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My impressions on D&D Next

2012-01-30T19:12:00.001+01:00

Well, it’s been an intense weekend! These days I’ve been too busy absorbing all that information about D&D Next and posting about it, with little time to stop and think how these changes will affect the game. Until now. In today’s post, I’m sharing my initial impressions on the new game – from my personal perspective as a 4E fan considering whether or not to switch editions when Next comes out.

4E features I need

To begin with, I originally had a list of must-have features that were key to my enjoyment of 4E, and I expected the new edition to keep. Given how much the designers like to emphasize the old school flavor and mechanics in D&D Next, I was pleasantly surprised to find that a lot of modern concepts introduced in this last edition are making the cut – including most of my favorite ones!

Here is the feature list, with comments on how they are getting implemented:

Tactical gameplay – A battle map and lots of mechanics that care about movement and positioning. It seemed difficult to actually have this in a game that was also aimed at folks who hate minis and squares, but they are including it as an option – the so-called “tactical rules module”. So far, it looks good to me.

At-Will attacks – Variety of at-will attacks will be available to both casters and non-casters. It’s unclear whether you will have them by default, or you’ll need to spend feats for them, but that’s fair game. Also, martial at-wills seem to be stronger than those of casters, which seems like a good mechanical niche for these classes.

Complex non-magical characters – The ‘dumb fighter’ archetype will exist in the game, but will not be the only way to play that class. The devs have promised more complex martial maneuvers will be available for those interested.

Non-magical healing – Little is known about this issue at this point, but it looks like at least some warlord builds will be able to heal without resorting to wands, gods, or other sorts of magic. I’d also like to see a second wind rule and something like healing surges in 4E, but that is more dubious.

Easy DM preparation – From what we have been told, the new game will be as easy to prepare for the DM as 4E, if not more! Monsters don’t follow the same detailed rules as PCs, and can be created in 5 minutes.

All classes are viable – This is the weakest point of the new edition, in my opinion. Obviously it’s too early to tell, and I haven’t even read a single character sheet, but some of the stated design principles will make it very difficult to have all character classes remain at as close a power level as I’d like. With the use of Vancian magic and, more generally, the eschewing of a common class framework, class balance should be hard to implement but still not impossible. What worries me more is the notion that non-combat class abilities can compensate for combat deficiencies (and vice versa) – I’d be willing to accept small deviations (say, classes that are 20% more or less efficient at combat/non-combat encounters), but I’m afraid that we will end up seeing something far more exaggerated.

New features I like

Though keeping the cool parts of the previous edition is a great thing, I wouldn’t bother trying out a new game unless it brought something new to the table. So far, it looks like there are a few nice ideas there, but nothing that moves me to immediately pre-order the books:

Lower bonus scaling – Attacks and defenses will grow at a slower pace in the new edition. I think this will improve the game, as it will let me play with wider ranges of levels for players and monsters - previously it was pretty hard to have parties of different-level adventurers, or encounters where the monsters had more than 3 levels of difference with the party.

Monster longevity – Thanks to the previous point, monsters will have a much longer useful life than the ~5 levels they had in 4E. If we are to believe the initial hype, a humble orc will still be a relevant threat to high level adventurers (though you will need lots of them to fill an encounter!). Conversely, we can assume that a single high level monster can be dropped on a low level party without the game breaking. I think this should make encounter design even easier and more fun. We can also expect minions, elite monsters and solos to be partially or completely replaced by monsters of very high or very low levels, in this model.

Skill system – I am moderately optimistic about the skill system, from what we have seen so far. Relying more heavily on ability scores and having many simple checks succeed automatically sound like great ideas, to me. The open-ended skill list might end up too fiddly and full of highly specific bonuses, but the fact that you can ignore that module reduces the risk.

Flexible multiclass – Not that we know much about the actual multiclass rules, but the stated goals of making them easy and flexible are something I fully agree with.

Emphasis on exploration – You won’t often hear me criticizing 4E, but if there is one thing that game was terrible at, it was exploration. Since this happened outside of combat encounters, the risk was usually reduced to losing a healing surge or two, and there was little excitement or fun. I have been toying around with some house rules to address this, but I’m glad that having proper exploration mechanics is going to be a priority for D&D Next

Faster mechanics – This is not a stated goal, but a consequence of streamlining the game for fans of earlier editions. Many of the changes point towards a faster-paced game, which is something I approve of. The option to resolve less important fights quickly without resorting to a map is also an interesting one, as much as I enjoy the full-fledged tactical combat.

Priest class – This may be a minor detail, but there were comments about splitting the cleric into two divine spellcasting classes: the classic D&D armored cleric, and the priest, a divine caster and healer wearing robes and with less emphasis on weapon use. Oddly enough, the priest archetype, though barely supported on previous D&D editions, is the more iconic fantasy character, even on D&D fiction like the Dragonlance series – and one I personally prefer.

Stuff I’m wary of

Though my opinion of D&D Next is mostly favorable at this point, there are a few things that might spoil the game for me, depending on how they are implemented. They are the following:

Ability-boosting items : I don’t like them, and I don’t think they contribute anything good for the game. I hope they kill them, or severely limit their effectiveness.

3 Pillar balance : The three pillars of the game will be combat, roleplaying and exploration. A class may be more focused on one of these over the others. I think this is an error, and prefer to clearly separate combat and non-combat features.

Vancian magic balance : Having Vancian magic that is well balanced with other resource management systems is not impossible, but will require a lot of effort.

Rollling abilities by default : I shouldn’t be bothered by this, since the option to use point buy still exists. Nevertheless, I’m afraid that this as a default may make for a poor game experience for starting players.

Saving throws instead of attacking vs defenses : I loved attacking vs Fortitude, Reflex and Will in 4E, and don’t particularly enjoy the move back to saving throws. I’ll probably houserule this in my games to have attacker roll against static values.

Roleplaying to use different saving throws: This sounds like a good idea in theory, but can get old very soon. Unless there are heavy limitations on this, you’ll end up with bard players trying to justify using their Charisma based for every attack.

Return to the old cosmology : Again, I shouldn’t mind something that is easy to ignore in my games, but I really liked some aspects of 4E cosmology (like the feywild and other new planes), and I’d wish they were still supported.

Are combat roles dead? : This is speculation, but we have heard nothing about combat roles in the new edition. Knowing it is a very delicate issue with old school fans, chances are we won’t be seeing them, at least in an explicit way.

Verdict

I’m not sold yet, but I’m moderately interested. Let’s see how the playtest turns out.

So, what do you think? Did you like the previews, or have you decided the new game is not for you?

D&D Experience: Reimagining Skills and Ability Scores

2012-01-30T00:48:00.001+01:00

The final D&D Experience seminar previewing game mechanics for D&D Next is called “Reimagining Skills and Ability Scores”. Along with the major changes to ability scores and the brand-new, open-ended skill system, there is talk about other topics, including equipment, themes, and the use of battle maps.

Ability Scores

When characters reach certain ability scores, they can automatically succeed at some checks without need to roll. This can vary depending on being in or out of combat or stressful situation.
Races change ability scores (both with bonuses and penalties!). Likely a +1 bonus to a single stat.
Classes give ability bonuses. Also looks like they will use a +1 to a single stat.
By default, abilities are generated by rolling! Roll 4d6, choose 3 highest.
Point buy generation will also be included as an option.
They want to have ability-boosting magic items (like Gauntlets of Ogre Power). There is talk of capping how much they can increase ability scores, though.
Ability scores will not increase as much [as in 4E] as you level up.

Saving throws

Saving throws are now directly associated with ability scores - the game now has six types of saving throws, rather than three defenses (Fortitude, Reflex, Will).
These six saving throws plus AC should make up all of a character’s defensive stats.
As an example, Charisma saves vs fear and charm.
If you justify it and provide a good description, you can use a different ability for a save.

Skills

The main means of interaction is the ability roll.
Skills are basically modifiers to ability rolls.
You may still be trained in a skill, and gain specific bonuses (e.g. moving faster while using stealth).
Since skills are now secondary, they can afford to include niche skills. Skills as flavorful options, rather than something with a lot of mechanical importance.
Skills are a module that can be ignored (in favor of just using ability scores).
There is mention of “open-ended” skills. This likely means that the game doesn’t actually have a closed skill list. Classes, themes and other options can add as many new skills as the designers feel like.
There is a bonus called “advantage” that a DM can provide for players giving good descriptions. This should be the non-combat equivalent for “combat advantage”, in 4E.
Skill challenges were considered a failure. They are not coming back.

Equipment

The standard coin will be silver, rather than gold.
Some mundane gear will be out of reach for lower level characters. No plate mail at first level.
Implements are still in the game, including non-magical ones.
Weapons can have different damage and accuracy. Weapon damage types (slashing, piercing, bludgeoning) are being considered.

Themes

In addition to race and class, characters can pick a theme, representing their background before they go adventuring. The same basic concept as 4E themes.
Theme examples they mentioned include potion-maker, blacksmith, commoner, noble, knight, apprentice, planetouched.
Themes can also be used to replace niche classes from previous editions. For example, Avenger will be a theme.
They are also considering themes for certain races, like deva.
No theme is restricted to specific classes.
Themes are an optional module.

Battle map

The use of a battle map is included as an optional module in the initial book: the “tactical rules module”.
Character options specifically useful with a battle map (such as abilities that push enemies) will be flagged for convenience. They will still be usable even without that module.

Other

Adventure preparation time will be quick, 4E style. Monsters use different rules as PCs, can be built in 5 minutes.
They seem to be looking for a middle point for lethality - not as much as earlier editions, but more than 4E.

D&D Experience: Class design, from Assassins to Wizards

2012-01-29T10:13:00.001+01:00

Yesterday we had the second D&D Experience seminar about the future of the game. With the title “Class design: From Assassins to Wizards”, this one covered a very important aspect of D&D we had yet heard very little about. What exactly were the designers planning to borrow from each edition of the game? As it turns out, it appears that they really want to follow the aesthetics and presentation of 3.5 and older games, while borrowing some great ideas introduced by 4E, including at-will powers, a well defined mathematical framework, and an interest in balance.

On complexity:

Different levels of complexity for classes: There will be some clear choices for beginners, and more sophisticated stuff.
There was talk of labeling each class as common, uncommon or rare. This will be a function of how iconic a D&D class is (Fighters and Wizards are commons, Assassins are rare), and may also be tied to complexity (with higher rarities getting more difficult stuff).
Different levels of complexity within each class. Once again, the example of the fighter was given: A very easy to run fighter build will exist, but adding options and complexity to it will still be possible. The wizard is also explicitly mentioned as a not so complex starting build.
Buying complexity. By default, classes can get simple yet effective stuff when leveling up, like more damage or bonuses to hit. Players would have the option of trading these bonuses for new powers or features.

On balance:

Balance is on their radar, and they seem to have put a lot of thought into it. They have a framework with estimates of average length of adventuring days and encounters, and at several times they mention figures for damage expectations of different classes.
That said, their approach to balance will be quite different from 4E. Whereas that edition had a common resource management system for all classes, this will no longer be the case for D&D Next. Expect wide differences in how each class handles its powers. Old school vancian magic for wizards and clerics has been mentioned as a prime example.
Another big change: It is no longer expected that all classes have to be equally effective in combat. Some classes may be weaker in combat but stronger in exploration or role play. More than anything else mentioned in these seminars, this seems to me to be the most dramatic change from the previous edition - though it remains to be seen how they will finally implement it.

What to include:

Initial goal is to have “Everything that has been in a Player’s Handbook I” from the start.
Regarding classes, this means: fighter, rogue, cleric, and wizard (of course), but also assassin, ranger, druid, paladin and bard, as well as barbarian, monk and sorcerer (from 3E) and the more recent warlords and warlocks. That’s a lot of stuff!
Psions are explicitly mentioned as being left for later.

On Magic

Vancian magic (the daily spell system used in all editions before 4E) is returning, and confirmed as the resource system for wizards and clerics.
No details have been provided, but I strongly believe that the system will mimic the classics in that there will be 9 levels of arcane spells and 7 levels of divine spells, and spell progression should look very much like this.
The main challenge for Vancian magic is preventing the “linear fighters, quadratic wizards” syndrome. The designers are aware of this, and are trying to deal with it.
One of the solutions implemented consists in removing spell scaling. As an example, Fireball (a 3rd level spell) will deal 5d6 damage regardless of caster level (when previous versions dealt 1d6/caster level, up to 10d6). The only way to gain stronger effects will be to use higher level spells.
For high level casters, instead of having dozens of lower level spells as in older systems, these slots will be replaced with higher level stuff. It is not clear if this will be the default behavior, or just an option, though.
Also, they are looking at average duration of encounters and adventuring day, and balancing around that.
Another crucial point: despite the Vancian system, casters will have access to at-will spells (so no more crossbow-wielding wizards!). However, these at-will attacks will be significantly weaker than their martial counterparts. Spells available per encounter also appear to be in the plans.
Ritual magic (useful but non-combat spells, like crafting, scrying or teleporting) is back. It looks like it will be open-ended and not as strongly tied to the wizard class as before.

On Aesthetics

The designers are carefully avoiding many 4E specific terms and definitions, in favor of older style wording.
Notably, there is no mention of “powers” for classes.
For the wizard class, at-will attacks are being called “magical feats”.
Power sources will no longer be explicitly mentioned.
Explicit class roles are very likely also gone (though this is speculation!)

Other

Clerics are (finally!) getting split into two archetypes: the classic D&D holy warrior with heavy armor, mace and shield, which will be called cleric, and an unarmored divine character more focused on spellcasting, called the priest.
Magic items will be more rare, and no longer expected to be a part of character progression.
For multiclassing, they want it to be very easy and flexible, 3E style.

D&D Experience: Charting the course (for D&D Next)

2012-01-26T22:36:00.001+01:00

This weekend we have the Dungeons & Dragons Experience, where WoTC is expected to reveal some interesting information about the next edition of the game (also known as D&D Next, for now). As usual, I haven’t been able to attend, but that doesn’t mean I can’t provide some coverage! The transcript for the first seminar, titled “Charting the Course” is available at wizards.com, and I have taken some notes of the highlights.

On leveling up:

For all editions, the game suffers important changes at a certain level
They consider 4E highlights this high level change the best [through explicit paragon and Epic tiers and mechanics]
They are looking at options that characters unlock at certain level. They mention castles and followers as examples.

On power increase as you level up:

They are discussing how power and number of options should be affected by level.
They want monsters to be relevant for a wider level range. The way to do this is to slow the rate at which attacks and defenses advance!
Ideally, you should be able to drop a random orc at a high level party and have it be relevant. Building encounters by taking any iconic monsters from the manual should be easy.
Your characters are still becoming badass heroes. At high levels, you’d be killing lots of those orcs in an encounter...

On the modular system:

They acknowledge the variety of tastes, including contradictory positions. They intend to take all of these into account - but no specifics as to how, yet.
A player suggests going for a freeform classless system. That doesn’t seem to be in the plans - They are commited to the class system, and consider the feeling of D&D classes very important. Wizards and Rangers are mentioned as examples.

On multiclassing:

They want it to be simple
Iconic class features are important
Packages to grant certain features or qualities

On randomness:

Some DMs like random generation of stuff. There will random tables for those who want them.

On switching modules:

The goal is that switching can be done very easily, from one encounter to the next. Turning on and off stuff like minis/grid is mentioned.
Players can add (and presumably remove) modules to adjust complexity of their characters as they level up.
An example is provided for two fighters at the same table with very different complexity levels: a classic “hit with my sword” basic fighter, and an advanced one focusing on “combat maneuver options”.

Game Math: Attack of the average adventurers

2012-01-11T17:01:00.001+01:00

How hard does an adventurer hit? The underlying math behind monster stats in D&D 4E is well known by this point, but working out the numbers for player characters is a much trickier proposition, due to the insane amount of customizability that the game offers. Indeed, if one looks to the most extreme build options and loopholes available out there, we come up with characters that can one-shot standard monsters of their level, and it’s even possible to engineer wizards capable of dealing hundreds of damage in a single turn... while charging with a melee weapon.

Since the optimized scenarios present so much variability, I want to focus on the most basic builds. What kind of numbers should you expect from characters of a certain level, provided they have the essential options and gear, but nothing else to boost their attacks? The answer is in the table below:

Note that this builds on some previous articles, like my study on basic attacks, and on character survivability. Damage Per Round, or DPR, is defined here.

I will devote the rest of the article to analyze these numbers, and explain how I came up with them. For now, keep in mind that although it is possible to have characters with attack stats slightly below these, it won’t be a common scenario - in most games, you can expect PC attacks to deal at least as much damage as shown in the table, if not considerably more.

Building our baseline adventurer

My philosophy for building the reference character was to give it all the offensive resources that can be considered essential - and nothing more. Any character built without particular attention to damage dealing should have attack stats very similar to those of the reference character, whereas damage-focused PCs (even if not particularly optimized) should easily outperform it. For reference, I also added damage numbers for a baseline striker (adding just the striker extra damage class feature), though in practice you will very rarely see a striker character which doesn’t devote feats, powers and equipment to improve his attacks.

Following these ideas, the character was build under these assumptions:

For simplicity, we only examine the character at certain critical levels: 1, 6, 11, 16, 21, 26, 30.
Starting 18 on primary ability score, with the usual boosts for levelling up. At epic, the PC gains a +2 to his ability score from an epic destiny .
At-will attacks are implement vs For/Ref/Will or weapon (with +2 proficiency) vs AC (same hit rate), and on a hit deal 2d4 + primary ability modifier damage (4d4+mod at level 21).
Encounter attacks are like at-will, but on a hit they deal 4d4+mod damage (levels 1,3,7), 6d4+mod (levels 11, 13,17) or 8d4+mod (levels 23,27).
Magic weapons/implements by level: Level 6 (+2), Level 11 (+3), Level 16 (+4), Level 21 (+5), Level 26 (+6). Extra crit damage is 4 per plus (rounded for convenience).
Only two feats are considered: Weapon/Implement expertise, and Weapon/Implement focus. Both are gain at level 6.
Magic items granting item bonus to damage (like Iron Armbands of Power or Rod of Ruin) are assumed. Item bonus to damage by level is: Level 6 (+2), Level 16 (+4), Level 26 (+6).
For the striker damage numbers, a class damage bonus of +4/tier is added.
Character themes are not considered.

Most of these points represent very common choices. The use of 2d4 for attack damage is unusual, but I chose it because the most common damage dice are d8s and d10s, so this is an intermediate point between those, with the advantage of averaging an integer value ( 5), allowing for much cleaner results. The starting 18 ability score is more or less standard (though 20s are also common). Likewise, the magic weapon/implement progression and use of expertise feats are pretty much universal. The most controversial points are probably the addition of weapon/implement focus and item bonuses to damage. Focus feats are often ignored at lower levels (though usually because players take superior weapons instead, wich are roughly equivalent), but tend to become too tempting to pass on by paragon tier. As for item bonuses to damage, virtually every character who can take them does so, though certain builds (i.e. implement PCs not using staves) have a hard time acquiring them. I have come to accept that game math works better with them, to the point of giving them for free as a house rule.

Note that attack powers (both at-will and encounter) have been greatly simplified. Non-damaging effects of the attacks are ignored, and we assume that the attacks themselves don’t provide extra damage, above that of a basic attack (for at-wills) or a basic attack plus extra damage dice (for encounters). Power damage shows great variance, though a very common implementation for attacks with extra damage consists on adding a secondary ability modifier to the damage roll, which can be roughly approximated as an extra 3 damage per tier (or about 25% more damage than the attacks in the table).

A look at the numbers

A spreadsheet with the calculations used for the stat table can be found here.

Some quick facts that can be derived from the table and spreadsheet:

Hit rate against same level monsters averages 65%.
Base damage of strikers is about 30% more than that of non-strikers.
Average base damage actually decreases a bit between level levels 26 and 30.
Interestingly, crit damage is almost exactly twice the normal damage for most levels.

One very interesting parameter that can be calculated from these attack stats is the average time it takes for a PC to kill a monster, which allows us to estimate how many turns combat encounters usually last:

And for striker PCs:

These tables show the number of turns that the reference character would need, on average, to kill a skirmisher monster. The PC first uses all his encounter powers, and then attacks with his at-wills. Daily attacks were not considered because they are hard to characterize and not always available. Action point usage is also ignored - for the purposes of this table, using an action point is equivalent to taking an extra turn.

In the tables and spreadsheet, we see that:

Non-strikers take 4-6 turns to kill a monster at heroic, 7-8 at paragon, and 8-10 at epic.
Strikers take 25% less turns.
Very challenging encounters can take almost twice as long.
The contribution of encounter attacks amounts to about 1 turn of saved time.

An important point about these numbers is that they suggest that combat at paragon and epic tiers takes too long. In my opinion, easy encounters (between level and level +1) should last about 4 turns at heroic and 5-6 turns at paragon and epic, to allow characters to use all their attacks without requiring them to spend a long time spamming at-wills. However, it should be noted that the deviation between the stats of our base character and actual damage-focused PCs increases with level - in my experience, it is perfectly possible to build a party of characters that end fights in reasonable times with little or no optimization effort.

5

2012-01-09T16:30:00.001+01:00

So. D&D Fifth Edition is announced. Now what?

At this point, we know nothing about the actual game – it’s way too early in development – but its design process sure looks interesting. They want feedback from the community, and will start an open playtest sometime this spring. I definitely intend to participate, and post my opinions on the process on this blog. That said… I don’t really know if I’ll make the switch to the new game.

As you may have guessed by now, I’m in love with D&D 4E. It is by no means a perfect game (I wouldn’t be able to write as much about how to fix it, if it were!), but it is the closest thing I’ve found. It has an amazing tactical combat system, a solid rules framework, and requires an extremely low amount of effort from the DM. It has been a live game with regular updates, fixing most of the broken stuff, and overall polishing the engine. It is quite easy to generate house rules and new content for it. And it’s FUN.

On the other hand, it can’t be said that 4E has been a rousing success, from a business perspective. I wouldn’t call it a straight failure, either, but it’s clear that it has not lived up to the high standards that should be expected from a brand as strong as Dungeons & Dragons. The strong reaction against 4E from a significant portion of the D&D community, which eventually led to the huge success of Pathfinder RPG (an independent D&D 3.5 spinoff which has reportedly overtaken D&D in sales over the last year) was a big hit against it. Also, the controversial semi-reset of the edition brought by the D&D Essentials line by the end of 2010 (barely 2 years after the game had come out) was a sign that something was off – and an attempt to turn the tables which didn’t work out all that well.

In light of this, it’s not surprising that one of the primary goals of D&D 5E will be to regroup this fragmented fanbase. The open playtest (an idea borrowed from Pathfinder’s book, by the way) is a step in this direction, as are most of the ideas and discussion presented on the Legends and Lore column, over at the official D&D site. They want “a game that rises above differences of play styles, campaign settings, and editions, one that takes the fundamental essence of D&D and brings it to the forefront of the game” – but is such a thing really possible? Right now we have three very different kinds of players, between the players of D&D 4E, those of D&D3E/Pathfinder, and the ones that enjoy older editions of D&D or retro-clones. Those groups share in common the love for exploring Dungeons and slaying Dragons, but other than that, their games of choice are quite different from each other. I honestly can’t imagine how a single game could please all of them.

I have a lot of faith in Wizards of the Coast as a company, and in the ability of designers like Mike Mearls to produce great games, and I fully understand the reasoning behind their current design priorities. That said, while I believe that however D&D 5E turns out it will likely be an enjoyable game for me… I suspect I won’t enjoy it as much as 4E.

