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crime fighting hog posted:It's my understanding that the offline monster builder isn't around anymore? Or did people keep it kicking like the character builder? The offline monster builder uses the old monster math and never was given an update to any of the stuff from MM3 and beyond. I wouldn't suggest anyone use it at all.
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Jan 1, 2015 15:51
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Apropros of nothing, how flexible is 4E character design? Can you make a Striker Cleric or a Defender Wizard or a Controller Paladin with enough splat/feats? I'm just curious.
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Jan 2, 2015 15:31
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gradenko_2000 posted:Apropros of nothing, how flexible is 4E character design? Can you make a Striker Cleric or a Defender Wizard or a Controller Paladin with enough splat/feats? I'm just curious. A full-fledged striker will always do more damage with its own attacks than a cleric designed for damage--but you can still do lots of damage as a cleric and take abilities that increase your party's round-to-round damage significantly. A defender is essentially a different kind of controller already. Paladins that make full use of mass divine sanction powers are already considered the superior paladins optimization-wise and can apply different effects to things they're sanctioning. Any defender that can mass mark is already the superior defender.
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Jan 2, 2015 15:45
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gradenko_2000 posted:Apropros of nothing, how flexible is 4E character design? Can you make a Striker Cleric or a Defender Wizard or a Controller Paladin with enough splat/feats? I'm just curious. It's best to think of this stuff on 4e's own terms - power sources and roles. Power sources include Martial (hitting folk, magic optional), Divine (god bothering), Arcane (books 'n beards), Primal (nature), Shadow (vampires, bad mages), etc etc etc. Roles are defender (stop enemies hitting anyone but you), striker (single-target damage), leader (healing and buffs), and controller (area attacks and debuffs). For most of the combinations a class already exists. So if you want Striker Cleric you could try and wrestle the Cleric class (which is a Divine Leader) into the "single-target damage" pigeonhole using feats, splatbooks, and power choices. However, it'd be a lot easier to take the Divine Striker class (Avenger) as your starting point, since "Striker Cleric" is literally what that class is for. Likewise the Swordmage class is the "Defender Wizard" and the Invoker class is the "Divine Controller" class. (apologies if you knew all of this already)
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Jan 2, 2015 15:47
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gradenko_2000 posted:Apropros of nothing, how flexible is 4E character design? Can you make a Striker Cleric or a Defender Wizard or a Controller Paladin with enough splat/feats? I'm just curious. Long answer: Role is mostly baked into both class features and powers, so it's kind of tough to deviate with a few exceptions. That being said, most classes/builds have a major role focus (the one the class is categorized as) and one or more minor ones. Over the life of the edition, quite a few classes got enough support in their minor roles that they'll perform okay at the them in certain builds. They still generally won't outperform a focused primary class, but they can be useful and fun as a backup for the party's primary in either role. An example of this would be a STR paladin with a 2-hander and all the multi-[w] powers, which is a fun defender/striker hybrid.
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Jan 2, 2015 15:52
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Depends on the class and how much support they've gotten. Striker Cleric? Probably not, they lean toward controller in their power selection, though with certain items/optimization you can hit Striker damage benchmarks on any class. Striker Fighter? Easy. Controller Fighter? Yeah, that can happen. Striker Pally? Yea. Controller Pally? They have some aoe and conditions but idk how good they'd be for the long stretch. Certain Justice from the Champion of Order PP fucks up a single target tho. Defender Wizard? Please don't.
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Jan 2, 2015 15:52
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You can make a servicable strikery paladin by taking ardent vow, blackguard dalies, and picking one of the prestige paths that focus on damage. But even then you're relying on your mark to give you damage boosts and you'll be taking more damage than a regular paladin would.
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Jan 2, 2015 15:53
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How do you go about making a striker fighter? Does it stand up all the way to level 30?
