of no trades, master of none either. The polar opposite of a wizard, one might say.
@@haenhaen4282 I'd like to know where the numbers are coming from. What stat line are we assuming here? 16 dex point by? Also what feats? Sharpshooter and crossbow expert? I'm coming at this in good faith because I legit want to understand. I've watched PT for a bit now and I'm confused why warlock is the baseline for comparison, is it just EB? Rogues also aren't frequently on the front lines and stay out of trouble anyway so how is the defensive stuff an issue overall? There's a lot of information being used that im just not privy to. Like what are fighters using to get these numbers? (i understand a lot of it comes from the number of their attacks) I'm also surprised that a monk somehow surpasses both a paladin and rogue on that baseline considering their damage isn't great until you get to second tier play and the die bumps to a d6 (and im a monk lover). As someone who has only known rogue and paly to be the big burst damage, its really surprising to me that the dpr is low and it doesn't make sense to me. Like I said. I'm not a math gal.
*takes a deep breath several times and chooses words carefully.* The problem I have with people who use numbers to justify their points about x is always this this is why this class is bad using dpr is they are confusing the point of sustained versus burst. For example the thing with Rogues is that you are not always going to be Frontline fighting you are going to be looking for a significant situation for the optimization of using one power or as we sometimes like to call it sneak attack. Well we would always love to have sneak attack it's not always going to happen. A fighter is going to be most of the time swinging their sword in melee at the front of the action. Others are not necessarily going to be doing this. (Of which the optimizers would then complain because Marshals are not going to be doing the same DPR as Wizards allegedly when you look at the overall power that they could do. Of which people are once again not taking a look at the limitation of spells running out which is the same argument of sustained versus burst, but I am going off point to the example here, moving on.) The same can be said with several of the other powers, using their powers at a specific moment not constantly. Which is why you have multiple things you can do including things that give you an automatic disengage or dash should you use your bonus action to do so. Think of it like a paladin using Smite even if you have your ability renewing. The mark of an individual who uses mathematics to show how something works is a good optimizer. The mark of an individual who has several options ready to go based on the contingencies that are happening in the game based on how they're playing with the character they selected, is the mark of a good strategy player overall. Because if we are going to start going into white room theorizing every time we are talking about a character class, then we're going to have to start coming up with Concepts that will show how that individual using their optimization will be dead because they didn't account for contingencies in the first place Downing them while they're hiding behind their DPR. All of this is missing the point of Dungeons & Dragons is to have fun and not talk about how who is the superior and who is inferior. (Although I will agree with UA-cam TreantMonk that monks were built badly in 5th edition if you optimize, but that's a whole other discussion.)
The worse is when someone brings a barbarian to the table and complains about being killed by a friendly fireball. Let the enemies come to you dude. Never charge alone like a maniac.
I will say that the 100% hit chance calculations can be a useful heuristic when comparing things where hit probability is going to be similar. E.g. comparing a gwm build to an ss build. Or trying to decide if you're better off using your dagger or your maul to fight the creature with bludgeoning resistance.
It would be awesome if the barbarian flew up and started shooting arrows at wolves only to see them charge the wizard and maul him to death. If the entire party has flight, the DM is just going to change the campaign so you're fighting the things that have ranged attacks. They aren't going to run a campaign where the party is just flying over grounded enemies slaughtering them with no recourse.
Yup, the fighter flys up, can't get hit, wolves flank the wizard, pack tactics him to death, and drag the corpse off. The BBEG knows the party has the only flying ranged fighter in the land? Hires a brace of harpies with nets. Or, just a dozen hobgoblins with short bows... Why short bows not long bows? The fighter has a long bow. Ah, the cowardly fighter will fly out of short bows range, and shoot with his longbow. Yes, he'll pick off the hobgoblins from 300 feet up! Yup, and so he'll be too far away to come to the aid of a downed party member. Then, when the harpies net him, and his move becomes zero, he'll drop like a stone and die. Flight only counters things when the flyer has room to fly high. Underground and indoors it's much less useful. Is it OP? It depends. Should the DM completely negate it? No. Is it OP compared to dark vision? Is it OP compared to a rock gnomes ability to make a small clockwork mouse or music box? It's very very good. It's clearly better than clockwork mouse. It may be less good than dark vision.
@@chrisflanagan7564 I was just thinking about dispel magic or (entering a) antimagic Zone when the fighter is really high up and introduce them to something I like to call falling damage. Also they're no longer allowed to fly.
I am guilty of assuming auto-hits/crits in my builds, but I try to make the [fact that is an] assumption clear when presenting them, as well as other assumptions of the build. I will also calculate max crit damage, but more often than not I will also calculate the min crit damage, the max non-crit damage, and the min non-crit damage (and differences with point-buy, if applicable). Also, not a lot of my builds actually factor in damage. A vast majority are concept-builds (Cantrip Master, fastest speed, Ritual Caster [all ritual spells with least time-and-money cost], etc.) or character builds, only two having a damage calculation (the highest single-attack damage, being an assassin rogue bugbear with two levels paladin and one barbarian [if melee] or just straight assassin rogue [if ranged], both against a surprised enemy; and the biggest jump build, calculating the bonus to the jump from dhampir's bite [added to athletics check bonus from beast barbarian]).
Using the term white room to me was meant for when someone only looks at the best possible scenerio for the use of some feature or spell and was to show that even though something may look good on paper it might not always be the best choice. Pack tactics made an example of this when people look at maximum damage. White rooms are meant to point out unrealistic scenerios or rare scenerios and i think Pack Tactics does a very good job of not doing this so anyone saying its white room stuff i very much disagree. White Rooms arent meant to stifle optimization, if anything its in favor of it because white room is wishful thinking, wanting/needing a specific scenerio to work and I dont think Pack Tactics does this at all. I really think optimization is important but not to necessarily do the most damage or be as powerful as possible but to make informed desicions that allow character choices to be unique and interesting without losing effectiveness.
3:00 I do not want to be overly pedantic, especially since it is dealing with a Lv 20 PC, but a max level barbarian can get 24 AC from Unarmored Defense (with max DEX and CON), their capstone feature raising their CON to 24, and by using a shield which is allowed by their version of Unarmored Defense.
Great break down on what you are trying to illustrate, for those who dont understand. I enjoy what you share, some is eye opening for sure. I may use the advice or maybe not. I like to build different and interesting builds which usually goes against your data. I will use it to adjust the mechanics or numbers with the DM so that the concept PC is feasable. I neither want a PC that always succeeds or fails because both are not fun. Failure drives the story as much if not more than always succeeding.
I've never heard the term "white room" used in such a way... kinda glad I don't deal with people who talk/argue that way :-o I like DPR as a comparative baseline, but the only times I've calculated it myself, is when prepping a session, and mocking up 2 NPCs fighting (which I like, because I know the exact ACs of both sides)... in one instance of doing this, I realized that the "professional monster hunter" in Curse of Strahd couldn't out-damage the health regen on a standard Vampire Spawn :-o
I write this before the vid came out. I thought I was being clever actually but I failed. My white room example with 1% counter is actually very easy to debunk. I forgot slimes and zombies exist so anyone with half a brain can exploit their movement very easily.
But anyways, even say a creature with 30 speed and you playing a race with 35 or 40 speed, these are not clear counters you can easily take advantage of, the creature will dash every turn and so will you until you get enough distance, it becomes a kite war. Sometimes you slip up the counter. The flight one is a perfect counter because you don't need to kite, all you do is fly up far enough and usually thats like 20 ft.
Then theres the dhampirs, They're also basically like flying races but in a very different way with spider climbing needing no hands. I actually think they're also broken too but not as broken as flight.
I wish they were a bit clearer about how dhampirs move - is it normal walking but upside down or scuttling around on all fours like a horror movie monster?
A spider climbing lad hanging upside down while wielding a two-handed glaive without difficulties seems perfectly realistic and not unreasonable (edit: imagine a terrifying ceiling fan). I only take issue with them using ranged weapons since aiming Australian style seems silly.
Also, why can flying creatures use heavy weapons when they can’t even wear medium armor?
RAW, dhampirs can go probe while standing on a wall/ceiling, meaning even something that can hit it with ranged is at disadvantage with no way to offset it.
