OK sorry guys I think we are talking past each other a bit here.

I agree if you are going to attack after drinking a power potion you should aim. Missing sucks and having the OL play a dodge sucks too.

But I am saying if your hero has 5 fatigue they should not use power poitions, they should INSTEAD use fatigue potions.

A single power boost (whether from a power potion or fatigue) is more valuable on an aimed attack than on a regular attack, because it carries the same cost, but you can reroll it once if it's blank, and they're less likely to be wasted due to a miss. And if you're going for raw damage, spending lots of boosts on a single attack is better than splitting them between two attacks, because if you need to spend some power dice to cancel armor/fear or to get enough range, you only need to do it once, rather than twice.

There is the separate question of whether a single aimed attack is better than two normal attacks. In vanilla Descent, two normal attacks is almost always much better--enough better so as to overcome the advantage from concentrating your boosts into a single aimed attack. But if you find a situation in which aiming is better than battling, then using up more potions or fatigue will tend to shift things further in favor of the aim, and the power potion allows you to concentrate all your bonuses on one attack.

I'm not convinced that aiming is a good idea terribly often even in RtL, but I haven't played RtL, I don't have all the stats for it, and the math is actually quite involved. You generally need to be fighting an enemy with a lot of armor and/or fear, and even in cases when aiming gives a better chance of killing the target with exactly one action, battling often gives you a better kills-per-action over the long term when you're fighting multiple opponents. There was a fairly lengthy thread about this on BoardGameGeek, but BGG is down for maintenance at the moment so I can't find it for you.

If you want to try doing a bunch of math, the spreadsheet linked in my signature may be helpful (though you probably can't access it, either, until BGG comes back up). Note that the "aim" functionality it supports is an approximation, so you'll still need to do a lot of math by hand if you want exact results, but it can still do a lot of the calculations for you.

Antistone said:

1) The cost for the boost on a aimed attack vs a regular is not the same. The aimed attack costs you one attack because you had to aim instead of battle, removing this from the cost of an aimed attack simplifies the compairison too much.

2) Given the fact that you can spend fatigue after you have rolled the other dice actually suggests you are far less likely to waste upgrades on missed or bad attacks form the get go. If you roll a miss you don't spend the fatigue you save it for another day. The fatigue spending is only on perfect information allowing it to at least break even for likelyhood of being wasted. I understand there are times you absolutly have to have an attack work right now. I suggest these do not happen often enough for a 5 fatigue character to buy power potions in the hopes of running into the situation.

3) I understand the armor and fear thing. However, I would say most of the time these can be overcome with your base attack dice. These dice get rolled both times for free.

granor said:

OOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHH.....okay yeah, I tend to agree then.

@Antistone: Unless I am using a Power Potion, I can't think of a single time when I've actually used an Aimed attack.

Oh wait, I do remember one time. I had Kirga and just got a Silver level bow that gave a good range bonus and some Pierce, plus I had Eagle Eye. I held a alleyway against Cooper level Skeletons in an outdoor encounter all by myself by making Aimed attack every turn and hitting them like 9 spaces away. It was fun. The alleyway was the one that 2x2 and has all the mud and water spaces on it.

1) I'm attempting to split the problem into two pieces for easier analysis. Piece one is whether you're better off making a single aimed attack or two unaimed attacks. Piece two is, if you have the option of spending fatigue either on an aimed attack or split across two unaimed attacks, which is more favorable.

If you favor the aimed attack and you favor spending fatigue on an aimed rather than unaimed attack, then the aim/power strategy is clearly better. If you favor multiple attacks and you favor splitting up fatigue between multiple attacks, then the battle/fatigue strategy is clearly better. If you get mixed results, then you have to ask which is more important.

My claim is that spending the boosts on a single aimed attack is better (assuming that you actually need the damage--if the target's dead anyway, things are different). Therefore, if you can justify aiming in the first place, then you can also justify using the power potion. You still have to justify aiming in the first place, which is quite difficult to do.

There's vigorous disagreement over how spending fatigue to add dice to an attack interacts with the re-roll from aim, so it's hard to discuss what effect that has.

2) I actually agree with you that this probably happens quite rarely, though I can't say much on RtL. In non-RtL, aiming is virtually never a good idea. You pretty much need to be going after top-tier monsters with shop weapons. Even Stealth doesn't usually make it a good idea.

3) Again, I'm not saying this is a typical occurrence, but the armor & fear do make things better for the single concentrated attack in some cases, and they never make things better for multiple attacks.

Oh, and Big Remy, I'm not entirely convinced that aiming is typically a good idea even when you do drink a power potion. You'll certainly feel bad if you don't aim and the attack ends up missing, but that tells us more about human psychology than about actual good tactics. The odds of a reroll (either an aim or dodge) making a significant difference on any given attack die are pretty small, and you can often do a lot of additional damage with a second attack.

But it depends who you're attacking, how important it is that you finish them off on the current turn, and probably on how likely the OL is to have a Dodge in his hand at that particular moment.

Antistone said:

My view is probably shaped largely by personal experience. I should probably add that i have a tendency to do it mostly on high armor monster and level bosses, since I've found that one strong Aimed shot does more damage than 2 normal attacks.

I've had times when I've made Power Pot attacks without Aiming and had everything work out fine, its more in the nature of added security. But since its about the only time I would actually use Aim, I might as well

I don't think anyone else has answered this yet...

The simple reason why a powerpot is still sometimes useful for a high fatigue character is that a power pot is +5 upgrades for 1 fatigue. The maximum attack you can get is with 5 gold dice - thats maybe 10-13 dice upgrades for most characters. A character with 5-9 fatigue, for example, can only get 5-9 upgrades on any one attack if he only carries fatigue pots. A character with 5-9 fatigue who carries a power pot can get 9-13 dice upgrades on any one attack.

Its that simple.

The whole aim vs battle thing is a completely different question, and irrelevant to the power pot vs fatigue pot question.

Aim is rarely (almost never) worth while in normal Descent. However, in RtL, due to much tougher monsters (mostly) and much greater potential additional one-off dice, it is mathematically worthwhile sometimes. In a separate thread on BGG I showed to my satisfaction (if not entirely to Antistone's) that Aim has definite benefits over battle in various circumstances - most commonly when a 1 hit kill is almost or just possible and there are a few fatigue available to be added if necessary. A battle, in such circumstances, will often require both attacks to hit (25/36 so fails 11/36), whereas the single aimed attack can often do the job far, far more reliably, especially with a few fatigue added.
Its not about the total damage over both attacks, its about getting the job done.

If anyone's interested, BGG is back up and the thread Corbon and I both alluded to can be found here . The discussion of the aim/battle tradeoff doesn't start until about 10 posts down. You are forewarned that it's a lengthy discussion.