If I could make the wish, the best possible fifth edition for me would be a light revision of 4E, cleaning up all of the minor problems with the system (feat taxes, masterwork armor, multi-attacks, skill scaling, defense scaling, minion design…) and presenting a clean slate for classes, feats, and magic items… while remaining mostly backwards compatible with existing 4E material. This is something I would greatly enjoy, and gladly spend money on. It’s also NOT what D&D 5E is likely to be – rather, in order to appeal to the majority of the fanbase, the new edition will need to take elements from 4E, but also from 3E, older editions, and something brand new. So chances are that this new game will have less of what I currently enjoy, rather than more.

Of course, they might still surprise me – and I keep my fingers crossed. For now, I expect to spend the following months trying to make D&D5E as great a game as possible… and maybe, when all this is over, I’ll go back to my good old Fourth Edition – and keep playing it and slowly changing it to be my own Perfect Game.

Anatomy of the At-Will (III): Weak broken options

2012-01-02T17:11:00.001+01:00

We continue our journey through the most poorly balanced powers available for the at-will slot. After discussing the overpowered stuff in the last article, today we examine something much less exciting - the unplayable and boring. They are the following powers:

Plain basic attacks

Problem: The first batch of powers is likely the most bland and unimpressive in the game. Simply put, they are simple basic attacks with no special mechanic whatsoever. What any weapon-based character can achieve by simply equipping a longbow, these arcane classes can get for the cost of an at-will slot. To make things worse, two of these attacks are mandatory for their builds, so we cannot even pretend they don’t exist...

On the upside, I can make up whatever I like as a solution for these powers, since they are a blank slate. I’ll tend to err towards simple effects that are nevertheless more compelling than “hit for standard damage”.

Acid Orb – Sorcerer At-Will (PHB2)

Suggested Fix: One of the mechanics I associate with acid attacks is hurting enemies even on a missed attack (due to acid corroding armor, or something like that). This looks like a good fit here.

Change Hit line, add Effect line.
Hit: 1d10 acid damage.
Level 21 : 2d10 acid damage.
Effect: Charisma modifier acid damage.

Note that this wording allows some unusual tricks, like auto-killing minions or triggering vulnerabilities twice.

Eldritch Blast – Warlock At-Will (PHB)

Suggested Fix: This power, too, seemed like a good candidate to give miss damage. In this case, I thought using the warlock’s curse would allow interesting interactions (including making good use of feat support for curses)

Add Miss line.
Miss: You can deal your warlock’s curse damage against the target. This damage does not benefit from any bonuses to damage rolls.

Eldritch Bolt - Warlock At-Will (HotFK)

Suggested Fix: Though the notion of using damage on a miss here was tempting (just kidding, I promise!), I felt I couldn’t pass on the opportunity to fix a hole in the Hexblade design. See, something I always found annoying on Hexblades is the fact that your pact boon works much worse when you are stuck attacking from a distance. Enter the new and improved Eldritch Bolt:

Change Hit line, add Effect line.
Hit: 1d10+Charisma modifier force damage. If this attack bloodies the target, you can use your pact boon.
Effect: Until the start of your next turn, when the target is reduced to 0 hit points, you can use your pact boon.

This way, using Eldritch Bolt doesn’t guarantee a pact boon trigger, but comes pretty close.

Basic attacks with drawback

The following powers are among the worst attacks in the game, since they work, in practice, like plain basic attacks with a drawback. Their common feature consists in giving the enemy choices that include negating whatever upside the attack could have, or even turning against you. This way, Brash Assault (of which I’ve talked at length) lets the monster trigger an attack exchange only when it thinks it’s to its advantage (or when the DM feels charitable). Erupting Flare lets the target move towards you and your allies to punish them if they don’t flee from it, and directly hurts any allies that may want to charge it or stay next to it. Elemental Spirits is highly dependent on order of initiative, but typically allows the enemy to move so that it no longer hurts its allies, but damages you and your companions.

Brash Assault - Warlord At-Will (MP)

Suggested Fix: Though in my *previous article* I did my best to balance the original mechanic of lots of extra attacks everywhere, I have since come to the conclusion that it’s not a very good mechanic to begin with - too swingy and gimmicky. What follows is an attempt to preserve the spirit of the power while going for a more conventional approach.

Change Hit line, remove Level 21 line, change Effect line:
Hit: Strength modifier damage.
Effect: The target may choose to be marked by you until the end of your next turn. You grant combat advantage until the end of your next turn. An ally within 5 squares of you may make a basic attack against the target as a free action.

As in the original version of the power, you open your guard to let an ally attack the target. This does not match the raw power of Commander’s Strike, but it comes close enough, while providing much greater flexibility and having looser ability requirements. The new drawbacks (granting CA and potentially screwing ally marks) force you to be careful, but are far from a dealbreaker.

Erupting Flare – Wizard At-Will (Dra388)

Suggested Fix: The most urgent change for the power is to make it ally-friendly - but even with that, this at-will is still sorely lacking in power for a controller attack.

Change the Hit line and add an Effect line:
Hit: 1d10 + Intelligence modifier fire damage.
Level 21: 2d10 + Intelligence modifier fire damage.
Effect: Until the end of your next turn, any other enemy that ends its turn adjacent to the target or willingly enters a square adjacent to it takes fire damage equal to 2 + your Intelligence modifier.
Level 21: 5+ your Intelligence modifier fire damage.

To recap: the punishing effect becomes reliable, no longer hurts allies, hits harder, and now also triggers for moving around the target. This remains mostly a damaging attack for mindless pyromancers, but the fire aura can be a major annoyance for your foes.

Elemental Spirits - Seeker At-Will (PHB3)
Suggested Fix: Again, the effect needs to become friendly to your allies, but that merely turns the attack into a realy weak proxy of an area burst that relies on initiative order to work.

Change Hit line.
Hit: 1[W] + Wisdom modifier damage of the chosen type. Each enemy adjacent to the target takes damage of the chosen type equal to 1d6 + your Dexterity modifier.

This removes the timing issues and adds a ton of damage to make the power into a weird area burst attack which is ally friendly, a bit harder to set up than usual, and provides a choice of damage types. Much closer to what I expect from a controller attack.

Basic attacks with irrelevant bonuses

Problems: Our next group of at-wills consists in powers that are nominally better than a basic attack, but have a benefit so situational or minuscule as to be irrelevant, if not insulting. Focused Fury is an avenger power which only does something when your main class feature isn’t working (due to the requirement of an additional adjacent enemy). Savage Reach and Foe to Foe are barbarian powers (which are supposed to have a built-in striker damage bonus of 1d6/tier on top of something else) that either lose all extra damage for no apparent reason, or give it with unreasonable restrictions with no real upside to compensate. Finally, Hunter’s Teamwork is a ranger power that requires a lot of work to provide an effect that is strictly worse than the current version of Careful Attack.

Focused Fury – Avenger At-Will (PHH2)

Suggested Fix: In order to be a useful attack, Focused Fury needs to work in scenarios where you get your Oath of Enmity bonus - or, even better, let you get the reroll when you normally wouldn’t. We can have that by making the push automatic, and happening before the attack.

Before the Attack line, add Effect line; change Hit line.
Effect:Choose an adjacent enemy other than the target. You push that enemy 2 squares.
Hit: 1[W] + Wisdom modifier damage.

Foe to Foe - Barbarian At-Will (PHH1)

Suggested Fix: One problem that comes up when rewriting barbarian at-wills is that you don’t just need to balance them - you also have to pay attention to its templating and level of complexity. In this case, we have a power whose damage needs to scale per tier, and which in the original implementation has three different damage values depending on context. If we were to take the original design and have it scale properly, we’d end up with a messy, unreadable wall of text. And we’re not doing anything particularly interesting or flavorful to begin with! I opted for a fairly radical redesign.

Add Effect line, change Attack line and Hit line:
Effect: Before or after the attack, you can shift a number of squares equal to 1 plus the number of non-minion enemies you have reduced to 0 hit points this encounter. If you are raging, you can shift before and after the attack.
Attack: Strength vs AC. You gain a bonus to the attack roll equal to the number of non-minion enemies you have reduced to 0 hit points this encounter.
Hit: 1[W] + 1d6 + Strength modifier damage.
Level 11: 1[W] + 2d6 + Strength modifier damage.
Level 21: 2[W] + 3d6 + Strength modifier damage.

The base damage now includes the striker bonus (which is a must to make the power playable, unless we have a really awesome effect). I took the additional damage for killing foes and turned it into an accuracy bonus, since that takes just a single line, rather than a bunch of text per tier. Finally, I added a mobility component that is heavily implied by the power name and flavor, and tied it to monster killing and raging. Overall the damage/accuracy alone still won’t beat more straightforward options like Howling Strike, but it is comparable - and the mobility should make it fun and useful in its own way.

Savage Reach - Barbarian At-Will (Dra384)

Suggested Fix: Sliding is a nice effect, but this attack is really missing the barbarian damage bonus. I found a flavorful yet effective way to link this extra damage to the slide:

Add to the Hit line: If the target ends this slide adjacent to an enemy or a solid obstacle, the target and all enemies adjacent to it take extra damage equal to your Strength modifier.

Hunter’s Teamwork – Ranger At-Will (PHH1)

Suggested Fix: I consider post-errata Careful Atack to be a good baseline for at-will power level. Granting combat advantage is worse than a straight +2 to hit, so I wanted the power to do something on top of that, and have an easy to meet condition. A leader effect was a natural fit, given the power’s flavor.

Change the Target and Attack lines, and add an Effect line:
Target: One creature adjacent to one or more allies.
Effect: Until the start of your next turn, the target grants combat advantage to you any allies adjacent to it.
Attack: Dexterity vs AC.

Weak non-conventional attacks

Problems: The final set of powers deviates more from the typical scheme of “basic attack with additional effects”, following more unusual structure. Sure Strike is a classic of at-will suckiness, providing extra accuracy but sacrificing way too much damage in the process, so that it ends up, on average, less damaging than a basic attack. Preparatory Shot also loses a ton of damage compared to a basic attack for too little in return - in this case, one turn’s worth of combat advantage. Call of the Beast is flawed at many levels, with a poor conditional damage mechanic that is easy to ignore and doesn’t work as intended (since an enemy can just move closer to the target of its choice to prevent it). Feinting Trick attempts to compensate thieves for attacking without combat advantage, but that is a moot point for a class that is almost assured to have combat advantage every turn (and highly encouraged to do so). Finally, Predator Strike and Circling Strike suffer from depending on a broken class mechanic, the ranger beast companion.

Sure Strike – Fighter At-Will (PHB)

Suggested Fix: Simply put, this attack needs to hit harder to be worthwhile. As Careful Attack and similar powers have proven, this would hardly be broken with the full Strength modifier as a damage bonus. However, I like the notion of sacrificing damage for accuracy, so I have tried to keep that aspect of the power and give it an additional mechanic: a bonus to compensate the fighter for missed attacks.

Change the Attack and Hit lines:
Attack: Strength +2 vs AC. If you have missed the target since the beginning of your last turn, gain a +2 power bonus to the attack roll.
Hit: 1[W] + one half your Strength modifier.
Level 21: 2[W] + one half your strength modifier.

Preparatory Shot - Rogue At-Will (MP2)

Suggested Fix: The basic concept of a weak shot that sets up a devastating attack later on is an interesting one, but you need to make sure it’s worth the effort and the wait. I changed damage numbers all around to ensure that preparatory shot resulted in a net damage increase (rather than a loss, as the original version), and made the preparation effect reliable

Change the Hit line, add an Effect line:
Hit: 1[W] damage.
Level 21: 2[W] damage.
Effect: The target grants combat advantage to you until the end of your next turn, and you gain a power bonus to your next damage roll against the target equal to your Dexterity modifier + your Intelligence modifier.

Call of the Beast - Druid At-Will (PHB3)

Suggested Fix: I like the idea behind this power, but the original implementation didn’t really work, and even if it did, it would need a significant boost to be worthwhile. I fixed the timing issues of the enrage effect, to ensure that targets would be adequately taunted by close enemies, and added a small damage to the initial attack.

Change the Hit line:
Hit: 1d6 psychic damage, and the target can't gain combat advantage until the end of your next turn. At the begining of the target's next turn, it chooses one of its enemies nearest to it or marking it. The target takes extra psychic damage equal to 5 + your Wisdom modifier when it makes any attack that doesn't include the chosen creature that turn.
Level 21: 2d6 psychic damage, and the extra damage is increased to 10+ Wisdom modifier psychic damage.

This is now a damaging burst with friendly targeting and a strong controlling effect, comparing favorably with controller favourites like Winged Horde - though it should be noted that the wizard equivalent becomes even more attractive once we factor in wizard-exclusive options like Enlarge Spell.

Feinting Trick - Rogue At-Will (HotFL)

Suggested Fix: Though I like to preserve the spirit of a power whenever possible, the problem with Feinting Trick was in the premise - thieves should almost never make an attack without combat advantage. Therefore, we need a major redesign. I want to keep the dependency on Charisma modifier (making it more useful), and some kind of compensation when you lack combat advantage, as a secondary mechanic.

Change the Effect line:
Effect: You move up to your speed. Until the end the end of turn, you do not need combat advantage to use sneak attack with basic attacks. After you make a basic attack this turn, you gain a power bonus equal to your Charisma modifier to the next damage roll against the target of the attack before the end of your next turn.

A straight Cha bonus to damage seemed excessive, so I opted for the delayed damage solution - this is now potentially the most damaging thief trick, but it requires a bit of set up effort and patience.

Predator Strike - Ranger At-Will (MP)
Circling Strike - Ranger At-Will (MP)

Suggested Fix: These powers can’t really be fixed as long as the ranger beast companion remains broken. Long ago, I devoted a series of articles to that topic, which can be read here.

Anatomy of the At-Will (II): Broken options

2011-12-22T00:59:00.001+01:00

Not all powers are created equal, but it would be nice if they were at least comparable. In the case of at-wills, this is not always the case. There are lots of at-will powers I would like to adjust to some degree, but in today’s article I will talk about the ones that are, in my opinion, in most urgent need of fixing due to their excessive power level. The next time I will discuss the opposite side of the spectrum – utterly weak at-wills that are hardly competitive with plain basic attacks (if not downright worse).

The table below shows what I consider the top tier of at-wills:

In truth, these powers fall into two distinct categories: Twin Strike, and everything else. The infamous ranger attack is way ahead of the competition, and is the go-to option whenever a character has the ability to steal an at-will from another class. I’ll be quick to concede that the other powers in this list aren’t that bad if you are more tolerant to high powered stuff than me (which is often the case), but Twin Strike is the real deal: something that messes with the math of the game, easily outperforming a vast majority of encounter attacks (and quite a few dailies!) in terms of damage.

Let’s take a look at them.

Twin Strike – Ranger at-will (PHB)

Problem: By providing two damage rolls (don’t be fooled by the lack of an ability modifier, doubling up on other modifiers more than makes up for it!), Twin Strike has the highest reliable single-target damage of any at-will in the game, by quite a large margin at higher levels. With enough damage bonuses, this eventually outperforms the single-target damage of any encounter power not based on multiple attacks or non-standard actions (i.e. 90+% of them). This virtually obsoletes any other ranger at-will, and seriously warps the value of at-will borrowing mechanics like Half-Elf dilettante.

Note that multi-target powers such as area attacks can often beat the total damage dealt by twin strike, by spreading it over multiple enemies. That doesn’t necessarily make them as good as the ranger power, since concentrated damage is usually much stronger because it allows you to remove enemies from the fight earlier. Thus, it would take a really strong area attack to have a comparable impact on an encounter (though more on that below!).

Suggested Fix: There is no safe way to implement a real multi-attacking at-will. The sensible thing would be to change Twin Strike to something unrecognizable, by removing the second damage roll or having each attack target a different enemy. That said, if you want to remain as faithful as possible to the original (which is my usual approach when changing stuff), this is the best I would allow it to be:

Change Attack line to: “Strength -2 vs. AC (melee; main weapon and off-hand weapon) or Dexterity -2 vs. AC (ranged), two attacks.”
Remove the following line: “Increase damage to 2[W] at 21st level.”

There aren’t many powers that would remain playable after taking a -2 penalty to hit, but Twin Strike manages just fine. Still well above the damage of a basic attack, this version of the power is competitive with other damaging at-wills, though it may not be the best option in certain scenarios. Still, even with this penalty the power could become problematic by the time a character reached epic levels, due to the expanded crit range and huge damage modifiers of epic PCs - but removing the extra (W) damage at level 21 helps keep that in check.

If you are interested in reading more about Twin Strike, there are some previous articles on the topic I wrote a while ago.

Hellish Rebuke – Warlock at-will (PHB)

Problem: When the punishing effect triggers, Hellish Rebuke deals amazing damage, even rivaling the mighty Twin Strike. This wouldn’t be so bad if the trigger was unreliable or could somehow be avoided by an enemy, but unfortunately this isn’t the case. With the current wording, any source of damage to the warlock will activate this effect - even damage inflicted voluntarily in small increments, such as stepping on a fire, or using a variety of self-damaging items like Shadowrift blade.

Suggested Fix: This attack becomes a lot more fair, though still quite useful, by limiting its effect to trigger only on enemy attacks. Its effect also makes a lot more sense as a punishment for enemy attacks than as a masochistic extra damage mechanic.

Change Hit line to: “1d6 + Constitution modifier fire damage. The first time you are damaged by an enemy attack before the end of your next turn, the target takes (...)

Hand of Radiance – Invoker at-will (DP)

Problem: Up until recently, this was hands down the strongest at-will attack for dishing out damage to multiple enemies, obsoleting such reasonable powers as Divine Bolts. I wrote about it in length here.

Suggested Fix: My idea for a ‘fair’ Hand of Radiance consists in a seemingly innocuous change: reducing its range.

Change Range line to: “Ranged 5”.

This has the double drawback of forcing the invoker to get up and close to his enemies and, more subtly, of making it considerably difficult to hit any 3 targets in the battlefield. Reaching the second and third targets (never mind the fourth at epic) will now require some effort and careful positioning from the invoker, and be downright impossible at times.

Magic Stones – Druid at-will (HoF)

Problem: The introduction of an improved version of Hand of Radiance could be seen as an acknowledgment that the invoker power is fair, or even underpowered. For me, it’s just a mistake - I appreciate the effort to give Druids better controller options in Heroes of the Feywild, but this one is way above the baseline set for other controllers.

Suggested Fix: What we have here is a multi-target damage source as strong as Hand of Radiance, with a useful controlling effect thrown in for fun. I think the ability to spam pushes on lots of enemies is the most interesting feature of the power, so given the choice, I prefer to cut the damage and leave the rest intact.

Change Hit line to: “1d4 damage, and push the target 1 square.”
Change Level 21 line to: “2d4 damage”.

Compared with my version of Hand of Radiance, this sacrifices a good chunk of damage for good range and control. Next to Beguiling Strands (another top tier controller at-will), this has better damage (except at the lowest levels) and range, whereas the wizard power has a stronger push and the potential to hit 4 or more targets.

Magic Weapon – Artificer at-will (EPG)

Problem: As I’ll discuss in a later article, I consider the baseline for a decent damaging at-will the ability to add a secondary modifier as extra damage. Magic Weapon has the potential to do that... several times. With careful positioning, the artificer can boost the damage of a whole party, but also their accuracy - and with an attack that has above average accuracy to begin with. This is too good a package in the best case scenario.

Suggested Fix: The ability to boost a lot of allies by placing yourself in the so-called “fireball formation” is definitely risky, but offers a hell of an upside. That said, I love the mechanic, though it’s current implementation is too good. For this reason, my revision of Magic Weapon keeps a generous power level, while addressing the most glaring excesses.

Change Hit line to: Hit: 1[W] + Intelligence modifier damage, and up to two allies adjacent to you gain a +1 power bonus to their next attack roll before your next turn and a power bonus to their next damage roll before your next turn equal to your Constitution modifier or your Wisdom modifier.
In the Level 21 line, remove this: “and a +2 power bonus to attack rolls.”

This cuts the ability to setup crazy turns, by no longer working with 3 or more allies nor boosting attacks granted by action points. Also, it no longer gets an even stronger boost at epic. Even after that, it remains a force to be reckoned with.

Broken Bits: Master of the Forge

2011-12-10T02:50:00.001+01:00

Broken Paragon Paths, Part Eleven
Previous - Index - Next

While going through this list of broken paragon paths we have found that, more often than not, the offenders were... well, focused on offense. Bonuses to attack and damage are the most common sources of unbalance in 4E, by a mile. On the other hand, if you have ever wondered what a broken defensive ability looks like, you need to look no further - Master of the Forge is your choice.

If you are optimizing a character’s defenses, every point counts, but you can certainly make some points worth way more than normal - particularly when you are close to unhittability from monsters of your level range. Master of the Forge is a paragon path for runepriests, which is effective in the hands of any multiclassing character, and allows you to make your allies’ AC almost impossible to hit by providing monstruous bonuses - as an at-will power. When most defenders happily take any +1 bonus to AC that comes over their way, and cry of joy when they find anything remotely resembling a continuous +2 bonus, something like Blessing of the Forge (a minor action utility granting a whopping +4 bonus to an ally adjacent to the runepriest) is a dream come true.

To see how this can become abusive, consider that a typical defender in plate and shield gets hit roughly 35% of the time against AC by enemies of its level. If the defender’s party includes a Master of the Forge, we can add an extra 5 points on top of that (4 from Blessing of the Forge, and another 1 from the extremely convenient Indomitable Steel feature), lowering this chance to a mere 10%, or a 19+ on the d20. This more than triples the defender’s survivability against attacks targeting AC, and makes attacking him an exercise in futility. Providing the bonus to non-defender characters is not as ridiculous, but it can still be quite strong as long as they have heavy armor.

A fix

I think is one case where simple number tweaking may do the job. I believe halving the bonus granted by Blessing of the Forge still leaves the paragon path at a very competitive power level:

Blessing of the Forge v.2 - Utility 12
At-Will - Divine
Minor Action - Melee touch
Target: One ally
Effect: Until the end of your next turn, the target gains a +1 power bonus to AC, or a +2 power bonus if the target is wearing heavy armor.
Special: You can use this power only once per round.

A secondary fix

With that out of the way, we can consider giving a slight boost to another feature of this path which suffers from the opposite problem: an excessively weak effect. Runes of the Blade Smith provides a continuous damage bonus, which is usually a great thing, but it amounts for a mere 1 extra point of damage, which seems way out of place for a paragon path. I’d rather have a slightly higher bonus, and make it into a power bonus to prevent stacking.

Runes of the Blade Smith (11th level): When you take a short or an extended rest, you can touch one weapon that you or an ally carries. That weapon then gains a +2 power bonus to damage rolls until you grant this bonus to a different weapon

Anatomy of the At-Will (I): Introduction

2011-11-21T18:32:00.001+01:00

Scorching Burst. Tide of Iron. Commander’s Strike. Chaos Bolt. I have a soft spot for at-will attacks, which are one of my favourite innovations of D&D 4E, and I always find a hard time trying to build non-human characters, because I miss the extra at-will so much. I loathe game options that diminish the fun of choosing and using at-wills, including boring, fixed, weak stuff like Eldritch Blast, but also boring, overwhelmingly good powers like Twin Strike. For these reasons, I’m starting a new article series focusing on the most humble tools in an adventurer’s arsenal. I have prepared long lists of issues and improvements for individual powers, discussions on game elements that affect the balance of at-wills with other types of attacks, reflections on at-will related game mechanics, and of course lots of complaints and a few suggestions regarding the combination of psionic at-wills and power points. I hope to get all these topics covered in this blog, eventually... but for now, let us have a quick summary.

