[RPG] the expected average damage for an area of effect power

dnd-4estatistics

I have spent quite a bit of time coming up with an average damage document for my party and for several other characters. However, the one thing I have not been able to represent well is the average damage for attacks that have an area of effect.

For example a Level 1 Wizard at will such as Freezing burst that does 1d6 across all creatures in an Area burst 1 within 20 squares.

How do I best represent average damage for these. Should I represent it per target, for the max number of targets or is there a recommended general average that I should be using?

Best Answer

This answer is a conservative justification of the low values presented in DPR King 2.0:

Squares       Friendly     Unfriendly
4  (2x2)       1.2         1.1
9  (3x3)       1.45        1.3
16 (4x4)       1.8         1.5
25 (5x5)       2.25        1.7
36 (6x6)       2.8         1.9
49 (7x7)       3.45        2.1
64 (8x8)       4.2         2.3
81 (9x9)       5           3
a 9x9 is the cap.

After some deliberation, I agree with these assessments. Given that enemies will be avoiding bunching up save for the opportunity to flank, the heavy discount on unfriendly AoEs seems to correspond to how often there will be a combat where:

1. There are enough enemies

Given that the number of enemies in a fight optimally decreases with respect to time (you don't want to leave everyone on 1 hp until the last round) blasts and bursts have a decreased time where they can be effective.

Given that a non-trivial fraction of the fights are versus solo, elite, or small numbers of people, fulfilling the parent condition is difficult.

2. They are close enough without a party member in the way

Enemies will maneuver to avoid AoEs, just like party members. The most likely people to catch are the meleers flanking in the dogpile/scrum/charlie foxtrot, whatever you want to call the ball where all the melee happens. Targeting party unfriendly powers is hard, and almost certainly cannot happen every round.

Now, with that said, there are all kinds of ways to virtually expand the size of blasts and bursts, and anything that just adds "one square" onto a blast or burst can be said to upgrade its size for purposes of this chart.

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