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thespaceinvader posted:If you're just designing a character for your home game, the most important thing is that you make something that matches your group's general level of optimisation. This here is probably the single most important bit of character creation advice you will ever receive. There is nothing more irritating than being a member of a group that's generally low-op except for the guy who built the twinked-out striker; the striker ends up melting everything and the rest of the group gets to feel like their contribution is meaningless. T
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Jan 8, 2015 01:00
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Gort posted:Having hard rules for determining who goes first in a combat is most important in "rocket-tag" type games where there are large advantages to going first. I dunno. That seems like a pretty good description of 4e to me.
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Jan 17, 2015 12:39
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thespaceinvader posted:Au contraire - if you build them right they can be very effective, and I've found that they let me kick back and focus on what I enjoy - the tactical combat game - rather than what I don't, which is picking out powers. The big thing that drew me to 4e was that my basic fighter had powers and poo poo and I wasn't just saying "full round attack" every turn. Learning that I had the options for all these different things other than "optimized basic attack" as non-mage classes was what made me fall in love with 4e in the first place. I might be a bit biased because of this, but I think that the "holy poo poo I can actually do things" feeling makes a fairly good argument for starting newer people off with the PHB stuff.
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Jan 22, 2015 05:59
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thespaceinvader posted:
Your baseline char-op level is significantly higher than that of the average player, imo. I would imagine that there's an awful lot of Straladins out there because Paladins have always been strength-based in the past and that's the mental image most people have of a paladin. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised at all if the most common Paladin build ended up being the Baladin simply because it lets people choose from all the powers.
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Apr 1, 2015 21:44
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thespaceinvader posted:If there's ever a world where a night's sleep =/= an extended rest, it's this one. Just say they can only sleep in town. This. I personally think that extended rests are better defined as something along the lines of "a rest that you take with a reasonable expectation of complete safety" or something along those lines instead of just "take six hour rest." Basically, if you're in any kind of situation where you'd reasonably want to set guards or take turns at watch or even just sleep lightly, I don't think you should get an extended rest just because you decide to stop for six hours.
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Apr 21, 2015 01:04
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The problem I always had with minions is that poo poo like Beguiling Strands can trivialize them right out of the gate at L1 and so they always ended up feeling like they were wasted encounter budget unless you designed the encounter specifically around making the minions useful. If I were to make any one change to minions I think I'd make them immune to burst/blasts, or at least require two hits from AOE.
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Apr 29, 2015 08:15
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Covok posted:I hope no one minds me asking, but is this character any good? Can he be made better? I am no expert with the system. I went over it and I made some changes. code:Some of the changes:
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May 19, 2015 16:17
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thespaceinvader posted:Barbs should generally go STR>DEX>Whatever because otherwise their ACs tend to suck. Derp, I always mix up my round/turn terminology. Hybrid Cleric is a strong choice, yeah, but I don't like to advise hybrids for people who aren't really familiar with system, cause it can be a huge pain in the rear end. It's definitely a strong option if you want more healing capability, though. Since I have nothing better to do today, here's a Barbarian|Cleric. code:
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May 19, 2015 19:22
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That frees up two feats from either build. For my pure barbarian build, I would look at picking up Deadly Rage and Improved Initiative, or maybe getting a Skill Power. There are some nice picks by level 10. Headsman's Chop is a great pick if somebody in the group knocks people prone all the time. This is also a fairly good place to pick up any sort of dragonbreath/flavor feats or the like that you want; the build as-is is pretty solid so the two bonus feats can be basically whatever you want and you'll be good. The same thing applies to the Barbarian|Cleric, but that build might also consider Defensive Healing Word, Battle Healer, or maybe Breath of Life.
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May 19, 2015 20:19
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These are what I would consider, in order of preference.
thespaceinvader posted:Thundering Howl should probably be your E3 (it gets two damage rolls, so you get all your static bonuses twice). Wellspring of Renewal isn't a great power, either, but I'm not sure offhand what's better in the Barb's arsenal. I've never agreed with that interpretation of Thundering Howl, and anyways that power got sacrificed for Rain of Blows since I didn't want to give up the Curtain of Steel. And, yeah, looking back over the powers at U10 I'd probably go for Barbaric Offering(save with +Cha bonus when you bloody/kill something) or Howl of the Alpha Wolf(move action, slide ally/allies 2 and you shift 3).
