the ready action allows the heroe to place an order and either move or make an attack. if i move and place the aim order, i risk getting wounds and remove the order. if i move again next turn before using attack- i remove the order.if i chhose to aim and attack- why not just use battle. the probability of gettin X(missing) is the same if i reroll all the cubes (aim) or using battle and missing twice.

oren said:

The most common usage of Aim is to Aim and immediately attack. Aim is probably the least used of all the orders. I pretty much only use it when taking a swing on an attack where i drank a Power Potion especially in RtL. Otherwise I would agree that you are better off just Battling.

oren said:

First of, Aim allows you to reroll any of the dice, not necessarily all of the dice. That means you can keep the 'good' dice and only reroll the 'bad' ones.

In general, battling is better. However, if fighting very heavily armoured monsters then a single powerful hit (ie all dice good) is often better than two weaker hits. Eg, better to have one aimed attack that does 12 damage to a 7 armoured monster (5 wounds), than 2 unaimed attacks that do 9 damage each (total 4 wounds).
Or maybe you need a very high range result to hit and do that last point of damage on a far away monster. It might be better to have one roll only where you can keep the good range rolls and reoll the bad ones rather than two rolls which are much less likely to have either one with max range result.
Fear is also another reason to Aim, sometimes.

It is very rare for Aim to be tactically better than Battling in vanilla Descent. It is somewhat more common in RtL, due to vastly increased monster armour possibilities (generally +1 armour per level upgrade and bosses usually get +1 or +2 more), and also the large trait dice bonuses that are possible with enhanced fatigue and power pots. But even there, Aiming is usually a once or twice a dungeon level occurrence at most (and sometimes not at all).

Basically Aim is for when you need extreme results of some kind, rather than multiple average results.

In addition, when attacking a figure with Stealth, Aim could be a better option, since you now have two X dice in the set. If one is good and one is an "X", you can reroll just the "X", giving you a better chance to hit than in a second attack (which has again a whopping 45% miss chance). Not 100% sure about the probs here, maybe someone could do some number crunching.

Well, you know, I think this question about AIM only depends on the Dragon's movement, which is a very unclear topic in my opinion.......... Ok, i'm outta here

Very funny, Hem.

Ok, I crunched the probs in the meantime:

Two attacks against a Stealth figure: 19.8% overall miss chance

Aimed attack against a Stealth figure: 13.7% overall miss chance

If you REALLY need to hit that Stealth figure, you´re better off Aiming at it.

Against a figure with Stealth , you have a better chance of at least one hit if you aim than if you battle. However, you get a higher average number of hits if you battle, so battling is still usually better if you're fighting multiple monsters or if the monster is unlikely to die in a single hit. So even with Stealth in play, battling is still usually better than aiming in vanilla Descent.

The other time when aiming is potentially useful is if you're preparing to open a door and you have an extra half-action that would otherwise go to waste. Aim is the only order that isn't removed at the start of your next turn, so if you really have nothing else to do, it can't hurt. Of course, usually there's a threat of spawns, or you have less than maximum fatigue, and so a dodge, guard or rest is still often preferable.

Aim is really an incredibly weak order. I've been thinking it might be interesting to remove the rules where it gets removed if you suffer wounds or use it to make an attack, so that you could place the order once and then make a bunch of aimed attacks across multiple turns as long as you don't move or re-equip, but monsters die so fast and the heroes are usually in such a hurry that I doubt that would actually help much.

Also, imagine a situation where a ranged/magic character is the only one who can get to a door, but would have to run to do it. Why open the door when you can't attack through it? Why not hold up a little short of the door, put up an Aim, and let one of your teammates come up the next turn and open the door for you, so you can battle with an Aimed attack and a regular attack?

Rajamic said:

That's actually a good point! I had in my mind that you would lose the aim when you started a new turn, but looking at the rules that is not the case. So doing so you will have indeed an aimed attack ready when you start your turn.
Only thing is to be sure that you are actually able to attack (nothing else in the way/range/didn't suffer wounds/etc).

Looking at our Quests it's quite often that heroes discard half of their turn just making a single move/single attack after waiting untill the rest of the group catches up to continue.