Kaelik wrote:Hogarth, the point is that the existence of a feat that gives a stun that 90% of all enemies will pass all the time or be immune to, and will only trigger on 10% of all attacks, maybe less, does not:
1) Justify expanding your crit range by 1 at the cost of 1 feat and -2 to -10 damage on every arrow.
2) Justify taking a series of crappy feats that probably started at level 12, just so you could at level 18 be able to stun people on 10% of all your attacks.
Well, it's a crossbow, so you would be increasing the critical range to 17-20 (i.e. 20% of the time). If three attacks hit, that's a 50% chance of stunning at least once.
Like you said, if you have access to better feats, you might as well take them. But stunning 50% of the time with no save doesn't seem that bad to me. YMMV, of course.
hogarth wrote:Well, it's a crossbow, so you would be increasing the critical range to 17-20 (i.e. 20% of the time). If three attacks hit, that's a 50% chance of stunning at least once.
This math makes no sense to me.
If you have a threat range of 4 numbers, you critical on 20% of your hits. If you hit three times, your chance of criticalling (and thus stunning) at least once is 48.8%. But of course with your attacks having some sort of miss chance to begin with, your chance of stunning at leas once is actually substantially lower than that.
And that still doesn't explain why you're a 17th level character who is fighting with a repeating crossbow.
FrankTrollman wrote:
If you have a threat range of 4 numbers, you critical on 20% of your hits. If you hit three times, your chance of criticalling (and thus stunning) at least once is 48.8%. But of course with your attacks having some sort of miss chance to begin with, your chance of stunning at leas once is actually substantially lower than that.
I forgot the magical mystery miss chance that you just made up.
FrankTrollman wrote:And that still doesn't explain why you're a 17th level character who is fighting with a repeating crossbow.
It wouldn't have been my choice. I was just hypothesizing that the character was trying to get some benefit from having a high critical range.
If I've followed correctly, it isn't a magical mystery miss chance, it's a chance that your attacks will miss. If you've got a 40% chance of missing the target entirely in a straight attack-roll-versus-armour-class comparison, then 40% of the rolls you make to confirm a crit will result in no crit.
hogarth wrote:
I'm not sure what you mean be "resisting it better than with a save"; it's just a freebie on top of a normal critical, so it can't really be compared to casting a save-or-suck spell.
Except that it CAN, because by the time you can do that you can in fact throw such a spell every single round. Often more than once. If it does allow a save it's automatically made of Fail, even if it's on every single hit because it will be Wis based and thus every single problem with Stunning Fist applies to it along with a new one. It's 10 levels late. Minimum.
Huh? I still don't get it; if you were using a weapon, why wouldn't you want the chance to auto-stun your opponent for a round on a critical (for instance)?
Here's one example feat (from this site):
"Stunning Critical (Combat, Critical)
Your critical hits cause opponents to become stunned.
Prerequisites
Critical Focus, base attack bonus +17.
Benefit
Whenever you score a critical hit, your opponent becomes stunned for 1d4+1 rounds. A successful Fortitude save reduces the duration to 1 round. The DC of this Fortitude save is equal to 10 + your base attack bonus. The effects of this feat do not stack. Additional hits instead add to the duration.
Special
You can only apply the effects of one critical feat to a given critical hit unless you possess Critical Mastery."
So at a bare minimum, your opponent is stunned for one round on a critical, with a chance of being stunned for 1d4 more rounds.
Trivial DC, as I expected. And since this is minimum level 17... how many aren't immune again?
In Pathfinder, fewer things are immune to criticals.
Ah yes, the handwaving bullshit not backed by anything. Informed Ability, indeed. How about actual facts next time?
What kind of retard starts complaining before he even knowing what he's complaining about?
Obvious Fail is Obvious. It's called making the Paizil dumbfucks own themselves by showing just how terrible the feat is.