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Jan 2, 2015 15:53
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By taking the parade of excellent striker powers the Fighter has (Rain of Blows, Bash and Pummel, Shock Trooper/Dreadnought PPs, etc etc) and swinging a big honking axe or two rapiers, and yes. It's not god-tier, but it's better at striking than a lot of nominally-striker classes (Blackguard, Vampire, for instance) purely due to in-class multi-attacks. 4e character building is very flexible - there are very few characters I've wanted to play that I've not been able to put on the table in one form or another; but you cannot CANNOT be married to the name of your class being important. A defender cleirc is a paladin. A striker cleric is an avenger. A controller cleric is an invoker. A striker fighter is a ranger or slayer, etc etc, the above notwithstanding. It's a game whose core philosophy is 'everything can be reflavoured' - if you want to make a character who, in-world, is a worshipper and preist of the war-god, you don't do that by taking the Cleric class and trying to wangle it into being a striker, you do it by playing a striker. The only archetypes I've found that it doesn't do very well are stealthy leader (for some reason they never wrote a DEX-primary leader class), ranged weapon user that isn't an archer ranger (ranged rogues and ranged warlords are iffy at best) and anything mounted (as in every other edition of D&D the mounted combat rules are lovely). Melee controller isn't amazing either.
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Jan 2, 2015 16:11
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One of my players brought up the question of whether you can just fire off an attack power that has an effect when there are no targets around to get just the effect. The rules on picking targets seem to support my point of view that you can't (and, more importantly, should never want to) but I could have sworn there was a line somewhere that made an explicit statement to that effect and can't find it. More to the point, is there a power hiding anywhere with an effect that's just too good for that sort of thing to be allowed? Is it no big deal on the basis of "it's your standard action, buddy, your PC can spend it breakdancing if you think it'll help but chances are slim"? Or is it maybe a big deal simply because you don't want people wasting their time breakdancing?
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Jan 2, 2015 16:33
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A skald can have Charisma and Dexterity as dual-primaries and make a bunch of ranged attacks. Not as stealthy as those with dedicated class features though, since you don't have things like Cunning Sneak or the ability to generate concealment or the bevy of powers that the rogue and assassin have for staying in stealth. Cavaliers have the only decent scaling mount, but since they removed the paladin level from the power it's no longer poachable by anyone else, so if you want to be mounted you have to stick with beastmaster ranger or fey beast tamer and then be small or smaller.
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Jan 2, 2015 16:33
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My Lovely Horse posted:One of my players brought up the question of whether you can just fire off an attack power that has an effect when there are no targets around to get just the effect. The rules on picking targets seem to support my point of view that you can't (and, more importantly, should never want to) but I could have sworn there was a line somewhere that made an explicit statement to that effect and can't find it. Dunno about rules as written, but it always seemed stupid to me that a character with a power that lets them teleport 5 squares as a reaction when hit would have to punch himself in the jaw in order to teleport 5 squares out of combat. I let my players use their combat powers out of combat and haven't had problems - which power are you worried about?
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Jan 2, 2015 16:36
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Well, the reason he brought it up was Hallowed Circle (Paladin daily 5). The effect lets him put up a zone in a close burst 3 that gives allies +1 to all defenses, lasts until the end of the encounter. That's not something I'm particularly worried about on its own because +1 isn't a very significant bonus, but I can't rule out that there's a power somewhere where the effect would worry me. (In fairness, I can't even think what that could be, but in a system written by WotC, better safe than sorry.) I dunno about that reaction teleport issue either. Teleport and forced movement are often used to model events that aren't literally "magically teleports from A to B" or "physically drags someone closer." But that's a whole other question really.
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Jan 2, 2015 16:50
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It's a daily power, who cares? I would only care enough to consider using a power's effect without attacking someone if the player attempts to cheese an at-will, and even then I don't think that you can make any kind of cheese that can break a campaign.