I agree with mostly everything that you said and your sentiment throughout the however I do think that solving the problem of flight and finding a way to balance it is the better more interesting option instead of baning it altogether it just feels like your restricting players fun and fantasies its a very cool i don't for such an arbitrary problem
@@alexandrudorries3307Dhampir leaves the PC’s hands free while upside down. The slippers of spider climbing exist and offer that exact same option for anyone that hasn’t been exsanguinated.
I have made a build that can temporarily gain a nearly 100% hit chance against any enemy tarrasque included. However, I feel this is more of a extreme case, and you'd never actually see it in normal play because it requires a lot of levels. The build is a halfling war cleric battle master fighter multiclass with the ranged weapon fighting style, and needs to use bless, maneuvers, and their channel divinity to get a +25 minimum to hit which in theory gives you an accuracy so high it may as well be 100% with the luck feat. It is impossible to get 100% accuracy RAW because you could roll 4 natural 1s in a row which is a 1/160,000 chance of occuring.
Kobold: "When you get a natural one you miss!" Halfling: "Is that what it's like for you? I'm so sorry!"
"May I present to you sir, the 2nd Natural 1"
@@UncleBBQ Good thing I have lucky!
@@MN121MN "When you roll a 1 on the d20 for an attack roll, ability check, or saving throw, you can reroll the die and must use the new roll."
You must use the new roll, lucky feat does not let you get out of the 2nd natural 1.
@@UncleBBQ Nooooooo
New race, half-halfling half-elf. Lucky feat, elven accuracy feat, advantage. You rolled five 1s, you still miss.
The White Room is actually where characters go when the cartoonist's budget is low.
Or the DM didn't have time to prepare battle maps.
THANKFULLY WE HAVE TODAY'S SPONSOR, DUNGEONFOG-
I thought it was a song by cream
Despite having a 6 INT score, I firmly believe Gator has a +19 to hit.
Gator is an Ancient Dragon taking the form of a gator.
@@epicazeroth Gator is a Gator taking the form of a gator in my opinion
The enemy won't know what you're doing if you don't. -Sun Tzu probably
"100% to hit is mathematiclly impossible"
Marut: *laught in Mechanus*
But seriously, this is probably the best videos about calculating damage in dnd on the entire youtube
*laughs in Magic Missile*
@@nessesaryschoolthing chuckles in shield and counterspell :)
*but kobald, my Marut Barbarian Can hit with a 100% chance and always has the mean damage* (as is a optional rule in dmg for mechanus, which is quiet interesting)
@@benzehunteer7411 I prefer the loud interesting over the quiet interesting 😆
@@benzehunteer7411 Marut always hits and always deals 60 force damage per hit
This is probably my favorite of your videos so far; you've summed up a lot of clever points very neatly about how optimization and the math behind 5e can viewed, and in doing so given me a video resource I'm glad to be able to share in the future.
I only calculate 100% chance to hit when comparing options with the same attack bonus because accuracy affects them the same amount so it's just an extra hoop to jump through.
Yeah, can see that. Should be called DpH(it) then imo.
Even in this situation you still need to consider the chance to hit.
An easy example is if you have a 10% chance to hit with either attack, would you rather spend a 1st level spell slot or a 4th level spell slot?
The 4th level slot will do more damage, but we can see that it's likely a waste to use a 4th level slot here because it's so unlikely to be effective.
I also calculate DPR with 100% chance to hit but I do that because I like to calculate accuracy separately.
@@Zulk_RS Calc your accuracy and then use your accuracy factor to then lower the damage by your miss calc.
@@kroth5810 I disagree, that's one like calculating Spirit shroud vs shadowblade, same chance to hit different damage.
That's like the dnd version of the physics problem "considering normal conditions of temperature and pressure, no air resistance and a perfectly spherical cow..."
(What isn't bad, it's necessary)
R O U N D C O W
@@epicazeroth they live next to the very feared gazebo!
Oh god. Air resistance. Truely the biggest enemy of our universe (at least for physics/engineering students)
In this model, the kobold is a perfectly smooth 5x5x5 cube. Because we live on a grid.
@@kevingriffith6011 As well in this model a Half-Orc is a 5x5x5 cube that is bigger than the Kobold because it is medium sized...DnD physics is weird.
I blame the weird rule in the dmg about "you can play anything you want" because is prevents us from directly criticising the system or design choices without someone saying "just do it differently". Because their is a point at which if you ignore the base mechanics of a game, it isn't that game anymore
Yeah this always bug me when the provided solution is "homebrew it".
I don't WANT to homebrew it, I want something official. I don't know what my DM is going to allow, and I want to be able to share a cool build idea with someone using official rules so they don't have to worry about getting DM approval.
@@grantbaugh2773 at the end of the day we can't say the best design solution to everything is "have the user fix it". I would rather have a good product than a flatpack one i have to fix constantly myself
The closest I can think of is poison immunity from Yuan-Ti. No creatures come to mind that deal exclusively poison damage, but it does significantly reduce the damage and CC from more than 1% of attacks.
Ya, Yuan Ti and Aarokocra / Owlin are consistently rated as top tier races due to poison immunity and flying.
@@vinspad3 Flying is broken and needs serious toning down officially IMO. Making encounters where flying can shine and other times where it’s a hindrance gets annoying. Poison immunity is something I hand wave away as “this specific poison/substance was created to counter Yuan-Ti biology, it has no damaging effect on other creatures” and then let them fight monsters etc. with total immunity after taking down some evil Witcher-esque killers for hire.
@@Orudaiken I genuinely think that, without giving a damn GOOD reason for it to be a thing, pulling the rug out from under players on abilities they were allowed to take is very, very silly to do, borderline just being a dick. Just tell them they can't play as that thing, as opposed to penalizing them for it.
I know you said it in a hyper-specific scenario, but I feel that it's a better engagement than bringing in the guys that have the "anti supershield laser"
The Yuan-ti race as a whole and the flying ability in general have already been nerfed in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes. A lot of the changes to racial traits from this book are questionnable, but I think those were warented. And I'm saying that as someone who play an Aaracokra in one game, and a Yuan-Ti in another. I actually said to my DMs that I was okay to change my characters with those new, more balanced versions of them.
And yeah, always pulling out of nothing random reasons for your players abilities to not work is a terrible move. One of my DM use to do that, and when we were questionning it, he would just say "Yes maybe I don't have a rule or story reason to do that but I'm the DM, I do what I want". We had a serious collective discussion about it, and he accepted to stop doing it. If you think an ability is broken, maybe the player and the DM can decide TOGETHER on a way to fix it BEFOREHAND, not in the middle of a session while the player can't say anything about it.
That being said, creating situations which make strong abilities less potent is an acceptable move, if you don't make it an automatism. Like, as an Aaracokra, I can accept that sometimes we might fight indoor, or I can accept that a group of villains who know our abilities and strategies might come prepared to counter my flight. But when every combat take place indoor, or every random bandit group come fully prepared to counter flying opponents for some reason, it feel completely unfair. I might as well have picked a variant human or an elf like everybody else, if I can't ever use one of my defining trait.
@@agilemind6241 I agree, as a DM myself I put ranged and/or flying enemies in almost every combat. I was talking about more extreme tactics, spells that stun or reduce movement to 0 cast exclusively at the flying PC, nets, etc...
Obviously, even when you let the PC fly more freely, you should still design your encounter to be challenging to everyone.
Druids are broken.
They can learn to locate poison at level one. Makes it super hard for a pack of murder hobos to run out of booze 🤔
Based drinking buddy hobo
I know what my next druid will do. (Minus the Murder Hobos)
100% to hit doesn’t exist? What are you talking about, my D20 with only 20 on every face clearly disagrees.
I believe it's right next to the D20 with one on every face.
Thankfully we have pack tactics and roll with advantage
IN THE WHITE ROOM
WITH BLACK CURTAINS
NEAR THE STATIOOOOON
I used to only talk about damage with assumed success on attack rolls, but now I love doing the DPR calculations in Excel based on accuracy and other factors. This is a great video! I loved Gator's response from the other room, which was probably also a white room.
I feel like a Dhampir's spider climb ability can counter at least over 1% of all creatures in all books combined. You have to wait until 3rd level to do it, but it costs nothing but movement speed.
