Anatomy of the At-Will (V): Basic

Once upon a time, basic attacks were the simplest, weakest form of attack in D&D 4E. One step below proper at-will powers, basics were there for specific scenarios, rather than something characters were expected to spend actual standard actions for. Yet, as is too often the case, later books attempted to spice up these options with potent feats and magic items... and ended up overcompensating. Even without accounting for any charge silliness, basic attacks with appropriate support were already well above average at-wills by the time Martial Power 2 was released - thanks to a cycle of weapon-specific feats that obsoleted such reasonable and iconic powers as Piercing Strike. And then the Essentials line came out, along with a bunch of new subclasses designed to make basic attacks turn after turn...

In today’s article, I’ll go over the game elements that break basic attacks, discussing why they are bad for the game and how they could be improved. They are summarized in the following table:

So, what is wrong with them? I see the following issues:

• Obsoleting good at-wills - I have mentioned before the death of rogue stape Piercing Strike at level 11. To expand a bit on the topic, I strongly believe that allowing your basic attack to become your best at-will makes the game worse. The total increase in raw power for the character in question may not be all that bad, but the fact that you are replacing two at-will options with one clearly superior one definitely is. Given all the random advantages of being basic, your basic attack should always be slightly below a regular at-will when used as a standard action in order to be fair - or, even better, do cool stuff but only when NOT used as a standard action.
• Aggravate charge brokenness - Remember charges? It turns out that, if they weren’t bad enough, you can also make them extremely accurate for a mere feat (or two, if your class is not martial).
• Essential taxes - One of the most common complaints about 4E is the existence of “feat taxes”, bland feats providing simple yet extremely powerful stat bonuses, which make a huge difference between characters who take them and those who don’t. Expertise feats are classic examples of such taxes... and several of the feats in the above list provide an accuracy boost equivalent to (and stackable with) expertise, for basic-attack using classes.
• Obsoleting weapon types - Another downside of having an overwhelmingly good cycle of feats for certain classes is the fact that they are weapon-specific... and fail to cover all weapon types. This is particularly troubling because the excluded types cover some of the most iconic adventurer weapons, like swords and axes - so if you just want to play a level 11+ knight with a bastard sword, or slayer with an executioner’s axe, you are taking a huge penalty for the privilege.

I could name a few more problems, but the ones above are the ones I find the most pressing. With that in mind, how should we proceed to improve the state of basic attacks? I have opted for two main approaches:

• Keep the cool stuff, but not for standard actions. I don’t want these effects for the character’s main attack, but they are fine as a boost to opportunity attacks and the occasional interrupt. Note that I explicitly leave free attacks out of the deal because the basic-attack granting leader powers are a bit over the top and don’t really need the boost.
• Pay damage/accuracy for the cool stuff. AKA the Power Attack mechanic (sometimes in reverse) - you have the option to take a penalty to gain a bonus. If I have got them right, you won’t want to activate these abilities all the time, but they will be quite handy once in a while. The accuracy increases in particular will no longer be a straight increase in average damage (often the opposite will be true), but something you bring out against highly armored enemies, or ones that are close to death.

When all else fails, I’ll settle with a good old nerf. As usual, my target for power level is to keep everything playable, though not necessarily optimal.

Can no longer be used as a standard

Deft Blade – Paragon Feat, Martial  (MP2)
Fix: Replace “to make a basic attack” with “to make a basic attack as part of an immediate or opportunity action”.

Hammer Shock  – Paragon Feat, Martial (MP2)
Piercing Pick – Paragon Feat, Martial (MP2)
Fix: Replace “to make a melee basic attack” with “to make a melee basic attack as part of an immediate or opportunity action”.

Pinning Challenge – Paragon Feat, Fighter (Dra379)
Fix: Replace with “Whenever you make a basic attack with a two-handed weapon as part of an immediate or opportunity action, if the target is marked by you, on a hit it is also immobilized until the start of your next turn”.

Require sacrifices to activate

Impaling Spear – Paragon Feat, Martial (MP2)
Fix: Replace with “Before you make a melee basic attack with a spear, you can choose to take a -3 penalty to the damage roll for each [W] of the attack. If you do, the attack can target AC or Reflex”

Grazing Shot - Paragon Feat (PHB3)
Fix: Replace with “Before you make a ranged basic attack, you can choose to take a -2 penalty to the damage roll. If you do, and the attack deals no damage on a miss, the target takes damage equal to your Dexterity modifier. The penalty increases to -4 at 21st level.”

Deft Aim – Epic Feat (PHB3)
Fix: Replace with “Before you make a ranged basic attack with a bow or crossbow, you can choose to take a -3 penalty to the damage roll for each [W] of the attack. If you do, the attack can target AC or Reflex”

Lashing Flail – Paragon Feat, Martial (MP2)
Fix: Replace with when you make a melee basic attack with a flail, you can take a -2 penalty to the attack roll. If the attack hits, you can slide the target 1 square.

Other fixes

Primal Eye - Paragon Seeker Feat (PHB3)
Fix: Add to the prerequisite line “Seeker’s Bond class feature”.
Comment: This should really have been a seeker class feature. The damage boost it provides to Essentials ranged classes is far from reasonable.

Eagle Eye Goggles – Level 2 Uncommon Head Item (AV)
Fix: Change property to “Gain a +1 item bonus to your the attack roll for your first ranged basic attack in an encounter”.

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How much damage is a basic attack worth?

