In this video I talk about the terms "high optimization" "mid optimization" and "low optimization" and made assumptions that I've been told are incorrect. If you would like to know what these terms refer to, I will link an article that discusses them. tabletopbuilds.com/proposed-standards-of-optimization-levels/
Ehh, I don't really see how your assumptions are incorrect? Reading the article it's a way of ranking effectiveness of one's builds, even if it's on a build-to-build basis it seems pretty easy to see the assumption being made that if you're putting out lower "op level" builds then the two choices are you actually aren't trying to optimize hardly at all or simply suck at it. Maybe it's optimizer vs powergamer vs min-maxer thing but anyways. Frankly, I am not someone who is keen to agree with Tabletopbuilds' philosophy to begin with... there are some neat concepts no doubt, and I love the UI format of their site but so many of their builds realllly reach with their assumptions and even though they say they don't include the so-called "Tech" they come up with in their final ratings, some of the stuff they seriously suggest the player try and convince their GM to allow is just mind boggling. From simple "drop your poor Conjured Animals 60ft onto the enemy for extra damage with this optional rule" to seriously suggesting that one could gain a way to penalize enemy saving throws by simply walking into combat as an Artificer with an 8 Int and using using your *buffing* feature Flash of Genius to grant an enemy a single measly -1. But don't worry, you can short rest after to attune to your Headband of Intellect. Or suggesting that players with the Ceremony spell should try to marry one another for a 7 day +2 to AC, then KILL one another on a weekly basis to widow themselves thereby bypassing the recasting restrictions of the spell. I don't mean to try and badmouth them and I hope they and their tables enjoy that kind of play, but... these are the kinds of things I'd suggest as a joke to ironically point out amusing rules loopholes, and to me this is the kind of stuff that gives optimizers a bad name.
So, I ran the numbers real quick, and assuming you are using the ranged fighting style for +2, the sharpened weapon feature for +3, and along with the optional rules at 20th level against an opponent with 20 AC here is the math I did. This is also only using a 1 level dip into fighter for archery fighting style, and including action surge along with battle master maneuvers your DPR can go over 100 in a single round though you'll use a ton of resources to do that. Accuracy Calc: With all the bonuses the effects of sharp shooter are negated, and assuming we burn through 3 ki points every attack for the +6 three times per round we end up with a +17 to attack rolls which gives us an accuracy of 90% as shown in the math bellow. The crit rate is calculated in much the same manner, and comes out of a 5% chance. The 21 is a stagnant part of the equation which is meant to balance out the division if I am correct. 21 - 20 + 17 / 20 > 1 + 17 / 20 > 18 / 20 = 0.9 * 100 = 90% DPR Calc: With the accuracy settled our attacks deal 1d10+15 damage per hit which can be done 3 times per round which came out to a DPR of 56.175 as shown in the math bellow. The damage calculation with 3 levels of battle master using action surge do up to 93.625 DPR, and using all of your maneuvers you get 110.725 DPR though this is rather costly to achieve but non the less worthwhile when the opportunity presents itself to deal such damage. (0.9-0.05) * 20.5 + 0.05 * 26 > 0.85 * 20.5 + 0.05 * 26 > 17.425 + 1.3 = 18.725 * 3 = 56.175 Additional Note It is important to remember that you won't always have to increase your accuracy by +6 to hit your opponent meaning your Ki point usage is actually much lower than this, and by 20th level you'll have plenty of Ki points to keep in going for multiple rounds. Additionally, figuring out an opponents AC is pretty easy by keeping track of what hits, and what doesn't. Obviously if a 15 hits you never need to go past that, or if a 14 misses while a 17 hits you know their AC is likely somewhere in between, so going past 16 is unimportant. In the same vein if your DM rolls openly you can figure out the enemies bonus to hit in a single roll.
I think low, mid, and high optimization aren't really negative, but rather refer to a persons preferred style of play. For example the group I am playing in now has two players with 14 in their attacking stat at 3rd level, and the one besides myself who does have a 16 in their attacking stat is unoptimized in other ways. There is nothing wrong with playing that way, and I do hold back so everybody can have fun sure I am rocking a 21 AC with shield of faith active but I am also getting attack way more than everybody else.
There is no correct number of combats per short rest. However, if you don't use a static number regardless of the build, then cacluating DPR is a waste of your time.
@@naturalkind5591 I was actually talking about applying this to general life. If someone tells you that you don't need to check their math/work, they are probably not the sort of person who double checks their own work. People who regularly audit themselves tend to be highly aware of their own ability to make mistakes, so welcome an outside perspective that may catch something they missed. The person who doesn't want you checking their results, or gets upset when you point out inconsistencies in their work, is often the sort to assume they were right first time and that they understand all the perspectives of an issue with minimal consideration. This is true in D&D, in school, in offices, in politics, in labs, and on job sites. I'm not saying it's done maliciously, but it is a warning sign. The number of assumed short rests is an entirely different issue, and mostly just comes down to consistency.
@@1217BC I will say though there's a difference between checking someone's work and checking someone's work every time. It's important to trust but verify. If it's the first time you work with someone then of course check but if you check every time then you give the impression you think they're incompetent
@@tomraineofmagigor3499 Oh, certainly. I'm just talking about initial interactions. An established rapport is far more important than a first impression.
Sadly had way too many similar experiences in the past with the difference, that what was said made those people money and not a little in not so fair way. Things didn't turn out that great that time and since then I'm hardly able to stand them even attempting to make me believe something they don't want to truly unveil, since there are some shady machinations being made up. Much praise to you sensei for trying to understand or at least confront their logic and numbers. Would appreciate if you still made your numbers the way you did till now. Still got headache from the video, sry wasn't your bad. Love your content bye.
Regarding knowing the creatures AC that just reminds me of this time when I was gming and I attacked the spell caster I said "does a 16 hit?" "Yeah it does though I wish I could shield it" - them "You can if you have the spell slot my Guy" Turns out that their last gm never let them use Shield if they knew it would save them from an attack. The GM would always just ask for their armour class say it hits, they'd cast shield if they thought it might help. Just very much a case of different strokes for different folks
Mike Mearls (the creative director of DnD up until 2019) once officially confirmed that the defender is supposed to know whether or not shield would block an attack to prevent them from wasting it. That DM that you mentioned in the story sounds not fun to play with. That's the type of DM that doesn't like a specific class/ability so they implement a shitty "balance patch" that makes the entire playstyle overwhelmingly weak. That shields story is the exact same thing as a DM that claims sneak attack damage is more "balanced" if its damage was halved. Nobody said 5E was perfectly balanced. However, for the vast majority of people its just blind arrogance to imagine they'd be able to homerule a change that's actually more balanced than RAW.
As an experienced adventurer, you should know how close an attack came to hitting, whether it be against you or an enemy. I equate it to hitting a baseball. As a batter or pitcher, you know when the bats makes solid contact or "just got under it." Hitters adjust missing all the time. IMO, DMs should let players know if a miss is close (within 1-2) or not.
@@hamsterfromabove8905 not letting them know attack rolls for shield isnt a shitty balance patch its great to make the most unbalanced spell in dnd less powerful
EDIT: This observation has been made by others: Actually, even within their own framework, they made a massive error (according to their own admission). They computed the number of misses of each type (1,2,3) and then prioritized the lower ones to use Ki on. This is not possible in gameplay. Suppose you are attacking and your misses are off by (3,3,3,2,2,2,2,1,1,1).. How could you possibly "prioritize" the "nearer" misses when you haven't seen them yet? In the first round you missed by 3, you have no way of knowing that you will later miss by only 2 or 1. BTW. Great breakdown of why applying the same criteria for all builds is critical. I recall someone doing a video on why DPR is a bad metric. :P
You are correct. When I’m the DM I never announce the AC of the enemy. And I’ve never had a DM announce the AC of my opponents when I’m in combat. The only way I ever know the AC of a monster is is when I roll a 15 and miss, but rolling a 16 hits.
The only time I got the AC of a monster from the DM was when I played a necromancer with a small army of the undead. It was simply better for the flow of play if he told me the AC so that when I rolled the dice I could separate out the hits from the misses. That was better than going does a 14 hit? No. 15? No. 16? Yes. Okay, then start separating the rest of my dice into hits and misses from there once I discovered the creatures AC.
@@orangeflame568 When I had a player with an army, he announced all the rolls, then I told him where the cutoff was. He still learned the enemies' ACs quickly, but it felt fairer than just telling him.
You can guesstimate a fair approximation with a couple of varied rolls. Thing is, you can't really factor that into your calcs, since it could potentially be already nearly dead by the time you figure it out, or you could get a string of similar hits or similar misses that don't really deliver any useful information.
If you wanted to represent this mathematically, you'd probably have to simulate other characters attacking the creature during the round. Keep track of the attack rolls that hit and only use ki when it can be used to turn a miss into an attack roll that previously hit. This means that, even though the assumption is made that you don't know what the monster's AC is, you get better at guessing the AC as the rounds go on. My guess is that after the first round (assuming a party of 4 or 5 players), your monk would probably have a good idea of what the enemy's AC is even if it doesn't know what the exact AC is. Then the usefulness of this feature would get better as rounds of combat go on. That does mean that it would likely be worse if you assume less fellow attacking party members and less rounds in each combat. It also makes it more likely to waste ki early in a combat if you overshoot the AC by too much.
Same here, the only way we know the AC is if we have players that roll within 1 of each other and 1 hits and the other misses, then we know. When I DM I regularly just grab random stat blocks that look interesting/fun to run and reskin them as whatever I need for that scenario. I want interesting combat, not a simple mathematical exchange dragged out for a few hours.
I recently created a Dragonborn Monk for a high tier dungeon, and we started at 12th level for this. I picked an Ascendant Dragon, which is generally considered a weaker subclass among one of the weakest classes. Does he do the most damage? No, but it's not terrible. It's pretty good. And his stunning strikes saved the day against a recent boss. Frankly, between Dragonborn and monk, he's incredible at avoiding damage. And I'm looking forward to 14th level when I get proficiency in all Saving Throws to make that even better. Sometimes we judge classes and subclasses harshly because they don't do great damage. He can run across water, up cliff faces, understands ever language, removes fear on himself with an action, never has to worry about how he can overcome resistance. Not sure how you can quantify that. But it's a lot of fun to play.
This reminds me of the time I was playing with someone who bragged about his Ranger "being able to" do 247 damage in a round at 6th level... Turns out they were assuming they hit every time, and rolled max damage (said calculating "average damage was too hard"), and had an enchanted longbow that added a few dice of lightening damage to each attack o.O
Lmao I remember talking to someone who said that monk kensai was better than a cbe/ss fighter. I started running the numbers only to find that they added a bracers of archery, a magic longbow and somehow an extra ASI and forgot they included that. I was like ok that makes sense but of course they only say these type of things one piece of information at a time
By the way. In the games that I play in we have a higher DPR than you calculate because we have fewer combats per short rest than you have. BUT! And this is important!!! Because you always calculate DPR using the exact same criteria your DPR calculations are valuable to me! Sure, I have different outcomes than I would have if I was playing at your table. But your calculations are useful when I’m creating a character because your calculations are consistent.
I remember him talking in a video saying that perhaps his method was too many fights in a day and he regretted not making it lower. But he didn't want to change it because then he would have to go back and change the math for all the other builds. It's just refreshing to have a standard somewhere in the dnd community
Bingo! Same here. I think 2 combats/short rest is about average for me, so short rest features are stronger for my characters, but his consistency makes his info useful.
@@TreantmonksTemple i think monk isn't bad, it has consistent damage on T1 and T2, works best as scout (from 100 foot or so since it can be back in a single turn) and thanks to gunner, Tasha's race and new class options it has well built kit that can shoot you with a longbow in the face without disadvantage (gunner) hit you from 120 (or more) also without disadvantage (thanks to sharpshooter) and keep his damage up (thanks to ki fueled attack). While I don't find kensei sharpshooter broken, I see it has his own strengths and capabilities. I think they weren't trying to tell you it was broken (and I don't agree with them if they did).
Well, Chris, I think you are listed as Mid Tier Optimization because you recognize that some builds/strategies are so strong that they unbalance the game and ruin it for the rest of the group. From what I've seen, high tier is the cheesiest of builds with all casters, rests between every combat, as many summons as can fit on the map, all the meta they can get, and assumptions that the DM will never alter anything from the books to attempt to rebalance. I'd say you are right where you want to be.
You got it a bit wrong, considering op levels rank builds, not people. As far as I’m aware TM has done high op builds like his artichron. You were somewhat right when it comes to a high op party with the exception of short rests after every fight (iirc they go with the DMG guidelines of 6-8 fights with 2 short rests). TM posted the website so you might want to take a look at that.
The rough truth as someone who does science and policy is that uh… these same issues about assumptions are everywhere. I love this video. I may adapt sections of it as a demo in undergrad statistics courses.
@@shorewall My college stats class spent maybe 1/4 of the time on the math behind stats because the professor said computers exist and you'll never hand calculate any of this in a real world scenario. The other 3/4 of class time was dedicates to understanding how stats were used and how to spot lies with numbers.
This feels like a great example of practical optimization vs theoretical optimization. I personally vastly prefer your methods but I do see how the other side isn't incorrect, just different
One other issue I take with the Focused Aim calculations is that no consideration is given to the circumstance that arrives when your estimation of target AC is off in a way that causes you to overspend or underspend, thereby wasting Ki and reducing your future damage output. If you spend 2 Ki points turning a 17 into a 21 against an enemy with a 22 AC, not only did you do no damage with that attack but you have also lessened your ability to use Focused Aim in the future. The risk/reward benefits are waved away in an assumption of BCS.
This isn't entirely true. If you spend 1 ki to turn a 17 into a 19 against an enemy with 20 AC you still get to make a bonus action attack with your longbow because you spent ki. There is a return even if you still miss but you want to be careful to not be guessing when you've already spent the 1 ki you needed to get that BA attack.
@@AdamZollo I meant wasted in the context of used to less than ideal effect, not used to no effect whatsoever, but I acknowledge that my intent was not fully clear and may not be representative of common usage. Thank you for the opportunity to clarify.
@@danielbeshers1689 Totally. But spending 1 ki, even though it might not be enough, is actually a really good strategy. Let's say you roll a 14 against an Ogre. DM says it's a miss. You guess the AC probably is around 15 to 19... maybe 20. If you spend 3 ki and hit: - you get full weapon damage + another attack (let's assume 60% chance this hits) - you still don't know anything except that the AC is between 15-20 - you return 53.3% of your normal damage per ki spent If you spend 1 ki, the worst case scenario is this: - you learn the actual AC is 17-20 - you get a bonus action attack (60% of damage) - you return 60% of your damage per ki spent So while spending 1 ki and missing might seem like a failure, you're actually getting a better return on damage per ki AND you gain more knowledge about the enemy for future rounds.