I never got into the "dnd optimixing" scene so didnt even know that some ppl calculate DPR that way. It always seemed intuitive to me to create a table for all ACs and look at that, then guessing what AC you will oppose
This is really good stuff! Another point to make is that it’s easy to build an ‘optimized’ character, whatever that means, and the player make massively sub-optimal decisions. The weakest link in most characters is the player.
Agreed. Problem exists between table and chair.
I like the content, but I was expecting the talk about "white room theory" where the environment has important features or enemies have special abilities that the math doesn't account for. In any case, that's still a plus for the classes who have far more options to approach combat than ones with a very limited pool of actions.
I also thought this.
Technically the math can account for everything but the average player definitely doesn't have the required statistics background to do the math and/or solve the optimization problem.
Whats harder is when you force a DM to use improvised damage because you decided to do something crazy like cast lightning bolt followed by fireball at an underground lake to electrolyze the water and then trigger a hydrogen detonation because all the players are nerds who hate their DM. (Note: IRL physics and D&D don't mix particularly well)
@@jasonreed7522 in highly nerd groups, my experience is that there is an gentlement's agreement to not try to build a nuke and make it too hard for the dm, we are high tier nerds but the dm is not that experienced as a dm.
@@xianwu5070 unless the dm is experienced, then go as fast as you can in that arms race
I always do the "lazy mans" dpr calculation. It's just "yeah, that is the average damage on a hit. Lets say it's about 60% to hit. That seems reasonable. Like 24 dpr then? Sure, sounds good."
How I do it too. The double crit damage very nicely cancels out the nat 1 miss too
You, sir, are a genius. I just ignored crits entirely.
I once wrote a big python notebook where I can calculate it super precisely.
But for my actual character ideas I really just add the damage dice too unless they have a super different chance to hit.
Only time I really bother with crit damage in dpr calculations is with things like Half Orcs and barbarians with Brutal Critical, or attack rolls with 3+ damage dice
The only time you should calculate for 100% chance to hit is for Magic Missile.
(and they uh...could have Shield)
Or counterspell.
if his calculation doesnt include chance the monster has resistance why should yours chance for monster to have shield spell?
@@FireGamingUltima because he doesn't know what specific enemy you are playing against, but it's pretty common for there to be shield spells?
I'll chime in on flight: there's more to encounter design than just pulling X monsters at random out of the book, and I'd argue that a DM that lets the flying character solve every combat encounter is probably doing it wrong (once in a while to let the player flex is probably a good thing though).
Of course there are social and exploration encounters, but also fights indoors, or in inclement weather that may make flying less practical (for instance my DM once threw a flying boss at a largely-flightless low-level party, who we beat largely due to catching him indoors during a thunderstorm), or encounters with timers where kiting to conserve resources isn't ideal (simple example: "you have X rounds to stop the ritual, here's what's between you and them, go").
In fact, having made similar observations as Pack Tactics about flight (albeit without counting every published monster to see how big the problem was), I actually want to incorporate the "flight problem" into worldbuilding--it stands to reason that military minds in a fantasy setting that includes fliers would pretty quickly realize how advantageous they are and either come up with countermeasures or get conquered.
All that being said: I'm not sure what other racial ability in the game forces the DM to warp their encounter design around it to the same degree. The closest I can think of is damage/condition immunities, but that's much more tailored to specific challenges. So yeah, flight is overpowered in that sense, but that doesn't necessarily mean you should ban it from your table if you are a DM--what it does mean is you'll have to take it into account, and whether you want to do that or not is up to you.
It's honestly not that much of a chore to design flight proof encounters. There are plenty of ranged attackers and drop bears in the monster manual. Just mix them in with the melee monsters.
"But what about wolves?" Why are wolves attacking anywhere from half a dozen to two dozen armed humans traveling with mounts, possibly guard dogs, fire, and big noisy wagons? Wild animals don't randomly attack healthy looking large groups.
Mix up your encounters in ways that make sense for the setting. Put some saddles on the backs of those wolves and throw pixie cavalry at the party. Have the wolves be scavengers that feed off the left overs from a drop bear type enemy living in the canopy above.
What do I mean when I say drop bear? I mean chokers, cloakers, dark mantles, creep vines, giant spiders, and anything that could drop down from above or pull a PC up and away from their party. Put one or more of those in the fight and have them working with the animals either knowingly or unknowingly.
Top tip: for the most part, you don't need to reallywork around a flying PC. Unless majority or all of the party a fliers, all it does is concentrate the damage onto fewer party members, which is mechanically more optimal for enemies. Also in published modules, most combat takes place in relatively confined spaces where flight may be possible but still fairly close to enemies.
If your exploration/encounter design is based around physical obstacles, these can often be solved with climbing gear or low level magics anyway. Finally, a flying party member might be scouting out the road ahead and give your party info on the enemy camps, but they just saw a winged person silhouetted against the sun so are now prepping for combat.
Rather than remove challenge, I find it mostly just creates alternative ones or changes encounter dynamic. And even if it does entirely mitigate an encounter, there are first level spells and race/class abilities that trivialise a whole host of social, exploration or combat encounters.
If you don't want to deal with flight it's your perogative, but practically it's not really as much of an issue as the maths makes it seem (unless you only ever have fights in open fields with melee enemies, in which case you also have the isdue of making combats boring before flight is involved).
I'd agree that for flight, the degree of warping necessary means that flight as a racial feature is likely OP, but this principle is the biggest counter to the 'white room'. White room maths usually assumes that the enemy is a big dumb sack of hit points, or that a group of enemies are all clumping together in such a way that the guy with Web can immediately turn the fight off. That happens sometimes, and as a DM, I would suggest intentionally making that happen sometimes as a 'shoot your monks' moment. But web shutting down half an encounter only applies if all your enemies are together in a convenient, 4X4 square, and in many actual situations, this is not the case. The mathematics of an encounter is at most half of its design.
Personally, I think that maximum, minimum non-zero, and expected damage values should all be calculated for the purposes of analysis 'cause it gives a fuller picture, though the emphasis should definitely be on the expected value.
^^ This. I like doing something like this for characters that have burst damage, or have a limited resource that they use to increase their damage (like monks).
A monks DPR can look either a Lot higher or lower depending on how many rounds of combat they go through in a day.
Seems like fullest picture would need a graph. Calculating min, max, expected(mean, mode, median) etc could certainly be great. mean+ std_dev or median+Interquartile range
"I think it's a good idea just to have a basic understanding of things"
my man, if only half of the people in this world shared that thought
I have successfully thought of a racial trait that invalidates "some percentage of the monster manual." Speed is a racial trait, and if your speed is more than double your enemy's, you can never lose to them assuming you have equal or better range. Flight is still OP and I am definitely just splitting hairs for the sake of a challenge posed.
There is another thing to consider: how the tables play X how the system is designed.
There is a lot of conversation about how the game is designed and how most tables play the game, especially from people who point out the problems with 5e. The system demands 8 encounters per day, with 2 to 3 short rests and 1 long rest at the end. With this metric, certain classes like Monks, Fighters and Warlocks shoot up in their usability since you will get your resources more as the days go by. A Sorcerer or Wizard won't have a 24 AC everytime, just a few spikes that allow them to reach this AC metric, while the 18 and up AC user will have it constantly, only requiring either a Fighting Style, a shield or a heavy armor. Sure, casters *can* reach similar values with multiclass, but it will be lower than the others unless you have *very* specific settings.
This does bleed into conversations like "Martials in 5e suck" or "You only need casters and half casters in a party" because they gain a lot more power in the way 5e DMs usually DM the game: 2 to 3 encounters per day, no short rests and a long rest after that. Even some modules are getting closer to this metric, with campaigns like Dragon Heist, Descent into Avernus and Wild Beyond the Witchlight having plenty of places for the group to Long Rest up.
There isn't a clear answer for no question in 5e. Even the examples you chose aren't straight answers. A Barbarian dealing more damage, but taking the damage, may be good to maintain the health of your party (unless you are doing the Ancestral Guardians ordeal). Someone with consistent 17 AC may be better than someone who can spike 24 AC, but has a starting point of 14. Even flying, the thing considered OP, depends of a lot of conditions to be considered a Hard Counter against creatures. And that is where I think "White Room" comes from: trying to seek a straight answer on a game with so many variables and options, instead of seeking something that works decently well on most situations, that has counters, but can contribute on most situations. Being aware that TTRPGs in general are something complex, with many variables on different situations, will bring the conversation to a higher point.