The importance of at-wills

The at-will attack slot suffers an interesting progression over the course of a campaign, in that it is the undisputed most character defining set of powers at level 1, but ends up getting very little use by the time you reach level 30. Keep in mind that I’m focusing on characters that follow the archetypal 4E class structure of at-will, encounter and daily attacks (as opposed to psionic classes or essential martial builds), and that this assumes (as the game usually does) that most or all encounter powers cost a standard action to use - so there are plenty of exceptions to this rule, as we discuss below. Still, for most ‘normal’ builds, the fact remains that at-wills make up roughly 80% of a lower level character’s attacks, and as little as 20% (or less) of a higher level character’s. As a consequence, the impact of any lack of balance in a character’s at-will selection will be huge at first, but decrease with each level until it becomes more or less irrelevant. Or so goes the theory...

Non-standards

I said above that the game system assumes that most, if not all of a character’s encounter and daily powers (leaving aside non-conventional Essentials classes for the moment) will cost a standard action. And that is true... up to a point. There are a few encounter attacks that can be used as a minor or immediate action which, among other consequences, increases the rate of usage of at-wills, since every standard action not spent on an encounter is a standard action that you’ll get to use for an at-will, at some point. Given that these off-action attacks only make up a very small proportion of the encounter power pool, one might think that this effect wouldn’t be too pronounced - except for one detail: they are strong.

The ability to make an additional attack aside from your standard action attack scales absurdly well (as long as said attack has a damage roll, which it usually has), to the point that it is extremely difficult for an standard action power to compete with an off-action one (unless the standard action is a multi-attack, though these are perhaps even more rare). As a result, the off-action power will more often than not be the best in its slot, and tend to be taken by players - even over attacks many levels above it. This means that the impact of off-action powers is much greater than what one would guess by looking at power lists, so that at-wills can often remain relevant all the way through the epic tier.

Charge!

On the previous section, we saw that sometimes encounter attacks powers naturally give way to at-will powers by freeing up attack actions, but there is another, much more worrying way for at-wills to remain in use even at higher levels: to have at-will attacks that are stronger than their encounter alternatives. Such scenario sounds like an alarming failure of the system (because expendable resources need to be the better ones, otherwise what’s the pint?), but it comes up all too often at high levels of optimization for damage-focused characters, particularly when no off-action attacks are available.

The problem is as follows. Leaving aside non-damaging effects, we can expect a single-target at-will attack to deal between 3 and 10 extra damage on a hit compared to a basic attack (provided the character has a decent BA in the first place), depending on level. Likewise, a single-target encounter attack will typically contribute 5 to 15 extra damage (again, depending on level) compared to the at-will, unless said encounter belongs to the vocal minority of off-action powers or multi-attack powers. Given these numbers, if it were possible to consistently add more than 8-25 extra damage to a basic attack (but not to the encounters or at-wills), you might end up with a character whose best option is to just repeat the basic over and over.

This is what happens with the technique known as charge optimization. To summarize, there is an awful lot of stacking ways to pile extra damage onto a charge attack, and it is possible to all but guarantee that a PC will be able to charge every turn of an encounter, making charges one of the best proven methods to have a character deal awesome damage even without access to off-action attacks or multi-attacks. This results in an abnormal use of basic attacks (or at-wills, if they allow their use in a charge) even at the highest levels.
To give optimizers credit, what usually happens is that the charging PC does not ignore his encounter attacks, but instead goes out of his way to get non-action attacks, so he gets the best of both worlds.

Psionic Spam

Psionic augmentable at-wills are in a strange place, in that while they are technically at-will attacks, they also fulfill the role of the character’s encounter attacks. With three different modes of variable effectiveness depending on power point expenditure, these powers are easily the most complex in the game. They are also the most sensitive to balance problems, due to the fact that each of them takes up the equivalent of an at-will slot and an encounter slot, coupled with the ability to use any version of them repeatedly. Unsurprisingly, this is a power category that suffers from serious fundamental issues.

To be fair with the designers of Player’s Handbook 3, I do think that psionic mechanics missed the mark by a very small margin. In fact, they work mostly fine at heroic tier games, and it’s not until paragon that they become problematic, due to the poorly adjusted power point progression. In short, higher level augments are costed so that they require more power points than those of lower level - this is reasonable in principle, since they tend to be stronger, but it fails in practice because the higher levels are severely overcosted. As a consequence, level 1 attacks are often used throughout a character’s career (and some times repeatedly, for most turns of each encounter), in detriment of alleged higher-level upgrades.

The high level psionic mess becomes even more complicated when you account for the fact that unaugmented attacks lack scaling damage at level 21, so they may end up hitting for less than the character’s basic attack. The trivial solution of adding an extra die to unaugmented attacks at epic doesn’t work as well as could be expected, since you end up with augmented versions of the power that deal less damage, or have no benefit at all. Likewise, adding the damage to all versions of the powers can result in augmented attacks that sometimes hit harder than their encounter equivalents for non-psionic classes...

Back to Basics

The point of an at-will is to be more interesting, and marginally stronger, than your plain basic attack. Because of this, any mechanic that provides a permanent improvement for a character’s basic attacks introduces a serious risk of obsoleting the at-will slot, encouraging players to use a turbo-charged basic over and over instead. Unfortunately, there are a series of options in the game that enable this, most notably a cycle of weapon-specific feats in Martial Power 2.

Basic attack boosters are most dangerous when combined with charge optimization, which is a common technique. Also, there are a few at-wills which count as basic attacks and become extremely effective in combination with these options.

What to expect

I intend to continue this series alternating articles that focus on some of the individual topics described above, and lists of at-will powers with my opinion on them and suggestions to bring them to what I think is the right power level. The first ones in my list are an article about charging, and a discussion on my top candidates for most broken at-wills in the game.

Heroes of the Feywild spoilers

2011-11-04T12:43:00.001+01:00

Heroes of the Feywild is coming out this month, and some people have been able to get early copies and share information about its contents. From what I have heard, this could be the best player book to see print since last year. Not that there has been much of a competition - the D&D release schedule has dried up lately, and the only player-oriented products since January have been Heroes of Shadow (which many found underwhelming) and the Neverwinter Campaign Setting (which was split between DM and player content). Nevertheless, the Feywild is an exciting environment of which we still know very little, and the mechanic content revealed so far seems to be rock solid.

The new class options appear to take the best of the Essentials and pre-Essentials styles. On the one hand, we have highly flavorful concepts, a focus on builds for existing classes rather than brand new archetypes, mixed power sources, class features gained at higher levels, and different roles present in a single class (including a genuine striker/defender hybrid!). On the other hand, all options seem to be highly modular and customizable, with few or no fixed power slots, and powers that can be traded freely between new and old builds. And, what is better, not all material is aimed at Fighters at Wizards this time!

There are four new class builds, for Wizards (the Witch), Bards, (the Skald), Barbarians (the Berserker) and Druids (the Protector).

The Witch is a Wizard variant which replaces the spellbook for a built-in familiar. Other than that, it’s not too different from a Mage or Arcanist wizard, apart from a fixed encounter attack at first level. The best part is the new array of spells, available to any wizard build, including lots of polymorph effects. The spoiled powers include a vicious controlling melee at-will, a Thunderwave variant that works as a close burst, and dailies to turn your enemies into helpless frogs - or savage monsters.
The Skald is a bard with a martial touch who specializes in close combat, casting inspiring spells when hitting with a basic attack. It replaces the usual Healing Word mechanic with a healing aura, which allows allies to heal themselves a couple of times per encounter. Many powers are tied to that aura, and there is a feat that allows regular bards to replace their Majestic Word with the aura, in order to have access to these new attacks.
The Berserker Barbarian is the first real dual role class in the game, and it’s based on a very cool concept. A berserker starts an encounter as a martial defender, using martial exploits and a defender aura. However, it has the ability to enter a rage which turns it into a primal striker, switching off the aura, and turning martial attacks into more damaging primal powers. The berserker has complete control over when this change happens (the first time he uses a primal attack), but there doesn’t seem to be a way to switch back. This change of roles should add a lot of tactical depth to the class, and I look forward to trying it out.
The Protector is a pure spellcaster druid, without an animal companion or beast form. This is something the class had really been missing, since I always found that the humanoid form had very little going for it. The new build has the power to create a permanent zone of difficult terrain each encounter, which looks very much like a role-defining class feature for a controller. And it doesn’t stop there - from what I have seen, there are plenty of strong controller powers that can be used both by protector druids and regular druids in humanoid form. These follow the trend introduced by recent wizard powers, of adding miss effects on encounter attacks, and include stuff as impressive as an encounter that dominates, as early as level 7. The new dailies focus on summoning beasts with instinctive actions, with the leaked examples looking decent at most, but still playable - an improvement over the mediocre summons from Heroes of Shadow.

To round the book, there are a bunch of new themes (including the amazing Fey Beast tamer, which grants you a companion that is suspiciously close to that of a Sentinel Druid), and three fey races: The Satyr, the Dryad, and the Pixie. The first two sound pretty boring to me, but the pixie is quite an achievement, in that it allows you to play a tiny flying character that nevertheless remains (mostly) balanced! This is a bold move, but I can see pixies becoming an instant favourite among players, due to how different (and, admittedly, strong) it is compared to most races.

I’m definitely buying this book.

Update: A great, detailed review of the book can be found in The Chamber of Mazarbul

Broken Bits: Binder (IV)

2011-10-17T10:18:00.001+02:00

Broken Bits: Binder
1-Introduction - 2-General Powers - 3-Gloom Pact - 4-Star Pact

For the last article in this series, we have the Star Pact Binder. This one is actually the “strong” binder build, with enough area attacks to make a decent blasting controller impression, and an spectacular, though extremely hard to trigger, pact boon. However, this pact still shows the weaknesses of the class design: even at its best, the binder fails to beat a regular warlock playing its own game. Virtually every star pact binder can be made stronger by rebuilding it as a warlock that picks binder powers – though admittedly, some of these powers are good enough for warlocks to bother taking, which is more than could be said about most of the gloom pact encounters.

Again, I suggest a whole lot of power updates, boosting the binder versions and weakening what normal warlocks get. The Mind Shadows at-will has been changed so that it’s still situational, but it grants a great effect when you manage to trigger it – as written before, an enemy could turn off the effect by walking toward your allies. As for the Hidden Lore boon, I found out I couldn’t loosen the triggering condition as much as I’d like, because the effect is so damn good. As a compromise, I decided that a binder would need to stay dangerously close (within 2 squares) to an enemy to activate the boon, without actively forcing a purely ranged character to move adjacent to enemies.

Mind Shadows - At-Will Warlock Attack 1
Replace Hit line with: (…) damage. Choose any number of allies who are 3 or more squares away from the target. Until the end of your next turn, the chosen allies are invisible to the target.

Hidden Lore - At-Will Warlock Utility
Replace trigger with: You reduce a creature to 0 hit points, or an enemy within 2 squares of you drops to 0 hit points

Shadow Tentacles - Encounter Warlock Attack 1
Replace Hit line with: (…)damage.
Replace Hit(Binder) line with: The target is slowed until the end of your next turn.
Add Effect: The burst creates a zone that lasts until the end of your next turn. The zone is difficult terrain for your enemies.

Cyst of Darkness - Encounter Warlock Attack 7
Remove Hit(Binder) line.
Add Effect (Binder): At the start of your next turn, you slide the target 3 squares. The target and each creature adjacent to it at the end of the slide take cold and necrotic damage equal to 5+ your Intelligence modifier.

Soul Eater – Binder’s Ally 9
Replace Standard Action line with: (…) you gain 5 temporary hit point and gain a +5 power bonus to your next damage roll.
Add Opportunity Action: At-Will; Trigger: An enemy adjacent to the soul eater takes an action that provokes opportunity attacks. Effect: The soul eater makes its standard action attack against the triggering enemy.

Banish to Darkness - Encounter Master Binder Attack 11
Remove Hit(Binder) line.
Add Effect (Binder): Until the end of the target's next turn, when it makes an attack, choose one creature within range at random, other than itself. The attack must include that creature.

Devouring Dark - Encounter Warlock Attack 13
Replace Effect(Binder) line with: The targets are slowed until the end of your next turn. Any enemy that ends its turn in the zone takes 5 cold and necrotic damage.

Greater Void Burst - Encounter Warlock Attack 17
Replace Effect line with: The burst creates a zone that lasts until the end of your next turn. The zone is heavily obscured and blocks line of sight. Any creature other than you that ends its turn in the zone takes psychic damage equal to 3 + your Intelligence modifier.
Remove Effect (Binder) line.

Inner Void - Encounter Warlock Attack 23
Remove Hit(Binder) line.
Add Effect (Binder): When you hit or miss the target, and at the start of your next turn, you slide the target 3 squares. The target and each enemy within 2 squares of it at the end of the slide take necrotic damage equal to your Intelligence modifier.

Doom Hulk – Binder’s Ally 25
Replace Standard Action line with: (…) you gain 10 temporary hit point and gain a +5 power bonus to your next damage roll.
Add Opportunity Action: At-Will; Trigger: An enemy adjacent to the doom hulk takes an action that provokes opportunity attacks. Effect: The doom hulk makes its standard action attack against the triggering enemy.

Hungry Void - Encounter Warlock Attack 27
Replace Hit(Binder) line with Effect (Binder): You pull each target 1 square toward the center of the burst. The burst creates a zone that lasts until the end of your next turn. Any enemy that ends its turn in the zone takes 10 cold and necrotic damage, or 20 cold and necrotic damage if it ends its turn in the square at the center of the zone.

1-Introduction - 2-General Powers - 3-Gloom Pact - 4-Star Pact

Broken Bits: Binder (III)

2011-10-16T09:35:00.001+02:00

Broken Bits: Binder
1-Introduction - 2-General Powers - 3-Gloom Pact - 4-Star Pact

In today’s installment, we tackle the pact powers for the Gloom Pact. Gloom Pact Binders have a great at-will attack in Echoing Dirge, but that’s about it - the encounter power selection is mostly underwhelming, with plenty of mediocre single-target attacks that most warlocks wouldn’t bother to take, even with the Binder bonuses. Making competitive single-target attacks for a controller is always a challenging proposition, but I have tried to solve it by combining decent control and reliable effects. Note that the final versions of these attacks aren’t truly single, target, since they feature single-target damage and multi-target control. Compared with the more area-happy star pact binder, the gloom pact should provide more focused damage, as well as very reliable area control that doesn’t hinder your allies.

Shadow Warp - At-Will Warlock Utility
Replace Trigger line with: You reduce a creature to 0 hit points, or an enemy in the burst drops to 0 hit points.

Hound of Dark Omen - Encounter Warlock Attack 1
Remove Hit(Gloom Pact Binder) line.
Add Effect (Gloom Pact Binder): You conjure a shadow hound in an unoccupied square adjacent to the target. The hound remains until the end of your next turn and occupies its space. The target is weakened while adjacent to the hound, and if it ends its turn adjacent to the hound, it takes psychic damage equal to 2+ your Dexterity modifier

Ebon Claws - Encounter Warlock Attack 3
Remove Hit(Gloom Pact Binder) line.
Add Effect (Gloom Pact Binder): Enemies adjacent to the target take necrotic damage equal to your Dexterity modifier and are knocked prone.

Pall of Darkness - Encounter Warlock Attack 7
Remove Hit(Gloom Pact Binder) line.
Add Effect (Gloom Pact Binder): Until the end of your next turn, your enemies are blinded while adjacent to the target.

Shadow Lurk – Binder’s Ally 9
Add Opportunity Action - At-Will; Trigger: An enemy adjacent to the shadow lurk takes an action that provokes opportunity attacks. Effect: The shadow lurk makes its standard action attack against the triggering enemy.

Binder’s Action - Paragon Path Feature 11
Add: …and one enemy hit by the attack gains vulnerable all until the end of your next turn. The vulnerability is equal to your Dexterity modifier.

Haunting Shadow- Encounter Warlock Attack 13
Remove Effect line.
Add Effect (Gloom Pact Binder): You conjure a shadow in in an unoccupied square adjacent to the target. The shadow remains until the end of your next turn and occupies its space. Your enemies are weakened while adjacent to the shadow. In addition, the target takes cold damage equal to your Dexterity modifier for each square it willingly moves on its next turn.

Devouring Tide - Encounter Warlock Attack 17
Remove Hit(Gloom Pact Binder) line.
Add Effect (Gloom Pact Binder): You slide each target 3 squares and knock it prone.

Umbral Radiance - Encounter Warlock Attack 23
Remove Hit(Gloom Pact Binder) line.
Add Effect (Gloom Pact Binder): Until the start of your next turn, you and your allies are invisible while within 3 squares of the target.

Umbral Swap- Encounter Warlock Attack 27
Replace Hit line with: 2d10 + Charisma modifier cold and necrotic damage .
Replace Hit(Gloom Pact Binder) line with: The target is removed from play until the end of your next turn.
Add Effect: Choose a square in the target’s space. Until the start of your next turn, any enemy that ends its turn in that square or adjacent to it takes cold and necrotic damage equal to 10 + your Dexterity modifier.

1-Introduction - 2-General Powers - 3-Gloom Pact - 4-Star Pact

Broken Bits: Binder (II)

2011-10-15T07:28:00.001+02:00

Broken Bits: Binder
1-Introduction - 2-General Powers - 3-Gloom Pact - 4-Star Pact

In this article, I revise the powers that are available to all binders: the fixed at-will, and the daily attacks from Heroes of Shadow. Note that, by moving much of the strength of some dailies to Binder-specific effects, this hurts regular warlocks who chose to pick shadow-themed options. I feel this is a necessary compromise to create a niche for the Binder, since the best dailies from HoS were already as good as what a real controller should get, despite being available to both controllers and strikers.

I applied the following design principles for the Binder version of all powers: when compared to a Wizard (the baseline controller), a Binder should have better single-target damage, roughly equivalent single-target control, and slightly worse multi-target attacks. In practice, though, most single-target controller powers in the game (i.e. the ones that don’t stun) are pretty bad compared to area ones, and I didn’t try to balance against those - so expect unusually good single-target stuff.

In addition, I took care to have versions of the powers for non-Binder warlocks that were noticeably weaker, but could still realistically have uses in a game. I followed these guidelines:

Control effects limited to single-target attacks. Warlock area attacks should have little or no control. Close burst or blast attacks can be slightly better, in this regard.
No big areas: Warlocks shouldn’t have attacks larger than area 1. Close bursts 2 and blasts 5 can exist, but should remain relatively rare.
No repeatable control in dailies: Warlocks shouldn’t have access to control effects that can last the whole encounter, unless they are relatively weak.

Finally, some daily powers like Malicious Shadow or Well of Shadows had the potential to lock down an enemy (usually through immobilizing) for many turns, maybe even a whole encounter. As much as I enjoy strong controllers, I find this kind of effect excessive, so I tried to avoid it.

Shadow Claws - At-Will Warlock Attack 1
Add Hit (Binder): If the target moves during its next turn, it takes cold damage equal to your Dex or Int modifier for every 2 squares it moves.
Change Efect line to: If the target moves during its next turn, it takes cold damage equal to your Dexterity or Intelligence modifier.

Hateful Shade - Daily Warlock Attack 1
Change Hit line to: 3d8+Charisma modifier force damage, and the target is grabbed by shadows. Until the grab ends, the target takes ongoing 5 force damage.
Add Effect (Binder): Until the end of the encounter, while no enemy is grabbed by this power, you can use the secondary attack.

Secondary Attack
Minor Action (1/turn), Ranged 10.
Attack: Charisma vs Will.
Hit: The target is grabbed by shadows. Until the grab ends, the target takes ongoing 5 force damage.

Web of Shadows - Daily Warlock Attack 1
Change Hit line to: (...) damage, and the target is slowed (save ends).
Add Hit (Binder): The target is immobilized (save ends) instead of slowed.
Add to the Effect line: Creatures in the zone take a -2 penalty to saving throws.

Malicious Shadow - Daily Warlock Attack 1
Add Sustain (Binder): When you sustain this power, you can move the shadow half your speed.
Change secondary Trigger line to: An enemy willingly leaves a square adjacent to the shadow without shifting.

Shard of Darkness - Daily Warlock Attack 5
Add Hit(Binder): Instead of slowed (save ends), the target is immobilized and takes ongoing 5 cold damage (save ends both). Until the end of the encounter, when you hit an enemy with a ranged attack, it is slowed, cannot shift, and takes ongoing 5 cold damage (save ends all).

Well of Shadows - Daily Warlock Attack 5
Change Effect line to: The burst creates a zone that lasts until the end of your next turn. Exiting the zone costs an additional square of movement for your enemies. Until the zone ends, you can use the secondary power at will.
Add Effect (Binder) line: The zone lasts until the end of the encounter.
In secondary power, change Hit line to: (...) if the target is already slowed, it is instead knocked prone and takes ongoing 10 necrotic damage (save ends).

Deathly Conduit - Daily Warlock Attack 5
Add Special line: This power does not provoke attacks of opportunity.
Change Hit line to: (...) damage.
Add Hit (Binder): 2d6 + Charisma modifier necrotic damage, and the target is blinded (save ends).
Change Effect line to: Each enemy adjacent to you (...)

Menacing Shadow - Daily Warlock Attack 15
Change secondary Hit line to: 2d6+ Charisma modifier necrotic damage.
Add secondary Hit (Binder) line: The target is dazed until the end of your next turn.

Oubliette of the Void - Daily Warlock Attack 15
Replace Range line with: Area burst 1 within 10 squares.
Add Range (Binder): Area burst 2 within 10 squares.

Shadow Mire - Daily Warlock Attack 19
Replace Range line with: Area burst 1 within 10 squares.
Add Range (Binder): Area burst 2 within 10 squares.

Star of Death’s Omen - Daily Warlock Attack 19
Add Hit (Binder): The target is stunned (save ends) instead of dazed. Aftereffect: The target is dazed (save ends).

Offering of Magic - Daily Master Binder Attack 20
Move Effect line before Attack line, and replace it with Effect: Until the end of the encounter, you can use your Pact Boon when you hit the target. When the target is reduced to 0 hit points, you gain an additional standard action on your next turn.

Draining Void - Daily Warlock Attack 29
Replace Range line with: Area burst 1 within 10 squares.
Add Range (Binder): Area burst 2 within 10 squares.

Shadow Legion - Daily Warlock Attack 29
Replace Range line with: Area burst 1 within 10 squares.
Add Range (Binder): Area burst 3 within 10 squares.

1-Introduction - 2-General Powers - 3-Gloom Pact - 4-Star Pact

Class Acts: Assassin–Secrets of the Ninja

2011-10-12T03:44:00.001+02:00

We don’t get a lot of exciting player content in Dragon magazine these days, but today’s article made me extremely happy. Written by Dave Chalker, of Critical Hits fame, the article offers an awesome new Executioner build: the Ninja. There are just 2 pages of mechanical content, including six powers, two magic items, and a new superior weapon, but they really get the job done. Ninjas get a Shuriken Barrage attack (which reminds me of a fixed Hand of Radiance), a Smoke Bomb, an short sword attack that rewards them for jumping around randomly, and a vicious double attack with their Kusari-gama – which is a weird, but effective weapon, by the way. On top of that, one of the magic items is a rare Ki Focus with an impressive set of abilities, easily among the best rare items I have seen to date.

I need to play this build. So far, the Executioner had been a class that I admired for its original design, but which didn’t quite convince me to try it out. These new options, along with the ability to use assassin’s shroud (from the Hybrid and Multiclass article), have finally tempted me.

Broken Bits: Binder (I)

2011-10-11T00:29:00.001+02:00

Broken Bits: Binder
1-Introduction - 2-General Powers - 3-Gloom Pact - 4-Star Pact

I have recently had the opportunity to make an in-depth reading of Heroes of Shadow and, for the most part, I like what I have found. I’m not even a fan of the anti-hero archetype, but I nevertheless enjoyed the flavor of the book, as well as many of the new builds and powers. The fact that it reprints a whole subclass that had been released months ago was annoying, but forgivable. That said, there is one thing in the book that can only be classified as a failure: the Binder subclass.