@@AdamZollo Exactly, when I did the calculations for the same Kensei-Musketeer months ago (not my creation, just entered a argument with a random guy on reddit), I assumed 1 ki expense per miss for the exact reasons you mentioned. It was the smartest thing to do, even blindly as a player you can assume expected ACs, so... Lets say if you miss an average of 45% of your attacks, and expend 1 ki in them, we can quickly estimate the amount of rounds per day we will be able to use this ability. It of course will show better results at the table than in the calculation (in the table you'll evaluate if the 1ki is a waste to expend as your friends hit or miss the target and an expectation of the value of it's AC is made).
Oh, even more than that there are absolutely conditions where it is in your best interests to lower your own bonus to hit because the expected gain of the bonus action attack is worth missing with your initial attack an additional 5-10% of the time and rounds where you don't have that near miss are actually a dpr loss. It's a very interesting, very heady play style. What I object to is people ignoring all that extra math.
Your baseline and math break downs have really helped me both understand optimizating concepts and what to look for when making characters. Give a dude a build and they'll have a character but teach a dude to optimize and they'll never play monk again or however the saying goes.
It's the teaching to optimize part that's really tricky, I learn something new almost every time I go back to Treant Monk, but I still would not comfortably say that I could make an optimized build entirely from scratch using all 3rd party or homebrew content. Although going more into the process that he went through trying to test these claims, maybe one issue is that I'm less able/willing to brute force putting a character together to see if it's worthwhile to bring to actual play.
I remember back when you posted your Bladesinger build... You were reporting a higher DPR than what I had calculated at Tier 3. But because you showed your math I was able to find the difference and it made sense again. Thanks for showing your math. PD: I was still atacking at Tier 3 instead of using Animate Objects. My bad. You were right :P
I love hearing from players who have some trick build that they say does some insane damage or mitigation, and then when you ask for details you find out that it comes from entirely misreading an ability or just not understanding the rules at all.
Honestly I completely agree with you that their assumptions aren’t the average D&D table. The average D&D table is playing for fun, not with the specific goal of optimizing combat. I have never heard of a table allowing the players to look up stat blocks, and in my experience when a GM knows that a player memorizes common enemies they either go out of their way to use oddball enemies or make their own stat blocks so that the mystery of the fight is still there.
Personally I allow my players to look up the statblocks of any officially published monster. However every single one of my monsters has some amount of home brew because I really enjoy homebrewing monsters. I will also give them the name of the official monster it is based on and assume that the official statblock is their (collective)base in character knowledge of the monster. Maybe they learned from legends, or schools or just from experience. They are then able to make rolls (history, arcana, nature ect) to attempt to get some more detailed information or hints about the specific creature they are facing.
I have tweaked many monsters to make a more balanced fight such as including more monsters with lower health so the players kill then easy. Or having one bigger monster with better saves and ac since the monster manual didn't expect me to just use one monster
For me, my personal ideal as a DM is to use the same enemy type enough times that the players _learn_ their stats through a mixture of knowledge checks and general experience. If a 17 hits and a 16 misses, you now know the enemy's exact AC.
I'm at the "getting more info" part of the video. If monks are good, then why is it so damn hard to make an optimized one? Chris is bending over backwards to make a decent monk. It shouldn't be this hard.
I think in a game without feats which I remind you is an optional rule monks do fine but once great weapon master, CBE, and sharpshooter come in other martial out match them by far
@@joepellicci8518 totally agree. I mean I've seen some analysis saying that a featless greatsword fighter still outpaces a monk substantially for damage but even if that's true monks get other stuff to make up for it. Bottom line is at the low op table I run the monk feels great, he couldn't be happier, and that's all that really matters for me. But yeah if you're talking any kind of optimisation using feats that's where monks fail
@@joshuawinestock9998 correct, I agree that they aren't good. But some folks think they are. As we've seen from Chris' sub-class rankings, some classes are good even without the sub-class features.
@@joshuawinestock9998 There is a stance on this just as much as there's a stance on gravity. It is what it is and it doesn't matter a persons individual perspective. Monks suck HARD and there's no rational way to see it otherwise. There are a lot of people that LOVE Monks, myself included, but they are Tier Z trash by their core abilities. It's so bad that even their best subclass, Mercy, is still subpar garbage.
It’s unfortunate that person got a bit aggressive near the end, but I think it’s very good that you cover the difference in how people optimize, both based on RAW and Table Rule differences
When you talk to people on the internet, and you disagree, it's easy to get frusturated. I talked to the same person today after the video came out and we're cool.
Say it with me class: "Ki is an extremely limited resource!" And blowing ALL of it to hit more accurately effectively shutdowns ALL other Monk features. Archery fighting style is more accuracy all of the time. Action surge is crazy burst windows. Slap some maneuvers on that? Why not! ASI boosts on a much less MAD class for quicker time to the crucial feats? This isn't a contest. But ok, let's watch Chris make these points even better than me -- starting the vid now. ;)
In computer science we use a system called Big O notation to measure the optimization of a function. The specifics of how it is used don't really apply to character builds, but the underlying idea can. This idea is that you don't get much information from analyzing the best case. Instead analysis should be focused on the worst case, or the average case, if the worst case is rare enough. In this build the best case would be knowing the monster's AC; therefore, allowing you to always use Focused Aim efficiently. The problem, as mentioned in the video, is that you won't always know what the AC is. You can get a more accurate information with the worst case: No knowledge of the AC. When doing the math for a build like this an optimizer would need to calculate how likely a player is to use miss even with Focused Aim. For this calculation it might be worth while to consider the average case where a player can figure out an AC after a round or two. It is the similar reason why I disagree with not including Sharpen The Blade. The worst case is that you fined no magic weapons, you then use a Bonus Action to give your self a +3 weapon for the fight. Even in the average case, you have +2 weapon. (With out need to do the math) This weapon is either better than bonus action for +3, the same, or worse. If it is better or the same then you are doing the same or more damage. If it is worse then you can opt to use a non magic weapon so that it can be boosted to +3.
I think not knowing the Monster AC after 1-2 rounds would exceedingly rare. A couple of attacks per round from the party will allow you to narrow it down fairly accurately almost every time
There are cases where best case performance is useful (or even just interesting). So for example, if you're trying to sort lists, and you're dealing with a lot of already sorted lists, you want to use something like insertion sort whose best case is an already sorted list and whose best case is quite fast. And sometimes it's just fun to know, like for example bogosort despite being godawful has a very quick best case time. (But that's also the cautionary tale of why you don't *only* look at the best case.) Similarly, if you know your particular GM tells you the AC of the monsters, you probably wanna compare builds assuming that you know the AC of the monsters. If you know your particular table short rests more frequently than average, you should probably assume frequent short rests. (TBH I honestly kinda think that Treantmonk's default assumptions around short rests are too harsh and lead to under-ranking short-rest-based classes like monk, but that's mostly based on my experiences as a GM who tries very hard to make sure the party actually takes any short rests.) Oh also: that's not the worst case for Sharpen the Blade, the worst case is that you and everyone else *does* have a +3 weapon so it's useless. What the worst case actually is depends on the algorithm you're using, it's not an objective thing. It's just whatever case is worst for what you're doing.
At least against big bads, my experience is that after a few rounds you know the AC if there are at least 3 people making Attack rolls every round. This makes the feature better, but it's extremely hard to put into numbers how often you know the AC without making vague guesses
The player can certainly figure out the AC in many situation, but I'm not sure it's reasonable to assume that the character should have the same knowledge. Of course, it depends on the table whether that is something to consider or not.
@@Pharoom To be fair, do characters know Ki points or something like that exists? Do they know exactly what a short or long rest is, and so on? These are all areas where it blends between what the characters know and what they do
I think the main problem with these "high optimization" builds is that whenever there is ambiguity about what assumptions to make, they always choose the most favorable ones (regardless of how realistic they are).
35:52 it’s pretty depressing that I knew this stat block’s AC 💀 I love the moral of this video though, excellent work, and good job of shining light on the fact that assumption and DPR will vary widely from person to person.
I think you were incredibly respectful, and open with your communication. The wisdom to be skeptical of other people's claims and math is valuable far beyond just DnD.
Honestly, I would love to see more optimization builds aimed at DM monster creation. I know people love to play this game, & make endless characters for it, but there aren't a lot of channels out there with content on designing good creature encounters for those players. I'm sure its a much more time consuming process, but it is a cornerstone of play
Someone already said this. But indeed. Matthew colville's action oriented monsters. Another way of doing it is just by inventing entirely new traits. For example. I dislike legendary resistances, so instead I have some substitute to it. Like an incapacitating spell won't be ignored by a boss through legendary resistance, but even if it fails the save, I might make it such that instead of incapacitation, it instead just reduces the number of attacks it can make. Other times, I combine multiple monsters into becoming one monster narratively. Like narratively, its a single wolf monster but having the stats of three wolves with three different turns.
Totally get you. Every DM has a tip on how to do it and they also suggest a lot of fun stuff. But no one talks about how to build a monster and for the new GMs, it gets really hard. I for one never played with optimizing players and when I make my monsters, I just try to make fun stuff, not hard stuff, I have a lot to learn about how to making things hard but that makes sense.
Honestly I love doing that but most DM content is just not very popular. Make a mediocre and poorly designed player feat and it will have hundreds of veiws and likes. Make a generic furry race and that's thousands. Make a well crafted statblock with cool lore and art? 10 ppl will see it.
It is so rare to learn something these days from a dnd youtube video. I learned a ton from this vid. These interactions, the low-mid-high self-aggrandizers, finnicky interactions of monk abilities (nobody plays monks at my table), all new.
Hi Chris! The best thing about this video is how chill, cordial and you assume the best of others. Proper math is rare, explaing your assumptions even more so, but being a nice person on line is the rarest. Keep up the great work!
Personally I see optimization level as more the environment than the players. Like there is no "high optimizer player" just players that that play or make builds in high optimization environments wich are just environments that favour/reward very well optimized characters, such as some meat grinder campaigns or optimization discord servers, hope this helped.
I'm not sure I agree. Like, if I show up to a very difficult campaign with a Twilight Cleric with concentration protection and SG+TK then I will be rewarded by contributing to the campaign. But if I show up to an easy casual campaign with the same character, I will still be just as powerful, but now I'll be drastically overpowered for the game. My character is too highly optimized for the campaign.
I find it's more about consciousness of optimization and permissiveness and other attitude related factors. Now there can be a bit of an arms race because then the DM has to step up their game in challenging these characters if they weren't already, although not quite the toxic way people usually think of a DM arm race
@@epicazeroth but does go back to the environment as a factor, which includes the attitudes of the other people table as well as what they have literally brought the table
Yeah I agree some games are more social and have a lot less combat or they do it go shake things up. Some games are mainly combat with railroading so the social situations really dont make a difference. I'm currently playing a game that is a little bit of a meat grinder so my semi optimized character is doing well. That being said I made my character around the team so when I joined I said what set of abilities is missing and fit in like a glove
I would absolutely love a video breaking down you and pack tactics differing opinions about optimization! I freaking adore both of your channels so I would totally love to hear that!
Correction for you on Sharpen The Blade: it doesn't become invalid with "any magic weapon at all" (29:42). It works with magic weapons as long as they don't have a bonus to attack+damage. So a magic weapon like a Longbow of Warning for instance, or even an Oathbow, are valid targets for this feature.
Also it might work with magic ammunition. If you use a +2 arrow it isn't the longbow that is magical, just the ammunition, so you could theoretically sharpen the blade of your longbow for an extra +2 for a total of +4 to hit and to damage
One of the things I really like about your channel is that you're always clear about your assumptions and how the math is done, so we can tweak it based on our experiences at our tables. Like for example, at my current table we usually only do 1-2 combats per SR and 2-3 combats per LR, but these are extended combats that last many rounds, as that's how my DM likes to play it, so I can tweak my resource assumptions accordingly. One thing I'd actually be interested in hearing about is on what optimization topics you and Kobold apparently strongly disagree on. Even though some things are mathematically so good that no optimizer is going to argue with, I find it most interesting to read about when different optimizers DO disagree (I've seen it a couple of times) and why they do so; whether based on their own assumptions, or flavor/out-of-combat utility, or different ways of approaching the math.
This is a great video. The lesson it teaches that almost every opinion about what's good or bad in D&D is based in assumptions. What people insist is great might not be great in your campaign, simply because your campaign may well play differently than how others assume it will be. I could give a million real life examples. Here's one: the campaign I'm currently playing in involves fighting huge swarms of undead. In this setting, Sickening Radiance is a god spell. In my previous campaign, which was Storm Kings Thunder, Sickening Radiance was trash, since Giants easily make CON saves. The lesson here is to look at the assumptions behind any piece of advice and see if it actually fits with the way you'll be playing the game.
Good video. My problem with so many optimization vids is that they're all assumptions. There's a big difference between someone calculating 4 rounds per short rest then discovering most the campaign is dungeon crawls on a timer. Save the villagers before they get sacrificed to Orcus, save the prince before the war begins, stop the necromancer from completing the ritual, etc. In my games, we never really know exactly how many encounters per rest there will be, unless we're rolling random encounters while traveling.
I know at around 29:40 Chris mentions comparing 4 rounds per Short Rest to 16 rounds per Short Rest, however, we do not know that Removed was saying that. I do personally think 16 rounds per Short Rest is too many in experience. Most combats (not Bosses) don't last longer than 4 rounds, maybe 5, possibly 6. Lets say 6. On average you have 2 combat encounters of medium/hard difficulty per Short Rest (as per DMG, pg 84). That lines up with about 12 rounds per Short Rest - which I feel is about right. I am not sure how much 12 rounds per Short Rest would affect Chris' calculation as opposed to 16. It would definitely have an effect on something with a lot of Short Rest mechanics, though.
And here is why I like listening to these videos and love Treant’s take on builds. Pretty much nothing is taken for granted and the number of encounters expected per short rest he uses would be labeled as hard-mode for most tables. I mean seriously, if you want to know the build is legit then he’s definitely one of the people you’d want crunching the numbers and putting it through the paces. Even better, he literally shows you his work in detail. Thank the dice gods for creators like him!
I like how you handled this vid, & I watch a lot of build videos from a bunch of different RUclipsrs, & I love hearing all the “assumptions” because it gives you a good foundation on how to gauge the actual dpr compared to how others calculate dpr. & thank you for all your hard work.
The Firearms have also been reprinted in Van Richtens guide. Also as for the Optimisation levels i do know where they stem from but linking it would get this into spam filter. But basically they describe different tiers of how powerful a build is, for example a well build straight classed Battlemaster would fit into mid Op. While something like a well build Arti or Peace Chron is high op. Simply by virtue of being that much stronger.
@@mirkofraccastoro7573 If your GM allows either all setting content (Like the undead warlock or Wildmount subclasses), or the optional rules for equipment and actions. It's always best to ask first but merely by the fact that the gunner feat exists i would assume GMs allowing conent around the time of Tasha's couldrun would.