Even in an 8 encounter day, you will get far more use out of a full caster than any other class, bar a gloomstalker perhaps. Concentration spells like conjure animals, and to a slightly lesser extent animate objects, allow for constant dpr throughout many rounds. Hell even if all they were doing were dropping big aoe damage rolls every round a party of fullcasters would probably steamroll hard enough to get through the adventuring day without much of an issue.
I played the gritty realism variant in the DMG and it really caused fighters and rogues to shine!
The problem with martials isn't that they are bad in combat. They're actually great at it. The problem is that casters get to be great at everything else, and also be great at combat too.
@@achillesa5894 to avoid fires in dungeons, kill the wizard first ;)
The point about adventuring days is one I rarely see adressed, which is a big issue. As you hinted at some classes, generally martials, are designed to have a relatively stable performance throughout the day. Fighters might have small peaks with Action Surge or Combat Maneuvers, or a Paladin might have the occasional Smite, but overall they'll perform roughly the same whether it's their 3rd encounter for the day or their 12th. Rogues even more so, having next to no features that have any risk of running out except for a couple of subclasses like Arcane Trickster. Meanwhile casters tend to be more balanced about having higher peaks but deeper valleys. Depending on how they manage their spell slots they might massively outperform the martials in one encounter, but be next to useless in the next.
Of course in a campaign with many (expected) encounters during per day, a smart caster will slightly lower their peaks in order to fill up their valleys and get a somewhat more consistent performance throughout the day. But in a campaign with very few encounters per adventuring day, the casters are free to cast their higher level spells with abandon, reaching for their highest peaks and then just take a long rest before they ever reach their valley. Meaning they'll consistently perform well above the martials for the entire adventuring day.
What I found difficult about flight is that shitters on the ground die.
It's also SUPER easy to fix. Just hide in rope trick while the flier makes DM add 120 ft range attacks only to realise that your effective range is 180
A flier can just kill a tarrasque. And the tarrasque can't do shit. That's how Powerful flight is. The freaking tarrasque can't beat it
You don't even have to spend the resources on rope trick. Is the enemy's move speed 30 feet or less? The party just... runs away from the encounter and lets the flying PC deal with it. Unless the party is actively trying to protect something that they can't carry with them or are up against a monster with a higher land speed than 55 (Else they have to dash to chase people who are dashing) there's nothing stopping the party from just leaving until the enemy is dead. Sure, a faster enemy will get attacks of opportunity, but that's hardly the full force of the monster bearing down on you. Hell, any intelligent monster will likely decide that certain death by flying PC just isn't worth it and will flee for cover in a cave or dense forest.
Naturally, this might be optimal but it's *really not fun*, and has a bad habit of turning the game into "flying PC and the people he hangs out with"
@@ninnusridhar you don't even need flying to do it, a riding horse can easily outpace a tarrasque. A commoner with a +1 bow and enough ammo can kill a tarrasque like this
@@ninnusridhar that’s why Tarrasque is a poorly designed monster…well, it’s hardly the only reason, but still a very compelling one.
@@agilemind6241 Oh 100%. Some of the worst sessions I've run were because I couldn't find a good way to just let combat end (Zombies. Go figure). I will say that in the case of most creatures vs a flying character, they'll need to try to find some dense treetops or a cave to hide in, as most flying characters will have more than enough speed to keep up with most intelligent enemies and chase them to the ends of the earth.
Barbarians: AC mean "Assumptions Kill."
Sorcerer: ...at least he's got the spirit!
As a Barbarian I don't know who this "Assumptions" is, but the killing part I agree with
I do think the 100% hit chance calculation has a place, and that's when you are comparing two options that have exactly the same hit chance. For example should you get the greataxe that does 1d12 damage or the greatsword that does 2d6 damage? It doesn't matter what you are fighting or what your attack bonus is because all of that is going to be canceled out anyways in your comparison, the only factor changing is the damage die so that's the only factor you need to consider. The only time this symmetry is broken in this example is if you have barbarian Brutal Criticals or Half-Orc Savage Attack, since these only use one damage die which benefits the greataxe over the greatsword. Only if you have those features do you need to start taking into account stuff like your chance to crit, otherwise it's just a waste of time even if it's technically more correct.
I tried to wash the smudges off the screen...Then realized ITS'S THE VIDEO.
Yeah, this is why whenever i talk about the mathematics of damage, I immediately use 0.5+(X 0.5) = Hit percentage | X - (Y 0.5)
X is a function of your hit bonus, while Y is a function of the enemy's ability to not be hit. every +1 is 5% effectively.
So then when you calc your average damage, take your DPR and then factor in your hit chance (Let's say it's 100 DPR) and use that to reduce your DPR. We don't factor in crits or crit misses since crits effectively double damage while crit misses eliminate damage and when I calculate DPR, I calculate per attack.
75% chance to hit in this example would mean that you get an even 75 damage since 25% of the time you will deal no damage.
The point of running the mathematics behind this hilariously enough isn't to minmax, but instead what I have been using for about 10 years now to run games where I can sufficiently challenge players based on their individualized stats due to CR being a terrible measurement. Sometimes I will intentionally raise the stakes and have a counter in m head knowing full well that if the enemies get their DPR for 10 rounds, they will kill at least one party member with split damage or 3-4 rounds with targeted damage. This means that the party will have to actually understand their magic items, spells and remember that there's alternative ways to do combat.
It's not often I kill characters. Maim, smash and incapacitate them though? I do a lot of that. The game runs smoother when characters are somewhat afraid of the possibility of dropping dead in an effort to save what they hold dear.
I played MTG at a high level. Exact math matters in the realm of probability, which DnD is definitely in. Thank you for pointing this out.
I enjoy my white room, lots of wall space for calculations.
This is why I view damage as a range, lowest to highest assuming to hit, and then dealing with attack chance separately.
So optimize your chance to hit.
Love your breakdown of why most DPR calculations are nonsense. This is a great video for dnd meta commentary. I still contend that flight, while definitely OP, is not nearly as bad as most people think it is in actual games. I'm running a game with an Aarakocra and an Aasimar (Protector) and all I've had to do is ensure most enemies have a ranged attack. If the party runs from a fight, then the enemy gets away with murdering that innocent person or running off with the macguffin! In our campaign, the players are incentivized to engage with fights. They're pursuing a story or moral obligation, not just surviving in the wilderness. Even if they were surviving, players aren't selfish enough to leave the rest of their non-flying party behind to die. If they are, that's a player problem, not a balance problem. Plus, we're playing in a city, so the usefulness of flight is negated in the sewers and some buildings (would be better in the wilderness for sure). It's amazing for scouting, but the Aarakocra takes all perception checks at disadvantage in dim light, which has been most of our sessions. Our Thief Rogue's Second Story Work feature is almost as useful when buildings are everywhere.
TL;DR: Yes, flying is op. But there's no need to ban it in the vast majority of non-survival campaigns, imo. Party dynamics and incentives to fight are more than enough to keep a flying character from leaving half your encounters, and that's if you ignore your job as a DM to build encounters around your players.
But kobold! Ty for the explanation. Very good video.
I like how Gator was still listening despite leaving.
"NO!"
You have no idea how convenient this video is.
Yesterday I had an argument with my table in which a spell worked on the party without saving throws.
When the caster's concentration was broken, all enemy units suddenly knew this no-save spell to trap the party in a 120-foot bubble.
I tried to talk to the dm about this and his response was "shut up or I'll kick you off the table"...
Everyone reacted with the argument that I don't like games with good stories because I'm a guy who thinks mechanics are more important...
I have never been more convinced in my life that this table was not for me.
Any dungeon master that counters discussion with shut up or I'm kicking you from the table is not a good dungeon master in the first place.
Any person however who wants to ruin Fun by proving they are right by sticking math in there is a killjoy.
(There is nothing wrong with using math to make a point and I am not saying you were doing the second point of course I'm just loading this up for all those people who are always having to be right by using math to prove their ridiculous what if theories.)
All the above written, any person who uses math to show how things *can* work is an optimizer.
