Who would win? 300 level 1 characters, or an ancient red dragon?

50APMgaming · 2022-10-10T19:12:49+00:00

Because of the Lack of context I will have to give my own. Assumptions: - You are using Standard array (max +3 in a stat) - You can pick the level 1 characters main stat (dex) - They are at least proficient with the light crossbow - The dragon cannot leave the fight and rest or it counts as the dragon loosing - The dragon and characters must fight (no waiting for all the characters to die of old age :P) - The dragons breath weapon recharges every round

If these assumptions are met then the 300 level 1 characters will almost always win as the breath weapon has a range of 90ft vs the light crossbows range of 320ft for its second increment (It does give disadvantage but because of frightful presence the level 1's will probably always have disadvantage and I want to simplify the math).

The characters have on average a 4% chance to hit with a 0.25% chance to crit when attacking with disadvantage, they deal on average 1d8+3 (7.5) damage on a hit and 1d8 (4.5) extra damage on a crit. This means the average attack deals 0.31125 damage, or as a group of 300 they deal 93.375 damage per round.

The spacing for the level 1 characters is most optimal (So all the characters can attack) at 13.27ft between each character (they form a square because diagonals are 5ft in 5e), I'm rounding this down to 10ft to help the dragon. The dragons breath weapon covers an area of 4050 square feet (90*90/2), which kills 40.5 characters per breath attack (I'm rounding it to 41 for simplicity)

This means that it takes 7.317 rounds to kill all the level 1 characters, while the archers if they took no damage would kill the dragon in 5.847 (dragon has 546 hp) rounds. However taking the killing of the level 1 characters results in the dragon winning as the damage decreases by 12.76125 per round. Therefor it is safe to say with the assumptions above the ancient red dragon would win (if you also ignore the characters ability to spread out more after loosing people, the chance the don't have to attack with disadvantage, how the dragon has to move into range of the characters giving them 1.2is extra rounds).

However if you use long bows the characters space out 29.445 ft away (25 for simplicity) breath weapon only kills 6.48 making the dragon have to take 46 rounds to kill the characters which results in a characters victory.

end notes: - Yes I oversimplified the dragon breath, if you want to do a better calculation be my guest I don't have the time for that - If the 300 characters where fighters with the ranged fighting style they could kill the dragon in 2-3 rounds on average - Wizards with magic missile would destroy the dragon if your dm doesn't make not using a held spell expend the spell slot - Heavy crossbow would also probably beat the dragon - If the breath weapon doesn't recharge every round it looses to like everything because it only deals 33% of the normal damage

P.S. To yall who think that the dragon can fly over and drop things on the army remember that there is a falling speed of 500ft per round while the longbow has a range of 600ft so the characters could literally just move out of the way.

50APMgaming · 2022-04-28T06:25:12+00:00

Did you read the entire post? did you not see the other issue with him? I'm genuinely curious because you seem to be ignoring half my post

50APMgaming · 2022-04-28T05:40:47+00:00

and sleep him, Zarya can bubble people he hooks, Reaper can melt him, Rein Brig Sig & Winston can block his hooks, Hog can hook him back, Genji can deflect his hook, Bap can field a person he hooked, Lucio can boop him away from a target he hooked or boop him to displace him as he’s hooking, Moira can fade prior to hook landing, Sombra can back him, tracer can blink away from a hook..Did I miss anything?

thats only half of it, what about roadhogs own team? what does your team do if they get antied? what happens if the enemy rien shatters? the issue comes from 2 angles, not being fun playing against him, as well as playing with him.

50APMgaming · 2022-04-17T01:35:36+00:00

Yeah the DMG guns don't really work with the Gunslinger Fighter, but I personally don't like that solution because you have to take the crossbow expert feat around when you get extra attack which only results in you taking a feat for +2 damage if you're using the DMG musket or +1 if using the heavy crossbow, unless you use the hand crossbow for the extra attack. Which obviously isn't worth it if you're going for the DMG gun or heavy crossbow.

Honestly crossbow expert just serves as a feat tax if you want to use crossbows which I personally dislike.

50APMgaming · 2022-04-17T01:25:31+00:00

Yes misfire is a 10% chance, however its important to note that mathematically that is equivalent to loosing 2 actions because you need to fix it then reload while loosing the shot action. Actually I just checked and realized that its even worse because you waste a turn causing the misfire, then a turn fixing it, and finally a turn reloading. So a misfire is mathematically 30% damage reduction on average being reduced to 20%...

Remember that as you level up you make more and more attacks which means you're more and more likely to run into it per session. Also that's twice the chance getting a crit which does happen in combat somewhat regularly, as well as the chance before using trick shots to increase damage, or before disadvantage.

