Shutters

Wednesday, August 20, 2014

PrC damage normalization


The basic principles behind the potency of damage in most games, both video and tabletop, are as follows:

1. Healers don't do as much damage as blasters/stabbers.
2. Tanks don't do as much damage as blasters/stabbers.
3. AoE must do less damage than single target effects
4. The classes that do the most burst damage must be squishy.

So truly the basic idea is the more you specialize in damage, the less you can survive and the less tools you have in your utility belt other than damage output.  Fine by me, although I do enjoy a tanky mage from time to time. We can all think of classes and champions that break the dps=squishy rule; however, what we need for this project is a set of damage tiers to accomplish two things:

1. To maintain a reliable correlation between damage output in LoL and damage output in Pathfinder.
2. To maintain a feasible damage output ratio among all PrCs, which is to say that their damage output is balanced by their utility and/or defensive potency.
3. To create a set of terms that will quickly indicate the amount of damage an ability puts out.

So, let's work with the following as descriptions for class ability damage and their resultant values:

1.  Tiny: add a fixed bonus (2-5) flat damage in Pathfinder math.
2.  Small: add the PC's stat modifier as flat damage (2-6)
3.  Poor: add class levels as flat damage (1-10)
4.  Nominal: add hit dice as flat damage (6-20)
5.  Medium: ability causes a fixed number of d6s (2-5d6) of damage
6.  Large: ability causes class level in d6s (1-10d6)
7.  Great: ability causes double class level in d6s (2-20d6)
8.  Destructive: ability causes hit dice in d6s (6-20d6)
9.  Colossal: ability causes hit dice in d8s
10.  Awesome: ability causes hit dice in d10s

Level 10 averages for the latter half of the list:
6: 17.5
7: 35
8: 35, but the damage potential reaches its peak sooner than damage tier 7
9: 45
10: 55, this should only be reserved for Nunu's ult.


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