Is Aggravated Damage really that dangerous?

[Kyeudo]

I came to this odd sort of realization the other day: Aggravated damage is only slightly better than Lethal damage in most situations. They heal at the same rate and Lethal and Aggravated Soak differs by about 2 points pre-Essence 5 and by only 5 points at Essence 10. Aggravated damage only really matters if the character suffering the damage has some sort of method to quickly heal damage, like Halting the Scarlet Flow, as most such methods don't work on Aggravated damage. Most Creatures of Darkness (the main victims of Aggravated damage) don't typically have such methods and the ones that do are Solar-derivatives and ignore such limitations anyway.


Something feels wrong about this. Aggravated damage feels like it should be something to fear, something nasty. As is, its 'slightly worse than lethal'.

 

[skafte]

It's not enough that you can't soak agg damage?


Aggravated damage in Exalted is something different than in WoD, my feeling is that it works better than in WoD where is easily gets way to overpowered.

 

[Moonstone Spider]

I think his point is that you almost can't soak lethal either, even a stamina 5 character has only 2 points of natural lethal soak, and armor counts against aggravated as much as lethal. So, for instance, when wearing a suit of non-artifact lamellar with maximized stamina your soak is 8 lethal, 6 aggravated.


For what it's worth, there's no hardness against aggravated listed for artifact armors but mostly I agree Kyeudo, aggravated isn't as potent as the system tends to assume.

 

[DasDom]

I found it useful for killing huge monsters with lots of stamina...but not for much else.

 

[Virjigorm]

The fact that agg is not able to be healed with magic makes it useful for putting enemies out of commission for a while, either to get away from them or to slow them down during a long pursuit or battle campaign. If you land some agg on the Wyld Hunt commander who is hunting you, he won't be back to full health when you double back and ambush him the next day, for example.

 

[Kyeudo]

For what it's worth' date=' there's no hardness against aggravated listed for artifact armors but mostly I agree Kyeudo, aggravated isn't as potent as the system tends to assume.[/quote']
When did Hardness ever thwart a serious attack?

The fact that agg is not able to be healed with magic makes it useful for putting enemies out of commission for a while, either to get away from them or to slow them down during a long pursuit or battle campaign. If you land some agg on the Wyld Hunt commander who is hunting you, he won't be back to full health when you double back and ambush him the next day, for example.

This assumes that the Wyld Hunt commander has access to someone who knows Dragon-Blooded Medicine Charms. If he doesn't, Lethal damage does the same job almost as good and doesn't require several motes per attack.


Also, interestingly enough, Ghosts (one of the most common Creatures of Darkness and thus one of the most frequent targets of Aggravated damage) almost don't care if the damage they take is Lethal or Aggravated. They heal both overnight, so its just a few points of Soak difference to them. It's Bashing damage they really fear, since Bashing can put them in a coma for eternity.


Further, how do you make Aggravated damage something to be feared without making it the Alpha and Omega of damage?

 

[Moonstone Spider]

For what it's worth' date=' there's no hardness against aggravated listed for artifact armors but mostly I agree Kyeudo, aggravated isn't as potent as the system tends to assume.[/quote']
When did Hardness ever thwart a serious attack?

Hence, "For what it's worth," which is to say, not worth much.
The obvious solution I came up with is to just make Agg heal half to a quarter as fast as lethal damage. This would primarily make it a problem for players, as a GM typically will have his big bad heal exactly as fast as the plot demands.

 

[Thanqol]

I think his point is that you almost can't soak lethal either, even a stamina 5 character has only 2 points of natural lethal soak, and armor counts against aggravated as much as lethal. So, for instance, when wearing a suit of non-artifact lamellar with maximized stamina your soak is 8 lethal, 6 aggravated.
For what it's worth, there's no hardness against aggravated listed for artifact armors but mostly I agree Kyeudo, aggravated isn't as potent as the system tends to assume.

3 points of natural lethal soak. Exalts always round up!