@@SomeBody08150 Interesting, maybe someday I'll try the musket ranger with swift quiver, or if I don't feel like waiting that many levels who knows sword bard and steal it? That many attacks with a D12 sound nice, or maybe any rogue, they work well with firearms due to 1 ark per round.
I always appreciate your statement of assumptions because at the table I play at, it would be unheard of to have more than 4 combats in an adventuring day (with 4 being rare) and only very rarely 3 of those combats occurring before a short rest without at least one of them being trivial. So I can always make some assumptions that many resources, if not all, will have greater availability. I'll never know what those numbers would be, but at least I know to adjust expectations
One house rule I use for sharpen the blade (yes, house rule, I understand now RAW) is that if the weapon already has a bonus to attack and damage rolls, you can still use the feature, expending ki to increase the bonus, but you can't make the bonus go above +3. So if you had a +2 weapon, you could spend 1 ki to make it a +3 weapon for the duration, but you couldn't spend 2 or 3 ki to make it a +4 or +5 weapon
I think they meant gun, not gunk. the gun monk is a popular (Kensei) monk. The assumption is you're going to be allowed to use a D10/D12 gun along with the Kensei's featuers... EDIT: Oh, you got to it, lol. Second Edit: Sharpen the Blade can add plusses to any magic weapon without plusses - you could have a +3 Flametongue. StB isn't useless if you have magic weapons, it's useless if you have a weapon that only gives pluses, but either way, you're GUARANTEED at least the 3 damage and attack when using it. This is like assuming an Artificer won't have access to magic weapons - it's baked into the class. You can't refuse to use class features because othr classes don't have them.
Gunk is based on one fact “just assume the DM will let you have an insanely long range D12 with no downsides because you took one feat” honestly a lot of Optimization build I’ve seen rely heavily on “just assume your DM will give you super strong magic items or let you do something really BS” like pack tactics saying “well RAW genie warlock doesn’t say you *cant* have a ring of wishes as your genie lap”
My understanding of the "low/mid/high optimization" term is that it's a sliding scale between the kind of stuff you'd see either rookie players or people focusing more on flavor than stats build (low op) versus number crunching out a perfect build and tactical plan with no regard to how things would make sense in universe (high op). These are extreme examples of course because flavor and optimization aren't mutually exclusive, but that's the gist of the idea. It's also more relevant in DnD 3.5/PF1e than DnD 5e due to the different design philosophies If they're labeling you as "mid op" then I assume that they're reserving "high op" for more theoretical or outright degenerate builds than the practical ones you advocate for.
Not an expert here, but I think I read somewhere that high optimisation revolves around group synergies and Chris generally does a single character build, so I don’t know if that is why. I do find the labelling a bit annoying as it just feels like a way of judging other peoples’ approaches arbitrarily
Labelling a person's channel as high low mid or any level of optimisation is degrading, end of. This is because its inherent in the idea of optimisation that you are using the most effective ideas, and as such someone else is wrong. The site Chris linked says its used to describe how a build fares against other builds, not how good ones skill at optimising is. Everything about the discord user screams disingenuous to me, and especially with the obvious dig and the pretentiontious statement of I thought you said you did the maths on focussed aim and clearly you didn't before presenting how they've done it. And for the record the assumptions they are making are wrong, metagaming and unrealistic in any actual table that doesn't have easy encounters. Specifically the rounds per short rest seems insane to me, and I'm someone who basically allows short rests after every combat, combats don't last 2 rounds and even then my players can't rely on short rest abilities well. I play with warlocks, whom I have given extra spells slots as homebrew, and before which always ran out of spells every fight because it lasts more than 2 rounds. Monks are even worse as low level they have no ki and high level combats last even longer hence they have even less ki. As many have said I enjoy channels like this that explain the maths because even if I don't pay attention I know that by presenting it and presenting their assumptions they aren't being disingenuous or hiding information. Even though I know this channel and d4 deep dive and pack tactics use different assumptions, their assumptions are always stated and so you know what to take with a pinch of salt.
@@deathtoexistance "This is because its inherent in the idea of optimisation that you are using the most effective ideas" That's optimization to some people and min-maxing/powergaming to others. Treantmonk usually doesn't focus on the most effective ideas; he starts with a concept and makes it as effective as possible.
@@timeforsuchaword I agree, what I'm saying is the way it's used in this case implies he doesn't fully know how to play the game. I think this is reinforced by other statements by redacted discorder in how passive aggressive he comes off. When using a term to describe someone the implications matter, though the term doesn't necessarily mean those things.
I also did the math on a test Kensei build (and saved the results, which I can't link to in YT comments, unfortunately) and had the exact same results you did. I talk about (and link to) that build in my Johnbron WickMonkStone build video, where I had to use Darkness shenanigans to approach an acceptable DPR output! Great video, this sort of deep analysis is lacking in the D&D YT space! P.S. I found your little aside about Tabletop Builds and their optimization levels to be pretty funny, lol.
I honestly love this video. I think it does an amazing job of highlighting some of the logical fallacies people in general when having discussions, not even specifically to DnD.
A couple of years ago I played a Shadow Monk/Gloomstalker character. I did my best to optimize it, and it played out ok, not a high-powered character but fun and versatile. I have read those archer monks lately, and maybe it's not going to outperform the BM archer with all the feats, but I could make some changes to my old character to improve its DPR. A nice buff indeed.
Thank you, and I appreciate what you do soooo much! I would rather have your numbers as base line, with reasonable assumptions. Thing is you calculate say 60 average damage per round, I can reasonably assume with better gear, magic items, and better than average rolls it will ONLY get stronger. With other assumptions on calculating this stuff using unreasonable values it can lead to getting frustrated more often than not wonder why I didn't reach that number. Thank you for all you do.
I understand not including Firearms as it is an optional rule. However, you do include optional rules like Feats, Multiclassing and Tasha's stuff in your normal builds. You have to draw a line somewhere, and it appears that your line is the DMG. But I think if you did a survey of all the optional rules used by various tables: Firearms would be the most popular item you don't include. I think tt would be worthwhile doing a mini-series based around some these Optional rules: what can you do if your table is implemeting them.
Math might be problematic, since everyone uses different methods for their calculations and if they do not know about the differences in their ways of calculating, they will never be on the same page. But I still like that you include your math in every video, so we can all compare your builds against each other, even if citcumstances at our own tables are completely different. So please keep it up and thank you for the good work!
Removed also suggested that they worked out the total misses for the combat then applied the focused aim Ki optimally turning the max number of misses into hits. Sounds very optimistic.
Always show the math my friend. I am thankful for your transparent and detailed approach; it not only helps in understanding what I can expect in performance, but knowing your assumptions allows me to adjust the figures to better match the way my table works.
My favorite kensei dip is one level war cleric, gives some bonus action attacks with the weapon and divine favor spell or whatever it's called, plus utility / ritual spells, and occasionally stacking shield of faith on kensei ac bonus
Yes, really anything other than another build using the Hand Crossbow; clearly the greatest weapon ever created in D&D. If I never see another Hand Crossbow build it will be too soon. I'd rather play a Grung with a Blowgun at this point
@@pranakhan I've never seen a +3 hand crossbow in a game. Dwarves, Fire Giants, and Celestials ain't using their ancient sacred forges to craft them in my experience. So while I don't assume you won't find a +2/3 longbow, I do assume you'll never find a +3 handbow, maybe not even a +2.
@@AdamZollo My assumption is that is a mechanical choice. With a +1 crossbow, one is capable of hitting any creature that requires being hit with magical weapons (a surprisingly small number). Including even a basic eye towards optimization with the traditional BM 1h xbow build, this character will surpass most high DPR builds. If there were +3 1h xbows out there, that character would be leaving all of the others dead in the water, further securing their ungodly to-hit rate alongside even an incremental damage increase. And thats just one build; how many 1h xbow build are there on this channel alone? The medieval gunslinger is becoming a tired troupe at this point in the category of OP builds IMO
@@pranakhan 100%. I also know that having that consistent, resource free BA attack from CBE is really damn good on paper... but I'm looking at the loot spreadsheet from my last 2 campaigns and there are 5-6 awesome items our groups picked up that utilize a bonus action. And typically these items don't get fought over, even if they're solid items (e.g., bag of tricks) because most players have their BA spoken for every turn. That's the optimizer way right? Always do something with your BA. But I've come to realize that sometimes a build that has an inconsistent BA but is otherwise solid (e.g., Kensei or Arcane Archer or Ranged Rune Knight) will probably work out just fine after a few missions and a visit to a magic shop.
There are many x factors in any ttrpg, and loot acquisition is one of those. At the end of the day, action economy is interaction based. Maybe we have a couple of plans for how our average rounds play out; surprise round or ambush? multiple or single target enemies? The better we understand our options, the better we optimize our choices in play. Making space for ingenuity is essential in all levels of tactical display
The reason why I look so much up to you, Treantmonk, isn't because of your great optimization, your professional approach to sticking to DPR or your vast knowledge of the game in general - which are all things I really appreciate, don't get me wrong - but to be so calm and collected, when presented with frustrating scenarios, while trying to take everything in as good faith as possible and then make the best of it, is why your subscribers (me at the very least) like what you do so much. At your core, you playing DnD is really about optimizing fun - for everyone. And that's why I look so much up to you, Chris.
I like Kensei with 3 levels of Ranger (Fey Wanderer, Gloom Stalker, Hunter, Swarm Keeper). The great thing about archery Monk is fact, that he is hard to counter. Has fantastic mobility, so is hard to catch, if you force him to melee, he looses only little dmg output, his HPs are ok, his AC is better than most archery builds have, his saves become great, he can catch ranged attack, reduce falling dmg, his attacks are magical even without magic weapon,… Ranger gives him Archery FS, Favoured Foe, Hunter’s Mark (against boss only), bonus dmg abilities (Colossus Slayer, Horde Breaker, Swarm, Dreadful Strikes, Dread Ambusher),… And I also use one homebrew - I use RAI CBE feat, so you cannot fire with Hand XBow with Attack Action and then do BA attack with it. So monk’s dmg cannot be compared to traditional CBE builds, because they don’t work.
It's weird, that they assume a perfect case scenario, plentiful short rests where they have FULL information. If this was a videogame, where you can see your opponents stats, that would work. But you never get that in actual play. As an example, if this was the case "power word kill" would be a much better spell, because you could know immediately when an enemy dips under 100HP. But that is not how the game is played most tables.
My understanding is that "Gunk" focuses on the warlock baseline as a non-primary damage dealer, with its biggest utility actually being Pass without Trace uptime due to the spell nigh-guaranteeing surprise rounds It is a rare build that *only* performs well at high-op tables where the goal of the table itself is optimization to its limits EDIT: to clarify, yes PwT is THAT important of a meta-definer in "high-op" play so having it tied to Short Rest ki is insanity (in that meta). A level 4 Shadow Monk can guarantee the whole party has surprise attacks for an hour twice per Short Rest, vs a level 5 ranger only being able to PwT twice per long rest, with Shadow's "spell slots" scaling much faster
Could you elaborate on this a bit. Specifically how a build that achieves baseline + a bit in damage and provides PWT is considered a high-op build? I feel like it would not be hard to smash the baseline and provide consistent access to PWT. But I'll admit I haven't tried it yet.
Pass without Trace is great for a scout build, but I prefer scouts to have a bit magical versatility or, at least, stopping power. A Gloomstalker Ranger is an obvious choice, with solid ambush ability and great boon for sneaking in the dark. Shepard Druids multi class with Rogue well. Artificers can choose Cloak of Elvenkind as an infusion, which can be insane given its advantage & disadvantage setup. The new version earth genasi is awesome, and they get Pass without Trace once per day. Mark of Shadow or Mark of Passage can grant Pass without Trace to any spell list, and, if sustained Stealth is critical, a Warlock 3 / Sorcerer 17 build could have that, all-round versatility, and an invisible familiar to boot. Alternatively, If you really wanted to go overboard, you could combine the Artificer and Mark of Shadow for incredible levels of Stealth. Lots you could do without tying down 3 levels in monk.
are DMs in "high optimization" tables just letting you roll stealth wherever you want like its skyrim or something or do all their campaigns take place in forests at night i suppose concepts like well-lit hallways are "low optimization"
@Elizabeth Violet "high optimization" is high optimization within the strict context of RAW, which does resemble Skyrim moreso than DM fiat. It's also why I think "high-op" is absolutely ridiculous to theorize for because playing 100% objectively does not at all represent what most people actually play
Monk is a dexterity based class; and using any race that is proficient with a long bow. And using what you are discussed in this video. The math is very simple, especially when you add archery style, dexterity of 20, a feat that grants hunters mark and3 levels of rogue and +1 bow. On a squishy and using a bonus action with a AC of 13, the probability to hit is 70% (higher with advance) per attack roll. 13-10-2+5=6. For damage, bow (d8 or d6), hunters mark (d6 per hit), sharp shooter (1d10 per hit), sneak attack (2d6 per hit) and dexterity (5 per hit). And +1 for magic bow. So, the math is on average for 3 hits per turn is 13.5 (or 10.5) + 10.5 + 16.5 + 7 + 3 + 15 = 65.5 or 62.5.
Thank you for posting this video, Chris. I really appreciate the point you make about needing a consistent standard across builds. Your "calculating average damage" video inspired me to begin making dpr calculations for my own builds. My table runs less than 4 combats per short rest, so I often calculate once with assumptions for my table, then a second time using your baseline for reference. It is really helpful to have a direct point of comparison between my theory crafting and your established builds, even if it doesnt exactly match what i see in play. Having an established point of comparison tells me if my build is on the right track. I wish every optimization channel outlined their assumptions as explicitly as yours.
I am so glad you discuseed this issue at length where a lot of optimisation builds use assumptions that aren't always the case for every situation at every table. It is very frustrating looking for interesting build ideas online only to see they require assumed knowledge of enemies stats, always getting surprise rounds, only working against grounded melee opponents that rush towards them blindly etc. The main reason I (and I assume others) love your channel and builds is because you assume a barebones rules as written game with high combat encounter rates, which means when I try the builds at a table I often am over prepared and have extra resources at disposal to help other characters or enhance roleplay situations. The whole terminology of "mid-high optimisation" seems very toxic and gate keepy to me, and I guess from their perspective its a dig saying that some people dont take builds to their full potential with all the assumptions in place. I think builds with less assumptions are more fun for general play as they don't require specific situaitons to excel in but rather can be great at a variety of things.
I really like your approach to builds because you make it clear what conditions you are working with. Also you take into account things like setup required instead of just saying the best case scenario after round 4 of combat with 2 allies buffing you.