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May 19, 2015 23:37
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Fumaofthelake posted:What are some good, semi-broken options for building a heroic tier half-elf cleric? Looking to be primary healer and be able to do at least respectable radiant/single target damage and a little field management. Generally speaking, I find Clerics incredibly boring to play; the best way to play a Cleric is as Cleric|X and largely pretend that you are not a Cleric until somebody needs a heal. If you're set on Half-Elf I'd probably roll Cleric|Avenger Cleric|Invoker depending on whether you want more control or more damage, because Con/Wis doesn't have very many good matchups. Maybe Conlock|Cleric could be interesting.
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May 20, 2015 23:47
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Fumaofthelake posted:I'm not really set on cleric, but I am pretty set on healing. Do you have any feelings on more interesting alternatives for healers? If you're set on Half-Elf you might want to look at Bard. It's got some fun powers and some really good healing potential. Shaman(wis) and Ardent(cha) are also interesting/good picks if you can stand the fiddliness of the spirit companion and power points, respectively. Warlord is easily my favorite leader in the game. Lots of enable, lots of granted attacks, lots of battlefield control. It's Str-primary, though, so it doesn't play that nicely with Half-Elf. This isn't to say that Clerics are bad, mind you; Clerics are a fairly powerful pick and lots of people enjoy them. I just find most of their powers uninteresting. You've got an awful lot of granted heals/saves and an awful lot of single target minor-disable type stuff so it's pretty easy to go through a fight as a Cleric and feel like you accomplished fuckall. Hybrid Cleric is strong because you basically lose one Healing Word to gain a lot more potential; the burst of a Cleric|Avenger/Barbarian/Ranger can easily save your party more HP than your extra Healing Word would have granted. Khizan fucked around with this message at 01:14 on May 21, 2015 |
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May 21, 2015 01:12
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:Strictly speaking if you want the most powerful leader in the game it's warlord, because you grant free attacks to the striker. Outside of that warlord is pretty bleh and if you find having other people take your turns boring, it's even more bleh. Warlord is simply the charop choice, nothing else it does besides constant access to bonus attacks is that interesting (though before long these are insanely powerful). Warlord free attack powers are also nice if you hybrid because they're not tied to your ability scores, someone else is making the attack. The thing about the Warlord is that, while I might not be doing the real damage, it never leaves me in a place where I look back on a fight and feel useless. I set up the bonus attacks, shifted the battlefield, and had an impact on the fight. I never felt like I was just standing in the back of the room spamming Smite, which is what Clerics end up feeling like to me.
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May 21, 2015 19:18
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I'm not that big on pure artificers, but I love hybrid artificers.
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May 22, 2015 04:48
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thespaceinvader posted:Clerics are the best healers, but being the best healer is not a useful goal; healing makes fights longer and grindier, buffing and enabling makes them shorter and funner. This is a much better way of phrasing my problem with Clerics, and it's why I think they're so much stronger as hybrids. Cleric|X has a good portion of a Cleric's healing while gaining the ability to contribute to the fight effectively aside from healing.
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May 22, 2015 23:02
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The Avenger double-roll class feature adds so much accuracy that I really think you'd be better off going with a different weapon choice. The Avenger is basically the one class that can easily afford to drop accuracy in favour of other damaging weapon features.ProfessorCirno posted:On the note of clerics and artificers, I'm playing as a cleric|artificer now (fluff wise it's pure cleric, but I wanted to add some oomph) and I do wonder a bit if I'd have been better off as just pure artificer. On the bright side I do have access to almost every amazing leader PP in existance (Flame of Hope, Battle Engineer, and Luckbringer of Tymora) so choosing that is gonna be hard. The Cleric|Artificer is actually one of the only hybrid Clerics that I really can't stand. BCL is much less important because Artificer is Int-primary, you've got to be a wisdom Cleric if you want artificer riders worth a drat, and I don't feel that Cleric adds enough to artificer to make Cleric|Artificer a better pick than just a plain Artificer. If I wanted to hybrid an artificer I'd go Artificer|Swordmage or Artificer|Lazylord. If I wanted to hybrid a Cleric to make a better leader out of it I'd just add Warlord and go str primary.