A while ago, we discussed some common methods for calculating the damage dealt by a character on average. However, it is common, particularly for leader classes, to have powers that deal a certain amount of damage and allow one or more allies to make an extra attack. Estimating the exact value of these powers is usually difficult, since it varies with party composition and the specific allies chosen. In today’s article, I’d like to provide some basic guidelines about how much damage to expect from a player character’s basic attack, depending on level.

Although the most immediate application is the evaluation of ‘extra attack’ powers, as mentioned above, knowing about average PC attacks can be useful in other ways. We could, for example, use it to estimate how painful it is for certain monsters to provoke opportunity attacks, or to study encounter duration across levels. I’ll take a look at this kind of issues in future posts.

Character stats

The following stats were chosen for this study. They are intended to include all the options that almost every character, regardless of role, normally takes: good ability scores, expertise feats, and feats to increase critical range at epic. Keep in mind that there is much room for improvement here, through specialized feats, paragon paths, and gear, but this should provide a good baseline. If your character is minimally competent at making basic attacks, he should perform at least as well as the numbers below show - or significantly better, if he focuses on boosting accuracy and damage.

Starting main ability score: 18. The character is assumed to make basic attacks with the best (main) ability score. For some classes or builds, this may require taking melee training at level 1. The ability modifier will increase at levels 8, 14, 21 and 28, as usual.

• Attack: Weapon attack vs AC, +2 proficiency bonus, 1d10 damage die, or Implement attack vs For/Ref/Wil, 1d10 damage die. Both are equivalent.


• Expertise: The character gains an appropiate expertise feat at level 5.


• Magic Weapon/Implement: The character gains a +1 weapon/Implement at level 2, and upgrades it at levels 6,11,16,21 and 26. No special enchantments are taken into account, but the crit damage is 1d8 per plus.


• Epic Tier: At level 21, the basic attack deals an extra d10 damage. Also, the critical hit range rises from 5% to 10% - this assumes the character takes a weapon mastery feat or its equivalent for the chosen implement/class.

In addition to these almost mandatory stats, we have considered the extremely common scenario where a character has a magic item granting item bonuses to damage, such as Iron Armbands of Power, Bracers of Archery, Staff of Ruin. We’ll provide damage values for both cases.

• Option - Item bonus to damage: The character gains a +1 item bonus to damage at level 2, and increases it by 1 at levels 6,11,16,21 and 26.

Hit Damage

With the stats described above, we have the following damage progressions. Only average damage on a hit is considered:

Since these tables are a bit cumbersome, and damage increases very linearly, we could approximate the values with simple formulas:

BA Damage (levels 1-20) = 9 + 0.6*Lvl
BA Damage (levels 21-30) = 14 + 0.6*Lvl

BA Damage (Item bonus, levels 1-20) = 9 + 0.6*Lvl
BA Damage (Item bonus, levels 21-30) = 14 + 0.6*Lvl

As we can see in the figures below, the formulas don’t deviate too much from the previous table. As a reference, we have also included monster damage progression, as calculated here.

Since our basic attack represents the lower bound of a PC’s damage, we can see that players will usually deal more damage than monsters of their level, even before taking at-will or encounter powers into account. However, this will not be necessarily true with monsters from Monster Manual 3 and later books, since their damage is higher - though we still haven’t figured out the exact numbers.

Hit Rate

The following figure shows the attack bonuses for our character’s basic attacks throughout levels, and the corresponding hit rates. These have been calculated as explained here. As usual, the character is assumed to be attacking a skirmisher monster of his level. Note that attack bonuses correspond with an implement attack; a weapon attack vs AC would have bonuses higher by 2 points. The chance to hit is the same for weapon and implement attacks, nevertheless.

As you can see, hit rates average 60%, never deviating more than 5% from that, and it tends to be slightly better at heroic levels, and slightly worse at epic.

Damage per Round

The next step, then, is to translate this data into actual damage dealt. We talked in depth about Damage-per-Round calculations in a previous article. The simplified formula that applies here would be:

Average Damage= (Hit rate * Average Hit Damage) + Crit Rate * Extra Crit Damage

We are still missing crit rates and damage. The rates are easy enough - the baseline 1/20 chance for heroic and paragon tiers, which increases to 10% with the appropiate feats at epic. As for the extra damage on a crit, it should amount to 1d8 per plus of the weapon, plus whatever damage you gain from maximizing each d10 (which is worth 4.5 average damage).

The table below shows DPR for characters with and without item bonuses to damage:

Adding striker damage, two-handed weapons

There are a LOT of ways to improve a character’s damage and accuracy beyond the minimum levels provided here. As we explained above, it’s not practical to go into every possible combination, so I chose to go for a straightforward build that can nevertheless be useful as a practical benchmark. That said, there are two hugely frequent character choices that affect attack performance and I wanted to comment: striker damage features, and two-handed weapons.

When talking about striker features, I refer specifically to those that directly add extra damage. Although there is a variety of these, the typical feature grants an extra d6 per tier to the damage roll, or some equivalent amount.

As for two-handed weapons, there is obviously a wide variety of them, including superior weapons, so it’s not easy to settle for a set of stats. Since our one-handed weapon attack assumed a +2 proficiency, 1d10 damage weapon, I’ve gone for the direct damage upgrade without feat investment: a +2 proficiency, 2d6 damage weapon. This would deal an extra 1.5 damage per [W].

The table below shows the increases in hit damage and average damage per attack from these options:

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