Amra wrote:If I've followed correctly, it isn't a magical mystery miss chance, it's a chance that your attacks will miss. If you've got a 40% chance of missing the target entirely in a straight attack-roll-versus-armour-class comparison, then 40% of the rolls you make to confirm a crit will result in no crit.
Ah, I see. I was just guessing that on average 3 out of 5 shots would hit out of a Rapid Shot full attack; admittedly, I just pulled that number out of my ass.
Not to mention you aren't hitting every time. So you're looking at... what? Maybe a 12% chance you even get to try and then since the DC is trivial it has a 95% chance of getting passed? And that assumes they aren't immune to crits or immune to stun... which is completely fucking unreasonable at 17+.
So... of 14 opponents, 3 of them are immune, 1 of them saves on a 2 or better, 1 of them saves on a 6 or better, 6 of them save on 8 or better, 1 saves on 12 or better and 2 save only on a 19 or 20. If you're getting a bullshit-crazy number of attacks per round then I can see this being something you might just want to do if you didn't have anything better to do with your time. Or is it?
In the unlikely event that he ever reaches a high enough level to qualify, my current thrown-weapon character will be getting... let me see... 18 attacks per round, assuming no magic whatsoever and no crazy crap like halfling skiprocks. Based on those enemies (and still with no magic of any sort) he'd be hitting the non-immune monsters with 70% of those attacks. As such, on a 19-20 threat range, he can expect to be forcing a saving throw against the stun effect due to a successful critical about five times in every four rounds... by which time, anything actually waiting to fail said saving throw is probably dead.
Hmph. Yeah, that feat doesn't look like such a good deal to me.
Pretty much everything about this thread is Wrong and Fail. From the guy claiming spellcasters are weaker to the guy arguing for pro Sundertards so he can break his own stuff to all the Monk Fail. Between dumbfucks like that being their primary source of information, and intelligence being a bannable offense on their forums is it any wonder anything and everything they design comes out so horrifically wrong?
Hell, one of my players is DMing Shackled City for a different group and he just ran into yet another example of this because the fucking encounter is written as if you have to make a Will save to enter an Unhallow effect. The reason being because it invokes a Magic Circle against Good effect. Which does force a Will save to enter... for summoned creatures only. Not his fault at all, the whole point of published modules is so you can just take their word for it instead of having to do your own design work.
But it does illustrate that even those, that they originally got started with are basically worthless because it is as much or more work to fix the existing framework than to make your own. And as an added bonus, you don't have to worry about the railroading issue that comes with all published modules.
Roy wrote:Why would you assume they aren't buffed? They have gear, are smart, and some of them have spells.
Very simple: because that way, madness lies. I assumed the character wasn't buffed either, so why not assume the monsters appear as presented? It is, after all, far more likely that a character will encounter a monster as written than that a monster will encounter a character who hasn't been buffed and isn't using any magical gear at all, at 17th level. Trying to take into account all of the spells the monsters and characters could possibly be using as counters would make my brain explode and I'm not going to do it.
More to the point, going for a comparison between "unbuffed character" and "unbuffed monster" gives a fair and equitable deal for the feat and it still isn't worth taking.
The point stands, even if you don't buff the monsters, that most of them will just be straight-up dead to the hit point damage you're doing with your attacks long before they fail a saving throw against the stun effect you get from a critical. I could seriously see a session playing out like this:
Player: My 16th attack hits.. it's a threat... YES! It's a crit! That's... *muttermutter* ...32 points of damage and the dragon has to make a Fortitude save! In your face!
DM: It doesn't have to make a Fortitude save, it's dead.
Amra wrote:As such, on a 19-20 threat range, he can expect to be forcing a saving throw against the stun effect due to a successful critical about five times in every four rounds... by which time, anything actually waiting to fail said saving throw is probably dead.
Why would you need to wait for a failed saving throw? All of those feats work even on a successful saving throw (e.g. failed saving throw = stunned for 1d4+1 rounds, successful saving throw = stunned for one round).
I agree that if you're killing every target every round, then those critical feats are terrible.