The only games I think racial flight is balanced for are ones where everything happens in dungeons with
I kinda don't think racial flight is OP. I think it's just bad balancing to place every encounter in an open field with no ranged enemies when you know there's a flying character among the PCs. As for pits, a flying PC can fly over them but... can they carry the whole party over it? What happens when monsters ambush them when half the party is on one side of the pit while the other is on the other side?
Let me introduce you to a fair and balanced weapon called Net.
There's literally zero reason why low level enemies like kobolds, goblins, hobgoblins, bandits and other enemies wouldn't have nets. By the time your party can fly with magic in game is around the same time where you don't have to worry about enemies carrying nets since the game will have plenty built in options to counter flight.
But yeah, if the party member goes really high in the air and is using a ranged attack, any spell or weapon that can drop their movement speed to 0 works.
Keep in mind also, a hero that's becoming more well known will eventually have groups of baddies aware that one of the group flies.
Also, assume hostile NPCs are smart enough to build buildings and hide in them or have watch towers that make it really easy to get high up enough to bait the flying target into getting close enough to be netted or targeted with a snare type spell.
If a player takes a flying character at level 1, let them. Mostly because as soon as they start falling and taking damage, they're not going to be as confident seeing as how it's easy to immediately have the NPCs alpha strike the now proned, snared PC.
@@Zulk_RS A good DM will adjust the encounters to ensure that the flying PC feels at least a little threatened, however there is a (very common) place in D&D where the encounters aren't designed with flying PCs in mind...
Pre-written adventures. If a PC picks a naturally flying ancestry for Curse of Strahd, or Storm King's Thunder, or Princes of the Apocalypse then suddenly the DM now has to put in extra work to make sure that the game doesn't turn into "Flying PC and the people they hang out with"... kinda defeats the purpose of using a pre-written adventure.
In the example you gave: Instead of carrying the party over the pit, how about using rope? The flying PC can secure the rope to something on the other side (Like a piton) and let the party navigate it while the flyer plays lookout in case something is coming. Don't get me wrong, I'm 100% the kind of DM that makes sure that flying isn't overpowered *in my own game* but this requires a lot of consideration in encounter design to make it so and not a lot of DMs have the time to bird-proof their dungeons and encounters.
@@kevingriffith6011 My own DMing style is "You do a thing and the world will rubber-band" If the flying PC uses a rope, let him! He gets to feel special for being able to pull that stunt off. Maybe send in a goblin squad while the rest of the party is halfway done crossing the pit. That would be an interesting encounter.
As for pre-written stuff, I think the easiest solution is to just give enemies more than one weapon. Goblin: In the stat box they have both short bows and swords so they can fight the flying PC. There are also probably low ceiling dungeons in many of the Prewritten stuff. There are also probably enemy spell casters that can cast anti-flight things. There are also probably traps. Pressure plate or trip wire traps can still be effective because I highly doubt a flying PC will be flying 24/7.
@@Zulk_RS That does account for intelligent creatures like orcs and goblins, but not wolves, or zombies, or Bulettes or a huge number of other D&D monsters that tend to be the centerpieces of these encounters. Don't get me wrong, flight isn't *hard* to consider for encounters, but it adds yet another layer on top of encounter prep which can in itself be a significant investment of prep time... and having to assess and modify the encounters in a module kind of defeats the intended "pick up and play" aspect that they have. (Not that I recommend running a module without reading it and modifying it. You're just asking for trouble there)
But Kobold 100% hit does exist in 5e magic missile is a spell and it always hits.
but it doesnt do optimal damage. all the time.
@@nunyobusiness835 but it still always hits Kobold said you can't base anything on always hitting
Kobold, you’re beautiful. Your work is quality and you improve the community with your words alone. Thanks dude
Re; 100% chance to hit DPR calculation, like you said, it's easier, and I think it works sufficiently well when you're comparing two options. If option A has higher DPR than option B with 100% chance to hit, often the DPR ratio will remain the same if the chance to hit is only 65%. It's only when you start figuring in things that manipulate the chance to hit that it matters.
Re; flying being overpowered, it's definitely strong, but I'm okay with it. I think it's fine for singular PCs to hard counter a limited selection of enemies. There are still plenty of enemies that are a threat to them, and that protection doesn't extend to their party members (unless _everyone_ is a flying race). It would be like saying you, as the DM, shouldn't ever throw flying enemies at the party, because there are some PC builds that can't deal with flying enemies. Now, if the party is ill-equipped to fight flying enemies, then you should probably go a little easy on them at first, but the onus is on them to figure out something to deal with flying enemies. (If needed, you could provide them with a magic item, but at least make it not a straightforward solution, so they still have to work to make it solve whatever problem they're dealing with, flying enemies in this case.)
But it's okay for the players to have an easy win sometimes. If every time a player gets/uses a cool ability, your reaction is to counter it to make it useless, I don't think that's good DMing. Whether or not any or all of the players took a flying race, you should be throwing a mix of monsters at them, some of which will be hard countered by flying, and some of which won't be. If _all_ you're throwing at them are enemies hard countered by flight, that's a DM issue. If the current campaign makes it difficult to introduce new monsters that can handle flying PCs, then consider raising the stakes, e.g. introducing alternate objectives, such as protecting a specific NPC or location. Flight is really only OP in the white room, as there are many ways a DM can diminish its value or nullify it completely. But again, you shouldn't do that all the time, just some of the time. Let the players feel like a badass sometimes.
I feel like there's a very fine balance between tailoring the campaign to suit the players but also remaining unbiased and not making changes, either to make an easy encounter harder or to make a hard encounter easier. If you've already created a scenario that the players can steamroll if they have a particular ability, and they do indeed have said ability, let them steamroll that scenario. "Easy" doesn't mean "boring", because often the players are cognizant of the hypothetical challenge a scenario poses. Slaying an ancient dragon without rolling a single attack might feel anti-climactic, but the players are still aware of the difficulty that an ancient dragon poses, and feel clever or badass for bringing it down in such a manner.
It's also worth pointing out that as the party becomes more renowned, people will hear of their exploits. This includes their enemies. Sure, random wolves or gobbos or whathaveyou will still fall prey to whatever broken tactics the party is using, but more intelligent and knowledgeable enemies will adapt to those tactics and actively counter them. And again, this shouldn't be all the time, which is why you still occasionally throw randos at them who have no idea about their tactics. But it does mean that the BBEG and his underlings are prepared, and those will be the more important battles.
If only for the purpouse of mental excercise, Dhampir probably get bypass a solid 1+% of creatures with his perma spider climb
but then again they can just get wings who cares about dhampirs
Dhampirs are cool and there are people who care about them. Permanent spider climb is basically fight and you're more likely to get away with it than flight at a table
some tactical consideration about fly : You cannot count on the entire party being able to fly unless you work it with them beforehand. Meaning that if you're flying there will probably be other pcs around and enemies will target them. This can be great if you're a squishy wizard, but is actually a drawback if you're a tank trying to prevent said monsters from attacking other party members. Though if the whole party is flying you can expect the DM to put a higher amount of flying or ranged enemies too.
That doesn't mean that you are wrong about flying though but it's important to keep things in perspective. Plus the higher level you go the higher chance of meeting flying enemies you get, leaning that to remain efficient melee characters should invest in getting flight too. Ultimatly it all balances out.
You also probably not going to fly if you intend to use mounts. Mounts allows hit and run tactics which is almost as good as flight at keeping away from enemies. And unlike flight, there are a lot more ways to give the party mounts as needed than flight. You just need someone who can ritually cast phantom steed. or to spend some gold on horses. And yeah they are impractical in dungeons, or tight quarters, but if you have tight quarters then you can just have the tank stand in the front. And prevent enemies from reaching you that way. I think you called it doorway dodging.
heck even if they are two handers or archers, I think most martial should carry a shield in case they need to do some doorway dodging. Shields are cheap and it's +2 AC.
Funnily enough you can tank as an archer. Well it depends on the archer, but crossbow expert remove the drawback of firing into melee and rangers and fighters are tough enough to handle the frontline. So they can act as backup tanks. That means that in practice if you have one of such characters in your party you don't need a tank. You can take every opportunity to fight at range using positioning and battlefield control, and whenever you actually need someone for doorway dodging or to cover the frontline you can send the crossbow guy
i love your video. I especially love how it's mostly about what I like to call "bare minimum flexing". ways to make powerful character and powerful moves by investing little resource, but leverage them cleverly using teamwork and tactics and preparation.