 

[Fabricati]

Nope, 2 points, it's explicitly stated that Exalts round soak down

 

[cyl]

Well you can always do the following:


- make it an unsoakable value bypassing EVERYTHING (the only protection could be the twilight anima): if the attack connects, roll essence, each suxx is a HL lost to the target. And then you deal with the regular damage. (which means some Martial Arts charm would kick ass !)


- apply the rule of uncool: Each Aggravated wound needs magic to be healed. (note magic in this case could be a counterspell per health level, as the essence spent remains tied to the wound and prevent the body from healing it).


- apply the rule of sick sad world: use both :twisted:

 

[Thorn Darkblade]

Nope, 2 points, it's explicitly stated that Exalts round soak down

What page is this on?

 

[Fabricati]

Nope' date=' 2 points, it's explicitly stated that Exalts round soak [i']down[/i]

What page is this on?

Page 101, core.

Note: Bashing soak equals the character’s Stamina and lethal soak equals half the character’s Stamina (rounded down). Only the Exalted and other supernatural beings can soak lethal damage with their Stamina.

 

[Kyeudo]

I generally throw that rule out in my own games. It feels so fiddly and also devalues Stamina 5.

 

[Persell]

For what it's worth' date=' there's no hardness against aggravated listed for artifact armors but mostly I agree Kyeudo, aggravated isn't as potent as the system tends to assume.[/quote']
When did Hardness ever thwart a serious attack?

When you're fighting Malfeas and he uses Devil-Tyrant Avatar Shintai and his charms to pump his Hardness into the 90s.

 

[Indon]

Well, what happens if you start with a source of Lethal damage that partially or wholly avoids armor soak, then use a charm or other power to make the damage aggravated? Don't you have completely unsoakable damage there?

 

[Beowulf89]

It helps with behemoths (and similar giant wriggly things), spirits... maybe automatons? Uhh... some Fair Folk...


Well, it's a lot better with Piercing damage as well, as the two blasts away the majority of a person's soak.

 

[Greenstalker]

Let's see. Aggravated damage is labeled as supernatural damage in its definiton at page 149. I don't see any problem with its current state of;


1) No hardness protection. This only affects Artifact armors but with piercing tag mentiond before its a threat to any artifact with 2 dot ot higher rating in core book since most of their hardness are higher than half of their soak.


2) No natural soak adds to previous ones problem with piercing making it hard to defend flurries of high rate, low damage weapons.


3) Hard to heal magically makes it a good hunting tool especially considering how long it takes to heal naturally. Example:for each -1 an exalt needs 2 days of rest without any way to heal aggravated damage (in core there is only a coupe of charms that can help this). So if you have 3 aggravated damage than you need 4 days of rest just to get down to 0 penalty health than another 6 hours of rest. Plenty of time for who was hunting you to find you in the middle of process and atttack again. Or double time for normal activities which means you won't be running away too far when they are hunting you.

 

[gatherer818]

I feel like I should mention that since in recent times faster healing methods are becoming available to Exalts, including combat-healing, Aggravated is feeling more and more dangerous. In my group, one person has Soothing Word of Wisdom and the main tank is a Lunar with both the regen Gifts, we're not used to Lethal damage lasting more than a handful of ticks. Aggravated bypasses the Lunar's regen and can't be healed by the Compassion stylist... suddenly the damage sticks for the whole fight. It sucks.

 

[Haku1]

I love Agg damage.


It prevents dickery in the form of quick heals. Like some spirit using their heal charm, some lunar with their regen charm, stupid solar medicine charms to accelerate healing.


It says no.


It also says to beings with MASSIVE stamina based soak, like behemoths, Raksha, spirits/demons/elementals, some earth aspect dragonblooded with anima up or exalts with soak charms up (lethal/bashing)... ahahahahahaha no.

 

[gatherer818]

this is a little off-topic, but I should mention the same martial art with the heal-other charm I mentioned above also has a "your unarmed attacks ignore natural soak" Form charm. Very nice for super-tough but unarmored targets - it's like aggravated damage, but with doubled wound penalties!