Where I see an archery monk being really good is with way of mercy monk, allowing for a run and gun character with emergency healing or with way of the astral self...you can then run within 10ft of the enemy use your bow and still get flurry of blows in
Everything here is generally on point. A few notes and a suggestion: 1) Most/many folks use naive or simply incorrect models for average damage calculations. That’s just a fact of life. The assumptions that you use are valid, and you explain them fairly well. 2) In some cases, you can use a weapon that has properties other than a strict +x bonus and combine that with certain class features that add a quasi-magical +x bonus to that weapon. 3) In terms of “optimization level,” its probably better to differentiate “Theoretical Optimization” vs “Practical Optimization” rather than some sort of arbitrary high-low-medium scale. Theoretical Optimization uses every inch of feasible advantage from both the rules and from the meta-game environment (including perfect knowledge of the encounter). Practical Optimization is something you can sit down at most tables to use without having to cajole or convince the DM in some way. And it furthermore has enough resilience and flexibility to always be of some use. 4) Suggestion: When providing DPR figures, it might make sense to assume a +1 weapon at level 5 or so, and a +2 somewhere beyond that (level 8-10?). Possibly a +3 at 18 or so. that is more realistic in the vast majority of games and allows direct comparison to spells and such that don’t require hit rolls. Also, it might be nice to include a “burst damage” figure. Most fights require/assume that you are conserving resources in some fashion, but the case of fighting the BBEG is often where you nova with everything you have. Burst damage is a very important consideration in Practical Optimization. Great channel!!
Your combats per day math is totally different from what I experience at my table but because your calculations are always consistent I can still get a good feel for how a build will play with my group. I really appreciate that consistency.
So I recalculated, without adding Sharpen the Blade** or using Gunner- assuming you know the true AC is target AC, and will Focus Aim for 1 ki when applicable, which is will often fail, but by round 2 you likely can deduce true AC, so it’s not far off. I also assume we will use Deft Strike every turn for an extra d10, mostly so we can consistently make the third bow attack, and of course a 1* level fighter dip. Under these assumptions I calculated ~52 DPR >45% above baseline, which will be sustainable for ~15 rounds per short rest. **While a +3 weapon isn’t uncommon by 20, it’s not guaranteed, and I think it’s bad faith to give a guaranteed bonus no value over a possible one, and any item you have is an item which someone else doesn’t, or which can’t be traded for gold and other items. Regardless, your top pick for ranged weapon would be an Oath Bow, which happens to mesh perfectly with Sharpen Blade so… I don’t know How we should weight this, but 0 isn’t the answer * Empty Body and an ASI are both good, but unless you need the ASI or you’re using Elven Accuracy or something, I would strongly consider Fighter 3 instead- Arcane Archer or Battlemaster are particularly good. At least you can use Empty Body to trigger Ki Fueled attack, or pair with Sharpen Blades if you know you can spare the ki.
I just appreciate how open and honest you are about particular things and putting everything under a microscope Honestly you’re the main reason I wasn’t terrified of one of my players taking silvery barbs, if anything how little he uses it nowadays with all his options, he ran into the situation of counterspell versus silvery barbs and what you talked about in your video literally happened Cast barbs and negate an attack roll or weigh in cast counterspell on a fireball later in the round So thanks man
Having reached eerily similar conclusions to the other guy in terms of the kensei's dpr, my belief is there are two factors at play. One, class against class, if one can replicate a magic item and the other can't, in a white room the magic weapon is, well, better. So many class features and spells are only ever valuable without magic items that grant hit bonuses. Two, sustained ranged advantage is decently rare, especially if you can't assume help from other party members in your math. The battlemaster can burst with precision attack but doesn't have the means to self-generate ranged advantage, while the kensei can start the fight with Empty Body. A monk can barely afford to take Elven Accuracy along with the ever-important Sharpshooter, and sustained advantage boosts dpr considerably over many turns, even making up for the loss of damage in the 1st turn.
I love knowing where the dpr numbers come from but then again, I'm a math nerd who builds character for fun in my free time that I rarely ever get to use 😆
Nice video :) I'd been playing around with this build for awhile and also come to conclusion that it probably wouldn't work. One fun thought I had would be to also take 1 level in war cleric to get a certain number of bonus action attacks that you can use when focus aim doesn't work out, and boost reliability that way. Haven't done the maths so not sure how much it would make a difference...
OK, so I stumbled onto this video today, and did some math for levels 1-5. I'm hoping you can help me out, telling me if I missed something: **L1** - use shortbow. no applicable features. Gunner feat. **DPR ac10=5.625 ; DPR ac15=5.0** Sharpshooter instead of Gunner is better damage average, but most players prefer to hit rather than miss. L3 - Ki fueled attack is nice, but not usable with ranged attacks, unless using 'Fangs of Fire Snake' (slow death subclass may have something too), at this level. **L4** - Sharpshooter. have enough cash for a 500gp musket (1d6 ->1d12 damage). **DPR ac10=9.75 ; DPR ac15=4.875** - unimpressed so far **L5** - Extra Attack, Focused Aim + Ki Fueled Attack I'm assuming that if you miss one of your two attacks, you will spend exactly 1 Ki to improve your accuracy, and attack again. I also assume you will not spend Ki on more than one attack per round, even if you miss, and will never spend Ki to boost the accuracy of your bonus action attack. You are spending Ki primarily to get a bonus action attack, and the bonus to hit is icing on the cake. **DPR ac 10=25.98 ; DPR ac15=10.968** this almost triples damage vs ac10, and doubles vs 15. looks to be above baseline at 5. The problem, as far as I can see, is that there isn't anything to really increase your monk damage, after this level. You already have a d12, at range. so it's really just Ability Score Increases that would bump damage higher. After this point, you would have to multiclass. (probably fighter. maybe get hex or hunters mark via feat) Does this seem about right to you?
@@TreantmonksTemple The fact that you take the time to reply back to 1000s of comments is amazing on it's own. Hope to work with you in the future. - Hector Salgado
There is one point though, sometimes certain tables tend toward things like 1 combat pr short rest or even 1 combat pr long rest. If this is the case certain builda will be better than they are using your metrics and similarly certain bullds that are optimized using your parameters will be less so if there is fewer combats. I think at a table with 1 combat pr short rest, so the monk can reliably burn all their ki every battle they will perform better than if we assume 4 combats pr short rest for example
With one combat per short or long rest, everyone else (except for maybe the rogue, but these tables probably do a lot of out of combat stuff and the rogue's good at that) will also perform better, and possibly experience a much bigger increase in power than the monk. So if I'm a paladin at this table... YEEEHAW IM BLOWIN MY SMITE SLOTS
@@elizabethviolet8448 but if youre a 6th lvl wizard you are very likely not blowing more than half your spellslotts, and the monk can use unlimited (as long as he has them) amount of ki pr turn. Not saying monks are great, but i do think the benefit more than many of the full casters from this
This type of video is one of the most important things optimizers need to know when using information from multiple groups/communities. My group optimizes with ample magic items so we get numbers that are far higher than what most builds end up as but when legendary items are relatively easy to come by. I know my group is not what most people play and when we playtest we drastically reduce our available magic. Your video shows that just as important as knowing the mechanics of any build is knowing the environment in which it is played. many of my builds are designed for AL play which features its own cadence of pacing and difficulty as well as the balance of combat vs. non-combat. Thank you for taking the time to point out how different groups can be and in many ways, yours is a moderate example.
Kobold's build provides utility through pwt. Darkness is a good way to shutdown casters because vision requirement. About op tiers: Low: your build is good Mid: your martials don't go melee so you spamming HP, plant/spike growth works much better High op: All party members coordinated their builds. A party of hexblades with devil's sight would count as high op. Mid to high is also the point when you start bugging your DM about tech. The build works well in high to mid op because SR features are easy to get back because rope trick (we assume minimal cooperation from party members starting at mid op) If you're expecting only published monsters(which is ratther common), you can expect average dpr for every level. From that you decide bow you use focused aim DMG optional rules are fair game. Especially since feats are optional rules and Tasha's kinda makes musket legal as long as feats are legal. Math isn't done because no way to count average ki expenditure Kensei is really bad. None of their features actually contribute to anything unless you invest too much. You probably go with BM 3, than gloom/assasin after monk 5-6
I applaud your well-measured analysis and response to criticism. Those traits are what drew me to your channel in the first place! Most of your points about the DPR assumptions (number of combats per short rest, ki points used to cover misses, etc.) seem spot on. But regarding the assumption of magic weapons in your calculations, I can see why you forgo adding them because you don't know what gear your character will get. But I think that in this case you *can* assume the opposite: my character can choose to not use a magical weapon so that I can guarantee their ability to use the Sharpen the Blade trait. If my DM gives me a +1 musket/bow, I could sell it or not use it and instead use the ki to sharpen.
Well, all you have to look at to know that these things change is the power of a short rest character vs a long rest reliant character, like perhaps a warlock vs a sorcerer, and realize how much difference there is between the two in a 10 short rest per long rest campaign vs a 0 to 1 short rest per long rest campaign. I was a warlock in the latter and I think it poisoned the warlock experience for me.
As a guy that is part of a "low optimization" group, I find all this number crunching to be intriguing. Don't think I'd ever do it but it's neat to see how in depth the community will go!
So I recently did play a kensei Sharpshooter monk, level 11 monks / 1 fighter and got about 40+ish dpr in a pre written adventure. the AC of the enemies were pretty much in line with what one would expect on that level. I competed very well with a phantom rogue with skulker and elven accuray who always had tripple advantage on their shots.
I'm pretty sure I talked to the same guy on reddit a few months ago, I saw the high values that he mentions, but I assume magic weapons in my DPR calculations (and also a lot of other things, I do my calculations with base on my homegames) so it was still close to "baseline" crossbow fighter. It's one of those things, most optimizer channels says "artificers suck at DPR", but then, the same channels will make a artificer build and go like "omg, 70 DPR, amazing" but they consider the magic weapon bonus at that build. It's great to see this video talking about DPR calculation and assumptions, specially because each person has their own way of doing things and if we want to check if something is better, it's best to do the math ourselves on our own set of rules. Also, I really do want to see the monsters that are being used in Treantmonk's games, I have the feeling that most optimizers tend to be DMs as well and it'd be nice to see "monster builds"
First of all, I want to congratulate you and thank you for all the work you do. I rarely leave comments on youtube, but this one really made me feel I have to join the conversation. Any build can be good if we assume the stars align in such a way to advantage our specific build. With a monk, I feel that the only thing they have better than others is their mobility and speed. So in order for monk to do more dpr, we need a way to turn their movement speed into damage. The only situation I can think of and is one of my favorite builds: a grappler skydiving divebomber. Basically this build only works outside and would turn all the movement speed into pure bludgeoning fall damage. I will not go into details, but you get the idea.
Treantmonk actually has a grappling build that does damage by moving fast! Look up his "Grapple Death Squad". You'll probably love it, but unfortunately he found better ways to make the build than using a monk
@@elizabethviolet8448 Just watched it. It's a great combo, but I was thinking of the best use for a monk without relying on other characters. You need a flying race like owlin, a feat or a level in rogue for grapple expertise and as high move speed as possible. With a feat or a few caster levels you can get longstrider and haste, but having access to haste potions would be the best as it doesn't even need concentration. Using a circle of the land grass druid gets you both spells and astral monk lets you use wisdom for grappling instead of strength. There are lots of ways to get advantage on grappling including the wild companion use of the druid wildshape just helping you on your checks. So after 5druid, you put the rest of your levels in monk, which at level 3 already gives you a dash with your bonus action and 10 more movement. You are a big owl with a small owl on your shoulder flying around, grappling 2 people at the same time with both your arms, while your imaginary fists beat your enemies on their falling way down from over 100 feet in the air.
It may not get views but I wish all the optimization build channels put out a short telling what they use as assumptions and put it on the channel page. I think (thought) everyone knew yours but I guess not. This is a great video reminding us that our old geometry teachers had a point - you have to show your work cause that is part of the answer.
A lot of optimizers know my assumptions, but disagree with them, so they use different assumptions. Nothing wrong with that, but unless we know what those assumptions are, their results only mean anything to them.
Ive been using a Kensei Monk Archer and our table is having really good results from it with the bonus action attack. I also like Gloomstalker dip for Archery, 4th attack first round, wis synergies, invis to enemies depending on darkvision for advantage. The anti darkvision is situational, but works pretty reliably with our tables tactics. Kensei Gloomstalker sounds like a very simple build. Elf can get Longsword proficiency easily for 1d10+dex damage at level2.
In this video I talk about the terms "high optimization" "mid optimization" and "low optimization" and made assumptions that I've been told are incorrect. If you would like to know what these terms refer to, I will link an article that discusses them. tabletopbuilds.com/proposed-standards-of-optimization-levels/
Ehh, I don't really see how your assumptions are incorrect? Reading the article it's a way of ranking effectiveness of one's builds, even if it's on a build-to-build basis it seems pretty easy to see the assumption being made that if you're putting out lower "op level" builds then the two choices are you actually aren't trying to optimize hardly at all or simply suck at it. Maybe it's optimizer vs powergamer vs min-maxer thing but anyways.
Frankly, I am not someone who is keen to agree with Tabletopbuilds' philosophy to begin with... there are some neat concepts no doubt, and I love the UI format of their site but so many of their builds realllly reach with their assumptions and even though they say they don't include the so-called "Tech" they come up with in their final ratings, some of the stuff they seriously suggest the player try and convince their GM to allow is just mind boggling.
From simple "drop your poor Conjured Animals 60ft onto the enemy for extra damage with this optional rule" to seriously suggesting that one could gain a way to penalize enemy saving throws by simply walking into combat as an Artificer with an 8 Int and using using your *buffing* feature Flash of Genius to grant an enemy a single measly -1. But don't worry, you can short rest after to attune to your Headband of Intellect. Or suggesting that players with the Ceremony spell should try to marry one another for a 7 day +2 to AC, then KILL one another on a weekly basis to widow themselves thereby bypassing the recasting restrictions of the spell.
I don't mean to try and badmouth them and I hope they and their tables enjoy that kind of play, but... these are the kinds of things I'd suggest as a joke to ironically point out amusing rules loopholes, and to me this is the kind of stuff that gives optimizers a bad name.
So, I ran the numbers real quick, and assuming you are using the ranged fighting style for +2, the sharpened weapon feature for +3, and along with the optional rules at 20th level against an opponent with 20 AC here is the math I did. This is also only using a 1 level dip into fighter for archery fighting style, and including action surge along with battle master maneuvers your DPR can go over 100 in a single round though you'll use a ton of resources to do that.
Accuracy Calc:
With all the bonuses the effects of sharp shooter are negated, and assuming we burn through 3 ki points every attack for the +6 three times per round we end up with a +17 to attack rolls which gives us an accuracy of 90% as shown in the math bellow. The crit rate is calculated in much the same manner, and comes out of a 5% chance. The 21 is a stagnant part of the equation which is meant to balance out the division if I am correct.
21 - 20 + 17 / 20 > 1 + 17 / 20 > 18 / 20 = 0.9 * 100 = 90%
DPR Calc:
With the accuracy settled our attacks deal 1d10+15 damage per hit which can be done 3 times per round which came out to a DPR of 56.175 as shown in the math bellow. The damage calculation with 3 levels of battle master using action surge do up to 93.625 DPR, and using all of your maneuvers you get 110.725 DPR though this is rather costly to achieve but non the less worthwhile when the opportunity presents itself to deal such damage.