You're quite right, of course, I missed the 1-round effect on a successful save. Even so, with the example character I was working from - a character, moreover, weighted towards high numbers of attacks / low damage rather than high damage per attack - the monsters they're fighting will, on average, be dead in around the same time it takes to confirm a critical.
Of course if you throw stat boosters and enhancement bonuses in then a crit is confirmed earlier, but by the same token the damage per attack goes up as well. If I get the time I'll look at higher-CR monsters as well, but at the moment it looks to me very much like the maths don't support the notion that this feat is anything more than a waste of time.
Amra wrote:If I've followed correctly, it isn't a magical mystery miss chance, it's a chance that your attacks will miss. If you've got a 40% chance of missing the target entirely in a straight attack-roll-versus-armour-class comparison, then 40% of the rolls you make to confirm a crit will result in no crit.
Ah, I see. I was just guessing that on average 3 out of 5 shots would hit out of a Rapid Shot full attack; admittedly, I just pulled that number out of my ass.
OK. So you're guessing that this character hits 60% of the time and misses 40% of the time. That means that 40% of the attacks are misses, 40% are hits that don't threaten, 8% are threats that don't confirm, and 12% are threats that do confirm. Out of 5 shots, you have a 52.8% of getting no hits that threaten and confirm.
And if he hits 80% of the time, it only pushes the 12% chance to threat and confirm up to a 16% chance - and you still have a 41.8% chance of not getting a crit on 5 attacks. And that's before your seventeenth level enemies protect themselves with mirror images, displacement, darkness, fortification, or any other defense that negates attacks or criticals. And of course it flat doesn't work against Elementals at all because they can't be stunned.
I think Roy's ability to communicate effectively has been fully ruined by internet memes. Sad, really.
Current pet peeves:
Misuse of "per se". It means "[in] itself", not "precisely". Learn English.
Malformed singular possessives. It's almost always supposed to be 's.
Well that explains it. Not even GMW and a decent Str. And here I was figuring you had ranged attacks that mattered. Which even just a bow with GMW and a decent composite bonus will easily go much higher.
As for the final destination bit, common failings don't deserve anything more than a stock response. Common failings are also unworthy of consideration. Thus it being written off as no tactics, auto attacks only, FINAL DESTINATION.
I'm not sure if Roy can't communicate any more, or if he's just insane.
I think he has a good suite on Paizo, since ever since the big Pathfinder experiment he's dropped into a totally incoherent and possibly crazy mess of memes.
NineInchNall wrote:I think Roy's ability to communicate effectively has been fully ruined by internet memes. Sad, really.
Yeah, I think Roy knows some stuff about the game, and has a decent grasp of things, but he really needs to lay off the memes and actually communicate some of those ideas.
Roy should try going 1 week without using any kind of internet meme.
NineInchNall wrote:I think Roy's ability to communicate effectively has been fully ruined by internet memes. Sad, really.
Yeah, I think Roy knows some stuff about the game, and has a decent grasp of things, but he really needs to lay off the memes and actually communicate some of those ideas.
Roy should try going 1 week without using any kind of internet meme.
Note: All instances of you are the impersonal version, referring to the Den in general.
Except that it's not only old news, it's the same old news over and over.
Paizo does more things that do the exact opposite of what they are supposed to do, or if they're lucky are just useless.
Someone claims destroying items is good in a game where items must be valuable to be good and you need valuable items to function.
Someone claims a character (usually Monks) have good saves simply because the base progression is labeled good.
And so on. It's the same ten or so things repeated Ad Nauseum. Now I could go into great detail each and every time, or I can start using short cuts to streamline the process. Given that everyone here should already know this stuff, referencing a shortcut to jog people's memories is just the way to go.
You and I both know you'd just bitch anyways if I went into detail, saying you already knew that and I was insulting your intelligence to state the obvious or pointing out that it was in fact old news.
So basically, you just want to whine. Prove me wrong.
Last edited by Roy on Thu Jun 04, 2009 10:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.