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May 23, 2015 10:31
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Madmarker posted:Sorcerer can be a pretty bad-rear end striker, the enc 3 Flame Spiral I believe its called does great damage. Flame Spiral does great damage if you have a DM that's wiling to let you cheese out the zone damage. If you don't have one of them, it's still strong cause it can doubletap but it's not a gamewinner. 1st Stage Midboss posted:I'm going to be running a 4e campaign soon, for the first time in years, and I could use some advice on encounter design. The party's a Swordmage, a Warlock, a Sorcerer, a Psion, and an Invoker - will I need to design around the party's lack of melee capability or should I just throw close-up monsters in their faces and let them handle it? This party is going to have a rough time of it because it has no leaders. Also, I think two controllers with that party is a little overkill, especially since warlock and swordmage aren't typically rolling max DPS. I fully expect most of their fights to be on the long(and boring) side because of this.
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May 28, 2015 20:41
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The only ritual I feel is really important is Comrade's Succor, to redistribute surges amongst the group, so I'd just make that ritual into a standard thing that people can do during any short rest. If you want to use rituals other than that, I'd just say that during every extended rest the ritual casters can gather N gold worth of miscellaneous ritual components for free, with the caveat that they can't store them past the next extended rest. Choose N so that it is low enough that they can use rituals somewhat sparingly. They still have to pay surge costs.
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May 29, 2015 21:10
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homullus posted:I think the inconvenience of dragging the body around and being shorthanded is enough of a cost to the party, but if it literally has no cost, then you are playing in a setting where everyone can Raise Dead, and that changes a lot of other things about your world. Where everyone who can cast the ritual can Raise Dead. Raise Dead is a level 8 ritual and your local village priest, if he's especially badass, is maaaybe L3. Outside of adventuring parties, L8+ ritual casters are pretty rare and they're probably not going to work for free.
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May 30, 2015 22:27
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I'd probably just see if one/both of the players wants to run two characters. Defender/Striker/Leader or Striker/Striker/Leader can be perfectly viable parties, controllers are really fairly unnecessary. Could even make it something like "rogue owns a fighter-golem" to make the extra characters require little in the way of roleplay.
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May 31, 2015 23:03
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Pfox posted:Load their journey up with some time pressures (e.g. get this mulligan to the top of the peak before next day's dawn), and present them with some seemingly insignificant encounters along the way. Do they pause in their quest to help the farmer put the wheel back on his wagon? What about give a coin or two to the hungry family? Easy things to for adventurers, but it might make them late. Judge their worthiness based on how they treat the unimportant (fix a wagon at level 25? But I'm king of three nations!). This is so obviously a "how do you treat your lessers" thing that I think you should do this the other way around and penalize them for stopping to help. Call it a lack of vision, inability to see the big picture, etc.
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Jun 8, 2015 23:39
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Prison Warden posted:The best idea is to have the result be open ended, and not have a fixed "this is the right path" idea in the first place. Ideally you'd screw them either way.
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Jun 9, 2015 00:48
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The Crotch posted:Anyone have experience with the class/recommendations on bones I can throw them that don't involve the word "hybrid"? Don't. Seriously, that's the recommendation. Don't. The normal vampire is awful. It has an interesting surge mechanic coupled with terrible performance. They'll drop below par well before leaving Heroic and the gap between them and the other classes only expands from there on out. The amount of buffing you'd have to give the class to make them worthwhile has you basically remaking the class. The only real way to make Vampire viable is to hybridize it; the Vampire MC is not worthwhile because you gain the Vampire's surge mechanics without gaining any of the powers that make that mechanic work and you will end every fight by stealing surges from your friends. Vampire|Rogue is probably the best of these; dex/cha is a very strong rogue statset, martial vampire can give you 2 free surges per fight, and the rogue skillset of quick powerful strikes and dexterous evasion blends well with the whole vampire vibe.