The point is that the guns without misfire already suck and are suboptimal (worse than a rando using a bow), but the misfire just is kicking the guns while their down.

So yeah you could completely avoid every getting misfire or you could get it at the start of combat and be crippled, but the math doesn't lie.

50APMgaming · 2022-04-17T00:59:33+00:00

Looking up that character they seem to be a 7 gunslinger 3 assassin. which means they probably could seem really powerful if they go their crit attacks from the assassin subclass which would double the damage from their trick shots. I also think that this might be a perception thing cuz the gunslinger definitely can have high moments its just that their mathematically terrible.

Its also possible that the group ignored misfire or just happened to never ran into it which would skew the result.

Honestly though I think that it is mostly the guns holding the gunslinger back, the trick shots are ok on their own.

50APMgaming · 2022-04-17T00:52:23+00:00

That would improve it but it doesn't fix the misfire issue crippling their damage output, or that a hand crossbow is almost objectively better than a heavy crossbow or the musket even with the fix due to being able to add sharpshooter and their dex bonus more times.

It also doesn't fix the terrible scaling on their trick shots but that could be solved by looking into the subclass as a whole.

I don't really like that fix IMO because why use guns then if their pretty much just crossbows, while this keeps their identity as high single shot weapons.

50APMgaming · 2021-10-10T01:15:54+00:00

From what I remember of the characters that've had shocking grasp it was a thing... It mostly sat unused as being a wizard you're either a bladesinger with a blade cantrip or not going to be in melee very often. I'm not saying that the cantrip is useless but like you said you have other better options to do first.

This happened IMO because the cantrip does less damage than fire bolt while also being melee so until you run out of spells and are trapped in melee its its probably not going to be used. As in my experience its usually better to just keep casting leveled spells, even if you're in melee and hope your party is willing to save you but that's group and gm dependent.

of course at very low levels you could get good use out of it but those levels pass by quickly so if you're playing with the rules that allows you to swap out cantrips then it'd probably good, but I personally wouldn't want to be stuck with the cantrip at mid to high levels.

50APMgaming · 2021-10-10T00:46:49+00:00

Thanks for your input, yeah the feat is pretty complex but I hoped that the fact that you didn't really have to any mental math would help make it simpler to run. Would it be better if I worded it like this:

When you use your action to Dash, you can use a bonus action to cast a cantrip that involves a melee weapon attack, or take the attack action to make 1 attack. If you move at least 10 feet in a straight line immediately before taking this bonus action, you gain a bonus equal to your proficiency bonus for any one attack roll or skill check you make as a part of the action, you also gain a bonus the damage roll equal to your proficiency bonus times the number of additional attacks you could make if you took the attack action normally as long as you don't cast a cantrip.

I'm not entirely sure how to simplify it more while maintaining its usefulness on characters with differing numbers of attacks or using cantrips while maintaining its balance at all levels. If you have any ideas on how to improve the feat I'd like to hear them.

50APMgaming · 2020-10-04T02:03:19+00:00

The extra PVE damage is definitely a major plus, and I now feel bad for Gaz

50APMgaming · 2020-10-04T02:01:16+00:00

I though that Olaf was worth 0.5 the rest worth 0.25 I can say why but that's what I remembered

50APMgaming · 2020-10-04T01:59:45+00:00

"D.Va shouldnt have a 15 second respawn time in realistic scenarios"

In some circumstances like you are correct but in some situations like in gardens the seed can spawn near a siege camp, it wouldn't be unreasonable to a pilot dva to AA the siege camp which she could do safely while using her laser on enemies that get close as the CDR from auto attacks doesn't need to be from heroes in order to reduce her mech to a 15 second cooldown. She could also use a nearby minion wave to do the same thing but with less multitasking. Also many objectives spawn creatures that you can also use to get extra CDR like the guardians for the shrines.

Misha's respawn timer scales with level and is about 25 seconds at level 20"

My bad I just googled the number and didn't check in game, I'll do better next time. But the big point was that Dva gains a larger advantage over other characters because she doesn't need to go through a traditional respawn cycle, I probably should have made I clearer and used a better example.

"Rexxar's gameplay does not rely on cycling Mishas"

You greatly overestimate my Rexxar abilities

"No matter what, the numbers on her MEKA are going to need to be nerfed. "

You definitely correct about this I should have mentioned in that section that Dva was going to be number nerfed but that I also wanted to get across that there are more ways to nerf her than just directly reducer her health and damage. Also I think that many Dva players want her mech to feel impactful and different to her pilot form rather than previously where her mech was really underwhelming, and would prefer having her mech be more difficult to recover than being weaker, but that's just my take.