(0.9-0.05) * 20.5 + 0.05 * 26 > 0.85 * 20.5 + 0.05 * 26 > 17.425 + 1.3 = 18.725 * 3 = 56.175
Additional Note
It is important to remember that you won't always have to increase your accuracy by +6 to hit your opponent meaning your Ki point usage is actually much lower than this, and by 20th level you'll have plenty of Ki points to keep in going for multiple rounds. Additionally, figuring out an opponents AC is pretty easy by keeping track of what hits, and what doesn't. Obviously if a 15 hits you never need to go past that, or if a 14 misses while a 17 hits you know their AC is likely somewhere in between, so going past 16 is unimportant. In the same vein if your DM rolls openly you can figure out the enemies bonus to hit in a single roll.
I think low, mid, and high optimization aren't really negative, but rather refer to a persons preferred style of play. For example the group I am playing in now has two players with 14 in their attacking stat at 3rd level, and the one besides myself who does have a 16 in their attacking stat is unoptimized in other ways. There is nothing wrong with playing that way, and I do hold back so everybody can have fun sure I am rocking a 21 AC with shield of faith active but I am also getting attack way more than everybody else.
Didn’t mean to offend you with that. I just say it to quantify what a build should be competent for assuming what I usually assume. Take care!
Also by floor of 69 or 78 just meant it’s reliable, so it can always be around 5-10 dpr ahead of the average
Life lesson: Never trust anyone who discourages you from checking their work.
Life lesson: don't assume 4 combats per short rest
There is no correct number of combats per short rest. However, if you don't use a static number regardless of the build, then cacluating DPR is a waste of your time.
@@naturalkind5591 I was actually talking about applying this to general life. If someone tells you that you don't need to check their math/work, they are probably not the sort of person who double checks their own work. People who regularly audit themselves tend to be highly aware of their own ability to make mistakes, so welcome an outside perspective that may catch something they missed. The person who doesn't want you checking their results, or gets upset when you point out inconsistencies in their work, is often the sort to assume they were right first time and that they understand all the perspectives of an issue with minimal consideration. This is true in D&D, in school, in offices, in politics, in labs, and on job sites. I'm not saying it's done maliciously, but it is a warning sign. The number of assumed short rests is an entirely different issue, and mostly just comes down to consistency.
@@1217BC I will say though there's a difference between checking someone's work and checking someone's work every time. It's important to trust but verify. If it's the first time you work with someone then of course check but if you check every time then you give the impression you think they're incompetent
@@tomraineofmagigor3499 Oh, certainly. I'm just talking about initial interactions. An established rapport is far more important than a first impression.
I LOVE hearing your math, my dnd group uses it to “educated guess” DPR, don’t exclude it from vids cause some of us love the math
The math is like the oracular tables of our shiny math rocks.
"show your work"
- some teacher
All you need is for your DM to give you an Antimatter Rifle. Then the math definitely works out!
I enjoy the professionalism. This could have esily been a "nerd rage" kind of exchange. Props for providing the context, Treantmonk.
Refreshingly calm and measured
The other guy was kinda rude at times. Like assuming Treantmonk doesn't know how to calculate DPR lol
Sadly had way too many similar experiences in the past with the difference, that what was said made those people money and not a little in not so fair way. Things didn't turn out that great that time and since then I'm hardly able to stand them even attempting to make me believe something they don't want to truly unveil, since there are some shady machinations being made up. Much praise to you sensei for trying to understand or at least confront their logic and numbers. Would appreciate if you still made your numbers the way you did till now. Still got headache from the video, sry wasn't your bad. Love your content bye.
Regarding knowing the creatures AC that just reminds me of this time when I was gming and I attacked the spell caster I said
"does a 16 hit?"
"Yeah it does though I wish I could shield it" - them
"You can if you have the spell slot my Guy"
Turns out that their last gm never let them use Shield if they knew it would save them from an attack. The GM would always just ask for their armour class say it hits, they'd cast shield if they thought it might help.
Just very much a case of different strokes for different folks
Mike Mearls (the creative director of DnD up until 2019) once officially confirmed that the defender is supposed to know whether or not shield would block an attack to prevent them from wasting it. That DM that you mentioned in the story sounds not fun to play with. That's the type of DM that doesn't like a specific class/ability so they implement a shitty "balance patch" that makes the entire playstyle overwhelmingly weak.
That shields story is the exact same thing as a DM that claims sneak attack damage is more "balanced" if its damage was halved. Nobody said 5E was perfectly balanced. However, for the vast majority of people its just blind arrogance to imagine they'd be able to homerule a change that's actually more balanced than RAW.
As an experienced adventurer, you should know how close an attack came to hitting, whether it be against you or an enemy. I equate it to hitting a baseball. As a batter or pitcher, you know when the bats makes solid contact or "just got under it." Hitters adjust missing all the time. IMO, DMs should let players know if a miss is close (within 1-2) or not.
@@hamsterfromabove8905 not letting them know attack rolls for shield isnt a shitty balance patch its great to make the most unbalanced spell in dnd less powerful
Can you show the math for that? I never thought shield was all that powerful, although definitely nice to have when it does save you. @@nebei3740
@@nebei3740that's a terrible excuse to allow dm's to cheat during fights and lie about what they roll
EDIT: This observation has been made by others:
Actually, even within their own framework, they made a massive error (according to their own admission). They computed the number of misses of each type (1,2,3) and then prioritized the lower ones to use Ki on. This is not possible in gameplay. Suppose you are attacking and your misses are off by (3,3,3,2,2,2,2,1,1,1).. How could you possibly "prioritize" the "nearer" misses when you haven't seen them yet? In the first round you missed by 3, you have no way of knowing that you will later miss by only 2 or 1.
BTW. Great breakdown of why applying the same criteria for all builds is critical. I recall someone doing a video on why DPR is a bad metric. :P
Right. This method would require you to know what your attack rolls would be on turns that haven't occured yet.
I did no see it but now that you point it is so obvious
You are correct. When I’m the DM I never announce the AC of the enemy. And I’ve never had a DM announce the AC of my opponents when I’m in combat.
The only way I ever know the AC of a monster is is when I roll a 15 and miss, but rolling a 16 hits.
The only time I got the AC of a monster from the DM was when I played a necromancer with a small army of the undead. It was simply better for the flow of play if he told me the AC so that when I rolled the dice I could separate out the hits from the misses. That was better than going does a 14 hit? No. 15? No. 16? Yes. Okay, then start separating the rest of my dice into hits and misses from there once I discovered the creatures AC.
@@orangeflame568 When I had a player with an army, he announced all the rolls, then I told him where the cutoff was. He still learned the enemies' ACs quickly, but it felt fairer than just telling him.
You can guesstimate a fair approximation with a couple of varied rolls. Thing is, you can't really factor that into your calcs, since it could potentially be already nearly dead by the time you figure it out, or you could get a string of similar hits or similar misses that don't really deliver any useful information.
If you wanted to represent this mathematically, you'd probably have to simulate other characters attacking the creature during the round. Keep track of the attack rolls that hit and only use ki when it can be used to turn a miss into an attack roll that previously hit. This means that, even though the assumption is made that you don't know what the monster's AC is, you get better at guessing the AC as the rounds go on. My guess is that after the first round (assuming a party of 4 or 5 players), your monk would probably have a good idea of what the enemy's AC is even if it doesn't know what the exact AC is. Then the usefulness of this feature would get better as rounds of combat go on. That does mean that it would likely be worse if you assume less fellow attacking party members and less rounds in each combat. It also makes it more likely to waste ki early in a combat if you overshoot the AC by too much.
Same here, the only way we know the AC is if we have players that roll within 1 of each other and 1 hits and the other misses, then we know.
When I DM I regularly just grab random stat blocks that look interesting/fun to run and reskin them as whatever I need for that scenario. I want interesting combat, not a simple mathematical exchange dragged out for a few hours.
I recently created a Dragonborn Monk for a high tier dungeon, and we started at 12th level for this. I picked an Ascendant Dragon, which is generally considered a weaker subclass among one of the weakest classes. Does he do the most damage? No, but it's not terrible. It's pretty good. And his stunning strikes saved the day against a recent boss. Frankly, between Dragonborn and monk, he's incredible at avoiding damage. And I'm looking forward to 14th level when I get proficiency in all Saving Throws to make that even better. Sometimes we judge classes and subclasses harshly because they don't do great damage. He can run across water, up cliff faces, understands ever language, removes fear on himself with an action, never has to worry about how he can overcome resistance. Not sure how you can quantify that. But it's a lot of fun to play.
If it's fun for you to play, that's the main thing.
I've been playing a Dragonborn monk for every official Monk subclass. Do you play with the Fizban's variants?
This reminds me of the time I was playing with someone who bragged about his Ranger "being able to" do 247 damage in a round at 6th level...
Turns out they were assuming they hit every time, and rolled max damage (said calculating "average damage was too hard"), and had an enchanted longbow that added a few dice of lightening damage to each attack o.O
If something sounds too good to be true...
Lmao I remember talking to someone who said that monk kensai was better than a cbe/ss fighter. I started running the numbers only to find that they added a bracers of archery, a magic longbow and somehow an extra ASI and forgot they included that. I was like ok that makes sense but of course they only say these type of things one piece of information at a time
I mean... he didn't lie. It could do 247 DPR. Doesn't mean he ever will.
i mean...technically they were right lol. They COULD do that damage, it's just highly unlikely that they ever would.
@@chrisstoltz3648 exactly or average damage is too hard to calculate so I just assume max
By the way. In the games that I play in we have a higher DPR than you calculate because we have fewer combats per short rest than you have.
BUT! And this is important!!! Because you always calculate DPR using the exact same criteria your DPR calculations are valuable to me! Sure, I have different outcomes than I would have if I was playing at your table. But your calculations are useful when I’m creating a character because your calculations are consistent.
I remember him talking in a video saying that perhaps his method was too many fights in a day and he regretted not making it lower. But he didn't want to change it because then he would have to go back and change the math for all the other builds. It's just refreshing to have a standard somewhere in the dnd community
Bingo! Same here. I think 2 combats/short rest is about average for me, so short rest features are stronger for my characters, but his consistency makes his info useful.
I love how you are always gracious to your posters, including troll posters, or flamers.
I usually shadow ban flamers actually. Disagreeing with me though I have no problem with.
@@TreantmonksTemple i think monk isn't bad, it has consistent damage on T1 and T2, works best as scout (from 100 foot or so since it can be back in a single turn) and thanks to gunner, Tasha's race and new class options it has well built kit that can shoot you with a longbow in the face without disadvantage (gunner) hit you from 120 (or more) also without disadvantage (thanks to sharpshooter) and keep his damage up (thanks to ki fueled attack).
While I don't find kensei sharpshooter broken, I see it has his own strengths and capabilities.
I think they weren't trying to tell you it was broken (and I don't agree with them if they did).
Well, Chris, I think you are listed as Mid Tier Optimization because you recognize that some builds/strategies are so strong that they unbalance the game and ruin it for the rest of the group. From what I've seen, high tier is the cheesiest of builds with all casters, rests between every combat, as many summons as can fit on the map, all the meta they can get, and assumptions that the DM will never alter anything from the books to attempt to rebalance. I'd say you are right where you want to be.
Well said! That bit about the DM not altering anything is especially grating.
You got it a bit wrong, considering op levels rank builds, not people. As far as I’m aware TM has done high op builds like his artichron. You were somewhat right when it comes to a high op party with the exception of short rests after every fight (iirc they go with the DMG guidelines of 6-8 fights with 2 short rests). TM posted the website so you might want to take a look at that.
@@kingdarkstalker7247 You're adorable!
The rough truth as someone who does science and policy is that uh… these same issues about assumptions are everywhere. I love this video. I may adapt sections of it as a demo in undergrad statistics courses.
Yeah, I took a stats class in college, and that was my big takeaway.
@@shorewall My college stats class spent maybe 1/4 of the time on the math behind stats because the professor said computers exist and you'll never hand calculate any of this in a real world scenario. The other 3/4 of class time was dedicates to understanding how stats were used and how to spot lies with numbers.
This feels like a great example of practical optimization vs theoretical optimization. I personally vastly prefer your methods but I do see how the other side isn't incorrect, just different
One other issue I take with the Focused Aim calculations is that no consideration is given to the circumstance that arrives when your estimation of target AC is off in a way that causes you to overspend or underspend, thereby wasting Ki and reducing your future damage output. If you spend 2 Ki points turning a 17 into a 21 against an enemy with a 22 AC, not only did you do no damage with that attack but you have also lessened your ability to use Focused Aim in the future. The risk/reward benefits are waved away in an assumption of BCS.
This isn't entirely true.
If you spend 1 ki to turn a 17 into a 19 against an enemy with 20 AC you still get to make a bonus action attack with your longbow because you spent ki. There is a return even if you still miss but you want to be careful to not be guessing when you've already spent the 1 ki you needed to get that BA attack.
@@AdamZollo I meant wasted in the context of used to less than ideal effect, not used to no effect whatsoever, but I acknowledge that my intent was not fully clear and may not be representative of common usage. Thank you for the opportunity to clarify.
@@danielbeshers1689 Totally.
But spending 1 ki, even though it might not be enough, is actually a really good strategy.
Let's say you roll a 14 against an Ogre. DM says it's a miss. You guess the AC probably is around 15 to 19... maybe 20.
If you spend 3 ki and hit:
- you get full weapon damage + another attack (let's assume 60% chance this hits)
- you still don't know anything except that the AC is between 15-20
- you return 53.3% of your normal damage per ki spent
If you spend 1 ki, the worst case scenario is this:
- you learn the actual AC is 17-20
- you get a bonus action attack (60% of damage)
- you return 60% of your damage per ki spent
So while spending 1 ki and missing might seem like a failure, you're actually getting a better return on damage per ki AND you gain more knowledge about the enemy for future rounds.
@@AdamZollo Exactly, when I did the calculations for the same Kensei-Musketeer months ago (not my creation, just entered a argument with a random guy on reddit), I assumed 1 ki expense per miss for the exact reasons you mentioned.
It was the smartest thing to do, even blindly as a player you can assume expected ACs, so...
Lets say if you miss an average of 45% of your attacks, and expend 1 ki in them, we can quickly estimate the amount of rounds per day we will be able to use this ability.
It of course will show better results at the table than in the calculation (in the table you'll evaluate if the 1ki is a waste to expend as your friends hit or miss the target and an expectation of the value of it's AC is made).
Oh, even more than that there are absolutely conditions where it is in your best interests to lower your own bonus to hit because the expected gain of the bonus action attack is worth missing with your initial attack an additional 5-10% of the time and rounds where you don't have that near miss are actually a dpr loss. It's a very interesting, very heady play style. What I object to is people ignoring all that extra math.