The binder is a cool concept spoiled by a flawed execution - even more than other kinds of warlocks, which is saying something. It’s not that they are useless characters (thankfully, that is quite difficult to achieve in D&D 4E), but they certainly feel underwhelming. In terms of power, they compare poorly to regular Warlocks, and those had traditionally been among the weakest classes, to begin with. More specifically, a Binder character does very little that a Warlock can’t do, whereas a Warlock can be build so as to replicate most of a Binder’s abilities - only better. The problems with the subclass could be summarized in that you could give Binders the Warlock’s Curse feature, and they would still be on par with conventional Warlocks. In the following articles, I will suggest an extensive series of revisions aimed at making the Binder competitive as a controller (its intended role). However, you should be aware that it is also perfectly possible to fix them by giving up and turning them into strikers - to do that, just give them Curse, and change their Pact Boons to trigger as those of a normal warlock.

These are the most important problems I found when reading the Binder class:

- Pact Boon reward triggers. The pact boon rewards (those little bonuses you gain when someone dies) are actually pretty decent for Binders, but the triggering condition is a joke. It makes absolutely no sense to have an effect that triggers off the death of enemies adjacent to the Binder, when the class has no melee capabilities whatsoever. These features become all but useless outside of fights with lots of minions.

- Lackluster powers. While not downright bad, the Binder power list is not good enough for its role. Controllers usually have above-average powers to make up for their relative lack of class features, but what the Binder gets is not substantially better than what you’d expect for a typical ranged striker.

- Warlocks steal their tricks. Related to the above point is the fact that regular warlocks can take most of a Binder’s attacks... and actually make better use of them than a real Binder. As an example, a Binder encounter power in the hands of a Warlock loses the pact benefit, but gets to deal curse damage, so to be remotely competitive, pact benefits for these powers should be stronger than 1d6 damage/tier. In most cases, they aren’t. To make things worse, Binders suffer from a fixed selection of encounter powers, whereas Warlocks can pick from a wide variety (including both Binder pacts). And then there are Daily attacks (usually the strongest point of a controller), where Binders don’t gain any benefit whatsoever over a regular warlock.

- Summons are terrible. As a rule of thumb, in order to be playable, a Summoning daily attack has to create a creature that can either make instinctive attacks, opportunity attacks, or have one hell of a standard action attack - and even that doesn’t guarantee a strong daily, just a passable one. Since a Binder’s Ally has neither, it’s impact on the battlefield will usually be negligible.

In order to address these issues, my fix for the class includes the following changes:

- New triggers for Pact Boon rewards. Pretty straightforward. The features are nice, but you need to actually be able to use them.

- Power Upgrades. This involved changing a LOT of powers, including nearly every Binder-specific attack, but also many generic dailies from Heroes of Shadow that were given special bonuses for binders. In general, the revisions made the powers better in the hands of a binder, but also worse for non-binder warlock.

1-Introduction - 2-General Powers - 3-Gloom Pact - 4-Star Pact

Monsters of the Trollhaunt: Index

2011-09-11T02:30:00.001+02:00

I have been working for months in an article series updating the monsters in adventure P1: King of the Trollhaunt Warrens to modern (i.e. post-MM3 standards). Here is a list of the articles released so far.

Introduction

Broken Bits: Messenger of Peace

2011-09-10T20:40:00.001+02:00

Broken Paragon Paths, Part Eleven
Previous - Index - Next

As too many paragon paths in my list, Messenger of Peace is a fairly impressive option when used as intended, but can become crazy in less conventional builds. In this case, ‘as intended’ implies being a pacifist cleric, one of the most extreme types of character in the game, as it sacrifices most of its damaging capabilities in order to become the ultimate healer. The powers and features in this path share this pacifist theme, in that they deal no damage on their own, and often ask the character to refrain from otherwise hurting his enemies. However, they impose a lot of negative conditions and penalties on foes, making for a pretty strong package.

While all elements of the path are quite potent, it is the 16th feature which justified its inclusion in the ranks of the broken. Called Aura of Peace, it imposes a continuous -2 penalty to attack rolls on all enemies within 2 squares. This is amazingly strong, yet somewhat balanced by the fact that the pacifist cleric himself is a relatively fragile character focused on ranged attacks, making it hard to really exploit such a short range aura. But put it on the hands of any capable melee combatant, and you have the ultimate defender feature!

To put the effect of Aura of Peace in perspective, we can split it in two separate abilities: one to defend oneself against attacks from nearby enemies (-2 penalty to attack rolls against you), and one that protects your allies (-2 penalty to attack rolls against your allies). The first one, by itself, would be one of the best defensive boosts available for a melee character in the game - almost equivalent to a +2 bonus to all defenses, with the right positioning. As for the second part, it is a defender’s mark/aura on steroids (sans punishment), with the added benefit of actually stacking with marks/auras - both yours, and your allies’. Having both effects is way too effective, as well as out of place for a leader option.

A fix

As written, Aura of Peace greatly rewards characters who can hold large groups of enemies around them, making it a great fit for defender archetypes, but not so much for its alleged target, the pacifist healer. In addition to lowering the power level of the feature, my proposal also tries to add some pacifist flavor:

Aura of Peace (16th level): Enemies within 2 squares of you take a -2 penalty to attack rolls against bloodied allies.

A penalty that only works against bloodied creatures will be less than half as effective as a constant modifier, particularly given how great healers pacifist clerics are. But it’s still nothing to sneeze at, and can realistically be used without staying at the front line at all times - rather, you can stay on the back until a comrade gets low on health. At that point, either you close in to succor him, or he falls back under your protection. You still have the option of getting into melee with this aura, keeping it mind that it won’t help your own chances of surviving - for that, you’ll have to rely on your Vow of Nonviolence.

Monsters of the Trollhaung VIII: Encounters I1, W7

2011-09-09T01:53:00.001+02:00

Monsters of the Trollhaunt: Index – Previous - Next

** SPOILER ALERT**
These articles update monsters in adventure P1: King of the Trollhaunt Warrens – reading them may spoil encounters in the module!

A couple of big, bad trolls…

Skalmad the Troll King (Level 13 Elite Soldier)

The players at last get to meet the King, and it should be a scary fight. The original stat block for Skalmad is surprisingly decent, though it suffers from outdated stats (i.e. poor damage) and a real, Elite-like double attack. With a few updates, it should prove a worthy foe

1. Changes introduced

Toned down Troll Healing - see previous article about trolls as a race. Since Skalmad is an elite, I gave it twice the usual amount of regeneration and had Troll Healing bring it back with more HP.
Modern Elite: Elite monsters should have roughly as many attacks as two standard monsters, so I gave Skalmad an at-will double attack in Dual Axe, and boosted the encounter and recharging powers to a more impressive level. I also added a bit of damage to Baleful Eye.
Modern Soldier: Aside from lowering attack bonuses, I changed the basic attack to mark as an effect. Toppling Swing became a downright scary attack with the addition of a daze (on top of the existing prone effect), but I made it target only marked enemies. This prevents Skalmad from using all its most powerful attacks in the first round, and adds quite a bit of strategy to the monster.
Removed redundancy: The claw attack was pointless, so I deleted it.

Warren Troll (Level 11 Brute)

See Encounter W1.

Nothic Gazer (Level 11 Artillery)

See Encounter W6.

Thurk, Troll Smith (Level 12 Soldier)

1. Changes introduced

Toned down Troll Healing - see previous article about trolls as a race. Since Skalmad is an elite, I gave it twice the usual amount of regeneration and had Troll Healing bring it back with more HP.
Modern Soldier: Aside from lowering attack bonuses, I changed the basic attack to mark as an effect. Toppling Swing became a downright scary attack with the addition of a daze (on top of the existing prone effect), but I made it target only marked enemies. This prevents Skalmad from using all its most powerful attacks in the first round, and adds quite a bit of strategy to the monster.
Removed redundancy: The claw attack was pointless, so I deleted it.

Redspawn Firebelcher (Level 12 Artillery)

1. Changes introduced

Updated defenses, attack bonuses, and damage. This is a simple yet serviceable monster, so a couple of straightforward number tweaks should leave it ready for use. I upped the ranged attack accuracy, increased damage all around, and boosted some defenses which where excessively weak.

Grimlock Minion (Level 14 Minion)

1. Changes introduced

Added Role (Brute). As an old minion, this one was missing a role. Brute was the most fitting, by far.
Updated defenses, attack bonus, damage. This monster’s stats were unusually low, to the point that they wouldn’t have been out of place in a minion with several less levels. Now it’s up to par with modern minions.
Added Trait (Grimlock Resilience). I stole this one from the Human Slaves in Dark Sun, and I think it’s an amazing design. This lets you have threatening minions even if you don’t use any special houserule for minions. With our house rules, they were pretty impressive, though not to the point of becoming unbalanced.

All images are (C) 2010 Wizards of the Coast LLC, a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc. All rights reserved. These statistics blocks were generated using the D&D Adventure Tools, despite the tons of bugs. Except for the ones where I gave up, and used MS Word instead.

The Magic Item Reset (XIX): Character Wealth and Rarity

2011-08-18T10:57:00.001+02:00

Magic Item Reset: Index

In testing the new set of magic items, one problem I have come across is that of equipping new characters of a level above the first. Not owning the Rules Compendium, I consulted the guidelines in the Dungeon Master’s Guide (p.143), finding them rather inadequate for my purposes. The DMG suggests that characters starting at higher level should get three items (of character level, level +1, and level -1) and gold equal to the value of an item of level -1. This wasn’t a bad approximation under the default treasure rules, but with the introduction of item rarity, it leads to inaccurate results.

With item rarity, as a character gains levels he not only acquires more and higher level items, but also more rare ones. Since uncommon and rare items cannot be bought with gold, a character starting with less such items than expected for his level will never recover from this disadvantage, unless the DM somehow compensates for it. The table in this article is intended to give DMs a more accurate guideline for handing out starting gear in campaigns using rarity, as well as for knowing when a party has too little (or too much) treasure for its level.

This table shows how many magic items a newly created character of a given level should have, along with their rarity: common (C), uncommon (U), or rare (R). Assign item levels in the following way: the highest level item can have up to the character’s level +1. The next item can have a level equal to the character’s. For each subsequent item, the maximum level is one less than the previous one. For example, a 15th level character could have items of levels 16,15,14,13,12,11,10,9. A player can assign item rarities to each item level as he prefers. For a given level slot, a player can choose to have a lower level item instead, though no compensation is given. Any item slot can be traded by the sell value of the item in gold pieces (usually 20% for common items), though selling uncommon or rare items is extremely discouraged, since there is no way to regain these slots.

Variant Rule: Catching Up

An interesting alternate rule I have been experimenting with consists in having high level characters start out with little or no gear (barring plain magic weapons/armor/amulets of the appropriate enhancement bonus), but hand out treasure at an accelerated rate until they catch up with the expected wealth. I like doing this because higher level PCs, particularly those at paragon tier or above, can be quite complex, requiring players several sessions in order to grow accustomed to their abilities. Since magic gear is yet another layer of complexity, I find that delaying the access to magic items for a while provides players with a smoother learning curve, rather than an overwhelming set of options right from the start.

Broken Bits: Life Singer

2011-08-15T08:48:00.001+02:00

Broken Paragon Paths, Part Ten
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The bard paragon path Life Singer is based on a cool and original concept: a pacifist character that tries to solve conflicts without resorting to violence. It is an unfortunate event that, because of an overpowered feature, the path ends up as a very tempting option for bloodthirsty killers...

The controversial path feature is called Serene Will, and it allows rerolling attacks against will. There is a small bonus thrown in if the attacks in question don’t deal damage, but otherwise nothing prevents you from going to town with Will attacks, violent or not. I have already discussed how absurd a reroll-granting feature is, so I’ll just say that it is really absurd, and in need of fixing.

A fix

It is not impossible to balance the ability to reroll most of your attacks, but it does require adding severe restrictions or some kind of drawback to compensate. Limiting the effect to attacks against will is hardly enough. A natural and flavorful solution would be to have it work only on non-damaging attacks but, alas, these are pretty scarce for the bard class, so we would be rendering the path unplayable, outside of weird multiclass builds. Still, the idea had potential, so I came up with this:

Serene Will (16th level): Before you use an attack power, you can choose to have it deal no damage. If you do, you can reroll missed attack rolls targeting Will made as part of that attack, and must use the second results.

There might be an uninteded interaction that breaks this rule in half, but I think this could work just fine. The rerolling is now tied to behaving like a proper pacifist, which is manageable but hugely restricting. On the other hand, it also grants the ability of using any power for non-damaging purposes, opening up a whole lot of combinations. Note that any area attack will lose its damage against all targets this way, so there should be no obvious way to exploit this to prevent hurting allies in the middle of a fireball.

A fix for a different issue

Though not a critical problem, the level 20 daily, soothing song, is worded so that the enemies you knock unconscious can’t be coup de grace’d by your allies - but nothing prevents YOU from slaying them, which is wrong on so many levels. I’d change the Hit line for the following:

Hit: The target falls unconscious (save ends). Each ally in the burst can spend a healing surge. If you or ally attacks an affected target, the target immediately awakens. The attacking character does not have combat advantage against the target for that attack and cannot make a coup de grace attack against it.

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Monsters of the Trollhaunt VII: Encounter W5, W6

2011-08-14T18:07:00.001+02:00

Monsters of the Trollhaunt: Index – Previous - Next

** SPOILER ALERT**
These articles update monsters in adventure P1: King of the Trollhaunt Warrens – reading them may spoil encounters in the module!

There’s one of these in every dungeon…

Adult Black Dragon (Level 11 Solo Lurker)

The template for fun, challenging dragons has been laid out in the Monster Vault, so the following stat block won’t be much of a surprise to anyone. Still, not all levels of dragons appear in that book, so I’ve had to scale the Young version all the way to level 11. For the most part, I left the original design untouched, except for one significant exception.

If you are interested in further discussion on dragon redesign, I recommend my previous articles on black dragons (now obsoleted by more recent books) and white dragons.

1. Issues identified

Acidic Blood is a beating. Seriously, I’m all for tough solos, but acidic blood can wreck any party moderately reliant on melee attacks, unless they are loaded with acid resistance potions. Shroud of Gloom aggravates this to ridiculous proportions.

2. Changes introduced

Level up: I used the Young Black Dragon from Monster Vault as baseline, and increased its stats.
Acidic Blood nerfed: I simply changed the damage to ongoing damage. This prevents multiple triggers from stacking, but is still painful enough for PCs to try and find a workaround, particularly if Shroud of Gloom is active (which it will).

3. Errata

Breath Weapon is enemies only. I missed this from my stat block (didn’t realize it had changed!), but it was not an intended change on my part. Note that I haven’t simply fixed the stat block due to the way the Monster Builder works (it doesn’t) – once I have saved as an image, I’m pretty much done with the monster, unless I want to start again from scratch. Incidentally, this is why I have switched to Word for stat blocks of later monsters.

Option for Encounter W5: one Water Elemental (Level 11 Controller)

I felt like the dragon encounter could use some spicing up, so I decided to add a Water Elemental lying in the pool. In this case, I merely took the monster from Monster Manual 3 and used it as written – I love when I can do that!

Warren Troll (Level 11 Brute)

See Encounter W1.

Boulder Troll (Level 9 Artillery)

One of the trolls is supposed to stand back throwing stones, so I switched it for a more appropriate artillery version. The Boulder Troll is described in Encounter 1

Nothic Gazer (Level 11 Artillery)

1. Issues identified

Lack of variety. Rotting gaze is not a bad attack, but it’s the only one. I usually like some encounter or rechargeable attack, to make a monster more interesting.

2. Changes introduced.

New power: Rot Burst. This is a strong area attack that requires rotting gaze to be active on a target. Typically, it will take a nothic gazer several turns before rot burst can be active, since an enemy can save against the rot before the nothic’s next turn. However, when you have multiple nothics in an encounter, they can focus fire on a target so that the second nothic will be able to use rot burst if the first one hit. Then again, a significant portion of the damage from rot burst is non-stacking ongoing damage, so a third nothic might prefer to use rotting gaze against a different target. At any rate, the mechanics encourage players to keep away from rotting allies, which is a flavorful and fun effect.

The Magic Item Reset (XVIII): Item Reference Tables

2011-08-13T20:24:00.001+02:00

Magic Item Reset: Index

This has taken a while but, finally, I have finished the Item Reference Tables, which compile all items in this collection, organized by rarity and level. The primary purpose of these tables is as a resource to quickly check which items are available at any given level/rarity slot. That said, I have added a random roll entry for those players and DMs interested in the optional random item generation rules introduced here – for all purposes, these tables count as the table T5 mentioned in that article.

Common Items

Uncommon Items

Rare Items

Skill Math: A look behind the new Skill DC tables

2011-08-06T23:28:00.001+02:00

Skills. It’s not an issue I cover much on this blog, mostly because I like to focus on combat-related rules topics, and because I tend to consider the skill system a poorly implemented mess: not broken beyond hope, but in need of a good overhaul. That said, It’s fair to point out that the skill framework did receive a significant improvement last year with the release of the new skill DC tables with revised math that actually matches skill bonus progression. Unfortunately, this update somehow didn’t make it to the errata compilations, and players who didn’t buy the Essentials books haven’t had the chance to use it.

Rather than reproducing the whole tables (which have entries for each level, and three degrees of difficulty), I have worked out some relatively simple formulas that give a good approximation of the DCs per level. Though not trivial, they are relatively easy to memorize so as not to need to consult any reference book while you play - I know I’m tired of looking for my copies of Heroes of the Fallen Lands or Forgotten Kingdoms in the middle of a game.

They are the following:

Easy DC:                7 + 0.55*Level
Moderate DC:   11 + 0.7*Level
Hard DC:              18 + 0.8*Level

Unlike most calculations in 4E, you should round these values to the nearest integer - so, as an example, the level 1 DCs will be 8, 12, and 19, respectively. These DCs have been chosen so that an incompetent PC using an untrained skill based on a tertiary ability will succeed on Easy checks roughly 60% of the time, whereas an expert PC with training on a skill and a primary ability score on it should pass 60% of Hard DC checks. Moderate DC is adjusted for PCs with either skill training or primary abilities on a skill, and they should succeed 60% of the time. The drawback of this approach is that the difference between Easy, Moderate and Hard is not constant across levels, and gets to be quite high at level 30 - DCs of 25, 33, and 42, respectively - meaning that, eventually, a character capable of succeeding on a Hard DC will never fail an easy DC, and vice versa.

It’s still possible to break these DC values by stacking skill bonuses, which can get pretty ridiculous when combining feats, backgrounds, and magic items. However, as long as you don’t put much effort into breaking it, the system will work fine. This is not the solution I would have chosen for skill progression (I may talk about that at some point in the future), but it is the only one that makes skills playable without having to adjust dozens of game elements.

Broken Bits: War Chanter

2011-08-03T01:51:00.001+02:00

Broken Paragon Paths, Part Nine
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Most Paragon Paths in the game follow a very predictable pattern, with three class features and a bunch of powers. Of these features, one (gained at level 11) is always related to action point spending, with effects ranging from worthless to moderately interesting - but it is typically the other two that carry the weight, and make players choose a path over the rest. Enter War Chanter.

War Chanter, a Bard paragon path, has what is possibly the strongest action point related feature of the game in Inspire by Example. And, I’m sorry to say, it is too much. Inspire by Example provides a huge (typically between +4 and +8, depending on level), Con-based bonus to all attack and damage rolls of the bard’s allies for a full round after the bard spends an action point. With a moderate investment in constitution (a must-have for valorous bards, anyway), this usually means that the party will be automatically hitting with its attacks that round, and dealing much more damage than usual. Consider that these allies can spend their own action points during that turn, and that the bard (who isn’t affected by the bonus) has several ways to grant attacks to them, and madness ensues.

I opened a thread to discuss this paragon path on the official errata forums a while ago. You can find it here.

A fix

I toyed around with the idea of halving the bonuses provided by Inspire by Example, but this merely delayed the problem, rather than fixing it - bonuses of +4 were still possible at epic levels, and that was still problematic. Instead, I considered that the paragon path was already rewarding high constitution scores with Inspire by Word (an amazing temporary HP granting feature which more than justifies taking the path, by itself), so I could eschew reliance on Con to use flat modifiers with the values I considered fair:

Inspire by Example (11th level): When you spend an action point to take an extra action, each ally within 5 squares of you gains a +2 bonus to attack rolls and damage rolls until the end of your next turn.

A small bonus, but when you apply it to most attacks from your party over a whole round, it adds up to quite a bit.

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My Minion rules

2011-08-02T09:53:00.001+02:00

One of my favourite things about combat in D&D 4E is the existence of minion monsters. These little guys add a new dimension to encounter composition: we are no longer constrained to skirmishes between roughly equivalent groups, or straightforward boss fights. Rather, we can have the PCs face dozens of foes at a time, in battles of epic (though not necessarily Epic) scale. However, as much as I like the basic concept of minions, I can’t help but notice that their implementation doesn’t get everything right.

The point of minions is to be fragile. That is the tradeoff they present: lots of monsters which don’t hit quite as hard, and die like flies. In principle, having PCs slaughtering them with ease should be a feature, not a bug. However, the way this is handled in 4E can only be classified as, well... overkill. Area attacks are bad enough, but at least they take some commitment, and are not 100% reliable.What is really troubling is the interaction of minions with sources of automatic damage (mostly daily attacks like Rain of Steel or Wall of Fire, but also present in class features like Flurry of Blows), which most parties have in enough numbers to guarantee that, in any encounter featuring lots of minions, it is extremely rare to have any of them survive past turn 2.

The bottom line is that minions are not threatening, as monsters. It’s not just a matter of XP cost: more often than not, adding more of them to a fight only causes them to die in droves after managing to make just one attack (if any), unless you are fighting in huge open spaces, and the minions in question have ranged attacks. Recent monster design technology tries to mitigate this with tricks like death triggers, which are nice enough, but ultimately, the only reliable way to have minions impacting a fight past turn three is to have them enter the fight past turn three. In fact, I have found relative success with staged groups of minions in my encounters. Also, you can just add one or two minions to an otherwise normal fight in the hopes that they escape PC attention long enough to survive the dreaded first rounds - I have found that this often works. Nevertheless, the problem remains that you can’t just have a group of minions make up a significant part of an encounter, and expect it to work. This needs to change.

After a lot of trial and error, I came up with the following house rule, which has addressed most problems with minions in my games:

Whenever a minion takes damage that is not the result of a hitting attack, if it is not prone, it can make a saving throw. If the saving throw succeeds, the minion is knocked prone and the damage is negated.

What does this do? The rule is intended to tone down the most egregious minion-wiping methods, without rendering them completely useless, while leaving fair minion-killing powers intact. That is to say, it gives a minion a chance to survive a Rain of Steel, Flurry of Blows, or pre-errata Flaming Sphere, to name some of the most common examples, but doesn’t stop tamer stuff like Cleave. Autodamage remains a very useful tool against minions, since it still provides a 45% chance of killing, and 55% of proning - and multiple instances should kill just fine, as prone minions can’t benefit from the save. Missed attacks are unaffected, since they still deal no damage to minions.

Applying this rule in my Trollhaunt campaign took some time to get used to (particularly for the monk player), but I can say that it had quite a positive effect in many minion-heavy encounters. Attacks that would have single-handedly destroyed the enemy hordes now left a few survivors to counterattack. A few heroic minions were even able to survive until the later stages of an encounter, more of an annoyance than a threat, but one that contributed to make the fight more exciting - we even joked about promoting a particularly persistent troglodyte minion soldier to standard status, after its prolonged combat experience.

As far as I can tell, this rule only negatively affects attacks that were on the abusive side against minions, with one remarkable exception: the Wizard’s Magic Missile. This power has already suffered enough from errata, and is the perfect attack to allow guaranteed minion slaying, so I would add the following line to it:

“Special: Any minion targeted by this attack is automatically reduced to 0 hit points”.