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Jan 2, 2015 17:01
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gradenko_2000 posted:Apropros of nothing, how flexible is 4E character design? Can you make a Striker Cleric or a Defender Wizard or a Controller Paladin with enough splat/feats? I'm just curious. Mu. A defender wizard would be a wizard who walks right up to the enemy and gets in their face, distracting them from attacking anyone else. You can't do that with the wizard class any more than you can do it with any other incarnation of the D&D wizard (although I would point out that a Pyromancer makes a pretty good striker). But you can easily be a spellcaster who walks right up to the enemy and gets in their face, using magic to bind them from attacking anyone else. That's the Swordmage class. Striker Cleric - no. A Cleric is a divine champion inspires their team mates (although you can make a pretty good controller Cleric). If you want to be a sword wielding holy warrior there's the Avenger class (or the Blackguard for the avatar of divine wrath in plate armour) - and if you want to call down the wrath of $Deity on your foes, an Invoker of Wrath makes a pretty good nuking spellcaster. Controller Paladin? A Paladin is a holy warrior in shining armour who's a beacon for friends and foes alike and in the thick of battle. A controller is a distance fighter who screws up the enemy and prevents them having targets. You can play silly buggers with some Paladin builds to really disrupt the enemy (like my gnome Paladin who started almost every fight by throwing out marks on everyone in Burst 3 then turning invisible) but if you want to call down the power of the divine to stop the enemy doing things, it's probably an Invoker you want (although it might be a Cleric). And as others have said, the big gap in 4e is the inspiring person you can't see (there are a number of Bard builds that aren't bad at this but none are great; I'd probably favour some sort of Lazylord* variant multiclassing into Rogue). * The Lazylord or Lazy Warlord is a type of Warlord that gives away all their attacks to other people and normally doesn't even touch a dice in combat. You need a certain mindset to find one fun to play but they can be very effective, and are frequently played as the comic relief. And there's no reason you shouldn't use powers outside combat or aimed at no one with the arguable exception of adrenaline-fuelled reactions.
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Jan 2, 2015 17:02
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My Lovely Horse posted:Well, the reason he brought it up was Hallowed Circle (Paladin daily 5). The effect lets him put up a zone in a close burst 3 that gives allies +1 to all defenses, lasts until the end of the encounter. That's not something I'm particularly worried about on its own because +1 isn't a very significant bonus, but I can't rule out that there's a power somewhere where the effect would worry me. (In fairness, I can't even think what that could be, but in a system written by WotC, better safe than sorry.) As for a rules reference, I think there's some advice squirreled away in the DMG somewhere about letting players use their powers creatively (like lighting things on fire with Fire keyworded powers and the like). And most of those will have a "Target: One creature in range". So I think the spirit of the game rules is to allow this kind of thing.
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Jan 2, 2015 17:02
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Generally, if it has an effect on an encounter, and they're expecting a fight, I'd be fine with kicking off a power like that - doing things like popping Moment of Glory immediately before kicking down a door behind which there are monsters is a time-honoured tradition among our group. But conversely, using a power that only works in reaction to being hit by something, without being hit by something is kind of a no-no for us. Similarly, Bag of Rats explicitly prevents doing things like this when you're talking about 'can I attack an enemy which is no threat in order to suck its HP or whatever'. In general, if it's cool, and particularly if they're using up a limited resource to do it though, I'd probably say yes regardless. If it takes them being attacked, between us we can probably come up with a justification for it, as long as they don't mind not having it if they're attacked properly before the next time they rest.
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Jan 2, 2015 17:12
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thespaceinvader posted:4e character building is very flexible - there are very few characters I've wanted to play that I've not been able to put on the table in one form or another; but you cannot CANNOT be married to the name of your class being important. A defender cleirc is a paladin. A striker cleric is an avenger. A controller cleric is an invoker. A striker fighter is a ranger or slayer, etc etc, the above notwithstanding. It's a game whose core philosophy is 'everything can be reflavoured' - if you want to make a character who, in-world, is a worshipper and preist of the war-god, you don't do that by taking the Cleric class and trying to wangle it into being a striker, you do it by playing a striker. Thanks for the all the responses! I knew about the roles and the encouragement of refluffing, but I wasn't aware of how power sources tied into that and how power source+role is a better way of looking at it (or just taking the role flat and refluffing everything)
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Jan 2, 2015 17:24
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gradenko_2000 posted:Thanks for the all the responses! I knew about the roles and the encouragement of refluffing, but I wasn't aware of how power sources tied into that and how power source+role is a better way of looking at it (or just taking the role flat and refluffing everything)
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Jan 2, 2015 17:33
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Primal's gimmick was being tougher- just about all of them have HP/surge counts that are one grade above normal for their role- druids have striker HP, barbarians have defender HP, wardens have more HP than any other class in the game. There may also have been a mild defender leaning towards the powers, though that's hard to determine.