Your baseline and math break downs have really helped me both understand optimizating concepts and what to look for when making characters. Give a dude a build and they'll have a character but teach a dude to optimize and they'll never play monk again or however the saying goes.
It's the teaching to optimize part that's really tricky, I learn something new almost every time I go back to Treant Monk, but I still would not comfortably say that I could make an optimized build entirely from scratch using all 3rd party or homebrew content.
Although going more into the process that he went through trying to test these claims, maybe one issue is that I'm less able/willing to brute force putting a character together to see if it's worthwhile to bring to actual play.
I remember back when you posted your Bladesinger build... You were reporting a higher DPR than what I had calculated at Tier 3.
But because you showed your math I was able to find the difference and it made sense again.
Thanks for showing your math.
PD: I was still atacking at Tier 3 instead of using Animate Objects. My bad. You were right :P
I love hearing from players who have some trick build that they say does some insane damage or mitigation, and then when you ask for details you find out that it comes from entirely misreading an ability or just not understanding the rules at all.
Honestly I completely agree with you that their assumptions aren’t the average D&D table. The average D&D table is playing for fun, not with the specific goal of optimizing combat. I have never heard of a table allowing the players to look up stat blocks, and in my experience when a GM knows that a player memorizes common enemies they either go out of their way to use oddball enemies or make their own stat blocks so that the mystery of the fight is still there.
I've been on both sides of that! 😅
gotta keep some suspense!
Personally I allow my players to look up the statblocks of any officially published monster.
However every single one of my monsters has some amount of home brew because I really enjoy homebrewing monsters.
I will also give them the name of the official monster it is based on and assume that the official statblock is their (collective)base in character knowledge of the monster. Maybe they learned from legends, or schools or just from experience.
They are then able to make rolls (history, arcana, nature ect) to attempt to get some more detailed information or hints about the specific creature they are facing.
Fam my DM once changed the language a unicorn used bc we meta’d just to spite us😂 it was pretty funny
I have tweaked many monsters to make a more balanced fight such as including more monsters with lower health so the players kill then easy. Or having one bigger monster with better saves and ac since the monster manual didn't expect me to just use one monster
For me, my personal ideal as a DM is to use the same enemy type enough times that the players _learn_ their stats through a mixture of knowledge checks and general experience. If a 17 hits and a 16 misses, you now know the enemy's exact AC.
I'm at the "getting more info" part of the video. If monks are good, then why is it so damn hard to make an optimized one? Chris is bending over backwards to make a decent monk. It shouldn't be this hard.
I think the point is that monks are not good. That's the official stance on this channel (Mercy aside)
I think in a game without feats which I remind you is an optional rule monks do fine but once great weapon master, CBE, and sharpshooter come in other martial out match them by far
@@joepellicci8518 totally agree. I mean I've seen some analysis saying that a featless greatsword fighter still outpaces a monk substantially for damage but even if that's true monks get other stuff to make up for it. Bottom line is at the low op table I run the monk feels great, he couldn't be happier, and that's all that really matters for me. But yeah if you're talking any kind of optimisation using feats that's where monks fail
@@joshuawinestock9998 correct, I agree that they aren't good. But some folks think they are. As we've seen from Chris' sub-class rankings, some classes are good even without the sub-class features.
@@joshuawinestock9998 There is a stance on this just as much as there's a stance on gravity. It is what it is and it doesn't matter a persons individual perspective.
Monks suck HARD and there's no rational way to see it otherwise. There are a lot of people that LOVE Monks, myself included, but they are Tier Z trash by their core abilities. It's so bad that even their best subclass, Mercy, is still subpar garbage.
It’s unfortunate that person got a bit aggressive near the end, but I think it’s very good that you cover the difference in how people optimize, both based on RAW and Table Rule differences
When you talk to people on the internet, and you disagree, it's easy to get frusturated. I talked to the same person today after the video came out and we're cool.
@@TreantmonksTemple Glad to hear that. And somehow, I think it's important that the community knows too.
Say it with me class: "Ki is an extremely limited resource!" And blowing ALL of it to hit more accurately effectively shutdowns ALL other Monk features. Archery fighting style is more accuracy all of the time. Action surge is crazy burst windows. Slap some maneuvers on that? Why not! ASI boosts on a much less MAD class for quicker time to the crucial feats? This isn't a contest. But ok, let's watch Chris make these points even better than me -- starting the vid now. ;)
In computer science we use a system called Big O notation to measure the optimization of a function. The specifics of how it is used don't really apply to character builds, but the underlying idea can. This idea is that you don't get much information from analyzing the best case. Instead analysis should be focused on the worst case, or the average case, if the worst case is rare enough.
In this build the best case would be knowing the monster's AC; therefore, allowing you to always use Focused Aim efficiently. The problem, as mentioned in the video, is that you won't always know what the AC is. You can get a more accurate information with the worst case: No knowledge of the AC. When doing the math for a build like this an optimizer would need to calculate how likely a player is to use miss even with Focused Aim. For this calculation it might be worth while to consider the average case where a player can figure out an AC after a round or two.
It is the similar reason why I disagree with not including Sharpen The Blade. The worst case is that you fined no magic weapons, you then use a Bonus Action to give your self a +3 weapon for the fight. Even in the average case, you have +2 weapon. (With out need to do the math) This weapon is either better than bonus action for +3, the same, or worse. If it is better or the same then you are doing the same or more damage. If it is worse then you can opt to use a non magic weapon so that it can be boosted to +3.
I think not knowing the Monster AC after 1-2 rounds would exceedingly rare. A couple of attacks per round from the party will allow you to narrow it down fairly accurately almost every time
There are cases where best case performance is useful (or even just interesting).
So for example, if you're trying to sort lists, and you're dealing with a lot of already sorted lists, you want to use something like insertion sort whose best case is an already sorted list and whose best case is quite fast. And sometimes it's just fun to know, like for example bogosort despite being godawful has a very quick best case time. (But that's also the cautionary tale of why you don't *only* look at the best case.)
Similarly, if you know your particular GM tells you the AC of the monsters, you probably wanna compare builds assuming that you know the AC of the monsters. If you know your particular table short rests more frequently than average, you should probably assume frequent short rests. (TBH I honestly kinda think that Treantmonk's default assumptions around short rests are too harsh and lead to under-ranking short-rest-based classes like monk, but that's mostly based on my experiences as a GM who tries very hard to make sure the party actually takes any short rests.)
Oh also: that's not the worst case for Sharpen the Blade, the worst case is that you and everyone else *does* have a +3 weapon so it's useless. What the worst case actually is depends on the algorithm you're using, it's not an objective thing. It's just whatever case is worst for what you're doing.
At least against big bads, my experience is that after a few rounds you know the AC if there are at least 3 people making Attack rolls every round. This makes the feature better, but it's extremely hard to put into numbers how often you know the AC without making vague guesses
My experience is usually that you can get it down to 1 or 2 values after the first round, but that's mostly thanks to our party's druid
yeah players usually know the rough AC of a creature after 1-2 rounds of combat.
Yes, you absolutely know AC (or can reasonably estimate it) some of the time.
The player can certainly figure out the AC in many situation, but I'm not sure it's reasonable to assume that the character should have the same knowledge. Of course, it depends on the table whether that is something to consider or not.
@@Pharoom To be fair, do characters know Ki points or something like that exists? Do they know exactly what a short or long rest is, and so on? These are all areas where it blends between what the characters know and what they do
I think the main problem with these "high optimization" builds is that whenever there is ambiguity about what assumptions to make, they always choose the most favorable ones (regardless of how realistic they are).
35:52 it’s pretty depressing that I knew this stat block’s AC 💀
I love the moral of this video though, excellent work, and good job of shining light on the fact that assumption and DPR will vary widely from person to person.
I think you were incredibly respectful, and open with your communication. The wisdom to be skeptical of other people's claims and math is valuable far beyond just DnD.
Honestly, I would love to see more optimization builds aimed at DM monster creation. I know people love to play this game, & make endless characters for it, but there aren't a lot of channels out there with content on designing good creature encounters for those players. I'm sure its a much more time consuming process, but it is a cornerstone of play
It's not exactly optimisation, but check out matt Colville action oriented monster
Someone already said this.
But indeed.
Matthew colville's action oriented monsters. Another way of doing it is just by inventing entirely new traits.
For example. I dislike legendary resistances, so instead I have some substitute to it. Like an incapacitating spell won't be ignored by a boss through legendary resistance, but even if it fails the save, I might make it such that instead of incapacitation, it instead just reduces the number of attacks it can make.
Other times, I combine multiple monsters into becoming one monster narratively. Like narratively, its a single wolf monster but having the stats of three wolves with three different turns.
Totally get you. Every DM has a tip on how to do it and they also suggest a lot of fun stuff. But no one talks about how to build a monster and for the new GMs, it gets really hard.
I for one never played with optimizing players and when I make my monsters, I just try to make fun stuff, not hard stuff, I have a lot to learn about how to making things hard but that makes sense.
Honestly I love doing that but most DM content is just not very popular.
Make a mediocre and poorly designed player feat and it will have hundreds of veiws and likes. Make a generic furry race and that's thousands.
Make a well crafted statblock with cool lore and art? 10 ppl will see it.
It is so rare to learn something these days from a dnd youtube video. I learned a ton from this vid. These interactions, the low-mid-high self-aggrandizers, finnicky interactions of monk abilities (nobody plays monks at my table), all new.
Hi Chris! The best thing about this video is how chill, cordial and you assume the best of others. Proper math is rare, explaing your assumptions even more so, but being a nice person on line is the rarest. Keep up the great work!
Wow, thanks!
Personally I see optimization level as more the environment than the players.
Like there is no "high optimizer player" just players that that play or make builds in high optimization environments wich are just environments that favour/reward very well optimized characters, such as some meat grinder campaigns or optimization discord servers, hope this helped.
I'm not sure I agree. Like, if I show up to a very difficult campaign with a Twilight Cleric with concentration protection and SG+TK then I will be rewarded by contributing to the campaign. But if I show up to an easy casual campaign with the same character, I will still be just as powerful, but now I'll be drastically overpowered for the game. My character is too highly optimized for the campaign.
I find it's more about consciousness of optimization and permissiveness and other attitude related factors. Now there can be a bit of an arms race because then the DM has to step up their game in challenging these characters if they weren't already, although not quite the toxic way people usually think of a DM arm race
@@epicazeroth but does go back to the environment as a factor, which includes the attitudes of the other people table as well as what they have literally brought the table
Yeah I agree some games are more social and have a lot less combat or they do it go shake things up. Some games are mainly combat with railroading so the social situations really dont make a difference.
I'm currently playing a game that is a little bit of a meat grinder so my semi optimized character is doing well. That being said I made my character around the team so when I joined I said what set of abilities is missing and fit in like a glove
I would absolutely love a video breaking down you and pack tactics differing opinions about optimization! I freaking adore both of your channels so I would totally love to hear that!
Correction for you on Sharpen The Blade: it doesn't become invalid with "any magic weapon at all" (29:42). It works with magic weapons as long as they don't have a bonus to attack+damage. So a magic weapon like a Longbow of Warning for instance, or even an Oathbow, are valid targets for this feature.
Also it might work with magic ammunition.
If you use a +2 arrow it isn't the longbow that is magical, just the ammunition, so you could theoretically sharpen the blade of your longbow for an extra +2 for a total of +4 to hit and to damage
One of the things I really like about your channel is that you're always clear about your assumptions and how the math is done, so we can tweak it based on our experiences at our tables. Like for example, at my current table we usually only do 1-2 combats per SR and 2-3 combats per LR, but these are extended combats that last many rounds, as that's how my DM likes to play it, so I can tweak my resource assumptions accordingly.
One thing I'd actually be interested in hearing about is on what optimization topics you and Kobold apparently strongly disagree on. Even though some things are mathematically so good that no optimizer is going to argue with, I find it most interesting to read about when different optimizers DO disagree (I've seen it a couple of times) and why they do so; whether based on their own assumptions, or flavor/out-of-combat utility, or different ways of approaching the math.
This is a great video. The lesson it teaches that almost every opinion about what's good or bad in D&D is based in assumptions. What people insist is great might not be great in your campaign, simply because your campaign may well play differently than how others assume it will be.
I could give a million real life examples. Here's one: the campaign I'm currently playing in involves fighting huge swarms of undead. In this setting, Sickening Radiance is a god spell. In my previous campaign, which was Storm Kings Thunder, Sickening Radiance was trash, since Giants easily make CON saves.
The lesson here is to look at the assumptions behind any piece of advice and see if it actually fits with the way you'll be playing the game.
Good video. My problem with so many optimization vids is that they're all assumptions. There's a big difference between someone calculating 4 rounds per short rest then discovering most the campaign is dungeon crawls on a timer.
Save the villagers before they get sacrificed to Orcus, save the prince before the war begins, stop the necromancer from completing the ritual, etc. In my games, we never really know exactly how many encounters per rest there will be, unless we're rolling random encounters while traveling.
I know at around 29:40 Chris mentions comparing 4 rounds per Short Rest to 16 rounds per Short Rest, however, we do not know that Removed was saying that. I do personally think 16 rounds per Short Rest is too many in experience. Most combats (not Bosses) don't last longer than 4 rounds, maybe 5, possibly 6. Lets say 6. On average you have 2 combat encounters of medium/hard difficulty per Short Rest (as per DMG, pg 84). That lines up with about 12 rounds per Short Rest - which I feel is about right.
I am not sure how much 12 rounds per Short Rest would affect Chris' calculation as opposed to 16. It would definitely have an effect on something with a lot of Short Rest mechanics, though.
This video might be one of your best ever. It's both insightful and non-judgmental about the intricacies of mathematical assumptions.
Thank you!
This video perfectly exemplifies why I follow Treantmonk. Excellent job and thank you.
And here is why I like listening to these videos and love Treant’s take on builds. Pretty much nothing is taken for granted and the number of encounters expected per short rest he uses would be labeled as hard-mode for most tables. I mean seriously, if you want to know the build is legit then he’s definitely one of the people you’d want crunching the numbers and putting it through the paces. Even better, he literally shows you his work in detail. Thank the dice gods for creators like him!
I like how you handled this vid, & I watch a lot of build videos from a bunch of different RUclipsrs, & I love hearing all the “assumptions” because it gives you a good foundation on how to gauge the actual dpr compared to how others calculate dpr. & thank you for all your hard work.
Honestly one of the things that really set your builds apart for me is that you get so into the math, seriously one of things that brings me back
The Firearms have also been reprinted in Van Richtens guide.
Also as for the Optimisation levels i do know where they stem from but linking it would get this into spam filter.
But basically they describe different tiers of how powerful a build is, for example a well build straight classed Battlemaster would fit into mid Op. While something like a well build Arti or Peace Chron is high op. Simply by virtue of being that much stronger.
Wait so they are technically free reign for players to pick?
Or at least on the same level as any other weapon?
@@mirkofraccastoro7573 If your GM allows either all setting content (Like the undead warlock or Wildmount subclasses), or the optional rules for equipment and actions.