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Jul 5, 2015 02:38
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Ferrinus posted:My experience with a mid-heroic vampire was that it was plenty capable of keeping up with other characters. The thing about vampires is that they don't get any multi-attacks and so can't apply all their static damage bonuses multiple times in the same turn; if you put them alongside other characters that also don't do that they're basically on par. No multi-attacks, no minor attacks, no multiple target attacks. No control. Fairly weak striker feature. The list of strikers with all of those problems is the list of terrible strikers that you should avoid using. The Vampire can maybe match the At-Will DPS performance of the real classes early on, but the problem here is that past L3 nobody is depending on At-Will DPS, really. The Avenger is using Avenging Alacrity into Fury's Advance with double rolls using a greataxe for monster crits and huge accuracy. The fighter is dropping rain of blows, the sorcerer is making GBS threads damage bonuses across the battlefield, the warlock just smacked one guy and then made him smack his neighbor which triggered the fighter's mark and let the fighter get a smack in on him too... and the Vampire is using the same At-Will he was using at L1, just with slightly larger numbers maybe. That's at L3. It gets worse from there on out. Even if the DPS was competitive(it isn't), this lack of options and powers still ends up sucking and making the class miserable to play.
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Jul 5, 2015 06:11
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Spiderfist Island posted:I'm going to make them a pool of characters to choose from since I'm more familiar with the system, but I'm looking for any possible ways I can speed up creating them I'd just ask them what broad concepts they want to play and generate characters off of those concepts. As long as you don't get too charop-y 4e can handle just about anything they come up with. Using the offline character builder you can crank out a solid character of any class in maybe 10 minutes. Maybe not optimal but certainly playable, especially when all the characters are at roughly the same char-op levels.
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Jul 6, 2015 13:17
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Spiderfist Island posted:I'm not in direct contact with most of the group, and I don't have access to the offline or online CB since I'm on a mac. The level 1 classes I'm going to make are as follows: Yeah, like TSI was saying, could crank those out in half an hour or so, easy. I would definitely stick with 4e, btw. It's got a lot more polish to it than 13th Age and since you're pre-genning the characters yourself you can build them in a way that emphasizes simplicity over fiddliness so there's not a ton of -2s and +2s and everything-always-prones to be dealing with. Personally, I would choose to avoid the controller and just add an extra striker if I were you; extra DPS wraps fights up faster and I generally find that controllers often add a lot of fiddliness for fights without adding much in the way of fun, especially at low levels, and it's pretty easy just to design an encounter around not having one.
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Jul 6, 2015 21:30
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I have two problems with that slot machine setup. The first is that it's possible to throw 6-6-6 immediately and short-circuit the mechanics almost entirely. Unlikely, granted, but possible. The second is that it's also possible to sit there rolling forever without ever getting 6-6-6. Either one will make the encounter sort of suck. This is one where I'd honestly just rig it. Determine you want the fight to last X spins and then just use the rolls to determine what comes up on rounds 1 through X-1. This lets you pace the encounter properly without having to rig it on the fly to account for bad RNG. This is something to consider with every fight in a gambling dungeon, imo; you need to have some way of mitigating the RNG baked into encounters to prevent them from dragging on past the point where they are fun or finishing up before they feel satisfying.
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Jul 11, 2015 21:11
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Whybird posted:(with standard-action skill checks to influence what it lands on) Ugh, the standard action skill check is one of the worst things in 4e, imo, especially when it has you doing something like "give up your attack for a chance to modify another chance".
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Jul 15, 2015 00:43
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My Lovely Horse posted:You know, good point. I guess with a good enough roll you should just be able to set one reel to 6 as a standard action. This sounds like it should trigger some kind of anti-cheating mechanism.
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Jul 15, 2015 12:23
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Farbond Spellblade is one of my favorite things for that when I think I'll get decent use out of the ranged function.
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Aug 1, 2015 08:57
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gradenko_2000 posted:How many fights is a 4e party generally expected to face between Extended Rests? IMO, this number is flexible. I think that a party should face an amount of encounters that is sufficient to stress their resources. If your party is sitting on 50% of their surges they haven't had enough encounters yet.
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Aug 8, 2015 07:11
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P.d0t posted:I would like to hear everyone's reasons for this, because I played with a rotating party that had 2 of them; the highest praise I could give for them was that the people playing them found the class "hilarious." I tend to judge Leaders based off of three different things. Healing, Defense, and Enable.