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Jan 2, 2015 17:39
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ImpactVector posted:warlord if you count the barbarian as their weapon
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Jan 2, 2015 17:41
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Strikers swing weapons, warlords swing strikers. However, the best striker for a warlord to swing is either a Thief or a Slayer rather than a barbarian.
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Jan 2, 2015 17:51
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Poison Mushroom posted:The mental image of a warlord with a barbarian strapped to his arm like a shield made me chuckle. The words "fastball special" come to mind.
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Jan 2, 2015 19:10
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Maxwell Lord posted:The words "fastball special" come to mind. It would function just fine as a Warlord at-will: Standard Action, make an athletics check to jump, but an ally within reach jumps that distance instead of you and makes a basic attack. If the ally weighs less than your ability to lift, the jump counts as having a running start.
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Jan 2, 2015 19:20
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LightWarden posted:It would function just fine as a Warlord at-will: Standard Action, make an athletics check to jump, but an ally within reach jumps that distance instead of you and makes a basic attack. If the ally weighs less than your ability to lift, the jump counts as having a running start.
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Jan 2, 2015 19:44
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It is pretty funny that no one here even mentioned the Psionic power source.
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Jan 2, 2015 19:46
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crime fighting hog posted:I just downloaded Masterplan.
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Jan 2, 2015 19:55
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I got to play around more with it last night and yeah I'll kick him some dough. Our next session is tonight so I ran out of time to really utilize it but will from now on. Beats the poo poo outta using a big word doc for everything.
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Jan 2, 2015 21:32
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Funny thing is I couldn't run games without Masterplan anymore, but still prefer to keep my notes, structure etc. in big old text documents. I guess I just got used to the workflow. e: if the meaning of "workflow" is understood to be "change plans, notice two weeks later you haven't changed the documents to reflect the new plans, update three documents with huge overlaps in purpose and no cross-referencing whatsoever" My Lovely Horse fucked around with this message at 22:10 on Jan 2, 2015 |
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Jan 2, 2015 22:04
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You know, I thought the whole surge stealing mechanic of the Vampire class was interesting, but very under-utilized. Do you think a class whose gimmick was both stealing surges akin to the vampire and expending them to achieve various effects would be interesting? They'd play a sort of weird juggling game with an already quite important resource.
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Jan 3, 2015 02:22
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Tough to balance with the rest of the game, because surges for literally everyone else, aren't an encounter resource. Which means you're liable to wind up with the situation where the Surgestealer can keep on kicking for encounter after encounter when everyone else is ready to drop which isn't really ideal.
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Jan 3, 2015 02:40
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Obligatum VII posted:You know, I thought the whole surge stealing mechanic of the Vampire class was interesting, but very under-utilized. Do you think a class whose gimmick was both stealing surges akin to the vampire and expending them to achieve various effects would be interesting? They'd play a sort of weird juggling game with an already quite important resource. I did theorycraft a build that uses Twisting Fortune (Occultist Theme U2 Encounter Minor, UEONT spend a surge to roll an attack/check/save three times) to try and leverage the surge gain Vampires have, but it struggles because the rest of Vampire is lousy. The main problem with balancing such a class is that easy surge regeneration effectively removes the primary pacing mechanic, forcing you to limit what else the class has to compensate. I'm sure you can do a better job than WotC did with the Vampire, but I also feel like you're going to be running an issue similar to the Psionic classes where you end up spamming a handful of powers and ignoring the rest.