It's always best to ask first but merely by the fact that the gunner feat exists i would assume GMs allowing conent around the time of Tasha's couldrun would.
@@SomeBody08150 Interesting, maybe someday I'll try the musket ranger with swift quiver, or if I don't feel like waiting that many levels who knows sword bard and steal it?
That many attacks with a D12 sound nice, or maybe any rogue, they work well with firearms due to 1 ark per round.
Wait where are the firearms printed in VGR? I spent the whole time I was watching this video flipping through it and I couldn't find it.
Where are these weapons in the guide? I can't seem to find them!
I always appreciate your statement of assumptions because at the table I play at, it would be unheard of to have more than 4 combats in an adventuring day (with 4 being rare) and only very rarely 3 of those combats occurring before a short rest without at least one of them being trivial. So I can always make some assumptions that many resources, if not all, will have greater availability. I'll never know what those numbers would be, but at least I know to adjust expectations
One house rule I use for sharpen the blade (yes, house rule, I understand now RAW) is that if the weapon already has a bonus to attack and damage rolls, you can still use the feature, expending ki to increase the bonus, but you can't make the bonus go above +3. So if you had a +2 weapon, you could spend 1 ki to make it a +3 weapon for the duration, but you couldn't spend 2 or 3 ki to make it a +4 or +5 weapon
This makes a lot of sense, I'd use it! Not like monks are at risk of being crazy op
I think they meant gun, not gunk. the gun monk is a popular (Kensei) monk. The assumption is you're going to be allowed to use a D10/D12 gun along with the Kensei's featuers... EDIT: Oh, you got to it, lol.
Second Edit: Sharpen the Blade can add plusses to any magic weapon without plusses - you could have a +3 Flametongue. StB isn't useless if you have magic weapons, it's useless if you have a weapon that only gives pluses, but either way, you're GUARANTEED at least the 3 damage and attack when using it. This is like assuming an Artificer won't have access to magic weapons - it's baked into the class. You can't refuse to use class features because othr classes don't have them.
Gunk is based on one fact “just assume the DM will let you have an insanely long range D12 with no downsides because you took one feat” honestly a lot of Optimization build I’ve seen rely heavily on “just assume your DM will give you super strong magic items or let you do something really BS” like pack tactics saying “well RAW genie warlock doesn’t say you *cant* have a ring of wishes as your genie lap”
My understanding of the "low/mid/high optimization" term is that it's a sliding scale between the kind of stuff you'd see either rookie players or people focusing more on flavor than stats build (low op) versus number crunching out a perfect build and tactical plan with no regard to how things would make sense in universe (high op). These are extreme examples of course because flavor and optimization aren't mutually exclusive, but that's the gist of the idea. It's also more relevant in DnD 3.5/PF1e than DnD 5e due to the different design philosophies
If they're labeling you as "mid op" then I assume that they're reserving "high op" for more theoretical or outright degenerate builds than the practical ones you advocate for.
Not an expert here, but I think I read somewhere that high optimisation revolves around group synergies and Chris generally does a single character build, so I don’t know if that is why. I do find the labelling a bit annoying as it just feels like a way of judging other peoples’ approaches arbitrarily
Labelling a person's channel as high low mid or any level of optimisation is degrading, end of. This is because its inherent in the idea of optimisation that you are using the most effective ideas, and as such someone else is wrong. The site Chris linked says its used to describe how a build fares against other builds, not how good ones skill at optimising is.
Everything about the discord user screams disingenuous to me, and especially with the obvious dig and the pretentiontious statement of I thought you said you did the maths on focussed aim and clearly you didn't before presenting how they've done it. And for the record the assumptions they are making are wrong, metagaming and unrealistic in any actual table that doesn't have easy encounters. Specifically the rounds per short rest seems insane to me, and I'm someone who basically allows short rests after every combat, combats don't last 2 rounds and even then my players can't rely on short rest abilities well. I play with warlocks, whom I have given extra spells slots as homebrew, and before which always ran out of spells every fight because it lasts more than 2 rounds. Monks are even worse as low level they have no ki and high level combats last even longer hence they have even less ki.
As many have said I enjoy channels like this that explain the maths because even if I don't pay attention I know that by presenting it and presenting their assumptions they aren't being disingenuous or hiding information. Even though I know this channel and d4 deep dive and pack tactics use different assumptions, their assumptions are always stated and so you know what to take with a pinch of salt.
@@deathtoexistance "This is because its inherent in the idea of optimisation that you are using the most effective ideas"
That's optimization to some people and min-maxing/powergaming to others. Treantmonk usually doesn't focus on the most effective ideas; he starts with a concept and makes it as effective as possible.
@@timeforsuchaword I agree, what I'm saying is the way it's used in this case implies he doesn't fully know how to play the game. I think this is reinforced by other statements by redacted discorder in how passive aggressive he comes off. When using a term to describe someone the implications matter, though the term doesn't necessarily mean those things.
Tremble, mortals, and despair. I am the High Optimizer. I look down upon you so hard that I have folded my spine backwards
I also did the math on a test Kensei build (and saved the results, which I can't link to in YT comments, unfortunately) and had the exact same results you did. I talk about (and link to) that build in my Johnbron WickMonkStone build video, where I had to use Darkness shenanigans to approach an acceptable DPR output!
Great video, this sort of deep analysis is lacking in the D&D YT space!
P.S. I found your little aside about Tabletop Builds and their optimization levels to be pretty funny, lol.
Thanks Bilbron! Always appreciate you stopping by and commenting.
I honestly love this video. I think it does an amazing job of highlighting some of the logical fallacies people in general when having discussions, not even specifically to DnD.
A couple of years ago I played a Shadow Monk/Gloomstalker character. I did my best to optimize it, and it played out ok, not a high-powered character but fun and versatile. I have read those archer monks lately, and maybe it's not going to outperform the BM archer with all the feats, but I could make some changes to my old character to improve its DPR. A nice buff indeed.
I would love to know this build.
@@PyrotechNick77 Goblin Rogue 1/Shadow Monk 6/Gloomstalker 3 was the base, add a few more monk levels later.
Imma be honest, I love number crunching and listening to you saying numbers that get exponentially bigger. It’s therapeutic.
Thank you, and I appreciate what you do soooo much! I would rather have your numbers as base line, with reasonable assumptions. Thing is you calculate say 60 average damage per round, I can reasonably assume with better gear, magic items, and better than average rolls it will ONLY get stronger. With other assumptions on calculating this stuff using unreasonable values it can lead to getting frustrated more often than not wonder why I didn't reach that number. Thank you for all you do.
Even if it was a good build, you can't say a class is strong or even balanced if there's only one viable option of how to play it
Definitely.
Yep, if you only have one good way to play a class, but 5 other ways to play that class as intended, then is the class really that good?
I’ve been working on a Monk archery build, really happy to see this video! Thanks
I understand not including Firearms as it is an optional rule. However, you do include optional rules like Feats, Multiclassing and Tasha's stuff in your normal builds. You have to draw a line somewhere, and it appears that your line is the DMG. But I think if you did a survey of all the optional rules used by various tables: Firearms would be the most popular item you don't include. I think tt would be worthwhile doing a mini-series based around some these Optional rules: what can you do if your table is implemeting them.
You think firearms would be more popular than flanking?
@@andrewmcmillan229 Flanking is in the PHB
@@andrewkennedy5946 Yeah but it’s still an optional rule
Math might be problematic, since everyone uses different methods for their calculations and if they do not know about the differences in their ways of calculating, they will never be on the same page.
But I still like that you include your math in every video, so we can all compare your builds against each other, even if citcumstances at our own tables are completely different. So please keep it up and thank you for the good work!
Removed also suggested that they worked out the total misses for the combat then applied the focused aim Ki optimally turning the max number of misses into hits. Sounds very optimistic.
Always show the math my friend. I am thankful for your transparent and detailed approach; it not only helps in understanding what I can expect in performance, but knowing your assumptions allows me to adjust the figures to better match the way my table works.
My favorite kensei dip is one level war cleric, gives some bonus action attacks with the weapon and divine favor spell or whatever it's called, plus utility / ritual spells, and occasionally stacking shield of faith on kensei ac bonus
Yes, really anything other than another build using the Hand Crossbow; clearly the greatest weapon ever created in D&D. If I never see another Hand Crossbow build it will be too soon. I'd rather play a Grung with a Blowgun at this point
@@pranakhan I've never seen a +3 hand crossbow in a game. Dwarves, Fire Giants, and Celestials ain't using their ancient sacred forges to craft them in my experience. So while I don't assume you won't find a +2/3 longbow, I do assume you'll never find a +3 handbow, maybe not even a +2.
@@AdamZollo My assumption is that is a mechanical choice. With a +1 crossbow, one is capable of hitting any creature that requires being hit with magical weapons (a surprisingly small number).
Including even a basic eye towards optimization with the traditional BM 1h xbow build, this character will surpass most high DPR builds. If there were +3 1h xbows out there, that character would be leaving all of the others dead in the water, further securing their ungodly to-hit rate alongside even an incremental damage increase.
And thats just one build; how many 1h xbow build are there on this channel alone? The medieval gunslinger is becoming a tired troupe at this point in the category of OP builds IMO
@@pranakhan 100%.
I also know that having that consistent, resource free BA attack from CBE is really damn good on paper... but I'm looking at the loot spreadsheet from my last 2 campaigns and there are 5-6 awesome items our groups picked up that utilize a bonus action.
And typically these items don't get fought over, even if they're solid items (e.g., bag of tricks) because most players have their BA spoken for every turn. That's the optimizer way right? Always do something with your BA.
But I've come to realize that sometimes a build that has an inconsistent BA but is otherwise solid (e.g., Kensei or Arcane Archer or Ranged Rune Knight) will probably work out just fine after a few missions and a visit to a magic shop.
There are many x factors in any ttrpg, and loot acquisition is one of those.
At the end of the day, action economy is interaction based. Maybe we have a couple of plans for how our average rounds play out; surprise round or ambush? multiple or single target enemies? The better we understand our options, the better we optimize our choices in play. Making space for ingenuity is essential in all levels of tactical display
The reason why I look so much up to you, Treantmonk, isn't because of your great optimization, your professional approach to sticking to DPR or your vast knowledge of the game in general - which are all things I really appreciate, don't get me wrong - but to be so calm and collected, when presented with frustrating scenarios, while trying to take everything in as good faith as possible and then make the best of it, is why your subscribers (me at the very least) like what you do so much.
At your core, you playing DnD is really about optimizing fun - for everyone. And that's why I look so much up to you, Chris.
I would love to see optimized builds featuring your monk fix and their fixed subclasses
I like Kensei with 3 levels of Ranger (Fey Wanderer, Gloom Stalker, Hunter, Swarm Keeper).
The great thing about archery Monk is fact, that he is hard to counter. Has fantastic mobility, so is hard to catch, if you force him to melee, he looses only little dmg output, his HPs are ok, his AC is better than most archery builds have, his saves become great, he can catch ranged attack, reduce falling dmg, his attacks are magical even without magic weapon,…
Ranger gives him Archery FS, Favoured Foe, Hunter’s Mark (against boss only), bonus dmg abilities (Colossus Slayer, Horde Breaker, Swarm, Dreadful Strikes, Dread Ambusher),…
And I also use one homebrew - I use RAI CBE feat, so you cannot fire with Hand XBow with Attack Action and then do BA attack with it. So monk’s dmg cannot be compared to traditional CBE builds, because they don’t work.
It's weird, that they assume a perfect case scenario, plentiful short rests where they have FULL information. If this was a videogame, where you can see your opponents stats, that would work. But you never get that in actual play. As an example, if this was the case "power word kill" would be a much better spell, because you could know immediately when an enemy dips under 100HP. But that is not how the game is played most tables.
My understanding is that "Gunk" focuses on the warlock baseline as a non-primary damage dealer, with its biggest utility actually being Pass without Trace uptime due to the spell nigh-guaranteeing surprise rounds
It is a rare build that *only* performs well at high-op tables where the goal of the table itself is optimization to its limits
EDIT: to clarify, yes PwT is THAT important of a meta-definer in "high-op" play so having it tied to Short Rest ki is insanity (in that meta). A level 4 Shadow Monk can guarantee the whole party has surprise attacks for an hour twice per Short Rest, vs a level 5 ranger only being able to PwT twice per long rest, with Shadow's "spell slots" scaling much faster
Could you elaborate on this a bit. Specifically how a build that achieves baseline + a bit in damage and provides PWT is considered a high-op build? I feel like it would not be hard to smash the baseline and provide consistent access to PWT. But I'll admit I haven't tried it yet.
Pass without Trace is great for a scout build, but I prefer scouts to have a bit magical versatility or, at least, stopping power. A Gloomstalker Ranger is an obvious choice, with solid ambush ability and great boon for sneaking in the dark. Shepard Druids multi class with Rogue well. Artificers can choose Cloak of Elvenkind as an infusion, which can be insane given its advantage & disadvantage setup. The new version earth genasi is awesome, and they get Pass without Trace once per day. Mark of Shadow or Mark of Passage can grant Pass without Trace to any spell list, and, if sustained Stealth is critical, a Warlock 3 / Sorcerer 17 build could have that, all-round versatility, and an invisible familiar to boot. Alternatively, If you really wanted to go overboard, you could combine the Artificer and Mark of Shadow for incredible levels of Stealth. Lots you could do without tying down 3 levels in monk.
are DMs in "high optimization" tables just letting you roll stealth wherever you want like its skyrim or something or do all their campaigns take place in forests at night
i suppose concepts like well-lit hallways are "low optimization"
@@elizabethviolet8448 This right here, thank you for this comment
@Elizabeth Violet "high optimization" is high optimization within the strict context of RAW, which does resemble Skyrim moreso than DM fiat. It's also why I think "high-op" is absolutely ridiculous to theorize for because playing 100% objectively does not at all represent what most people actually play
Monk is a dexterity based class; and using any race that is proficient with a long bow. And using what you are discussed in this video. The math is very simple, especially when you add archery style, dexterity of 20, a feat that grants hunters mark and3 levels of rogue and +1 bow. On a squishy and using a bonus action with a AC of 13, the probability to hit is 70% (higher with advance) per attack roll. 13-10-2+5=6. For damage, bow (d8 or d6), hunters mark (d6 per hit), sharp shooter (1d10 per hit), sneak attack (2d6 per hit) and dexterity (5 per hit). And +1 for magic bow. So, the math is on average for 3 hits per turn is 13.5 (or 10.5) + 10.5 + 16.5 + 7 + 3 + 15 = 65.5 or 62.5.
Maybe the most important video I've seen on your channel! Thanks for the content
Thank you for posting this video, Chris. I really appreciate the point you make about needing a consistent standard across builds. Your "calculating average damage" video inspired me to begin making dpr calculations for my own builds. My table runs less than 4 combats per short rest, so I often calculate once with assumptions for my table, then a second time using your baseline for reference. It is really helpful to have a direct point of comparison between my theory crafting and your established builds, even if it doesnt exactly match what i see in play. Having an established point of comparison tells me if my build is on the right track. I wish every optimization channel outlined their assumptions as explicitly as yours.
