Friday, August 6, 2010

Essential preview: a striker fighter!

D&D Essentials class previews

Ever since the release of the first Player’s Handbook, Fighters have been one of the most damaging classes in 4E. Forget about roles and that stuff for a moment: these defenders have the right combination of class features, paragon paths and feats to give them a realistic shot at beating many strikers at their own game, when properly built. If you think that is frightening (and it is!), imagine a fighter build that was even more focused towards bringing pain, to the point of eschewing defender marks in favor of striker-like extra damage features. Heroes of the Fallen Lands brings us exactly that - it’s called the Slayer, and it looks brutally straightforward - and terribly effective.
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Essentials spoilers: At-Wills, racial powers and... a solution for Expertise?

As I mentioned yesterday, some bits of preview information about D&D Essentials have been leaked by the community manager at wizards’ site. We have a couple of at-will attacks (or rather, their equivalent for Essential fighters and rogues), a new racial power, and a humble feat that may be a sign of deep changes in design - not many things, but definitely solid stuff. Here’s my opinion on them.
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Thursday, August 5, 2010

Essentials Fighter spoiler: Battle Guardian revealed!

A couple of weeks ago we talked about the previews for the new fighter builds to be included in Heroes of the Fallen Lands. As could be expected, the preview teased us with a handful of class features and powers, from the many that the final text will have, which was all the more frustrating since there was one missing piece in the puzzle that was, well, essential. We had an innovative mark-like mechanic in Defender's Aura, but lacked the all-important class feature focused on punishing enemies for attacking your allies - the very core of any defender class. Thankfully, this feature (alongside other interesting information, which I may comment in a later post) was leaked in D&D Community Manager Trevor Kidd's site at wizards.com. Let's talk about it.
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