Nice vid! How we figure out what's good is a fun conversation and it's always nice to see people trying to standardize approaches.
Re: What racial feature can counter 1% of all creatures.
Changeling's Shapechange? Maybe?
Obviously not the point of your question, but I really feel like that feature is super overpowered, as it feels unreasonable for most creatures to be aware and constantly paranoid for their existance.
I mean they do count towards being immune to things like Polymorph, but Moonbeam is also their kryptonite.
I...can't really agree with flying argument. Yes, you can counter most of the encounters with flying, that's totally true. But it's almost impossible to find all-flying party. That means, the enemy that can't attack you, attacks whoever left on the ground. So, his attack still hits, and he still deals damage. It's worse than high AC or damage resistance, because you can negate that damage, even against ranged attacks.
Also, I would really love to see your thought on the Net. Yes, you forgo your action, but you give your whole team advantage, disadvantage to your target, 0 speed, and disadvantage to dex saves. And unless it's dealing slashing damage, it has to use whole action to escape!
And you don't waste your whole action, necessarily. Dragonborn can use a breath weapon if he has multiattack, ascendant dragon monk can too, beast master can command his beast to attack, etc. There are possibility for interesting, and actually working build.
Honestly that's my same thought on fly. Ya your dude is up in the air but now you're putting a lot more pressure on the squishes. Dropping to 0 sucks A LOT more if you're flying since hitting the ground causes an auto failed death save.
Also quite frankly, more often than not players are inside of enclosed spaces where flying won't even work.... Like you know... Dungeons?
I think the problem is he used a barbarian as the example, the classic ‘I want to be taking all the hits’ class. If it’s say a ranged fighter, or like… just anything that doesn’t want to get hit the argument holds up imo
Check the Nets range.
@@GrimHeaperThe that's one of two build-around (first one being one attack only). You can ignore net range penalty with sharpshooter/Crossbow Expert, or by being unseen by your target(short range disadvantage happens when the creature sees you). Or you can get advantage, to make a straight role
@@Raghetiel (You also need martial weapon prof) That's the thing though. I'd rather prone them then net them. Then lock the target in an inescapable loop of being prone whilst having the advantages of them being prone. It's like making something have zero movement and proning.
Eldritch knight can reach AC of 24.
- Full plate = 18 (Expensive)
- Shield = 2
- Defence fighting style = 1 (Other fighting styles probably more viable, but eh for fun)
- Shield of faith from magic initiate = 2 (Concentration though)
- Shield spell = 5 (1 until start of your next turn)
Total 28 AC.
Granted the last 7 points of AC are temporary and its probably not very well optimized character, but its reachable.
Or just Defence fighting style, full plate and shield +3. Actually, 24 AC isn't that hard, then I expected
Honestly, reaching 24 AC as a caster is mostly temporary, since it's using Shield and maybe Mage Armor (if they aren't dipping into Artificer, Cleric or something else)
You just confirmed his point, caster's can get that high.
Everyone forgets about cover when they talk about AC. Give yourself a +2 or a +4 depending on how much you take.
Plate. Shield. Defensive. Cover. 18+2+1+2 or 4. Add warforged and you're at 24.
Heck you could do it with medium armor.
14 + 2 (dex), warforged +1, medium armor master +1, defensive fighting style +1, dual wielder +1. Cover gets you 22 or 24.
And that COULD be a ranged character since you could be using Throwing Daggers, so taking cover behind things shouldn't be too hard. Much more reliable than Shield spell which you get max 4 of per day.
Also, if you take Battle Master you'd get 4 uses of superiority die to increase your AC while moving or if you get to level 7 a hunter with Multi-Attack Defense, or a Kensei Monk getting +2 when they use an unarmed attack.
Generally, you can get a higher AC more consistently with a melee character, but yes, you can get wildly higher ACs if you dip into casting classes, and that's his point.
@@chiepah2 Didnt he say full casters?
"flying in dungeon can be a little tricky" Thx Pack Tactics for the vid love it. Keep up the good work.
If you have a Flying Barbarian, you're going to be fighting enemies with ranged attacks.
Hey Gator, have you ever seen a creature with a 100 percent chance to hit? No? Then let me introduce you to my friend, the Marut.
Does this white room have black curtains?
The White Room, AKA: I hope you don't like using your eyes
both as a DM and a player i care more on having fun than having the optimal math, flying is only op if you follow prewritten campaigns in a homebrew campaign I can just add crossbows to my bandits or make the spiders acid spit, or flying enemies, or cave combat a lot of option are in the books to counter flying. some sub-optimal spell or classes are just fun. doing more damage could be fun but maybe you ave way more fun casting hex and pot shooting a enemy, or summoning a beast I described the form of. i don't really mind the new UA Kobold I am happy that they fix the negative modifiers and no longer need to cower or beg.
6:05
What about the clockwork soul level 14 feature ?
I am homebrewing some stuff right now for my campaign, and wanted to check if removing concentration in Favored Foe for our ranger will break the game in half or something... These calculations helps me a lot! You couldn't pick a better moment to upload this, Thanks man!!
Huh. This video has caused me to reevaluate my tendency to call people out for this type of thinking. Thanks, Kobold!
This is a very common mistake, annoyingly common. The flying barbarian could be more optimal, but almost always wont be. HP are not a precious commodity to be protected, they are an expendable resource. if you don't spend your HP that is money left on the table.
Never expend resources to avoid damage that is less than what you can restore on a short rest. A barbarian gets half their level x (1d12+con) for free every day. At 6th level that is 33hp on average. If they aren't using it they are wasting it. Throw in whatever you had to spend to make them fly and it is almost always better to spend that resource on something else. Remember the barbarian flying does not stop the enemy doing damage. It just means that damage will happen to a different target, one that probably doesn't have resistance and a massive pool of hit dice.
The words next to kobold: This is not a player channel
Me: I have betrayed myself
The reason that first comes to mind for why the people may ignore hit rate for most to hit attacks is that the hit rate in most cases is the same from attack to attack. unless it scales separately from your character like with conjure animals, it applies a bonus/penalty like bless or bane, or it ignores ac like magic missile, the percent reduction remains the same and as a result isn't very important when comparing to one another.
with all that being said i agree with the overall point of the video, if a specific situation doesn't already exist then you assume average conditions and work from there.
Running with 100% to hit makes sense sometimes! If you're comparing builds that have the same to hit, for example. A fighter with a longsword and a fighter with a rapier for example.
But yeah overall agreed. The really telling thing is that as soon as you start making the room less "white" aka adding things like terrain and doorways and trees and whatnot, the people who scream 'whiteroom' get angrier (especially as it usually reinforces points like the one about flight speed)
The only thing I will say with respect to your last point is that even within the "meeting point" that is the books, there's still a lot of variance in terms of experience. Some DMs think running 12 encounter days is normal, others think 2-3 is "more than enough." This does drastically change the balance of a lot of features.
Thank you so much for going over SS and GWM. People act like it's the end all be all of damage.
At the end if the day, even the best optimization can't save you from just being cursed like Wil Wheaton.
But, But.. Kobold! If you go this UA called Mystic and do this thing with this [Insert some ability]. You don't need to hit! and.. and... your DPR calc won't account that! so... the other DPR is totally correct!
As a DM, when I'm making encounters I usually go with the basic calculation (100% hit) for understanding the basics of how much damage my players will put out a round and how much damage the monsters will put out a round. Since this number is always high, it means that any encounter I create with these basics in mind will run a little longer than expected when it comes to PCs winning, and a lower chance of a TPK should things go sideways. Easy math for easy encounter creation.
With that in mind, I believe the full math is best when trying to make systemic changes, add new feats, classes, abilities and the like. For anything system related, use the better math. For quick checks to make sure an encounter will go well? Fast math works fine.
Generally, if you are comparing a basic build with GWM to another, or if you are comparing two without, the exact to hit comes out in the wash. Problems arise when you are comparing between them, or if you expect damage to accurate. Same goes for ranged attacks, since the Archery fighting style throws everything off.