Monsters of the Trollhaunt VI: Encounters W2, W3

2011-08-01T13:29:00.001+02:00

Monsters of the Trollhaunt: Index – Previous - Next

** SPOILER ALERT**
These articles update monsters in adventure P1: King of the Trollhaunt Warrens – reading them may spoil encounters in the module!

Something is rotten in the Trollhaunt Warrens – and it’s the monsters in today’s article!

Marrowmaw Mauler (Level 8 Soldier)

1. Issues identified

Claw attack is redundant, serves no purpose
Relies too much on Bite for damage.
Lack of mark punishment

2. Changes introduced

Attacks: reduced accuracy, increased ranged damage. Damage shifted from Bite to Greatclub. Note that this monster’s melee damage was already competitive with MM3 guidelines thanks to minor action Bite.
Defenses: –1 Fortitude
New power: Enduring Stench
Removed power: Claw

Kasszt (Level 9 Elite Controller - Leader)

1. Issues identified:

Claw attack is redundant, serves no purpose
Cavern Curse is extremely weak, no point in casting it.
Chant of Renewal has not enough impact for an Elite standard action power.

2. Changes introduced.

Attacks: Increased damage and accuracy for Quarterstaff, increased damage for Poison Ray, Cavern Curse. Quarterstaff now pushes. Cavern Curse is now at-will.
Powers: Double Ray now gives a choice of Poison Rays or Cavern Curse. Chant of renewal now costs a minor action.
Defenses: –2 AC, –1 For.
Removed power: Claw

Nothic Stalker (Level 11 Skirmisher)

1. Issues identified

Dazing Gaze too annoying as an at-will. Also, triggering Dazing Gaze off a Retaliate is too frustrating
No Skirmisher mobility

2. Changes introduced.

Attacks: Increased damage and accuracy for Claw, increased damage for Dazing Gaze. Dazing Gaze is now recharge 3+. Claw now grants extra shift.

Troglodyte Mauler (Level 6 Soldier)

Using level 6 monsters against PCs of level 11 or 12 is downright silly. These should have been minions instead. I used 2 types of minions for this: Troglodyte Grunts, and Troglodyte Warriors.

Troglodyte Grunt (Level 12 Minion Skirmisher)

There is a skirmisher troglodyte minion in Monster Vault, which could be used with minimum update effort, once I had added some levels to it.

1. Issues identified

Lack of a ranged attack. I wanted at least some of my minions to have a Javelin attack, since the encounter was designed with Maulers, which have one.

2. Changes introduced.

Level Up: +6 to attack and defenses, +3 to damage. +5 Initiative.
Attacks: I added a slide effect to the Club attack, to make it a bit more interesting.
Defenses: –3 For, +1 Ref, +1 Wil
New Power: Javelin ranged attack.

Troglodyte Warrior (Level 12 Minion Soldier)

1. Issues identified

Old school minion. The warrior lacked a proper role, decent damage, and compelling abilities. Basically, this called for a completely new design.

2. Changes introduced.

Soldier Role: Since the Maulers I were replacing with minions were soldiers to begin with, I wanted these Warriors to be Soldiers, too.
Attacks: +2 attack and damage for Club.
Defenses: +3 AC, +1 Ref, +2 Wil
New Trait: Defender Aura. I could have used a mark as usual, but I wanted to experiment with different mechanics.
New Power: Ferocious Bite. I liked the Mauler’s Bite attack, but minor action attacks don’t make a lot of sense for minions. This is a vicious ability for this kind of monster
New Power: Ferocious Reflexes. I needed a mark-enforcing power, and the threat of Bite should be an effective deterrent.

3. Gameplay Notes

To my knowledge, there is no precedent for monsters with defender’s aura. I have been playing for months in a party with a Cavalier, and I must say I loved the mechanic and wanted to see how it played out on the monster side. And it was quite a success! These minions were not particularly sticky (since they did not punish enemy shifts), but the ability to defend a zone works great when present in multiple creatures. My players took a while to get used to it, but it felt fair, fun, and quite different from traditional mark mechanics. I’ll definitely use this for future monsters, both minion and not.

Marrowmaw Impaler (Level 9 Artillery)

See Encounter W1

Ssark, Battle Champion (Level 11 Elite Soldier - Leader)

1. Issues identified:

Excessive damage. The Battle Champion Tactics trait combined with two attacks from Double Attack and a third from Bite combines for impressive amounts of damage, that can be concentrated on a single PC. I found this to be too dangerous for a monster of its level.
Redundant Claw attack.
Inspiring Assault is very unimpressive. I had the luck of scoring a critical hit during my encounter with Ssark. Unfortunately, I can’t say this highly situational trait did much for the monsters – it needs to provide a better reward.
Soldier without marks. Too common in older monsters.

2. Changes introduced.

Attacks: Reduced accuracy and increased damage for regular attacks. Bite damage was reduced, because Ssark already gets a damage boost with combat advantage. Added mark to Greatclub and Bite, and leader effects to Greatclub and Javelin. Changed Double Attack to prevent using both attacks on a single target. Changed Javelin to target one or two enemies.
Defenses: –2 AC, –1 For
Traits: Battle Champion Tactics damage reduced to 1d10
New Power: Champion’s Revenge – the necessary mark punishment mechanic.
Removed Power: Claw

All images are (C) 2010 Wizards of the Coast LLC, a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc. All rights reserved. I tried to generate the statistics blocks using the D&D Adventure Tools, but I’m fed with the endless bugs. I ended up writing them on Word instead.

Warlock Updates (revised)

2011-07-30T07:43:00.001+02:00

The playtest for the Warlock class updates has ended, and what seems to be the ultimate revision for the class has been released. Not much has changed from the previous document, but they did succeed in implementing the most demanded fix: Star Pact warlocks can (finally!) have their choice of Charisma or Constitution for their fixed at-will, Dire Radiance. This had been a long standing problem for a build that allegedly allowed focusing on either ability modifier, and goes a long way towards improving the playability of the Star Pact. Aside from that, a few daily powers have received additional rewordings, usually to boost their power (notably, Hunger of Hadar has basically recovered its pre-errata status), and the at-wills Hellish Rebuke and Dire Radiance have been rewritten so as to trigger only once per round, which seems only fair and prevents a few egregious loopholes.

If you have ever been curious about playing a warlock, the class is in better shape than ever, and well worth a shot. It’s still a striker with relatively low damage output (meaning that it’s not uncommon for non-strikers to hit harder than you), but on the other hand it offers very respectable control and many, many tricks. It’s also one of the most supported classes in the game, with tons of options for powers and feats, and even a good deal of class-specific magic items, offering a potential build variety that is only matched by fighters and wizards, if at all. And, most importantly, it’s quite fun to play.

By the way, for those lacking a Player’s Handbook or a DDI subscription, the class is now available for free on wizards website.

Broken Bits: Infernal Strategist

2011-07-29T01:08:00.001+02:00

Broken Paragon Paths, Part Eight
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We have talked before about how the standard for an awesome damage-boosting paragon path consists in having a feature to add an ability modifier to a character’s damage rolls. I tend to consider these paths overpowered, particularly when no particular condition is required to benefit from the extra damage, yet (barely!) not broken.That said, it doesn’t take much to push them into the realm of unfairness - and doubling this damage bonus certainly qualifies.

At first glance, Infernal Pincer (the 11th level feature of warlord paragon path Infernal Strategist) seems almost innocent: it’s a damage boost that only comes up when you are flanking an enemy. However, its true power soon becomes apparent, since this significant bonus can apply to both the warlord and his flanking buddy. It’s not unusual for this feature to contribute for 10 or more extra damage per turn, even at lower paragon levels - and that is before accounting for the impact of action points, multiattacks, and similar effects, as well as the rare occasion where the warlord manages to flank multiple enemies.

Granted, flanking is not a trivial requirement to meet. However, even in scenarios where the target enemy starts off isolated, it’s fairly easy for a warlord to set up a flank in an ally’s turn, so the feature is all but guaranteed to operate, at worst, at 50% efficiency (which is amazing enough). Add to this the fact that the rest of the paragon path is actually pretty cool to begin with (with a 16th level feature that opens up tons of possibilities, and a level 12 utility offering four great choices), and we get to the conclusion that Infernal Pincer needs a thorough revision.

A fix

I knew I wanted to cut the damage of Infernal Pincer in half, if not more. An obvious approach was to have it affect a single character only - which would be the flanking ally, as it is the option that makes more sense in a leader paragon path. However, this change would have left the path just as effective in niche builds focused on Commander’s Strike and similar powers, and I wanted to lower the path’s effectiveness - not just its scope.

While looking for alternative solutions, an idea that called to me was using both Int and Cha for the feature. After all, resourceful warlords are one of the few class builds in the game that supports two secondary abilities at once, and this had the side effect of reducing the power level. Just adding Int to your damage and Cha to your ally’s damage was tempting, but ultimately a bit too good for my taste, so I settled with the following:

Infernal Pincer (11th level): You gain a bonus to melee damage rolls equal to 1 + one half your Intelligence modifier against enemies you flank. Your allies gain a bonus to melee damage rolls equal to 1 + one half your Charisma modifier against enemies they flank with you.

This may look like a very modest bonus, but if you add up your extra damage with your ally’s, you end up with quite respectable values (i.e. 2+ Int/2 + Cha/2).

A different, unrelated fix

This path also has a level 12 utility called Flexible Authority, which doesn’t work properly at the moment. It is used as an immediate reaction, but is supposed to apply modifiers to an ally’s attack as it’s being made. As such, it should become an Immediate Interrupt instead.

The Magic Item Reset (XVIII): Adjusting Damage

2011-07-28T11:37:00.001+02:00

One conscious decision that I made while designing my magic item collection was to avoid items that granted flat bonuses, like the extra damage from the infamous Iron Armbands of Power. I believe that the result is a more varied and satisfying treasure system, but it does mean that characters end up dealing less damage than if they used the original rules. For this reason, and unless your group is interested in slightly longer combat encounters, I recommend to use the following house rule.

Optional rule: Damage adjustment

All player characters gain a bonus to damage rolls of melee and ranged attacks depending on their level, according to the following table:

PC Level - Damage bonus
1-5 - +1
6-10 - +2
11-15 - +3
16-20 - +4
21-25 - +5
26-30 - +6

Discussion

Here is some explanation of the reasoning behind this rule.

- Why keep this bonus?

I think the game plays better with it. It’s not a huge deal at lower levels, but at paragon and epic, encounters can drag a little, and this extra damage can help a bit on that. That said, it is not vital to a party’s success, so you can feel free to ignore it.

- Why not give it through items?

I just couldn’t find a proper way of implementing this bonus using items without seriously warping one or more item slots. Using specific items was out of the question (Iron Armbands and Staves of Ruin being great examples of what I don’t want to do with my system), but even using item categories introduced its share of problems.

I first thought of having every Arms items grant the bonus (+2 damage /tier), but it was hard to balance so that common items of level 11 and 21 wouldn’t trump any uncommon or rare of the previous tier as soon as they became available. The other option was resorting to the weapon slot (granting +1 extra damage / enhancement bonus), but this had a similar problem: I think some high level uncommon and rare weapons can be competitive with plain magic weapons with higher enhancement bonus... but with that extra damage, that was impossible to achieve.

- Why are area and close attacks excluded?

I wanted to make single target attacks more competitive against areas. Right now, when a character has a choice between a melee or ranged attack and a burst or blast, unless the single target option does something ridiculous like stunning or dominating, the area wins handily. You just don’t lose all that much damage against the primary target, and affecting one or more additional monsters is obviously a huge advantage. By preventing the extra damage from working with areas, we provide a slight incentive to try out those single target powers.

Not that I am suggesting that area powers are broken, but given the chance to make this small adjustment, I think it’s best for the game. By contrast, some types of powers which are indeed broken are multiattacks and immediate action attacks - but fixing those requires deeper changes to the game (which I intend to implement, some day).

The Magic Item Reset: Compilation

2011-07-27T13:02:00.001+02:00

After months of work, my epic rework of the 4E magic item system is, if not complete, at least ready for release. In the link below you will find the compiled .pdf file with the latest version of this item collection. Alternate treasure generation rules are not included, but can be found here.

Magic Item Reset-v1.13.pdf

For insight on the design process and discussion of specific items, I recommend checking out previous articles on this blog.

Bladesinger preview

2011-07-26T12:28:00.001+02:00

The upcoming Neverwinter Campaign Setting supplement is including a brand new character class: the Bladesinger, the first level of which was previewed last week. In previous editions, Bladesingers had warriors of elven origin that mixed martial techniques and the arcane arts, usually fighting in light armor and channeling deadly spells through their swords. This comes off as a bit of a deja vu, since only a couple of years ago, we were introduced to a 4E sword-wielding fighter-wizard hybrid in the swordmage class, included in the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting (with the fact that Neverwinter is located in the Realms only contributing to the redundancy). Then again, whereas the swordmage performed the defender role, Bladesingers are labeled as controllers. More specifically, they are melee controllers with defender-like AC, and an extra damage mechanic not unlike that of an striker. Oh, and they actually count as a Wizard subclass. Confused yet? This is only the beginning.

A note of caution: like most of the material released in the last year, the Bladesinger is a post-Essentials design, meaning that the class deviates from the classic 4E structure of at-will, encounter, and daily powers, gains class features as you level up, shows a love for basic attacks, and tends to sacrifice build variety for flavor, simplicity, and focused mechanics. That said, I believe there are a lot of things to love. The core of the class is solid enough: they have striker hit points, are proficient with swords (both as weapons and implements, since they can use them as wands) and leather armor, use Intelligence as a primary ability and Dexterity as secondary (it is, after all, a class for elves-eladrins), have a good basic attack, and gain a shield bonus for free. That alone makes them competent melee fighters. On top of that, they count as a wizards, so they can benefit from plenty of great feats and utility powers, though access to actual wizard attacks (the strongest element of that class, by a mile) is far more tricky.

So far, what we have seen is interesting, but not all that original. It is in the attack power department where the Bladesinger shows the most innovative (some would say heretic) ideas. To sum it all up, they get at-wills that add damage and controlling effects to their melee basic attack, a fixed selection of encounter powers (of which the one that has been revealed is awesome at so many levels), and daily attacks that are actually wizard encounter powers (!).

The at-wills are my favourite part of the class, by a mile. Called Bladespells, they are ranged attacks that trigger when you hit with a melee basic attack, and hit automatically for a fixed amount of damage (based on your Dex score) and a control effect. The really nice part is that you can target different foes with the basic attack and the bladespell, opening up some strategies that are unavailable to most other characters. Notably, you can use your melee attack against whatever monster the party is focusing fire on, and use a bladespell to hinder the actions of a different enemy on the other side of the battlefield. Or kill a minion just about anywhere without sacrificing much damage. And, of course,something that most controllers are usually unable to do: unleash both attacks on the same target, weakening it and hitting for a total amount of damage not too far off that of the party striker. Add to that the fact that a bladesinger can choose three bladespells (out of a total of 6), with a wide variety of useful controlling effects and energy types, and we have a very versatile class, with a unique fighting style.

As for the encounter attacks, there is a selection of three fixed powers whose effect will scale across tiers. This means that the experience of building a bladesinger character won’t be as varied or interesting as with other classes, but it looks like, at least, the powers that you end up getting are well worth it. Only one of them is shown in the preview, but it is impressive on all fronts. Called Bladesong (though “God-Mode” would also be an accurate name), it provides a significant two-turn boost to the character’s stats: damage, accuracy and defenses. Damage-wise, it is easily equivalent to two Power Strikes or similar attacks, and of course the synergy with action points and daily powers (and perhaps other encounters) is nothing short of amazing. As for the remaining two encounter attacks, only the name is provided, but we can hazard a guess. The level 7 one is called Steely Retort, and it will likely consist in an immediate action attack dealing fixed damage and an extra effect to an enemy hitting you, much like the powers Hexblades get. At level 3 you get Arcane Strike, which sounds similar to Power Strike, so I expect some special trigger when you hit with a basic attack. Linking these effects to Bladespells (for example, by allowing additional uses of Bladespell when you use them) is a potential design solution, and one that I’d enjoy very much.

Finally, we get to the most controversial point: the daily attack slot. The good news is, Bladesingers get to choose among a huge amount of powers with a variety of effects here. The bad news is that they achieve so by using the Wizard’s encounter attacks as their dailies. This kind of move is unprecedented in the game, so let’s try to make some sense out of it. To begin with, we have to be realistic: with a class so front-loaded on features and at-will powers, there was no way they could have been given access to regular wizard dailies without being grossly unbalanced. That said, how lackluster are wizard encounters for a daily, after all? In my opinion, not as much as you’d think. Keep in mind that most of them have received errata to have miss effects, so they will at least meet the minimum criteria for a daily: have an impact on the board whether or not you hit. The downside is that the second requirement usually asked for those powers (have effects lasting for several turns, if not the whole encounter) is pretty much out of the question. That said, this power list includes some fairly impressive area attacks (something that Bladesingers can’t have through their at-will or encounter slots), as well as strong controlling effects such as stuns, or area blinding and immobilizing. Add to that the fact that Spellsong will virtually always be active when you cast a daily, and you have, at the very least, the ability to unleash highly damaging Fireball effects and extremely accurate control. To be the weak point of the class, your dailies may not compete with those of a true Wizard, but they don’t have that much to envy those of non-controlling classes.

Conclusion

I like this class, and I think I would enjoy playing it. Although this is just a preview, we are actually two class features short (the level 3 and 7 encounter attacks) of having all of the essential information for playing it all the way through epic tier. I think this is the best implementation of the elusive arcane fighter archetype to date: the Swordmage is pretty decent (at least for the playable builds), but I don’t think the defender role is what most people have in mind when thinking about spellcasting swordsmen; as for Hexblades, they aren’t too bad, either, but they offer less variety in both build and combat options, and aside from the amazing Gloom Pact build they feel slightly underpowered. I am still growing accustomed to the idea that Bladesingers are a Wizard subclass, but this has the advantage of providing plenty of support for daily and utility powers, as well as paragon paths and feats. This kind of design works great for adding new classes to the game without requiring any additional support, and we can only wish they had thought of it when implementing stuff like Runepriests or Seekers.

Class Compendium: Arcanist Wizard

2011-07-16T22:19:00.001+02:00

The Class Compendium series comes to an end with what is likely the most complex class update yet: the Player’s Handbook Wizard, now known as Arcanist. Ever since I read Heroes of the Fallen Kingdoms, I had been awaiting this revision, to finish the changes started there: give miss effects to wizard encounter powers, and add school keywords to all spells. The article addresses this, but also tackles the issue of attacks with persistent, damaging zones, severely weakening many wizard spells that, to be honest, were likely deserving their fate.

A huge amount of game elements were changed in the article, so I’ll show them classified into five broad categories: General, At-Wills, Encounters, Dailies, and Paragon Paths (curiously, the update had no effect on wizard utilities).

General

Zone Damage: Almost every damaging zone was changed. Zones now tend to deal damage at the end of turn, using static amounts rather than damage rolls, and only once per turn. This is a severe reduction in power, but in many cases it was well deserved . On the bright side, the powers become much more interesting, since enemies now actually have an incentive to move away from damaging zones, so the wizard has -gasp- control over their actions. Still, in some cases this would work better if the end of turn damage was raised - I’m not advocating returning to damage rolls, but some higher modifiers would be in order.

Cantrips: Arcanist Wizards can now choose which cantrips they have, so spells released in Essentials books become relevant for them.

At-Wills

No Improvements: This is the big letdown for me, in the article: PHB wizard at-wills haven’t got any better, despite the fact that the standard for controller at-wills is now much higher than 3 years ago. I was particularly hopeful for my pet power, *Scorching Burst*, which really deserved some additional effect, or (my personal favourite) just boosting its damage die to d10. Ray of Frost is likewise unimpressive, and would really need to slow on a miss, slow (save ends), or prevent shifting to remain remotely competitive. Cloud of Daggers, which was fine before, has been hurt by the sweeping changes to zones, so its damage now triggers at the end of turn - underwhelming to say the least. I would really like it if they kept this timing but, say, doubled the zone damage. The rest of at-wills are ok, though: Magic Missile is weak but has its niche, and Thunder Wave is awesome as ever.

Encounters

The update had a very positive impact on wizard encounter attacks - the vast majority of the ones released in Player’s Handbook now have an effect on a miss, and the very few which don’t are likely mistakes that will be corrected before the final version. A couple of powers suffered a reduction in power, due to the sweeping changes to zone damage, with automatic damage triggering at the start of turn getting downgraded to damage at the end of a creature’s turn. Still, most remain competitive.

Note that many encounter attacks had already been reprinted and improved on Heroes of the Fallen Lands, and have not been affected by this article.

Get better (* marks very weak improvements): Chill Strike (L1*), Ray of Enfeeblement (L1), Icy Rays (L3), Spectral Ram (L7*), Mesmeric Hold (L13), Prismatic Burst (L13), Thunderlance (L13), Combust (L17), Ice Tomb (L17*), Thunderclap (L23), Black Fire (L27), Force Cage (L27)

Get worse (* marks weak powers now): Winter’s Wrath (L7), Frost Burn (L13*), Acid Storm (L23)

Unchanged, deserve improvement: Force Orb (L1), Fire Burst (L7)

Dailies

If the update brought an increase in power level for wizard encounter attacks, the same cannot be said about dailies. Daily attacks with damaging zones are much weaker now, and non-zone dailies with multiple damage rolls like Prismatic Beams and Prismatic Spray no longer get to pile damage bonuses several times against each target. This affects some of the best damage-dealing dailies in the wizard class (or in the whole game, for that matter), and it’s a change likely to affect many players. On the other hand, these powers definitely had it coming, and they remain, for the most part, very playable, and very dangerous, even in this diminished state. The one exception where I feel they went too far with the nerf is Flaming Sphere, which may have become too much of an action sink for too slim a chance of damaging an enemy: having it trigger on enemies moving adjacent to it in addition to ending their turns there would greatly increase its usefulness in combat.
I generally approve of the updates made to dailies, but for a glaring omission: Fireball (and its big brother Meteor Swarm) still suck. I really, really want to play those, but they are extremely poor options, even after the errata to their worst competitors for area damage.

Get better (* marks very weak improvements):Acid Arrow (L1*)

Get worse (* marks weak powers now):Flaming Sphere (L1*), Freezing Cloud (L1, also got minor buff), Stinking Cloud (L5), Wall of Fire (L9), Prismatic Beams (L15), Cloudkill (L19), Elemental Maw (L25), Necrotic Web (L25), Prismatic Spray (L25)

Unchanged, deserve improvement:Fireball (L5), Lightning Serpent (L9)

Paragon paths

For a long time, the undisputed star of wizard paragon paths has been the Bloodmage, and even a couple attempts at errataing it down to more reasonable levels didn’t bring it down. This article reduces its power level once again, and it looks like they finally nailed it. Two other paths also see minor changes, though nothing of that scale.

Battle Mage: Closing Spell (L20 Daily) reduced in area.

Bloodmage: Bolstering Blood (L11 feature) damage limited to one target; Burning Blood (L16 feature) damage changed; Destructive Salutation (L20 Daily) reduced in damage, now dazes instead of stunning.

Spellstorm Mage: Extra Damage Action (L11 Feature) damage limited to one attack. Storm Cage (L11 attack) wall damage moved to end of turn.

