u/Jounniy

Hey there. I am currently brainstorming about making use of the "burning" condition to regularly inflict burning, thus triggering the Hat of Fire Acuity regularly. However, I do not have acess to the hat yet and I‘m not sure whether this works at all: Do creatures set aflame by the character wearing it boost the hat when recieving the damage? Because I know that some of those conditions do not actually count as the one inflicting it doing the damage but the one having the condition. (That‘s also why (for some reason) burning yourself while having "Elemental adept: Fire" bypasses instances of your own fire resistance.)

Does anyone know whether this works or has a save at hand to test it? Thanks very much.

So as you might know, GWM and ShSh give you +10 to damage at the cost of a -5 penalty to hit. I do not know whether someone else did something similar up here, but I for those among us that realy like optimising our damage, I thought I‘d share some calculations I did regarding the topic. (Call it a shower thought if you will, even though I wasn‘t showering when I thought of it.)

As you might know, the chance to roll any given number on a d20 is 5%=0.5 and the amount of dice results which let you hit are 20–[enemy AC]+1 (since meeting the AC also makes you hit). This means that (ignoring crit hits/misses) your chance to land any given attack is the amount of hitting dice results times 0.5. This also means that any given bonus or penalty of +1 or -1 to your attack roll increases or decreases your chance of hitting by 0.5. This in turn means that the penalty recieved from GWM/ShSh equals -25% to hit. (You might have already seen this when hovering over enemies and comparing your chances of hitting with and without the "All in"-effect.)

Now the average result of a diceroll equals the number of the results added together and then divided by the amount of available results. In the case of a d6 this would be: 1+2+3+4+5+6=21. 21 divided by 6=3.5. With a d4 it would be: 1+2+3+4=10. 10 divided by 4=2.5. As those of you farmiliar with TTRPGs (or other basic math) might know, this process can be shortened by adding 1 to the highest possible result you can roll and then deviding by 2. With this technique, it is possible to calculate the average damage of every hit. Now the average damage of an attack (ignoring the chance of crits for simplicites sake) equals the chance of hitting multiplied by the average damage of the attack.

What can we do with this information? It is possible to calculate the amount of average damage lost or gained when using "All in" by calculating:

["All in" damage]=0.75x([regular damage]+10)

As you might be able to see, the only unkown quantity on the right side of this equation is [regular damage]. With this, we can make a diagram. The horizontal line is our regular damage, the vertical line is our new damage. If we do not use "All in", our old average damage obviously euqals our new damage (represented by the blue line). However, if we use "All in", our new average damage start looking differently (represented by the green line). With this, it‘s easy to see that the average damage of an attack is higher with "All in" active, as long as you don‘t deal more than 30 damage per strike.

However(!) as some of you might be aware, this calcutlation ignores that (without adavantage) you can never increase your hit chance above 95% (as crit misses can always happen), but you can continue stacking bonuses nontheless. Practical example: If your enemies AC is 10, it does not matter wether you have +8 oder +9 to hit, the only way you can miss is by rolling a 1. But this also means that if you have +9 to hit, recieving a -1 penalty does not affect your chances of hitting against anyone with an AC of 10 (or lower).

What this means is: If your attack-bonus matches or exceeds the AC of your target, the penalty recieved from using "All in" starts to become more and more irrelevant. And if your bonus is 4 (or more) points higher than the AC "All in" effectively doesn't impact your chances of hitting at all, becoming a flat +10 to damage.

Something I also want to take into account when determining the results: Those statistics only work out in the long run. The lower your chances of hitting become, the more likely it is that you‘re just not going to hit at all over the course of a fight, especially if it‘s a small one. Since missing an attack means dealing 0 damage, the general rule of thumb should be the obvious: Attacking with "All in" turned on is only worth it, if your chance of hitting is >50% and if a one or two hits would likely be enough to end the fight anyway, then it is not worth using at all.

So? What do we learn from this?

Tldr:

- If you deal less than 30 damage per strike and have a chance of hitting >75% on a regular hit, "All in" is generally worth using unless your regular damage would be enough to kill the enemy anyway.

- The best use of "All in" is by just by having a hit bonus high enough so that applaying -5 means you‘d still hit on every attack but a 1.

Sorry by the way for not including advantage, I did not have the time or tools at hand to properly calculate when it would be worth using. I might get to doing that some time in the future.

Burning and the Hat of Fire Acuity?

I did some math on using GWM/ShSh…