One of the factors in 5e that I feel a lot of people dismiss is the lack of in game economy.
This issue normally comes up when talking about resistances to non magical weapons because the general response to mid tier up is that "the party will probably have magical weapons at that point," but there is no mechanical thing backing that claim up. In game if you have a magic item for the most part its meant to count as a bonus and not something you are always going to get. This has also lead to an issue with in game rewards not really having a meaning outside of magic gear, encounters that make assumptions that are wrong, or character expectations that do not happen. I appreciate that this channel does not count magic weapons as a part of dpr and expected progression, but I see a lot of builds that depend on at a minimum of a +1 weapon past a certain level. When talking about the way the games mechanics work together the assumption must be that no magic items are given or the discussion is about a specific magic item. This just leads to non magic resistance being way stronger then it should in balancing discussions until a way of getting a consistent way of gaining items is available.
Dice are chaos you can't just believe they roll at the mathematical odds
And here I thought white room was going to be some sort of holodeck/danger_room.
Love this video and all your others finally had to say it. As a person who doesn't get or like math a lot, it's a big deal for me when someone can explain it in an entertaining and digestible way! So thanks!
In german there's a nice word for those kinds of words/phrases like white room. They're called "Totschlagargument" (lit. murder argument) and basically nullify anything else someone might tell you.
In the white room? Sure, but only if it has black curtains and is at the station.
Then a 1 hitting is a table thing we do, cuz we've played against creatures where rolling a 1 with modifiers makes it where we hit cuz the AC of a creature is that low.
adjusting for AC is more accurate but it doesn't matter if all you want to know is one weapon combo more effective than another because they all are equally effected by the AC. It would only matter if you are comparing to hit attack to something like saving throw or if there is a to hit modifier involved.
Hey Kobolt, I have a question?
Where can I find the statistic for the percentage avarage of each dices, since there are spells that can modify what you roll on a d20 like bless and bane. It would be a totally useful to have those type of percentages. But by far my most concern percentage is the avarage number rolled for each dice.
This a good skill to know as a DM for planing encounter that are fair and possible to overcome without fustrating the players.
As player this is okay so that way they can feel that they are making the right desicion for a effective character, because that's something that all players want. On the other hand this can turn to be something super meta where the player is just obsessed with making the most powerful build. But I think we both agree on the power gamer problem.
Anyways great video super Insight full.
I've been trying to explain the average DPR thing to a couple of the players at my table and they still just don't care lol
That said, I'm never sure what the best AC to assume when calculating actual average DPR. Anybody have a suggest for this?
You start with 13 AC at level 1, 14 AC at level 4, 15 AC at level 5, 16 AC at level 6, 17 AC at level 9, 18 AC at level 13, 19 AC at level 17.
As for your players not caring, I mean. Thats fine. I wouldn't press it unless they talk damage with me.
I once found a table per CR average Ac over all books. But that gave weird curve.
two options for deciding what AC to go up against
15 flat is a common one that people use, and it lets you keep track of how your character gets more powerful over time.
Or, average of proficiency bonus to CR. Basically, the average AC of all creatures whose CR is equal to your proficiency bonus at any given level. It's more work, but more likely to give a number that's applicable to your table. That being said, AC varies wildly at all levels of play, so 15 flat is probably your best bet.
7:40 A Druid Conjured Animals to steal their lunch money.
Yuanti with magic res and poison immunity is fairly busted, but with an average campaign flight is busted. That being said, it's not in my campaign because my dm doesn't like how weak most creatures are at range and almost all of his creatures have some sort of counter to it. But like you said, everything I just said is in various white rooms.
4:35 That reminds me, how do you determine what range of enemy AC is most relevant to a given level? Do you just go with what gives a 60% or 65% chance to hit given the "baseline" attack roll modifier for that level's proficiency bonus and expected ability score modifier? Refer to one of those resources which averages out the AC of WORC published creatures in a given tier?
Something completely different?
Do you think you'll ever cover what you can do with manifest mind? Like a 300 foot misty step ?
There's a place for 100% hit chance calculation.
Simplification.
So long as you know it's inaccurate, and you you judge everything by the same metric. (Of course, great weapon can mess this up, but again, Simplification.)
It also helps to determine worst/best case scenarios for a particular instance, so you know how far things can swing.
Besides, you can always input into a accuracy calc to really figure it out.
Flying is pretty broken when playing with other optimized groups, but its almost worse when you arnt.
Now everyone BUT the flyer is getting hit and taking the bad stuff. Its like the teacher caught 3/4 of the group and gave them detention, but since johnny flappers was on the ceiling she missed him. Hes getting dirty looks while the rest of the group get led away to clean the toilets or whatever detention is nowdays. Either everyone is in the flappy family or no one is.
The tone of this video is of a kobold being told by dumb humans that his traps suck once too often.
I'd say it's fairly easy to counter a flying race with something entirely in the book. A net. That's all, net or a web ability like a giant spider's. It's reasonable to say a massive portion of the monster manual has a net or will be paired with creatures capable of having a net. Sure, it requires a little bit of fiat but in a world where some people can fly at will I imagine people are prepared to stop flying creatures.
It's amusing how basically everything is a "muh whiteroom" assumption unless it has enough upvotes on Reddit. More funnies:
- Remember the clickbait/dumb builds that assume 100% chance to hit with a GWM martial? At level 5, they have +1 to hit(16 Str, 3+3-5). "But Conjure Animals has a low attack bonus so will never hit" is especially amusing when you consider that a wolf has +4, and a cow or horse has +6.
- If someone throws some stupid DPR calc assuming 100% hit chance, you are legally allowed to respond with damage calcs for a commoner assuming 1 000 000% hit chance. Bonus updoots for miscalculating too.
Another annoying assumption is having an arbitrary amount of set-up time. I cast Spirit Shroud round 1, Hexblade's Curse round 2, Vow of Enmity(vengeance paladin, eww) round 3, round 4 I actually attack, assume everything hits and all crits because obviously the other casters in the party are my slaves who only cast Hold Person on my command(100% chance for target to fail its save, Legendary Resistance only exists when I'm gaslighting myself into disbelieving the martial-caster disparity) or HASTE(I snort spite each time I hear of the OPness of this spell). The resulting numbers are taken out of context and called my DPR.
Or how about the whole Resource Expenditure Fallacy? Comes in two variants.
Variant one, I say your DPR is actually very bad because whatever thing you do requires resources and therefore is obviously worse than my rogue, who is totally not trash because I can go on all day(rituals, cantrips, fighter being better than rogue anyway, expected resource allocation over a finite-length adventuring day and hit points are all myths made by some mad cultists to oppose the Holy Hivemind).
Variant two, my fighter's DPR is enormous because I have action surge, so I do 1d6+5+10 five times, so like 90 DPR. Yes, I action surge every round at level 5 and rolled 21s for all my stats. Anyone who disagrees is obviously an evil enemy of fun, also something is not RAI but I don't know what.
I'm stupid. I'm a dense person who became an art major because she didn't wanna do math so I ask in all genuineness. Why is rogue considered trash? While my own pov is a limited one, I've never felt lacking for feeling useful in any given combat scenario when I've played rogue. I've reread your statement multiple times to try and make sense of it but the sarcasm is making it really difficult to parse for me. So you're either saying rogue is trash or you're not and I'd just like some clarification.
Technically 5lvl wizard can deal 2400 dmg to your enemies. Max density of enemies in 20ft sphere (50 enemies) and all of them dont make save and we applied max dmg. What is dumb and extreamly incorect :)
@@BubblingBrooke The problem with the rogue class is that it's weak even for a martial. Its defensive capabilities are lacking, needing Moderately armored to catch up with the others. However, ad a martial, it needs two feats to keep up damage-wise already, so right away its defenses are hindered for a very long time.
Additionally, and perhaps even more importantly, the class struggles offensively, and the average DPR of a rogue(over a day of 8 encounters, 32 rounds total) is the second lowest damage output of any class in 5e, with only a paladin that uses all its slots on smites falling lower. It barely surpasses the warlock baseline, and before accounting for subclass an optimized level 20 rogue gets to 44-45 DPR. A fighter at the same level dishes out damage in the high fifties before adding in a subclass, and benefits more from its good subclasses than rogues do.