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Jan 3, 2015 04:12
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Yeah, usually you're better off MCing into vampire from a Charisma-heavy class because then you have actual functioning class abilities. If you're taking something like Martial Vampire, the Blood Drinker feat and maybe even the Vampire Noble Paragon Path you can generate something like three or four surges per encounter, but that won't really help your party unless you have an artificer, the Comrade's Succor ritual or an epic level cleric with Shared Healing. If you slap it on a class without dailies like a thief, elementalist or an atypical half-elf knight you can get the Eager Hero's Tattoo and then never take an extended rest again to roll around with a quite frankly ludicrous amount of THP until your DM hits you with a book. Slap it on a paladin (or bard who also MCs into paladin), then take the Vampire Noble Paragon Path for the level 16 feature, then run around in the sunlight to weaken yourself and immediately save against it so you can keep Hero's Poise rolling forever. I need to do a Murphy's Rules write-up for this class.
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Jan 3, 2015 04:40
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LightWarden posted:Yeah, usually you're better off MCing into vampire from a Charisma-heavy class because then you have actual functioning class abilities. If you're taking something like Martial Vampire, the Blood Drinker feat and maybe even the Vampire Noble Paragon Path you can generate something like three or four surges per encounter, but that won't really help your party unless you have an artificer, the Comrade's Succor ritual or an epic level cleric with Shared Healing. If you slap it on a class without dailies like a thief, elementalist or an atypical half-elf knight you can get the Eager Hero's Tattoo and then never take an extended rest again to roll around with a quite frankly ludicrous amount of THP until your DM hits you with a book. Slap it on a paladin (or bard who also MCs into paladin), then take the Vampire Noble Paragon Path for the level 16 feature, then run around in the sunlight to weaken yourself and immediately save against it so you can keep Hero's Poise rolling forever. Don't forget the classic Revenant cheese, endless death saves and the Belt of Sonnlinor Righteousness for that 10/20/30 resist all. Then mix in Meloriating Armor and the three rings for +milestones to all your defenses (and the Many-Fingered Gloves to wear all three rings at once), with Imperishable Destiny for +milestones to your ability/skill/save checks. You might not be very good at killing anything, but you sure as hell aren't going to die to anything short of an instant death power.
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Jan 3, 2015 05:02
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isndl posted:Don't forget the classic Revenant cheese, endless death saves and the Belt of Sonnlinor Righteousness for that 10/20/30 resist all. Then mix in Meloriating Armor and the three rings for +milestones to all your defenses (and the Many-Fingered Gloves to wear all three rings at once), with Imperishable Destiny for +milestones to your ability/skill/save checks. You might not be very good at killing anything, but you sure as hell aren't going to die to anything short of an instant death power. That Revenant Paladin you brought some time ago was ultimate level cheese, but righteousness cheese is almost too easy. I expect better from you, like rolling the attack on a burst 10 enemies-only four times.
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Jan 3, 2015 05:09
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:That Revenant Paladin you brought some time ago was ultimate level cheese, but righteousness cheese is almost too easy. I expect better from you, like rolling the attack on a burst 10 enemies-only four times. Well, I did have the Invoker with a roll twice on an enemies-only close burst 10, with an option of rolling four times on one or two of the targets. Rolling four times on every target takes more resources than I'd like to invest unfortunately. I'm still sad that character only triggered his crit-to-dominate power once when rolling 4-8 times on the attack with a 19-20 crit range. My rolling is terrible. 
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Jan 3, 2015 05:21
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LightWarden posted:Yeah, usually you're better off MCing into vampire from a Charisma-heavy class because then you have actual functioning class abilities. If you're taking something like Martial Vampire, the Blood Drinker feat and maybe even the Vampire Noble Paragon Path you can generate something like three or four surges per encounter, but that won't really help your party unless you have an artificer, the Comrade's Succor ritual or an epic level cleric with Shared Healing. If you slap it on a class without dailies like a thief, elementalist or an atypical half-elf knight you can get the Eager Hero's Tattoo and then never take an extended rest again to roll around with a quite frankly ludicrous amount of THP until your DM hits you with a book. Slap it on a paladin (or bard who also MCs into paladin), then take the Vampire Noble Paragon Path for the level 16 feature, then run around in the sunlight to weaken yourself and immediately save against it so you can keep Hero's Poise rolling forever. Funnily enough I'm actually playing the Paladin MC Vampire with Vampire Noble right now, in a party with an artificer, and it works surprisingly well. Probably not as well as using those feats for something actually good would, but it's effective and the surge-stealing minigame is fun. You can't do the weaken into Hero's Poise thing if you take the Divine Vampire feat for that extra surge steal though; it makes you immune to sunlight as a side benefit.