The Magic Item Reset (XVII): Update 1.1

2011-06-26T09:15:00.001+02:00

Edit (27/07/11): Clarified text for Winged Weapon

I have implemented a round of revisions on these items, based on reader feedback and my first play experiences with the system. Broadly speaking, the changes can be classified in:

Power balance adjustments. A few items have been weakened, including the Vorpal Weapons (which was found excessive in combination with auto-crit effects) and the Belt of Regeneration (which was too good with regeneration-boosting feats, and now grants a higher regeneration value, but only while bloodied). Many items have been improved, including most options at the Hands slot.
Level adjustments. The original list had a shortage of uncommon items at levels 1,6,11,16,21 and 26. Many items have been shifted in level to address this, including most rings.
Skill support. Skill bonuses have been added to many items where it felt appropriate. These are all of the form “replace your ability modifier with +4/+7/+10”, in order to prevent skill bonuses stacking to ridiculous values.
Ranged weapon support. Weapon enchantments were a bit skewed towards melee characters. Two new items for ranged characters have been added.

The change list is shown below. These will be incorporated to the corresponding blog entries as soon as possible. The article index is here.

The following items have been added:

Winged Weapon - Level 2+ Common Weapon
Lvl 2 (+1); Lvl 7 (+2); Lvl 12 (+3); Lvl 17 (+4); Lvl 22 (+5); Lvl 27 (+6)
Requires: Ranged or thrown weapon
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls
Critical: +1d6 damage per plus, and the target is knocked prone if it is flying
Property: When you make a ranged or area weapon attack with this weapon, if the target is flying you gain a power bonus to the damage roll equal to the weapon’s enhancement bonus.

Snap Shot Weapon - Level 3+ Uncommon Weapon
Lvl 3 (+1); Lvl 8 (+2); Lvl 13 (+3); Lvl 18 (+4); Lvl 23 (+5); Lvl 28 (+6)
Requires: Ranged weapon
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls
Critical: +1d6 damage per plus.
Power (Encounter). Opportunity Action. Trigger: An adjacent enemy provokes an opportunity attack from you. Effect: Make a ranged basic attack with this weapon against the triggering enemy.

The following items have been modified:

Extending Weapon (Level 3+ Uncommon Weapon)

Power changed to “Until the end of your next turn [was “this turn”], the reach of this weapon increases by 1, and the normal range and long range of this weapon increase by 5.”

Vorpal Weapon (Level 5 Rare Weapon).

Critical changed to “+1d12 damage per plus. If you rolled a natural 18, 19 or 20 on the attack roll, you deal +2d12 damage per plus instead, and roll a d20. On a roll of 18-20, the enemy takes double damage from the attack.”
Property changed to –7 penalty at level 15 [was –8] and –10 penalty at level 25 [was –12].

Nimble Armor

Added Property: “You can use this armor’s enhancement bonus instead of your Strength, Constitution or Dexterity modifier when making Acrobatics, Athletics, Endurance, Stealth, or Thievery checks.”
Removed Requirement (Hide or higher armor).

Juggernaut Armor

Reduced level to 4+ [was 5+]

Bramble Armor

Daily power changed to “…enemies that hit you take damage equal to 2+ the enhancement bonus of this armor” [was damage equal to the enhancement bonus]

Dwarven Armor

Added bonus to Endurance skill.

Invulnerable Armor

Daily power changed to add “Until the start of your next turn, you take half damage from attacks”.

Amulet of Shared Suffering

Encounter power changed to “… and has a –5 penalty to saves made against the ongoing damage this turn”. [was –4 penalty]

Trekking Boots

Level 2 Encounter power changed to add “You gain a +1 power bonus to speed”.

Acrobat Boots

Level changed to 6/16/26 [was 8/18/28].
Added bonus to Acrobatics skill.

Belt of Regeneration

Property changed to “You gain regeneration 3/5/7 while bloodied” [was regeneration 1/2/3 at all times]

Crown of Victory

Added bonus to Diplomacy skill

Glasses of True Sight

Added bonus to Perception skill

Mask of Terror

Added bonus to Intimidate skill

Covering Shield

Redesigned item. It is now as follows:

Gloves of Sleight of Hand

Added bonus to Thievery skill

Gauntlets of Glancing Blows

Changed At-Will power to “and deals 3/6/9 damage on a miss” [was 2/4/6 damage]

Gloves of Piercing

Changed property to add “When you hit an enemy, if the enemy has resistance against any damage types of your attack, you reduce its resistance against those damage types by 5/10/15 until the end of your next turn.”

Gloves of Mercy

Added bonus to Heal skill
Change At-Will power to “…the ally regains 1d6/2d6/3d6 additional hit points” [was 3/6/9 hit points]

Gloves of the Wind

Change At-Will power to add “At the end of this movement, the target grants combat advantage to all adjacent characters until the end of your next turn.”

Gloves of Fearsome Abandon

Changed At-Will power to “…takes a –3/6/9 penalty to damage rolls until the end of your next turn…” [was –2/4/6 penalty]

Bloodclaws

Changed level to 6/16/26 [was 9/19/29]
Changed Encounter power to “deals an extra d10/2d10/3d10 damage on a hit” [was an extra 1d12/2d12/3d12]

Ring of Terror

Changed level to 11/21 [was 12/22]

Ring of the Sentinel

Changed level to 11/21 [was 13/23]

Ring of the Frenzied Berserker

Changed level to 11/21 [was 14/24]

Ring of Shared Hope

Changed level to 16/26 [was 17/27]

Ring of Covetousness

Changed level to 16/26 [was 18/28]

Ring of Death

Changed level to 11/21 [was 15/25]

Ring of Life

Changed level to 16/26 [was 20/30]

The Magic Item Reset (XVI) : Treasure generation

2011-06-17T12:33:00.001+02:00

At a certain point during the design of my item collection, I decided that I wanted to revise how treasure parcels are generated in the game. Not to change the average PC wealth per level, as that would be cheating - I had set out to fix the issues with the treasure system just by redesigning the items themselves, but otherwise working within the same framework. That said, there were a number of changes that could be introduced without altering the fundamentals of item distribution. This included rules for upgrading uncommon and rare items, integrating consumables in the general loot tables, scaling treasure with party size, and (once I realized that my item selection could make it work) random loot generation.

I have compiled all of these alternate rules, along with slightly modified tables for item and gold allocation in parcels, so that the whole treasure creation process is covered in this article. These rules are not required in order to use the new magic items, but I believe they can improve the player experience, so I recommend to give them a try. Likewise, you could use them in a campaign with regular magic items, and except for the random treasure, they should probably work fine. With one notable exception (consumables, of which I’ll talk below), this process will provide an equivalent amount of treasure as the rules from Dungeon Master´s Guide or Rules Compendium.

Overview

The item creation process takes up four steps, with an additional one if you go for non-random treasure. They are the following;

0. Wishlist Generation
1. Parcel roll
2. Item generation
3. Gold generation
4. Consumables generation

Step 0 applies at the beginning of a campaign or adventure, and steps 1 to 4 apply whenever a new treasure parcel is generated.

0. Wishlist Generation

Skip this part if the players and DM have agreed to try out the fully random treasure rules. At the start of a campaign or an adventure, have every player select at least 1 item for each slot, write it down on a wish list, and hand it to the DM.. The following guidelines should apply:

In case of doubt, suggesting multiple items of different rarities for a slot is a valid option, and gives the DM some flexibility.
Players should be aware of rarity distribution across tiers. PCs will have, on average, 3 uncommons and 1 rare by the end of the heroic tier, 5 uncommons and 2 rares by the end of paragon, and 6 uncommons and 3 rares at level 30.
Likewise, having an even spread of item levels is also advisable. Try not to end up, for example, with no item choices between levels 7 and 10.
Secondary, and even tertiary weapons or implements often come handy, and should be considered as a slot.
When dealing with rares, I personally prefer when players write down a couple of options for each rare slot, so that there is some uncertainty (and excitement!) about this crucial piece of treasure.

1. Parcel roll

When generating treasure for a parcel, roll on table T1 to determine whether it has magic items or gold. This roll can be made by the DM beforehand, when planning an encounter or set of encounters, or after the fact, when the players win a fight. If the d20 result matches the Item chance, the parcel has a magic item: go to step 2. If the d20 matches the gold and consumable chance (“Gold/Cons. chance”), go to step 3 and then, if you are using the optional consumable rules in your campaign, go to step 4.

Note that a parcel can have both a magic item and gold or consumables, if the part has more than 5 members. Conversely, when there are less than 5 PCs, it is possible for a parcel to contain no treasure at all.

2. Item generation

If the step 1 has resulted in a parcel that has a magic item, roll on table T2 to find out the level and rarity of the item. At the DM’s discretion, a roll of 1 or 2 can generate a common item of the party’s level, or its equivalent in gold. The Dungeon Master’s Guide tables provide gold in this slot, but a campaign can benefit from having items instead, if the players aren’t interested in crafting items or won’t have a chance to purchase items in a shop.

As an optional rule, this can be taken a step further for a goldless PC economy (see step 3).

If the roll results in an uncommon item, there is a chance that the parcel has a rare item instead. This can be determined randomly (roll 1d4, on a result of 4, the item is rare), or at the DM’s discretion. However, the following restrictions apply:

At the end of each tier, every PC should have acquired 1 rare item - no more, and no less. If random item generation provides a rare item when all PCs have covered their quota, the parcel has an uncommon item instead. Likewise, if one or more PCs are missing a rare by the end of a tier, the DM should force their inclusion in parcels - either by automatically considering the first uncommon item to appear as a rare for those PCs, or by adding rare items to a parcel by hand.

Item upgrades (new rule)

As the PCs grow in level, their item slots should become filled with items they want. These PCs expect new treasure to include either items for empty slots, higher rarity replacements for some of their items, or higher level upgrades for their existing gear. This last option isn’t well covered in the standard rules, but can be addressed in the following way.

When an item is generated, there is a chance, depending on level and rarity, that it is an upgrade for an existing piece of gear instead of a brand new item. Roll on table T3, taking into account the level and rarity of the generated item. These guidelines apply:

If the generated item is common, an item upgrade can apply to any common or uncommon item. You can also upgrade a rare item this way, but only if the original rare item and the upgraded version are both in the same tier (i.e. both have levels between 1-10, 11-20, or 21-30).
If the generated item is uncommon, an item upgrade can apply only to a rare item, if the original rare item and the upgraded version are in different tiers.
If the generated item is a rare, it is always a new item; don’t roll on table T3.
When a generated item is an item upgrade, make a list of all the items owned by PCs that can be upgraded to an item of the specified level and rarity, and choose one of these items at random. If no item of that exact level is available for an upgrade, choose among PC items of the highest level that can benefit from the upgrade. If no item at all can benefit from the upgrade, generate a new item of the level and rarity determined on T2.
When an item is upgraded, the original item is replaced by a higher level version of it, and the party gains, as part of the same parcel, an amount of gold of residuum equal to the value they would have gained by selling or disenchanting the item.

If a new item is generated (i.e. the roll doesn’t result in an item upgrade or in raw gold), the DM selects an item of the chosen level and rarity from the PC’s wishlists. This selection should be made at random between all PCs with an appropriate item in their wishlist. Optionally, a DM may choose to exclude a PC from the roll if he or she has acquired magic items recently, or automatically assign the item to a PC if he or she is lagging behind in gear. If no PC has an item of that level and rarity in their wishlist, choose one of lower rarity. If there isn’t any item to choose at that rarity, follow these guidelines:

If the generated item is common, generate a common item at random (see random item generation rules below) or, at the DM’s discretion, add gold to the parcel equal to the value of the item.
If the generated item is uncommon or rare, the PCs gain no new item, but the first time a parcel is generated after the PCs gain a level, that parcel automatically has an additional item of chosen rarity and level equal to the chosen level+1. At the DM’s discretion, this can apply to any treasure parcel after the PCs gain a level.

Random item generation (optional rule)

As an optional rule, instead of using a wishlist, a DM can have all treasure in a campaign be generated at random. If you use this rule, when a new item is generated, roll on table T5 to determine which item of that level and rarity it is. This replaces the wishlist selection rules above. Item upgrade rules still apply as normal.

Note: Table T5 is huge, and will be included in a separate article, coming soon. This rule only works with my collection of magic items, unless the DM generates his own table T5 from any given item collection.

3. Gold Generation

If the step 1 has resulted in a parcel that has a gold and consumables, consult table T4. For each level, table T4 shows two gold values: the item cost of a magic item of that level, and the base treasure gold, or [G]. Each parcel with gold has the following amount of gold:

1d4 x [G] gold pieces, if treasure parcels in this campaign include random consumables.
2d4 x [G] gold pieces, if parcels don’t include random consumables.

A note on character wealth: The rules in the Dungeon Master’s Guide hand out, for a 5-man party, an amount of gold per level equal to the cost of two magic items of that level, or 50[G]. Under my method, half of that is given out during the Item Generation step - specifically, for rolls of 1 or 2 on table T2. The other half is given as a combination of gold and consumables, so that if no consumables are used, PCs gain 25[G] per level from table T4. If consumables are used, PCs gain an average of 12.5 [G] per level from table T4, plus 12.5 [G] worth of consumables. Read section 4 - consumables for more about the value of consumables.

Goldless campaigns (optional rule): In some campaigns the players may prefer to have a PC economy that is entirely based upon magic items and consumables without any gold or residuum. If you want to have this style of play, use the following rules:

When a parcel would have gold and consumables, don’t roll on table T4 for gold, but gain twice the normal amount of consumables instead.
Alternately, if you prefer having no gold and no consumables, ignore parcel rolls with gold or consumables, but have table T2 for item generation provide two common items of the party’s level on a roll of 1 or 2.

4. Consumables

If the step 1 has resulted in a parcel that has a gold and consumables, roll on table T5, and add 1d4+1 consumables of the chosen rarity and level to the parcel. If you are using my item collection, there will only be one choice of consumable items for any given rarity and level. For a reference of the consumables available at each level, consult table T7 (to be included in a future article)^.

A note on consumable value: The amount of consumable items generated this way has been calculated so that a party will receive over the course of each level consumables worth an average of 12.5[G] when sold or disenchanted. The actual market value of these items will be 3 to 4 times that much (given that common items sell for 20% of their value, and uncommons for 50%), so that, strictly speaking, a party following these rules for consumable generation will receive slightly more treasure than if they followed the guidelines in Dungeon Master’s Guide. That said, I decided to use these values for the following reasons:

These tables provide what I consider to be the right amount of consumables: roughly enough for each PC to be able to spend 1 consumable every 3 encounters.
Due to their expendable nature and the (newly introduced) limitation on consumable uses per encounter, any extra items generated this way do not result in a substantial advantage for the party on the long term.
If the players choose to trade their consumables for cash, there is no net gain compared to the default rules.
An excessive reduction of available party gold (or non-consumable magic items) results in players being unable to upgrade all their gear according to their level.

Saving the game

2011-06-12T23:48:00.001+02:00

I’ll let you in on a little secret: I never play long D&D sessions. I have this amazing gaming group who meets with regularity, takes turns for the DM role, and is kind enough to come play to our house and patiently wait for us to put the baby to sleep (often after several attempts) before we start with the dice rolling. Pulling off multiple encounters in a single evening is plainly impossible for us, and we are are often hard pressed to find the time for properly closing one fight. Still, we have managed to get by, and slowly level a party well into the paragon tier in these small increments, without finding any major trouble – that is, until last night.

This is how the table looked, like, when disaster struck.

It was a combination of several factors: poor planning, a late start, and an epic (though not Epic – we’re still stuck at level 12) encounter involving a large map and waves of minions. To be fair, it was a blast of a fight, where everything came together perfectly except for one niggling detail: it just wouldn’t end. A climatic moment where the party Assassin was brought down with no healing available wasn’t properly appreciated by the Assassin player, because she had fallen unconscious (save ends) in the sofa a while before that. The adventurers eventually started to drive back the hordes of foes, but there was more yawning than shouting with excitement. I tried to press on, to give this session a proper end but eventually it became obvious that we’d have to leave it unfinished with just a few monsters standing (but still resisting boldly against the worn down adventurers). And thus, a game that would have been all kinds of awesome had we started playing at an earlier hour had to be interrupted anticlimatically due to lack of time.

After my players left, I was left wondering how we could have addressed the situation better, other than turning the encounter into a more conventional and brief skirmish. It’s not like our scheduling allowed us to start playing much earlier, anyway. And then, looking at the untidy table covered with dungeon tiles, dice and miniatures, the solution dawned on me – I could save the game state at any point and continue the fight the following day!

Ok, so it’s not a huge revelation or anything (and besides, the post title was kind of an spoiler). Stopping games mid-combat is a straightforward concept, and one that I had already implemented as early as 20 years ago (don’t try to play Rolemaster in 15-minute school breaks, kids!). But it’s never been an efficient solution, and it only gets harder with a game as complex as 4E, with its rich tactical map, and the zillion variables to keep track of for each character. So, for practical considerations, I had erased that idea from my mind, when it came to my 4E campaign. But thinking about it at that moment, it all started to click.

The map status is easily taken care of, in this digital age – just take a handful of photographs, and use them to reconstruct the map at a later point. But what about the game status? How to handle the initiative order, spent HP and surges, PC conditions, and used powers for PCs and monsters? It turns out I had solved that problem months ago. As the group DM, I’ve been experimenting for a while with aggregating all game data on an excel sheet, which I update in real time. It’s a bit cumbersome, but you get used to it, and it is by far the most efficient way I’ve found for keeping track of all game variables. I figured out that with the data I had filled into that sheet, plus a couple of photos, we would have no trouble continuing an interrupted encounter.

This had two interesting consequences. The most immediate one, that I will actually be able to play through the demise of the mighty Ssark and his cohorts next week, making up for the failure of last session. And the second, that I will no longer need to force my patient players through a few more rounds just to prevent leaving a fight unfinished. I am now free to close a session whenever we feel like it, which is quite a relief. Hooray!

So, is there a lesson to be learned from all this? I don’t think this specific method for pausing and resuming encounters will be useful to all groups, as there are uncountable ways of keeping track of game status, and I suspect most wouldn’t lend themselves to this. But maybe you can do the trick by taking some notes, or it doesn’t matter so much if some information is lost along the way. The important thing is, there is a definite temptation of trying to push a game beyond the time your players should be going home, just because you only need one more turn (or two). When that time comes, it’s good to know that other options exist.

Playtest: Warlock Updates

2011-06-07T12:03:00.001+02:00

The long awaited overhaul to the Warlock class (similar to, but not actually in, the Class Compendium series) has come out in playtest form, and there are quite a few interesting changes - but, unfortunately, one cannot help noticing the important issues they missed. Here is a summary of the changes, along with my thoughts on the matter.

The update: An unprecedented trap-removal exercise

It’s not easy to build a decent warlock. Or, to put it the other way, it’s too easy to build a terrible warlock. More than most 4E classes, the warlock is plagued by an excess of thoroughly underwhelming powers, which sit in the power list as a trap to the unwary player, often disguised under pretty names and shiny flavor. On the other hand, as more and more options have been published (and few classes can match the sheer amount of stuff that warlocks get), it is now quite possible to build a decent, if not spectacular, warlock character - provided that you know where to look, and that you are proficient enough to avoid the traps. Like it or not, this is the way things develop in 4E - you never get rid of bad stuff, but this is hopefully compensated by the abundance of newer options. The last update to the warlock puts an end to this.

There is a well known rule in the 4E errata cycle, that only overpowered options tend to be revised, whereas the weak stuff is left alone. After all, overpowered game elements tend to be much more disruptive to the game, and there are a LOT more weak options than strong ones. Still, players have often wondered what the game would be like if R&D took the time and effort to purge the underwhelming feats and powers. Now we know.

Not counting paragon paths, 27 warlock powers have been revised, from a total of 75 in the Player’s Handbook. Most of them have been improved in some manner, except for three that have been toned down, and one that just received clarification. The slot receiving the most changes is the daily attack, with 19 out of 27 dailies receiving some kind of revision. The changes range from small increases in a power’s damage dice, to cleaning up of mechanics (particularly for those pesky powers with “save ends” effects that you had to sustain), but also include adding a damage roll to powers that lacked it (typically turning them from useless into legitimate options) and one complete redesign, for Thief of the Five Fates.

Overall, this update achieves a much more coherent power level across most attack options for the warlock. Now we can find a viable power for each build at each encounter and daily slot using just the PHB, which is no mean feat, considering that there are three builds to support, with two different attack abilities. Not only that, but at most levels there are two useful options, though in-build powers will typically be preferred. Though some attacks are still better than others, the difference has been reduced greatly, and I wouldn’t point to any single one of them as being completely without merit (which is a HUGE improvement from the original version!). This is also helped by the controversial decision to weaken some of the most spectacular daily attacks in the Warlock’s repertoire (such as Hunger of Hadar, Tendrils of Thuban, and Hurl through Hell), which are still extremely competitive, if not the best at their respective slots, though no longer to the point that you should altogether ignore the alternatives.

What they missed

I believe that most of the changes were well implemented and in the right direction - but that doesn’t mean that they got everything right. Specifically, there is one glaring hole in the update, affecting the Star Pact Warlock. As anyone who has tried to build such a character will agree, the Starlock is a messy character build whose ability score requirements are all over the place: Your build-specific powers are split in half between Constitution and Charisma, but also ask for Intelligence as a secondary score for their additional effects (never mind AC!). This is complicated enouch, but what really kills the build is the fact that one of your fixed at-wills, Dire Radiance, will only work for Constitution-based characters. Unless you are willing to ignore that power, you won’t be able to build a Cha-focused starlock, and all Charisma-based powers for the build are unplayable except for characters boosting both Con and Cha, in detriment of Int (which is usually considered a very bad idea). At the very least, they should have offered the option to use Charisma with Dire Radiance.

The problems with at-will attacks (which are untouched by this update) do not end here. Eldritch Blast remains a frustratingly boring and weak mandatory power, the equivalent of a longbow basic attack that does nothing special but takes up an attack slot. It should be changed to have some additional effect. Anything would work, here, though my personal favourite would be the ability to deal curse damage on a miss.

And there is yet another broken at-will in Hellish Rebuke, which suffers from horribly ambiguous wording, and an extremely exploitable trigger. The power as written doesn’t clarify if the extra damage can trigger once or multiple times per turn, which is bad enough, but there are also some doubts as to whether this damage trigger is affected by modifiers such as feats or enhancement bonuses. In addition, the fact that a character can hurt himself in order to trigger the extra damage makes this one of the most absurd damage sources in the game, rivalling even the mighty Twin Strike. I’d like to see this as a 1/round trigger that only works off damage dealt by your enemies.

Finally, there are some concerns about the overall ability of the class to perform as a striker (i.e. damage monsters), which the update doesn’t really address. I personally think that warlocks are in decent shape now, after hundreds of released feats and powers, but they could still see a minor damage bump. Their at-wills in particular (barring Hellish brokenness) don’t hit all that hard, getting routinely outclassed by basic attacks from non-striker classes with two-handed weapons, even after accounting for curse damage. A dice size increase for most of them (including those outside PHB) would be welcome: Eyebite, Dire Radiance and Hellish Rebuke could deal 1d8 (or even 1d10), and Eldritch Blast could remain as is or improve to 1d12, depending on what extra effect it got. I wouldn’t mind seeing curse damage boosted to 1d8 per tier, too.

The Magic Item Reset (XV): Consumables

2011-05-30T09:51:00.001+02:00

(Updated 18/7/11: Fixed item levels for Potion of Cleansing)

And finally we get to the last batch of items: consumables.

I recommend applying the following variant rule when using consumable items:

A character can only use one consumable item per encounter.

This prevents characters from hoarding potions and using them all at once to annihilate a specific encounter. More importantly, it encourages players to use consumables with regularity, since, much like action points, they otherwise run the risk of being unable to spend them all. The items have been balanced under this assumption, although they should also work with the default rules - rarity keeping all potions but the healing ones from coming up too often.

A future article will discuss how the DM should hand out consumables and other items.