I am so glad you discuseed this issue at length where a lot of optimisation builds use assumptions that aren't always the case for every situation at every table. It is very frustrating looking for interesting build ideas online only to see they require assumed knowledge of enemies stats, always getting surprise rounds, only working against grounded melee opponents that rush towards them blindly etc.
The main reason I (and I assume others) love your channel and builds is because you assume a barebones rules as written game with high combat encounter rates, which means when I try the builds at a table I often am over prepared and have extra resources at disposal to help other characters or enhance roleplay situations.
The whole terminology of "mid-high optimisation" seems very toxic and gate keepy to me, and I guess from their perspective its a dig saying that some people dont take builds to their full potential with all the assumptions in place. I think builds with less assumptions are more fun for general play as they don't require specific situaitons to excel in but rather can be great at a variety of things.
I really like your approach to builds because you make it clear what conditions you are working with. Also you take into account things like setup required instead of just saying the best case scenario after round 4 of combat with 2 allies buffing you.
Where I see an archery monk being really good is with way of mercy monk, allowing for a run and gun character with emergency healing or with way of the astral self...you can then run within 10ft of the enemy use your bow and still get flurry of blows in
Everything here is generally on point.
A few notes and a suggestion:
1) Most/many folks use naive or simply incorrect models for average damage calculations. That’s just a fact of life. The assumptions that you use are valid, and you explain them fairly well.
2) In some cases, you can use a weapon that has properties other than a strict +x bonus and combine that with certain class features that add a quasi-magical +x bonus to that weapon.
3) In terms of “optimization level,” its probably better to differentiate “Theoretical Optimization” vs “Practical Optimization” rather than some sort of arbitrary high-low-medium scale. Theoretical Optimization uses every inch of feasible advantage from both the rules and from the meta-game environment (including perfect knowledge of the encounter). Practical Optimization is something you can sit down at most tables to use without having to cajole or convince the DM in some way. And it furthermore has enough resilience and flexibility to always be of some use.
4) Suggestion: When providing DPR figures, it might make sense to assume a +1 weapon at level 5 or so, and a +2 somewhere beyond that (level 8-10?). Possibly a +3 at 18 or so. that is more realistic in the vast majority of games and allows direct comparison to spells and such that don’t require hit rolls.
Also, it might be nice to include a “burst damage” figure. Most fights require/assume that you are conserving resources in some fashion, but the case of fighting the BBEG is often where you nova with everything you have. Burst damage is a very important consideration in Practical Optimization.
Great channel!!
Your combats per day math is totally different from what I experience at my table but because your calculations are always consistent I can still get a good feel for how a build will play with my group. I really appreciate that consistency.
So I recalculated, without adding Sharpen the Blade** or using Gunner- assuming you know the true AC is target AC, and will Focus Aim for 1 ki when applicable, which is will often fail, but by round 2 you likely can deduce true AC, so it’s not far off. I also assume we will use Deft Strike every turn for an extra d10, mostly so we can consistently make the third bow attack, and of course a 1* level fighter dip. Under these assumptions I calculated ~52 DPR >45% above baseline, which will be sustainable for ~15 rounds per short rest.
**While a +3 weapon isn’t uncommon by 20, it’s not guaranteed, and I think it’s bad faith to give a guaranteed bonus no value over a possible one, and any item you have is an item which someone else doesn’t, or which can’t be traded for gold and other items. Regardless, your top pick for ranged weapon would be an Oath Bow, which happens to mesh perfectly with Sharpen Blade so… I don’t know How we should weight this, but 0 isn’t the answer
* Empty Body and an ASI are both good, but unless you need the ASI or you’re using Elven Accuracy or something, I would strongly consider Fighter 3 instead- Arcane Archer or Battlemaster are particularly good. At least you can use Empty Body to trigger Ki Fueled attack, or pair with Sharpen Blades if you know you can spare the ki.
I just appreciate how open and honest you are about particular things and putting everything under a microscope
Honestly you’re the main reason I wasn’t terrified of one of my players taking silvery barbs, if anything how little he uses it nowadays with all his options, he ran into the situation of counterspell versus silvery barbs and what you talked about in your video literally happened
Cast barbs and negate an attack roll or weigh in cast counterspell on a fireball later in the round
So thanks man
This is fantastic video. Thank you for pulling the curtain back. It was super helpful.
Having reached eerily similar conclusions to the other guy in terms of the kensei's dpr, my belief is there are two factors at play. One, class against class, if one can replicate a magic item and the other can't, in a white room the magic weapon is, well, better. So many class features and spells are only ever valuable without magic items that grant hit bonuses. Two, sustained ranged advantage is decently rare, especially if you can't assume help from other party members in your math. The battlemaster can burst with precision attack but doesn't have the means to self-generate ranged advantage, while the kensei can start the fight with Empty Body. A monk can barely afford to take Elven Accuracy along with the ever-important Sharpshooter, and sustained advantage boosts dpr considerably over many turns, even making up for the loss of damage in the 1st turn.
I love knowing where the dpr numbers come from but then again, I'm a math nerd who builds character for fun in my free time that I rarely ever get to use 😆
In the end, Kobold's video is about shadow monk with a musket lmao.
Nice video :) I'd been playing around with this build for awhile and also come to conclusion that it probably wouldn't work. One fun thought I had would be to also take 1 level in war cleric to get a certain number of bonus action attacks that you can use when focus aim doesn't work out, and boost reliability that way. Haven't done the maths so not sure how much it would make a difference...
You don't always need to use focus aim, it's better to try to just get bonus hits than trigger bonus action attacks.
OK, so I stumbled onto this video today, and did some math for levels 1-5. I'm hoping you can help me out, telling me if I missed something:
**L1** - use shortbow. no applicable features. Gunner feat.
**DPR ac10=5.625 ; DPR ac15=5.0**
Sharpshooter instead of Gunner is better damage average, but most players prefer to hit rather than miss.
L3 - Ki fueled attack is nice, but not usable with ranged attacks, unless using 'Fangs of Fire Snake' (slow death subclass may have something too), at this level.
**L4** - Sharpshooter. have enough cash for a 500gp musket (1d6 ->1d12 damage).
**DPR ac10=9.75 ; DPR ac15=4.875** - unimpressed so far
**L5** - Extra Attack, Focused Aim + Ki Fueled Attack
I'm assuming that if you miss one of your two attacks, you will spend exactly 1 Ki to improve your accuracy, and attack again. I also assume you will not spend Ki on more than one attack per round, even if you miss, and will never spend Ki to boost the accuracy of your bonus action attack. You are spending Ki primarily to get a bonus action attack, and the bonus to hit is icing on the cake.
**DPR ac 10=25.98 ; DPR ac15=10.968**
this almost triples damage vs ac10, and doubles vs 15. looks to be above baseline at 5.
The problem, as far as I can see, is that there isn't anything to really increase your monk damage, after this level. You already have a d12, at range. so it's really just Ability Score Increases that would bump damage higher. After this point, you would have to multiclass. (probably fighter. maybe get hex or hunters mark via feat)
Does this seem about right to you?
Thank you for all you do Treantmonk. You are one of my inspirations for D&D Content - Hector Salgado
Wow, thank you!
@@TreantmonksTemple The fact that you take the time to reply back to 1000s of comments is amazing on it's own. Hope to work with you in the future. - Hector Salgado
You are very kind to this person...shows what a quality person you are and why we trust you in your optimizations.
*Kobold enters the chat*
*Gator trails in behind*
"But TreeeeEnt....."
Just here to say that I hope the people complaining don't affect you too badly
I think a lot of us just enjoy the content you enjoy making
Keep hitting us with the maths. I WANT numbers in my optimization channel. :)
There is one point though, sometimes certain tables tend toward things like 1 combat pr short rest or even 1 combat pr long rest. If this is the case certain builda will be better than they are using your metrics and similarly certain bullds that are optimized using your parameters will be less so if there is fewer combats. I think at a table with 1 combat pr short rest, so the monk can reliably burn all their ki every battle they will perform better than if we assume 4 combats pr short rest for example
With one combat per short or long rest, everyone else (except for maybe the rogue, but these tables probably do a lot of out of combat stuff and the rogue's good at that) will also perform better, and possibly experience a much bigger increase in power than the monk. So if I'm a paladin at this table... YEEEHAW IM BLOWIN MY SMITE SLOTS
@@elizabethviolet8448 but if youre a 6th lvl wizard you are very likely not blowing more than half your spellslotts, and the monk can use unlimited (as long as he has them) amount of ki pr turn. Not saying monks are great, but i do think the benefit more than many of the full casters from this
Sharpen the blade IMO is super hilarious if using the musket. It means that your ki "sharpens" your bullets.
This type of video is one of the most important things optimizers need to know when using information from multiple groups/communities. My group optimizes with ample magic items so we get numbers that are far higher than what most builds end up as but when legendary items are relatively easy to come by. I know my group is not what most people play and when we playtest we drastically reduce our available magic. Your video shows that just as important as knowing the mechanics of any build is knowing the environment in which it is played. many of my builds are designed for AL play which features its own cadence of pacing and difficulty as well as the balance of combat vs. non-combat. Thank you for taking the time to point out how different groups can be and in many ways, yours is a moderate example.
Kobold's build provides utility through pwt. Darkness is a good way to shutdown casters because vision requirement.
About op tiers:
Low: your build is good
Mid: your martials don't go melee so you spamming HP, plant/spike growth works much better
High op: All party members coordinated their builds. A party of hexblades with devil's sight would count as high op. Mid to high is also the point when you start bugging your DM about tech.
The build works well in high to mid op because SR features are easy to get back because rope trick (we assume minimal cooperation from party members starting at mid op)
If you're expecting only published monsters(which is ratther common), you can expect average dpr for every level. From that you decide bow you use focused aim
DMG optional rules are fair game. Especially since feats are optional rules and Tasha's kinda makes musket legal as long as feats are legal.
Math isn't done because no way to count average ki expenditure
Kensei is really bad. None of their features actually contribute to anything unless you invest too much. You probably go with BM 3, than gloom/assasin after monk 5-6
I love the respectful approach you take to others you may not agree with. Great video and much love.
Thank you! 🤗
I applaud your well-measured analysis and response to criticism. Those traits are what drew me to your channel in the first place!
Most of your points about the DPR assumptions (number of combats per short rest, ki points used to cover misses, etc.) seem spot on. But regarding the assumption of magic weapons in your calculations, I can see why you forgo adding them because you don't know what gear your character will get. But I think that in this case you *can* assume the opposite: my character can choose to not use a magical weapon so that I can guarantee their ability to use the Sharpen the Blade trait. If my DM gives me a +1 musket/bow, I could sell it or not use it and instead use the ki to sharpen.
Well, all you have to look at to know that these things change is the power of a short rest character vs a long rest reliant character, like perhaps a warlock vs a sorcerer, and realize how much difference there is between the two in a 10 short rest per long rest campaign vs a 0 to 1 short rest per long rest campaign. I was a warlock in the latter and I think it poisoned the warlock experience for me.
And by the way - dpr is the gdp of dnd. It isn't useless, but it is not enough to assess if something is good or not.
As a guy that is part of a "low optimization" group, I find all this number crunching to be intriguing. Don't think I'd ever do it but it's neat to see how in depth the community will go!
So I recently did play a kensei Sharpshooter monk, level 11 monks / 1 fighter and got about 40+ish dpr in a pre written adventure. the AC of the enemies were pretty much in line with what one would expect on that level. I competed very well with a phantom rogue with skulker and elven accuray who always had tripple advantage on their shots.
I'm pretty sure I talked to the same guy on reddit a few months ago, I saw the high values that he mentions, but I assume magic weapons in my DPR calculations (and also a lot of other things, I do my calculations with base on my homegames) so it was still close to "baseline" crossbow fighter.
It's one of those things, most optimizer channels says "artificers suck at DPR", but then, the same channels will make a artificer build and go like "omg, 70 DPR, amazing" but they consider the magic weapon bonus at that build.
It's great to see this video talking about DPR calculation and assumptions, specially because each person has their own way of doing things and if we want to check if something is better, it's best to do the math ourselves on our own set of rules.
Also, I really do want to see the monsters that are being used in Treantmonk's games, I have the feeling that most optimizers tend to be DMs as well and it'd be nice to see "monster builds"
First of all, I want to congratulate you and thank you for all the work you do. I rarely leave comments on youtube, but this one really made me feel I have to join the conversation. Any build can be good if we assume the stars align in such a way to advantage our specific build. With a monk, I feel that the only thing they have better than others is their mobility and speed. So in order for monk to do more dpr, we need a way to turn their movement speed into damage. The only situation I can think of and is one of my favorite builds: a grappler skydiving divebomber. Basically this build only works outside and would turn all the movement speed into pure bludgeoning fall damage. I will not go into details, but you get the idea.
Treantmonk actually has a grappling build that does damage by moving fast! Look up his "Grapple Death Squad". You'll probably love it, but unfortunately he found better ways to make the build than using a monk
@@elizabethviolet8448 Just watched it. It's a great combo, but I was thinking of the best use for a monk without relying on other characters. You need a flying race like owlin, a feat or a level in rogue for grapple expertise and as high move speed as possible. With a feat or a few caster levels you can get longstrider and haste, but having access to haste potions would be the best as it doesn't even need concentration. Using a circle of the land grass druid gets you both spells and astral monk lets you use wisdom for grappling instead of strength. There are lots of ways to get advantage on grappling including the wild companion use of the druid wildshape just helping you on your checks. So after 5druid, you put the rest of your levels in monk, which at level 3 already gives you a dash with your bonus action and 10 more movement.
You are a big owl with a small owl on your shoulder flying around, grappling 2 people at the same time with both your arms, while your imaginary fists beat your enemies on their falling way down from over 100 feet in the air.
It may not get views but I wish all the optimization build channels put out a short telling what they use as assumptions and put it on the channel page. I think (thought) everyone knew yours but I guess not. This is a great video reminding us that our old geometry teachers had a point - you have to show your work cause that is part of the answer.
A lot of optimizers know my assumptions, but disagree with them, so they use different assumptions. Nothing wrong with that, but unless we know what those assumptions are, their results only mean anything to them.
@@TreantmonksTemple I agree. But I don’t know their assumptions. I know you and D4’s pretty well but anyone else - no clue.
Ive been using a Kensei Monk Archer and our table is having really good results from it with the bonus action attack.
I also like Gloomstalker dip for Archery, 4th attack first round, wis synergies, invis to enemies depending on darkvision for advantage. The anti darkvision is situational, but works pretty reliably with our tables tactics.
Kensei Gloomstalker sounds like a very simple build.
Elf can get Longsword proficiency easily for 1d10+dex damage at level2.