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Jan 3, 2015 05:33
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Debatable. The exact text of the ability says "if you end your turn in direct sunlight... you take 5 radiant damage (plus additional damage from your radiant vulnerability) from the sunlight, and you are weakened (save ends)..." while the Noble Vampire paragon path abilities say "In addition, sunlight no longer deals damage to you, and when it weakens you, you gain a bonus to saving throws to end that effect. The bonus equals your Charisma modifier." This implies that the damage and weakening are two different effects applied under the same condition. Divine Vampire says "...and you do not take damage from direct sunlight." but doesn't say anything about the weakening, so it's quite possible that it's the same "no damage, but still weakened" effect that Noble Vampire has. If it is, Rules Compendium says you can take end of turn effects in any order, so it's totally legal to do something like... End of Turn. (End of Turn in Sunlight)- Now Weakened (save ends) Save vs. Weakened (save ends) with +Charisma to saves- succeed. No longer weakened Succeeded at a save: Activate Hero's Poise. And thus you're only weakened by sunlight for half a second.
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Jan 3, 2015 05:50
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gradenko_2000 posted:Thanks for the all the responses! I knew about the roles and the encouragement of refluffing, but I wasn't aware of how power sources tied into that and how power source+role is a better way of looking at it (or just taking the role flat and refluffing everything) Yeah! Power sources are usually a good place to start, and then indeed you're liable to find a whole lot of additional options if you're willing to cast your net across the rest of the role's design space. For example, yeah, if you want to play a striker fighter, you could play a ranger, or a slayer, or a high-Strength brutal scoundrel rogue with Versatile Duelist and a longsword or a bastard sword (all martial)... or you could perfectly well play an extremely satisfying barbarian (technically primal, but if you don't choose the absolute most magical-looking rage powers, no one will ever notice). Or a monk (technically psionic but, again, no one will ever notice). It might even be possible to play an avenger (divine) if you're willing to reflavor some powers and overlook the occasional odd damage type (or buy a flaming sword to convert the occasional radiant/thunder damage to fire or something). Or if you want to be a mysterious priestess of Sehanine, a nimble, lightly-armored, charismatic lady who eschews the hammers and armor and IN THE NAME OF PELOR DO I SET THEE ON FIRE of typical clerics in favor of engaging in battle shielded only by her fey patron's illusions, infiltrating her enemies' minds and twisting them against one another with glamours and enchantments, here disappearing into the autumn wind to escape an enemy's grasp, there calling down the stars to dazzle and burn a foe -- don't play a cleric! Play a fey pact warlock! That is what fey pact warlocks are for! Or an invoker would also work -- as would a psion, or a wizard, or a bard, or a sorceror, or maybe a shaman or a druid, or a somewhat reflavored Dragon-magazine assassin -- but fey-pact warlock is the obvious choice there even if it isn't technically a divine class. Basically the operative question is, "what do I want this character to do?" Iny fucked around with this message at 08:27 on Jan 3, 2015 |
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Jan 3, 2015 08:20
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It is possible, it should be noted with sufficient system mastery to make a Cleric kind of Striker-y or make a Paladin sort of Leader-y. They'll never be as good at your desired off-role as a class that is designed for that role and they'll probably trade off some of their primary role capability to boot. But it's possible. I played a Cleric who beat things to death with his hammer almost as well as the Blackguard in the party, provided excellent defensive bonuses to the melee characters, usually helped set up CA from flanking and could still heal 4 or 5 times per combat. This is pretty unique to Cleric which has massive support (some of which is for a pure STR character) but it's certainly possible to tweak a class to fit multiple roles awkwardly. If your goal is to play a pure Striker Cleric though I agree with the general advice that you're better off taking another class entirely.
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