Potion of Healing - Level 1+ Common Consumable
Level 1, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30
Power (Consumable, Healing): Minor Action. Spend a healing surge. Instead of the hit points you would normally regain, you regain 6 hit points.
    Level 5: 12 hit points
    Level 10: 18 hit points
    Level 15: 24 hit points
    Level 20: 30 hit points
    Level 25: 36 hit points
    Level 30: 50 hit points

Potion of Defense - Level 1+ Uncommon Consumable
Level 1, 6, 11, 16, 21, 26
Power (Consumable): Minor Action. You gain a +3 enhancement bonus to all defenses until the end of your next turn.
    Level 6: +4 enhancement bonus
    Level 11: +5 enhancement bonus
    Level 16: +6 enhancement bonus
    Level 21: +7 enhancement bonus
    Level 26: +8 enhancement bonus

Potion of Accuracy - Level 2+ Uncommon Consumable
Level 2, 7, 12, 17, 22, 27
Power (Consumable): Minor Action. You gain a +3 enhancement bonus to attack rolls until the start of your next turn.
    Level 7: +4 enhancement bonus
    Level 12: +5 enhancement bonus
    Level 17: +6 enhancement bonus
    Level 22: +7 enhancement bonus
    Level 27: +8 enhancement bonus

Potion of Resistance - Level 3+ Uncommon Consumable
Level 3, 8, 13, 18, 23, 28
Special: Choose one of the following damage types when the weapon is created: Acid, Cold, Fire, Force, Lightning, Necrotic, Poison, Psychic, Radiant, or Thunder.
Power (Consumable): Minor Action. Until the end of the encounter, you gain resist 2 against the chosen damage type.
    Level 8: resist 4
    Level 13: resist 6
    Level 18: resist 8
    Level 23: resist 10
    Level 28: resist 12

Potion of Cleansing - Level 4+ Uncommon Consumable
Level 4, 9, 14, 19, 24, 29
Power (Consumable): Minor Action. You make a saving throw. If you attempt to save against an effect of level 7 or higher, you take a -5 penalty to the roll.
    Level 9: -5 penalty against effects of level 12 or higher, and +5 bonus if level 6 or lower.
    Level 14: -5 penalty against effects of level 17 or higher, +5 bonus if level 11 or lower.
    Level 19: -5 penalty against effects of level 22 or higher, +5 bonus if level 16 or lower.
    Level 24: -5 penalty against effects of level 17 or higher, +5 bonus if level 21 or lower.
    Level 29: no penalty, and +5 bonus if level 25 or lower.

Energy Potion - Level 5+ Uncommon Consumable
Level 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30
Special: Choose one of the following damage types when the weapon is created: Acid, Cold, Fire, Force, Lightning, Necrotic, Poison, Psychic, Radiant, or Thunder.
Power (Consumable): Minor Action. Until the end of your next turn, all damage dealt by you is of the chosen type, and you gain a +3 enhancement bonus to damage rolls.
    Level 10: +4 enhancement bonus
    Level 15: +6 enhancement bonus
    Level 20: +7 enhancement bonus
    Level 25: +9 enhancement bonus
    Level 30: +10 enhancement bonus

As usual, any feedback will be greatly appreciated.

Previous: Wondrous Items

Index

The Magic Item Reset (XIV): Wondrous Items

2011-05-26T12:53:00.001+02:00

There are very few items for this slot, but they are very customizable, and have a wondrous power level. Go figure!

Figurine of Wondrous Power - Level 10+ Uncommon Wondrous Item
Lvl 10 (Heroic); Lvl 20 (Paragon); Lvl 30 (Epic)
Figurine: A character can only activate a single figurine between extended rests.
Power(Daily). Minor Action. Effect: You conjure a Medium mystic animal (See below for stats) in a space adjacent to you, and give it 25 temporary hit points. The creature can be attacked, and it remains until it is reduced to 0 or less hit points, you take an extended rest, or until you dismiss it as a free action. Every action it takes costs you a minor action, and the creature cannot exceed the normal allotment of actions (a standard, a move, and a minor action) each turn.
Level 20: 35 temporary hit points.
Level 30: 50 temporary hit points.
Special: When this item is created, choose the type of animal it conjures, and one of the following traits. Your conjured creature gains the abilities from that trait.

Sentinel: +2 to all defenses, the creature’s attacks mark targets on a hit.
Harrier: Fly 8, when the creature attacks, it can shift 2 squares before or after the attack.
Mount: Size Large, Speed 8, an you can ride the creature.
Brute: Size Large, reach 2, +2 bonus to damage.
Sneak: Deals double damage while invisible, and as a Standard Action, the creature becomes invisible until the end of its next turn or until it attacks.
Artillery: The creature can use its melee attack as a ranged 10 attack.
Aquatic: Swim 8, the creature is Aquatic (can breathe underwater, +2 to attack rolls against nonaquatic creatures while in aquatic combat), and its attack slides the target 1 square on a hit.
Elemental: When the item is created, choose one of the following energy types: fire, cold, lightning, acid. The creature gains resist 5 against the chosen type, and its attacks deal damage of the chosen type. Once per encounter, the creature can use its melee attack as a close blast 3.

Conjured Creature – Medium natural animate
Initiative as conjurer - Senses as conjurer
HP 1
AC your level + 14, Fortitude, Reflex and Will your Level + 12
Speed 6
Standard Action - At-Will
Attack: Melee 1 (one creature); Your level + 5 vs AC
Hit: 5 damage.
Level 20: 10 damage.
Level 30: 15 damage.

Greater Figurine of Wondrous Power- Level 5+ Rare Wondrous Item
Lvl 5 (Heroic); Lvl 15 (Paragon); Lvl 25 (Epic)
Figurine: A character can only activate a single figurine between extended rests.
Power(Daily). Minor Action. Effect: You conjure a Medium mystic animal (See below for stats) in a space adjacent to you, and give it 25 temporary hit points. The creature can be attacked, and it remains until it is reduced to 0 or less hit points, you take an extended rest, or until you dismiss it as a free action. Every action it takes costs you a minor action, and the creature cannot exceed the normal allotment of actions (a standard, a move, and a minor action) each turn.
    Level 15: 35 temporary hit points.
    Level 25: 50 temporary hit points.
Property: When you gain a milestone, you can spend a healing surge to regain this item’s daily power.
Special: When this item is created, choose the type of animal it conjures, and two of the following traits. Your conjured creature gains the abilities from those traits.

Sentinel: +2 to all defenses, the creature’s attack marks the target on a hit.
Harrier: Fly 8, when the creature attacks, it can shift 2 squares before or after the attack.
Mount: Size Large, Speed 8, an you can ride the creature.
Brute: Size Large, reach 2, +2 bonus to damage.
Sneak: Deals double damage while invisible, and as a Standard Action, the creature becomes invisible until the end of its next turn or until it attacks.
Artillery: The creature can use its melee attack as a ranged 10 attack.
Aquatic: Swim 8, the creature is Aquatic (can breathe underwater, +2 to attack rolls against nonaquatic creatures while in aquatic combat), and its attack slides the target 1 square on a hit.
Elemental: When the item is created, choose one of the following energy types: fire, cold, lightning, acid. The creature gains resist 5 against the chosen type, and its attacks deal damage of the chosen type. Once per encounter, the creature can use its melee attack as a close blast 3.

As usual, any feedback will be greatly appreciated.

Previous: Rings Next: Consumables

Index

The Magic Item Reset (XIII): Rings

2011-05-19T01:45:00.001+02:00

Updated (v1.1) 26/06/11

With apologies to Geoff Johns...

Ring of Passion - Level 11+ Uncommon Ring
Lvl 11 (Paragon); Lvl 21 (Epic)
Power(Encounter). Minor Action. Target: one adjacent ally. Effect: Until the target is no longer adjacent to you, you and the target gain 5 temporary hit points at the beginning of the target's turns. If you have reached at least one milestone today, you and the target cannot be pushed, pulled or slid while the effect lasts.
   Level 21: 8 temporary hit points.

Ring of Terror - Level 11+ Uncommon Ring
Lvl 11 (Paragon); Lvl 21 (Epic)
Power(Encounter, Fear). Minor Action. You gain an aura 1 until the end of your next turn. Your enemies treat squares in that aura as difficult terrain. If you have reached at least one milestone today, enemies in the aura grant combat advantage unless they have combat advantage against you.
   Level 21: The power gains 'Sustain Minor: The effect persist until the end of your next turn'.

Ring of the Sentinel - Level 11+ Uncommon Ring
Lvl 11 (Paragon); Lvl 21 (Epic)
Property: Enemies marked by you or affected by your defender aura take a -3 penalty to damage rolls against your allies. If you have reached at least one milestone today, they also grant combat advantage to you until the end of your next turn whenever they attack an ally.
   Level 21: –5 penalty.

Ring of the Frenzied Berserker - Level 11+ Uncommon Ring
Lvl 11 (Paragon); Lvl 21 (Epic)
Property: At the start of each of your turns, choose an enemy closest to you. You gain a +2 power bonus to damage rolls against that enemy this turn. If you have reached at least one milestone today, your critical hits against the chosen enemy also deal an extra 2d6 damage. At the end of turn, if you haven't attacked the chosen enemy, you cannot benefit from this damage bonus until the end of the encounter, and you grant combat advantage until the end of your next turn.
   Level 21: +3 power bonus, 3d6 extra damage on critical hits.

Ring of Mercy - Level 16+ Uncommon Ring
Lvl 16 (Paragon); Lvl 26 (Epic)
Property: When you use a power that allows an ally to spend a healing surge, if the ally is bloodied, he or she regains an additional 1d6 hit points. If you have reached at least one milestone today, the ally gains a +1 bonus to all defenses until the end of your next turn.
   Level 26: An additional 2d6 hit points.

Ring of Shared Hope - Level 16+ Uncommon Ring
Lvl 16 (Paragon); Lvl 26 (Epic)
Property: Your allies can reroll attack rolls of 1 against enemies they flank with you. They must use the second result. .
   Level 26: Allies adjacent to you can also reroll attack rolls of 1 of any attack made with combat advantage.

Ring of Covetousness - Level 16+ Uncommon Ring
Lvl 16 (Paragon); Lvl 26 (Epic)
Power(Encounter). Free action. Trigger: You use an encounter attack power and miss every attack roll. Effect: The power has no effect, and it is not expended.
   Level 26: Encounter or daily attack power.

Ring of Death - Level 11+ Rare Ring
Lvl 11 (Paragon); Lvl 21 (Epic)
Power(Encounter). Free action. Trigger: You reduce an enemy to 0 HP, or an enemy adjacent to you is reduced to 0 HP. Target: The triggering enemy. Effect: At the end of the target’s next turn, it stands up with 1 hit point and becomes dominated until the end of its next turn. The target cannot regain hit points while dominated. When the domination effect ends, the target drops to 0 HP. If you have reached at least one milestone today, the power gains 'Sustain Minor: The dominated condition persists until the end of your next turn'.
    Level 21: The target gains temporary hit points equal to your healing surge value.

Ring of Life - Level 16+ Rare Ring
Lvl 16 (Paragon); Lvl 26 (Epic)
Requires: Extended rest.
Property: You gain an aura 2. Dying creatures within the aura gain resist 10 all.
    Level 26: Aura 5, and the creatures gain resist 15 all.
Power(At-Will) Free Action. Trigger: A creature within the aura fails a death saving throw. Effect: You spend a healing surge without regaining hit points, and the triggering creature succeeds on the death saving throw.
Power(At-Will) Free Action. Trigger: A dying ally within the aura regains hit points. Effect: The ally stands up.
Power(Daily) No action. Trigger: You or a character within the aura is reduced to 0 hit points. Effect: The triggering character can spend a healing surge.

As usual, any feedback will be greatly appreciated.

Previous: Hands Items Next: Wondrous Items

Index

Class Compendium: Cleric. Goodbye, controller powers.

2011-05-17T15:00:00.005+02:00

If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. Or should you? The latest installment of the Class Compendium series (available for free here) reprints the cleric class with a new format, incorporating all previous errata. However, unlike similar articles for Fighters and Warlords, this time the update comes with a good deal of brand new errata which definitely goes beyond mere clarifications. To say most of these changes were unexpected would be quite an understatement.

One thing that has to be understood about the cleric is that, while fairly competent, it is by no means a powerhouse of a class. It had its brief time in the sun somewhere after the release of Divine Power, where healing bonus stacking got to the point that you could outheal one or two monsters’ worth of damage at no surge cost, just with your at-wills - whereas parties could become nigh unkillable in any encounter where a daily prayer was involved. Thankfully, this was put to stop through an errata that brought drastic cuts to most common methods used to boost healing, particularly of the non-surge-required variety.

After that update, clerics were left as very strong healers (probably the best in the game, at least regarding single-target heal output), but became otherwise unremarkable leaders, noticeably behind all-stars like the Warlord. So what are we to think, when Warlords go through their Class Compendium revision mostly intact, yet Clerics get weakened significantly? Have the developers gone crazy? That may be the case but, as we will see, there is a method in this madness...

Here is a summary of the updates, classified by what got changed:

Area attacks with reduced area/damage/friendliness
Turn Undead (feature), Flame Strike (Daily 9), Holy Spark (Daily 15), Pufifying Fire (Daily 15), Seal of Warding (Daily 15), Enthrall (Encounter 17), Fire Storm (Daily 19), Healing Torch (Encounter 23), Sacred Word (Daily 25), Astral Storm (Daily 29), Astral Wave (Paragon Path Encounter 11), Healing Sun (Paragon Path Utility 12), Radiant Brilliance (Paragon Path Daily 20), Battle Pyres (Paragon Path Daily 20).

Options switched to Strength/Weapon
Holy Wrath (Daily 19), Seal of Protection (Daily 25), Angelic Avenger (Paragon Path), Warpriest (Paragon Path)

Clarification
- Spiritual Weapon (Daily 5) , Astral Refuge (Utility 10), Thunderous Word (Encounter 17), Clarion Call of the Astral Sea (Utility 22), Angel Ascendant (Paragon Path Utility)

Other
- Consecrated Ground (Daily 5) - removed area mobility.
- Nimbus of Doom (Daily 25) - added miss damage.
- Radiant Servant (Paragon Path) - crit-boosting feature now requires cleric powers. - Warpriest (Paragon Path) - renamed to Tactical Warpriest to prevent confusion with the Warpriest.
- Warpriest (Paragon Path) - marking feature toned down, now works 1/encounter.

So we see a couple of trends here. Apart from a few clarifications and a handful of random changes, there are two major update categories: improving support for the Strength Cleric build, and nerfing the Nine Hells out of the cleric’s area damage capabilities. The Strength Cleric thing is not earthshaking by any means, but it does mean that all strength-based attacks are now weapon based (which is a good thing, since requiring an implement made these powers virtually useless), and that there are two very solid paragon path options for the build, where there previously was almost none (one of the weakest points of the build, by far). This is still one of the least supported builds in the game, but going over the book, I could see that it now gets two solid choices at almost every level, and as much as we’d all want some more, I’d say the build is now in a decent shape.

As for the fact that virtually every cleric area attack in the PHB has gotten worse... well, I really didn’t see that one coming. Yet, in hindsight, it does make sense, in a way. Let me begin by pointing out that this in no way answers any game balance issue: The revised powers didn’t make the cleric any stronger than (or, some will argue, even as strong as) other leaders. Or characters of other roles, for that matter. On the other hand, I don’t think this creates a game balance issue, either - the cleric still has a lot of cool stuff going on, and is wholly capable of performing its role in a capable, if not spectacular way. More important, though, is the fact that the revised powers are still playable, and in some cases pretty good.

No, really. Look at them. It’s easy to come to the conclusion that, if something that wasn’t game breaking gets weaker, it surely has to become worthless. And, although that is often the case, I don’t think it is what has happened here. When I read the new power list without looking at the old versions, nothing stands out to me as particularly weak (or, at least, none of the powers that actually got changed), because the new values really reflect the current standard for the game. And even with the smaller, less damaging, and more unwieldy areas, clerics still have some impressive controller abilities. On the other hand, even if the update isn’t disastrous, that doesn’t mean it was justified. Why change things for change’s sake? I think that the main reason behind this is the fact that the cleric stepped a bit too much on the toes of real controllers. I mean, there are few, if any, area attacks hitting as hard as pre-nerf Astral Storm in the game, and Sacred Word was one of the most brutal ways to stun the opposing team, particularly after other classic options, like the wizards’s Legion’s Hold had got their own errata. This is not to say that every revised power was problematic, but as a whole, this collection of area attacks had little to envy that of a Wizard, and in some cases could make other controllers cry with envy. So this may be an attempt at drawing a line for what kind of controlling effects should be available for controllers and non-controllers. And we still only know half the story. The Compendium version of the wizard still has to come out, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see some powerhouses that are currently considered benchmarks for area damage, like Flaming Sphere or Stinking Cloud getting their own, well deserved revisions.

Overall, I think this isn’t as big a deal as one would think by looking at the long list of affected powers. If you enjoyed playing a cleric before, your character will still play just fine. Oddly enough, the characters suffering the most from this update won’t be clerics: Warpriest (or should I say, Tactical Warpriest) was the paragon path of choice for many defenders or defender wannabes, but didn’t fit as easily in cleric archetypes - and while the new version is still strong enough, players who relied too much in its defender mark will suffer. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that this is all downside for cleric players, who won’t see much relief in the thought that class roles in the game become slightly better defined because of this. I mean, the update is good news for Strength Clerics, but otherwise most clerics don’t get much to compensate for the loss, and with the current rate of content release, are unlikely to do so in the foreseeable future.

Oh, well. I’m glad that Consecrated Ground got the axe. But I still don’t understand how they missed Divine Oracle.

The Magic Item Reset (XII): Hands items

2011-05-12T00:13:00.000+02:00

Updated (v1.1) 26/06/11

We are almost finished now. Here are a handful of items to boost your attacks in a variety of ways.

Gloves of Sleight of Hand - Level 2+ Common Hands
Lvl 2 (Heroic); Lvl 12 (Paragon); Lvl 22 (Epic)
Property: You can use a +4 bonus instead of your dexterity modifier when making Thievery checks.
   Level 12: +7 bonus.
   Level 22: +10 bonus.
Power(Encounter). Free action. Special: Use this power only during your turn. Effect: You draw a weapon or a stored object, or you sheathe a weapon or stow an item.
    Level 12: You can use this power as an at-will, but only once per turn.
    Level 22: You can draw a weapon or object, and you can sheathe a weapon or stow an item. Resolve both effects in any order.

Gauntlets of Glancing Blows - Level 4+ Common Hands
Lvl 4 (Heroic); Lvl 14 (Paragon); Lvl 24 (Epic)
Power (At-will). Minor action. Until the end of turn, your damaging attacks take a -2 penalty to damage and deal 3 damage on a miss.
    Level 14: -4 penalty to damage, 6 damage on a miss.
    Level 24: -6 penalty to damage, 9 damage on a miss.

Gloves of Piercing – Level 6+ Common Hands
Lvl 6 (Heroic); Lvl 16 (Paragon); Lvl 26 (Epic)
Property: Your attacks ignore up to 3 points of resistance. . When you hit an enemy, if the enemy has resistance against any damage types of your attack, you reduce its resistance against those damage types by 5 until the end of your next turn
    Level 16: Ignore 6 points of resistance, reduce resistance by 10.
    Level 26: Ignore 9 points of resistance, reduce resistance by 15.

Gloves of Mercy - Level 8+ Common Hands
Lvl 8 (Heroic); Lvl 18 (Paragon); Lvl 28 (Epic)
Property: You can use a +4 bonus instead of your wisdom modifier when making Heal checks.
Level 18: +7 bonus.
Level 28: +10 bonus.
Power (At-will). free action. Trigger: You damage an enemy with an attack. Effect: You take a -3 penalty to the attack damage. If the attack does not reduce the target to 0 hit points, the next time you use a power that allows an ally to spend a healing surge this turn, the ally regains 1d6 additional hit points.
    Level 18: -6 penalty, 2d6 additional hit points.
    Level 28: -9 penalty, 3d6 additional hit points.

Gloves of the Wind - Level 3+ Uncommon Hands
Lvl 3 (Heroic); Lvl 13 (Paragon); Lvl 23 (Epic)
Power (At-will). Minor action. Until the end of turn, you take a -2 penalty to attack rolls, and whenever you hit an enemy with an attack that pushes, pulls, or slides, increase the distance moved by 1 square. At the end of this movement, the target grants combat advantage to all adjacent characters until the end of your next turn.
    Level 13: 2 squares.
    Level 23: 3 squares.

Gloves of Fearsome Abandon - Level 5+ Uncommon Hands
Lvl 5 (Heroic); Lvl 15 (Paragon); Lvl 25 (Epic)
Power (At-will). Minor action. You take a -2 penalty to all defenses until the start of your next turn. The next enemy you hit this turn takes a -3 penalty to damage rolls until the end of your next turn. This is a fear effect.
    Level 15: -6 penalty.
    Level 25: -9 penalty.

Bloodclaws - Level 6+ Uncommon Hands
Lvl 6 (Heroic); Lvl 16 (Paragon); Lvl 26 (Epic)
Power (Encounter). minor action. You take 1d4 damage, and your next melee or ranged attack this turn deals an extra d10 damage on a hit.
Level 16: Take 2d4 damage, and deal extra 2d10 damage.
Level 26: Take 3d4 damage and deal extra 3d10 damage.

Gloves of the Brawler - Level 7+ Uncommon Hands
Lvl 7 (Heroic); Lvl 17 (Paragon); Lvl 27 (Epic)
Property: You can make unarmed attacks as if you were armed with a +2 magic club. Power (Encounter). Minor Action. You make a grab attack with a +2 power bonus to the attack roll.
    Level 17: +4 magic club, +4 power bonus to the attack roll.
    Level 27: +6 magic club, +6 power bonus to the attack roll.

Gauntlets of Ogre Power - Level 2+ Rare Hands
Lvl 2 (Heroic); Lvl 12 (Paragon); Lvl 22 (Epic)
Property: You can use a modifier of +4 instead of your Strength modifier when making an athletics check, an strength ability check, or a damage roll for a melee basic attack.
    Level 12: +7 modifier.
    Level 22: +10 modifier.
Power(Daily) Minor Action. Until the end of the encounter, your melee attacks deal half damage on a miss and push targets 1 square on a hit.
   Level 12: Push 2 squares on a hit, and gain a +3 bonus to damage rolls.
   Level 22: Push 3 squares, and gain a +6 bonus to damage rolls.

Gloves of Admixture- Level 7+ Rare Hands
Lvl 7 (Heroic); Lvl 17 (Paragon); Lvl 27 (Epic)
Power (At-Will) Minor action. Choose one of the following damage types: fire, cold, lightning, thunder, acid. The next attack you make this turn gains that damage type in addition of any damage types it already has.
Power (Encounter) Minor action. The next time you damage an enemy with an attack this turn, that enemy takes an extra d4 damage for each damage type of the attack.
    Level 17: 1d8 damage for each damage type.
    Level 27: 1d12 damage for each damage type.

As usual, any feedback will be greatly appreciated.

Previous: Arms Items Next: Rings

Index

The Magic Item Reset (XI): Arms items

2011-05-11T00:42:00.001+02:00

Updated (v1.1) 26/06/11

The arms slot is a strange one, in that it combines two very different types of items: bracers and shields. If you have ever wondered what it would be like to fill your arms slot with something that didn’t grant an item bonus to damage, this selection is for you.

Covering Shield – Level 2+ Common Arms
Lvl 2 (Heroic); Lvl 12 (Paragon); Lvl 22 (Epic)
Requires: Shield.
Power (At-Will) Opportunity Action. Trigger: You are targeted by an area or close attack. Effect: One ally targeted by the attack gains partial cover against the attack.
    Level 12: One or two allies targeted by the attack.
    Level 22: All allies targeted by the attack. You can use this power as a free action.