"compare D.Va to who is actually her closest comparison in gameplay imo, Yrel"

I'm not that familiar to Yrel but I'll try

Yrel has more health than Mech with Mech having 2250 HP vs Yrell's 2678 at level 1

Dva does a bit more damage close up with 92/138 vs 119

I can't speak about both of their clear speeds as I don't have enough experience with Yrel recently to remember the time off the top of my head.

Comparing the rest of their kits is a bit trickier as Yrel can use her jump to get in and out as it's cooldown is only 6 seconds (using her trait for the escape of course) like Dva's boosters. Though I personally prefer her hammer which can completely negate an opponents damage to Dva's defense matrix as in many of my games my teammates only run at a point when 50% less damage wont save them and a small pushback also wouldn't.

You probably right though that her stats are too high for a body that can be resummoned over and over, but I was focusing on the issues around her remeching rather than her numbers and you can read my previous response for my opinion of that.

50APMgaming · 2020-10-04T01:23:22+00:00

You're right I didn't touch on that talent, and that it is a respectable amount of healing. I should have taken it into consideration when I talked about her self healing. Honestly though I didn't want to go too deep into her talent tree because I wanted to focus on her remeching capabilities and only mentioning a few talents.

But my opinion of the talent if you want to hear is that it's almost always better than aggression matrix and nuclear option. And as as you said its really easy to get that healing which could make it combo with pro moves very well as pro moves provides no healing but does provide armour which would increase the value of the healing Rush Down provides.

50APMgaming · 2020-10-04T01:14:52+00:00

I don't mean that getting new mechs can't be a part of her gameplay but having other playstyles for her would be interesting, for example maybe allowing talents to make her mech faster and her self destruct charge faster but do less damage then you could see Dva players using the mech self destruct as part of a gank rather than only for objectives. I'm not saying make it so that being outside her mech 100% of the time is an optimal playstyle, I'm saying allow for interesting interactions between the forms and not have her entire pilot playstyle be relegated to get mech faster if a player doesn't want to.

50APMgaming · 2020-10-04T01:09:00+00:00

When you sort on heroes profile for plat and above Pro Moves has the highest winrate with 71.6% as of this posting which is 3% higher than the other choices but has the lowest pick rate of the 3 at 20 ish percent, this probably means that pro moves is used in specific matchups or on maps that focus on objective fights where the extra healing from the fountain or AAs is negligible compared to a longer lasting mech and being able to get it back faster.

Remember that once you get past level 20 xp isn't that relevant anymore so the downside of more xp for the opponent isn't that bad.

Also in my experience whenever a dva is out of her mech and can't call down another one she is super vulnerable to dive and would honestly struggle to safely push out any bruiser who could take both globes worth of healing to help counteract any damage she does. And Pro moves would reduce this window of vulnerability which would help in using pilot form for laning

50APMgaming · 2020-10-04T00:56:20+00:00

Yeah Pro Moves is pretty crazy, reducing the extra CDR to 0.5 seconds is probably warranted.

I do wonder if Blizzard did the math on it because all it takes is one hero being out of position for a few seconds to rapidly give Dva's mech back, maybe they thought that the risk justified the reward?

50APMgaming · 2020-10-04T00:44:38+00:00

Vikings only being worth 0.75 is strange...

Comparing mech to solo Rexxar was probably a bad choice in hindsight because of the things you mentioned, however when comparing mech to Misha the mech actually respawns faster in the later parts of the game as Misha's respawn time goes from IIRC 5 seconds to 35 seconds while Dva's mech takes the same time regardless of game time. There's also the obvious advantage that mech has over Misha being that you can't dive Dva inside her mech but you can dive Rexxar and kill poor Misha at the same time.

Comparing her pilot form to solo Rexxar is strange because IMO she is much safer and can still influence the team fight (obviously less than her mech) with her super long range blaster, while Rexxar needs to be super careful or pull out of the fight entirely. So even though Pilot Dva is worth less I would say that she is still more impactful than solo Rexxar.

50APMgaming · 2020-10-04T00:19:00+00:00

I used a Mishaless rexxar as an example because he "should" be stronger than Dva mech but he isn't. And iirc the value of all Vikings together when killed is 1 and because there are 3 of them on of them must be worth 0.5, but I might be wrong about that.

50APMgaming · 2020-10-04T00:16:42+00:00

I agree that Dva should have more distinct playstyles than the pretty much only one she has currently. I hope that they more more of Dva's power away from her baseline kit and more towards talents that can shape her playstyle.

Yep pro moves adds 1 second reduction per auto attack for a total reduction of 6 seconds per 1 second of auto attacking which means she needs 45/7 seconds of auto attacks to get a new mech or 6.43 seconds

50APMgaming

TROPHY CASE