Of the three of these things, healing is the least important because healing is what you do after you have failed at preventing the damage from occurring; if you have damage to heal you've allowed the enemy to attack successfully. Defense is more important because defense prevents the need for healing and thusly it is more resource efficient; preventing hits preserves surges and eliminates the need for healing. However, for defense to matter you have to be allowing enemies to attack, which is decidedly worse than killing them before they can attack. Enable is the most important category, because enable prevents the need to heal damage by killing the enemies before they can deal damage. Killing enemies leads to shorter fights leads to fewer attacks against your party and less resources used. Enabling is by far the most efficient type of leadership and warlords are by far the best at enabling. Moving your team around, granting shifts, setting up off turn attacks, the warlord excels at all. You're a tremendous force multiplier as long as you've got some decent basic attacks around you, and I've had many fights as a Warlord where I come out feeling like I totally won that fight for the team. The Barbarian got the kills, but I set them all up. And it's not all lazylord bullshit where you just make the Barbarian attack, either. There's a ton of powers along the lines of "I hit then you hit" and the warlord can pack a pretty decent punch. The way I think of it, the warlord is a striker and the Barbarian is just its striker feature.
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Aug 10, 2015 04:18
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It becomes easier to flank, it gains the ability to threaten more squares, and it can potentially activate various dwarf/halfling type giantslayer-type feats and mechanics that deal with Large enemies if any of those would apply. The flanking thing probably makes it easier, but it could go either way depending on how the fight is set up.
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Aug 15, 2015 04:12
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Littlefinger posted:That's basically what many crpgs did, banned/restricted a lot of the problem spells and made people play blaster wizards. This is what we did for pencil+paper games, too. Otherwise you ended up with the problem of "The game is only fun for casters" and you got groups where your party lineup was something like '1 Wizard, 2 Clerics, 1 Druid" because people have learned that playing a fighter or a paladin or a thief is a good way to spend most of the game using basic attack actions while the casters get things like "choices in combat" and "spells that can handle your out of combat niche without a need for you to be present" .
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Aug 22, 2015 20:29
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Pfox posted:Encounters aren't balanced for player vs. player combat, so you'll spend nine weeks resolving a combat. More likely you'll spend 15 minutes resolving the combat and the outcome is going to be determined primarily by the initiative order.
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Sep 21, 2015 04:18
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homullus posted:This is what I would have said. A fight literally full of creatures than can Action Point and Daily can be suuuuuper short, especially if one side generally wins initiative. Like, literally, look at the damage each character at a given level can do with a daily, and then look at the HP of that same character. And then remember that if they have two dailies, they can use both when they Action Point. Some PC classes could KO clones of themselves in a single round, and two PCs (depending on class and power choices) could outright kill another PC in one round. And that's just damage. If a controller gets a shot at them before they can spread out...
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Sep 21, 2015 22:28
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Pfox posted:Length of time will depend on how familiar you and the rest of the players are with the system. Don't be afraid to call a fight when it's clearly decided for one side or the other, and only only only make players actually fight if there's something to be gained. A random encounter just for a random encounter isn't much fun for anyone. 4 encounters at a minimum. If they're still sitting on more than 30% of their healing surges after four encounters, give 'em another encounter.
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Sep 22, 2015 01:50
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Agent Boogeyman posted:During Heroic you want to keep combats as close to the level of the party as possible, usually Level+0 or Level+1 or +2. This really depends on the char-op levels of your group. L+0 wouldnt even be a speed bump for our group and it's probably not going to feel challenging until at least L+3. And, in my opinion, if a fight isn't challenging you shouldn't have that fight. Fights in 4e take so long that I don't think you should waste your group's time on any kind of mediocre poo poo that's just padding out play length.
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Sep 23, 2015 20:20
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Really Pants posted:Alchemical Items. Mostly crap, unfortunately. Better to just take a ranged class and reskin its attack powers. It's a good thing they're crap. Burning gold to gain temporary combat advantage is a pretty lovely system to balance around.
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Sep 24, 2015 00:36
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Brutal Barrage is a pretty binary skill, is the thing. It's broken or it's useless.
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Sep 24, 2015 03:51
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