So it's weak on both the offensive front and the defensive front, and all it gets for its troubles is very late Wis prof, expertise and reliable talent - the last two are only situationally useful, the third comes very late and its usefulness is offset by the fact you'll need Resilient Con anyway to have prof in both important saving throws.
To summarize, rogues are really bad all around, and are pretty much the jack of no trades, master of none either. The polar opposite of a wizard, one might say.
@@haenhaen4282 I'd like to know where the numbers are coming from. What stat line are we assuming here? 16 dex point by? Also what feats? Sharpshooter and crossbow expert? I'm coming at this in good faith because I legit want to understand. I've watched PT for a bit now and I'm confused why warlock is the baseline for comparison, is it just EB? Rogues also aren't frequently on the front lines and stay out of trouble anyway so how is the defensive stuff an issue overall? There's a lot of information being used that im just not privy to. Like what are fighters using to get these numbers? (i understand a lot of it comes from the number of their attacks) I'm also surprised that a monk somehow surpasses both a paladin and rogue on that baseline considering their damage isn't great until you get to second tier play and the die bumps to a d6 (and im a monk lover). As someone who has only known rogue and paly to be the big burst damage, its really surprising to me that the dpr is low and it doesn't make sense to me. Like I said. I'm not a math gal.
*takes a deep breath several times and chooses words carefully.*
The problem I have with people who use numbers to justify their points about x is always this this is why this class is bad using dpr is they are confusing the point of sustained versus burst.
For example the thing with Rogues is that you are not always going to be Frontline fighting you are going to be looking for a significant situation for the optimization of using one power or as we sometimes like to call it sneak attack. Well we would always love to have sneak attack it's not always going to happen.
A fighter is going to be most of the time swinging their sword in melee at the front of the action. Others are not necessarily going to be doing this.
(Of which the optimizers would then complain because Marshals are not going to be doing the same DPR as Wizards allegedly when you look at the overall power that they could do. Of which people are once again not taking a look at the limitation of spells running out which is the same argument of sustained versus burst, but I am going off point to the example here, moving on.)
The same can be said with several of the other powers, using their powers at a specific moment not constantly.
Which is why you have multiple things you can do including things that give you an automatic disengage or dash should you use your bonus action to do so. Think of it like a paladin using Smite even if you have your ability renewing.
The mark of an individual who uses mathematics to show how something works is a good optimizer.
The mark of an individual who has several options ready to go based on the contingencies that are happening in the game based on how they're playing with the character they selected, is the mark of a good strategy player overall.
Because if we are going to start going into white room theorizing every time we are talking about a character class, then we're going to have to start coming up with Concepts that will show how that individual using their optimization will be dead because they didn't account for contingencies in the first place Downing them while they're hiding behind their DPR.
All of this is missing the point of Dungeons & Dragons is to have fun and not talk about how who is the superior and who is inferior.
(Although I will agree with UA-cam TreantMonk that monks were built badly in 5th edition if you optimize, but that's a whole other discussion.)
Guys, does your white rooms have cushioned walls as well? Im asking for a friend
The worse is when someone brings a barbarian to the table and complains about being killed by a friendly fireball.
Let the enemies come to you dude. Never charge alone like a maniac.
Or don’t fireball your barbarian ffs
I prefer doing my math in the void where I assume everything goes wrong cause I have a dice curse
I will say that the 100% hit chance calculations can be a useful heuristic when comparing things where hit probability is going to be similar. E.g. comparing a gwm build to an ss build. Or trying to decide if you're better off using your dagger or your maul to fight the creature with bludgeoning resistance.
1 level of Peace Cleric or Oath of Devotion 3rd level can cancel out -5 of sharpshooter.
It would be awesome if the barbarian flew up and started shooting arrows at wolves only to see them charge the wizard and maul him to death. If the entire party has flight, the DM is just going to change the campaign so you're fighting the things that have ranged attacks. They aren't going to run a campaign where the party is just flying over grounded enemies slaughtering them with no recourse.
Full party flight is fun, all the way up until the DM starts knocking folks prone in the air over an acid pit.
Yup, the fighter flys up, can't get hit, wolves flank the wizard, pack tactics him to death, and drag the corpse off. The BBEG knows the party has the only flying ranged fighter in the land? Hires a brace of harpies with nets. Or, just a dozen hobgoblins with short bows... Why short bows not long bows? The fighter has a long bow. Ah, the cowardly fighter will fly out of short bows range, and shoot with his longbow. Yes, he'll pick off the hobgoblins from 300 feet up!
Yup, and so he'll be too far away to come to the aid of a downed party member. Then, when the harpies net him, and his move becomes zero, he'll drop like a stone and die.
Flight only counters things when the flyer has room to fly high.
Underground and indoors it's much less useful.
Is it OP? It depends.
Should the DM completely negate it? No.
Is it OP compared to dark vision?
Is it OP compared to a rock gnomes ability to make a small clockwork mouse or music box?
It's very very good. It's clearly better than clockwork mouse. It may be less good than dark vision.
@@chrisflanagan7564 I was just thinking about dispel magic or (entering a) antimagic Zone when the fighter is really high up and introduce them to something I like to call falling damage. Also they're no longer allowed to fly.
@@joshuacr trouble is, dispel magic isn't going to make any difference to an Aarakocara PC's flying.
100% to hit does't exist?
*prepares magic missile with malicious intent.
Flavoring my banishment spells to send people to the white room now
I am guilty of assuming auto-hits/crits in my builds, but I try to make the [fact that is an] assumption clear when presenting them, as well as other assumptions of the build.
I will also calculate max crit damage, but more often than not I will also calculate the min crit damage, the max non-crit damage, and the min non-crit damage (and differences with point-buy, if applicable).
Also, not a lot of my builds actually factor in damage. A vast majority are concept-builds (Cantrip Master, fastest speed, Ritual Caster [all ritual spells with least time-and-money cost], etc.) or character builds, only two having a damage calculation (the highest single-attack damage, being an assassin rogue bugbear with two levels paladin and one barbarian [if melee] or just straight assassin rogue [if ranged], both against a surprised enemy; and the biggest jump build, calculating the bonus to the jump from dhampir's bite [added to athletics check bonus from beast barbarian]).
As a proud spreadsheet warrior I like to see good math. I hope this video reaches lots of people!
Using the term white room to me was meant for when someone only looks at the best possible scenerio for the use of some feature or spell and was to show that even though something may look good on paper it might not always be the best choice. Pack tactics made an example of this when people look at maximum damage. White rooms are meant to point out unrealistic scenerios or rare scenerios and i think Pack Tactics does a very good job of not doing this so anyone saying its white room stuff i very much disagree. White Rooms arent meant to stifle optimization, if anything its in favor of it because white room is wishful thinking, wanting/needing a specific scenerio to work and I dont think Pack Tactics does this at all. I really think optimization is important but not to necessarily do the most damage or be as powerful as possible but to make informed desicions that allow character choices to be unique and interesting without losing effectiveness.
i agree goblins are real
I always say this Regardless of which side of the DM screen I’m on. We start with the rules then go from there
I want to know where Gator went. I think he's going to do some shenanigans without Kobold knowing.
3:00 I do not want to be overly pedantic, especially since it is dealing with a Lv 20 PC, but a max level barbarian can get 24 AC from Unarmored Defense (with max DEX and CON), their capstone feature raising their CON to 24, and by using a shield which is allowed by their version of Unarmored Defense.
Great break down on what you are trying to illustrate, for those who dont understand. I enjoy what you share, some is eye opening for sure. I may use the advice or maybe not. I like to build different and interesting builds which usually goes against your data. I will use it to adjust the mechanics or numbers with the DM so that the concept PC is feasable. I neither want a PC that always succeeds or fails because both are not fun. Failure drives the story as much if not more than always succeeding.
I've never heard the term "white room" used in such a way... kinda glad I don't deal with people who talk/argue that way :-o
I like DPR as a comparative baseline, but the only times I've calculated it myself, is when prepping a session, and mocking up 2 NPCs fighting (which I like, because I know the exact ACs of both sides)... in one instance of doing this, I realized that the "professional monster hunter" in Curse of Strahd couldn't out-damage the health regen on a standard Vampire Spawn :-o