Shield of Deflection - Level 5+ Common Arms
Lvl 5 (Heroic); Lvl 15 (Paragon); Lvl 25 (Epic)
Requires: Shield.
Special: When this item is created, choose ranged attacks or area and close attacks.
Property: You gain resist 2 against the chosen types of attack.
    Level 15: Resist 4.
    Level 25: Resist 6.

Throwing Shield - Level 8+ Common Arms
Lvl 8 (Heroic); Lvl 18 (Paragon); Lvl 28 (Epic)
Requires: Shield.
Property: This shield can be used as a +2 magic throwing hammer to make melee and ranged attacks.
    Level 18: +4 magic throwing hammer.
    Level 28: +6 magic throwing hammer.

Bracers of Armor - Level 1+ Common Arms
Lvl 1 (Heroic); Lvl 11 (Paragon); Lvl 21 (Epic)
Property: While wearing light armor, you can use a +2 modifier instead of your dexterity or intelligence modifier to calculate your AC.
    Level 11: +4 modifier.
    Level 21: +6 modifier.

Bracers of Opportunity - Level 2+ Common Arms
Lvl 2 (Heroic); Lvl 12 (Paragon); Lvl 22 (Epic)
Property: Your opportunity attacks deal an extra 1d6 damage.
    Level 12: 2d6 damage.
    Level 22: 3d6 damage.

Armbands of Power - Level 5+ Common Arms
Lvl 5 (Heroic); Lvl 15 (Paragon); Lvl 25 (Epic)
Special: When this item is created, choose melee attacks, ranged attacks, or close and area attacks.
Property: Your critical hits with attacks of the chosen type deal an extra d8 damage.
    Level 15: 2d8 damage.
    Level 25: 3d8 damage.

Bracers of Cleaving Strikes - Level 9+ Common Arms
Lvl 9 (Heroic); Lvl 19 (Paragon); Lvl 29 (Epic)
Power(Encounter). Free action. Trigger: You hit an enemy with an attack. Effect: Deal 1d8 damage to an enemy adjacent to the triggering enemy.
    Level 19: You can use this power twice per encounter, but only once per turn.
    Level 29: 2d8 damage.

Recoil Shield - Level 5+ Uncommon Arms
Lvl 5 (Heroic); Lvl 15 (Paragon); Lvl 25 (Epic)
Requires: Shield.
Power(Encounter). Immediate Reaction. Trigger: An enemy hits you with a melee or close attack. Target: The triggering enemy. Effect: You knock the target prone.
    Level 15: Effect: You push the target 3 squares and knock it prone.
    Level 25: Target: The triggering enemy and all enemies adjacent to you.

Fortress Shield - Level 10+ Uncommon Arms
Lvl 10 (Heroic); Lvl 20 (Paragon); Lvl 30 (Epic)
Requires: Shield.
Property: You gain resist 2 against attacks without combat advantage.
    Level 20: Resist 3.
    Level 30: Resist 4.

Quickhit Bracers - Level 5+ Uncommon Arms
Lvl 5 (Heroic); Lvl 15 (Paragon); Lvl 25 (Epic)
Power(Daily). Trigger: You hit or miss an enemy with an attack. Effect: You make a basic attack against an enemy other than the triggering enemy.
    Level 15: Effect: You make a basic attack against up to two targets within range.
    Level 25: Effect: You make an at-will attack against up to two targets within range, with a +2 power bonus to the attack roll and a +5 power bonus to the damage roll.

Bracers of Accuracy - Level 10+ Uncommon Arms
Lvl 10 (Heroic); Lvl 20 (Paragon); Lvl 30 (Epic)
Power(Daily). Until the end of the encounter, you gain a +1 power bonus to attack rolls, and your attacks score critical hits on rolls of 19-20.
    Level 20: Crits on rolls of 18-20.
    Level 30: +2 power bonus.

Dragonslayer Shield - Level 6+ Rare Arms
Lvl 6 (Heroic); Lvl 16 (Paragon); Lvl 26 (Epic)
Requires: Shield.
Property: You become immune to fear. You gain resist 5 against area and close attacks.
    Level 16: Resist 10.
    Level 26: Resist 15.
Power(Daily). Immediate Interrupt. Trigger: You take damage from an attack. Effect: You reduce the damage taken by 2d6. An enemy adjacent to you takes that much damage.
    Level 16: 4d6 damage.
    Level 26: 6d6 damage.

Golden Bracers of Riposte - Level 3+ Rare Arms
Lvl 3 (Heroic); Lvl 13 (Paragon); Lvl 23 (Epic)
Property: Whenever an enemy misses you, it grants combat advantage to you until the end of your next turn, and gains vulnerable 2 against your attacks until the end of your next turn.
    Level 13: Vulnerable 4.
    Level 23: Vulnerable 6.
Power(Daily) Immediate reaction. Trigger: An enemy hits you with an attack. Effect: The attack also hits the triggering enemy.

As usual, any feedback will be greatly appreciated.

Previous: Head Items Next: Hands Items

Index

The Magic Item Reset (X): Head items

2011-05-09T12:35:00.003+02:00

Updated (v1.1) 26/06/11

Helmets, crowns, tiaras, masks, and the odd set of glasses… we may not have a lot of items for the head slot, but there’s quite a bit of variety in how they are implemented.

Helm of Fortification - Level 1+ Common Head
Lvl 1 (Heroic); Lvl 11 (Paragon); Lvl 21 (Epic)
Property: When an enemy scores a critical hit against you, roll a d20. On a roll of 16 or more, the attack becomes a normal hit.
    Level 11: On a roll of 11 or more.
    Level 21: You treat all critical hits against you as normal hits.

Helm of Tactics - Level 3+ Common Head
Lvl 3 (Heroic); Lvl 13 (Paragon); Lvl 23 (Epic)
Property: You can use a +4 modifier instead of your dexterity modifier for initiative rolls.
    Level 13: +7 modifier.
    Level 23: +10 modifier.

Tiara of Unshakeable Loyalties - Level 5+ Common Head
Lvl 5 (Heroic); Lvl 15 (Paragon); Lvl 25 (Epic)
Property: You gain a -2 penalty to attack rolls against your allies.
    Level 15: -4 penalty.
    Level 25: -5 penalty, and you can't score critical hits against your allies.

Horned Helm - Level 7+ Common Head
Lvl 7 (Heroic); Lvl 17 (Paragon); Lvl 27 (Epic)
Property: The first time you hit with a charge attack in an encounter, you deal an extra d6 damage.
    Level 17: 2d6 damage.
    Level 27: 3d6 damage.

Helm of Warning - Level 2+ Uncommon Head
Lvl 2 (Heroic); Lvl 12 (Paragon); Lvl 22 (Epic)
Power(Encounter). No action. Trigger: You roll initiative. Target: An ally you can see. Effect: The target can reroll the initiative roll.
    Level 12: Targets you and an ally you can see.
    Level 22: Targets you and any number of allies you can see.

Goggles of Vision - Level 4+ Uncommon Head
Lvl 4 (Heroic); Lvl 14 (Paragon); Lvl 24 (Epic)
Property: The blinded condition does not cause you to grant combat advantage, and you do not grant combat advantage to invisible enemies.
Power(Daily). Minor Action. Until the end of turn, you treat enemies with total concealment as though they had partial concealment, and ignore partial concealment on other enemies.
    Level 14: You can use the power as an encounter power.
    Level 24: Until the end of your next turn, you ignore partial concealment and total concealment.

Helm of Mental Resolve - Level 6+ Uncommon Head
Lvl 6 (Heroic); Lvl 16 (Paragon); Lvl 26 (Epic)
Property: The dazed condition does not cause you to grant combat advantage, and you gain a +2 item bonus to saving throws against effects that cause that condition.
    Level 16: Dazed or stunned conditions.
    Level 26: Dazed, stunned or dominated conditions.

Crown of Victory- Level 8+ Uncommon Head
Lvl 8 (Heroic); Lvl 18 (Paragon); Lvl 28 (Epic)
Property: You can use a +4 bonus instead of your Charisma modifier when making Diplomacy checks.
   Level 18: +7 bonus.
   Level 28: +10 bonus.
Power(Daily). Minor Action. Until the end of the encounter, you and any allies that can see you gain a +1 power bonus to damage rolls and saving throws.
    Level 18: +2 power bonus.
    Level 28: +3 power bonus.

Glasses of True sight - Level 2+ Rare Head
Lvl 2 (Heroic); Lvl 12 (Paragon); Lvl 22 (Epic)
Property: You can use a +4 bonus instead of your Wisdom modifier when making Perceptionchecks.
   Level 12: +7 bonus.
   Level 22: +10 bonus.
Property: You gain resist 5 against psychic damage, and treat enemies with total concealment as though they had partial concealment.
    Level 12: Resist 10 psychic. You treat enemies with total concealment as though they had partial concealment, and ignore partial concealment on other enemies.
    Level 22: Resist 15 psychic, ignore partial and total concealment.
Power(Encounter). Minor Action. Until the end of turn, you can see all creatures within 6 squares regardless of cover, concealment, hiding, or blocking terrain.
    Level 12: 12 squares.
    Level 22: Until the end of your next turn.

Mask of Terror - Level 7+ Rare Head
Lvl 7 (Heroic); Lvl 17 (Paragon); Lvl 27 (Epic)
Property: You can use a +4 bonus instead of your charisma modifier when making Intimidate checks.
   Level 17: +7 bonus.
   Level 27: +10 bonus.
Property: Enemies you hit take a -2 penalty to damage rolls until the end of your next turn. This is a fear effect.
    Level 17: –4 penalty.
    Level 27: –6 penalty.
Power(Encounter, fear) Close Blast 3. Target: Enemies in Blast. Attack: Primary ability +4 vs Will. Hit: You push the target 2 squares, and it grants combat advantage until the end of your next turn.
    Level 17: Primary ability + 7 vs Will, push 4.
    Level 27: Blast 5, primary ability + 9.

As usual, any feedback will be greatly appreciated.

Previous: Waist Items Next: Arms Items

Index

The Magic Item Reset (IX): Waist items

2011-05-06T11:31:00.001+02:00

Updated (v1.1) 26/06/11

We continue with a collection of belts and girdles that will boost your durability and ensure that monsters don’t catch you with your pants down...

Note: Some of these items require an extended rest. An item that requires an extended rest only works if you have worn it without interruption since your last extended rest.

Belt of Vigor- Level 2+ Common Waist
Lvl 2 (Heroic); Lvl 12 (Paragon); Lvl 22 (Epic)
Requires: Extended rest.
Property: You gain a +2 item bonus to your healing surge value.
    Level 12: +4 item bonus .
    Level 22: +6 item bonus .

Belt of Resolve - Level 4+ Common Waist
Lvl 4 (Heroic); Lvl 14 (Paragon); Lvl 24 (Epic)
Property: While weakened, your attacks deal half damage +5 instead of half damage. If this effect would cause you to deal more damage than if you were not weakened, you deal damage as if you were not weakened instead.
    Level 14: Half damage +10.
    Level 24: Half damage +15.

Belt of Giant Strength – Level 6+ Common Waist
Lvl 6 (Heroic); Lvl 16 (Paragon); Lvl 26 (Epic)
Property: You can use a modifier of +4 instead of your Strength modifier when making an athletics check or strength ability check.
    Level 16: +7 modifier.
    Level 26: +10 modifier.

Durable Belt - Level 8+ Common Waist
Lvl 8 (Heroic); Lvl 18 (Paragon); Lvl 28 (Epic)
Requires: Extended rest.
Property: Your number of healing surges increases by 1. Whenever you spend a healing surge during a short rest, you regain 1d8 additional hit points.
    Level 18: 2 healing surges, 2d8 additional hit points.
    Level 28: 3 healing surges, 3d8 additional hit points.

Shielding Belt - Level 3+ Uncommon Waist
Lvl 3 (Heroic); Lvl 13 (Paragon); Lvl 23 (Epic)
Property: Whenever you gain temporary hit points, you gain a +1 item bonus to the amount gained.
    Level 13: +2 item bonus.
    Level 23: +3 item bonus.

Belt of the Mountain - Level 5+ Uncommon Waist
Lvl 5 (Heroic); Lvl 15 (Paragon); Lvl 25 (Epic)
Power(Encounter). Immediate Interrupt. Trigger: An attack pulls, pushes or slides you. Effect: Reduce the pull, push or slide by 1.
    Level 15: You can use this power as an at-will power.
    Level 25: Negate the pull, push or slide.

Belt of Health - Level 7+ Uncommon Waist
Lvl 7 (Heroic); Lvl 17 (Paragon); Lvl 27 (Epic)
Requires: Extended rest.
Property: You gain a +4 item bonus to your total hit points.
    Level 17: +8 item bonus.
    Level 27: +12 item bonus.

Belt of Heroic Recovery - Level 9+ Uncommon Waist
Lvl 9 (Heroic); Lvl 19 (Paragon); Lvl 29 (Epic)
Power (Daily) Minor action. Until the end of the encounter, you gain a +2 power bonus to Fortitude and regeneration 5.
    Level 19: Regeneration 10.
    Level 29: Regeneration 15.

Belt of Regeneration - Level 3+ Rare Waist
Lvl 3 (Heroic); Lvl 13 (Paragon); Lvl 23 (Epic)
Requires: Extended rest.
Property: You gain regeneration 3 while bloodied.
    Level 13: Regeneration 5.
    Level 23: Regeneration 7.

Girdle of the Giant - Level 8+ Rare Waist
Lvl 8 (Heroic); Lvl 18 (Paragon); Lvl 28 (Epic)
Power(Daily) Minor Action. Until the end of the encounter, your melee reach becomes 2 and your size becomes large. You can dismiss this effect as a minor action.
    Level 18: You can use this power as an encounter power.
    Level 28: Melee reach 3, size huge.

As usual, any feedback will be greatly appreciated.

Previous: Feet Items Next: Head Items

Index

The Magic Item Reset (VIII): Feet items

2011-05-05T12:07:00.008+02:00

Updated (v1.1) 26/06/11

We start our look at secondary items with the feet slot. Here is a fine assortment of comfortable boots and slippers for adventurers of all sizes.

Running Boots- Level 3+ Common Feet
Lvl 3 (Heroic); Lvl 13 (Paragon); Lvl 23 (Epic)
Property: You gain a +1 item bonus to speed when you run or charge.
    Level 13: +1 item bonus to speed, +2 item bonus when you run or charge.
    Level 23: +2 item bonus to speed, +3 item bonus when you run or charge.

Wavestrider Boots - Level 5+ Common Feet
Lvl 5 (Heroic); Lvl 15 (Paragon); Lvl 25 (Epic)
Property: During your turn, you can walk across liquid as if it were normal terrain. If you are still on liquid at the end of your turn, you fall in.
    Level 15: You can walk or shift across liquid as if it were normal terrain at all times. You don't fall in at the end of your turn.
    Level 25: You also gain a swim speed equal to your speed+2.

Elusive Boots - Level 7+ Common Feet
Lvl 7 (Heroic); Lvl 17 (Paragon); Lvl 27 (Epic)
Property: You gain resist 5 against opportunity attacks.
    Level 17: Resist 10.
    Level 27: Resist 15.

Slippers of Spider Climb- Level 9+ Common Feet
Lvl 9 (Heroic); Lvl 19 (Paragon); Lvl 29 (Epic)
Property: During your turn, you gain a climb speed equal to half your speed. .
    Level 19: Climb speed equal to your speed.
    Level 29: You gain the climb speed at all times.

Trekking Boots - Level 2+ Uncommon Feet
Lvl 2 (Heroic); Lvl 12 (Paragon); Lvl 22 (Epic)
Power(Encounter). Minor Action. Until the end of your next turn, you gain a +1 power bonus to speed and ignore difficult terrain while walking.
    Level 12: Gain a +2 power bonus to speed, and ignore difficult terrain when you move or shift.
    Level 22: You can use this power as an at-will power.

Slippers of the Escapist - Level 4+ Uncommon Feet
Lvl 4 (Heroic); Lvl 14 (Paragon); Lvl 24 (Epic)
Power(Encounter). Minor Action. You can ignore the slowed condition this turn.
    Level 14: You can ignore the slowed, immobilized and grabbed conditions this turn.
    Level 24: You can ignore the slowed, immobilized, restrained and grabbed conditions until the end of your next turn.

Acrobat Boots - Level 6+ Uncommon Feet

Lvl 6 (Heroic); Lvl 16 (Paragon); Lvl 26 (Epic)
Property: You can use a +4 bonus instead of your dexterity modifier when making Acrobatics checks.
   Level 16: +7 bonus.
   Level 26: +10 bonus.
Power(Encounter). Minor Action. You stand up from prone.
    Level 16: You can use this power as an at-will power.
    Level 26: You can use this power as a minor action or as an immediate reaction that triggers when you are knocked prone by an attack.

Boots of Shifting- Level 10+ Uncommon Feet
Lvl 10 (Heroic); Lvl 20 (Paragon); Lvl 30 (Epic)
Property: When you shift, you gain a +1 item bonus to the distance shifted.
    Level 20: You also gain a +1 item bonus to speed.
    Level 30: You gain a +2 item bonus to speed and to the distance shifted.

Winged Boots - Level 5+ Rare Feet
Lvl 5 (Heroic); Lvl 15 (Paragon); Lvl 25 (Epic)
Property: You gain a fly speed equal to half your speed, and an altitude limit of 2.
    Level 15: Fly speed equal to your speed, altitude limit 3.
    Level 25: +2 item bonus to speed, no altitude limit.

Boots of teleportation - Level 10+ Rare Feet
Lvl 10 (Heroic); Lvl 20 (Paragon); Lvl 30 (Epic)
Power(At-will) Move Action. You teleport 2 squares.
    Level 20: Teleport 3 squares.
    Level 30: Teleport 4 squares.

As usual, any feedback will be greatly appreciated.

Previous: Neck Items Next: Belt Items

Index

The Magic Item Reset (VII): Neck items

2011-05-04T00:05:00.003+02:00

Updated (v1.1) 26/06/11

We get to the neck slot: cloaks, amulets, brooches, and other shiny things.

Magic Cloak- Level 1+ Common Neck
Lvl 1 (+1); Lvl 6 (+2); Lvl 11 (+3); Lvl 16 (+4); Lvl 21 (+5); Lvl 26 (+6)
Enhancement: Fortitude, Reflex and Will

Elven Cloak - Level 2+ Common Neck
Lvl 2 (+1); Lvl 7 (+2); Lvl 12 (+3); Lvl 17 (+4); Lvl 22 (+5); Lvl 27 (+6)
Enhancement: Fortitude, Reflex and Will
Property: You can use a +4 bonus instead of your dexterity modifier when making Stealth checks.
   Level 12: +7 bonus.
   Level 22: +10 bonus.

Feather Cloak - Level 2+ Common Neck
Lvl 2 (+1); Lvl 7 (+2); Lvl 12 (+3); Lvl 17 (+4); Lvl 22 (+5); Lvl 27 (+6)
Enhancement: Fortitude, Reflex and Will
Power (Encounter). Free action. Trigger: You fall. Effect: You take no damage from the fall, regardless of its distance, and do not fall prone at the end of the fall.

Cloak of Resistance - Level 3+ Common Neck
Lvl 3 (+1); Lvl 8 (+2); Lvl 13 (+3); Lvl 18 (+4); Lvl 23 (+5); Lvl 28 (+6)
Enhancement: Fortitude, Reflex and Will
Special: When this item is created, choose one of the following damage types: force, poison, necrotic, radiant, psychic.
Property: You gain resist 5 against the chosen damage type.
   Level 13: Resist 10.
   Level 23: Resist 15.

Amulet of Life - Level 3+ Common Neck
Lvl 3 (+1); Lvl 8 (+2); Lvl 13 (+3); Lvl 18 (+4); Lvl 23 (+5); Lvl 28 (+6)
Enhancement: Fortitude, Reflex and Will
Property: You gain a +2 item bonus to death saving throws.

Periapt of Wound Closure - Level 4+ Common Neck
Lvl 4 (+1); Lvl 9 (+2); Lvl 14 (+3); Lvl 19 (+4); Lvl 24 (+5); Lvl 29 (+6)
Enhancement: Fortitude, Reflex and Will
Property: You gain a +2 item bonus to saving throws against ongoing damage.

Resilience Amulet - Level 5+ Common Neck
Lvl 5 (+1); Lvl 10 (+2); Lvl 15 (+3); Lvl 20 (+4); Lvl 25 (+5); Lvl 30 (+6)
Enhancement: Fortitude, Reflex and Will
Property: The first time you make a saving throw during each encounter, you can roll twice and use either result.

Ironskin Amulet - Level 2+ Uncommon Neck
Lvl 2 (+1); Lvl 7 (+2); Lvl 12 (+3); Lvl 17 (+4); Lvl 22 (+5); Lvl 27 (+6)
Enhancement: Fortitude, Reflex and Will
Power (Daily) Minor action. You gain resist to all damage equal to twice the amulet's enhancement bonus until the end of the encounter.

Amulet of Shared Suffering - Level 3+ Uncommon Neck
Lvl 3 (+1); Lvl 8 (+2); Lvl 13 (+3); Lvl 18 (+4); Lvl 23 (+5); Lvl 28 (+6)
Enhancement: Fortitude, Reflex and Will
Power (Encounter). Free action. Trigger: An attack gives you ongoing damage. Effect: The attacker gains an equal amount of untyped ongoing damage (save ends), and has a -5 penalty to saves made against the ongoing damage this turn.

Cloak of Distortion - Level 4+ Uncommon Neck
Lvl 4 (+1); Lvl 9 (+2); Lvl 14 (+3); Lvl 19 (+4); Lvl 24 (+5); Lvl 29 (+6)
Enhancement: Fortitude, Reflex and Will
Property: You gain partial concealment against all ranged attacks from 5 or more squares away.

Amulet of Rapid Recovery - Level 5+ Uncommon Neck
Lvl 5 (+1); Lvl 10 (+2); Lvl 15 (+3); Lvl 20 (+4); Lvl 25 (+5); Lvl 30 (+6)
Enhancement: Fortitude, Reflex and Will
Power (Daily) Minor action. Until the end of the encounter, the first time you make a saving throw each turn, you can roll twice and use either result.

Necklace of Fireballs - Level 3+ Rare Neck
Lvl 3 (+1); Lvl 8 (+2); Lvl 13 (+3); Lvl 18 (+4); Lvl 23 (+5); Lvl 28 (+6)
Enhancement: Fortitude, Reflex and Will
Property: You gain resist 5 fire.
   Level 13: resist 10.
   Level 23: resist 15.
Power (Daily). Standard action. As the wizard's Fireball power. You can use this item as an implement for the power, applying its enhancement bonus to attack and damage rolls. You can use your primary ability modifier instead of your intelligence modifier for the attack rolls, and gain a +1 item bonus to attack rolls and damage rolls for the attack.
   Level 13: +2 item bonus.
   Level 23: +3 item bonus.

Cloak of Invisibility - Level 4+ Rare Neck
Lvl 4 (+1); Lvl 9 (+2); Lvl 14 (+3); Lvl 19 (+4); Lvl 24 (+5); Lvl 29 (+6)
Enhancement: Fortitude, Reflex and Will
Property: When making stealth checks, you can roll twice and use either result.
Power (Encounter): Minor action. You become invisible until you attack or until the end of your next turn.
   Sustain minor: The power persists until you attack or until the end of your next turn.

As usual, any feedback will be greatly appreciated.

Previous: Armor Next: Feet Items

Index

The Magic Item Reset (VI): Level and rarity distribution

2011-05-03T11:14:00.002+02:00

One of the main differences that come up when you jump from designing a bunch of magic items to planning a full, standalone set is the need to find the right spread of items over levels. I don’t think this was a high priority for the designers of 4E, as the first PHB had an irregular level distribution for its items (with some slots barely featuring a couple of options at certain tiers), whereas the Adventurer’s Vaults just used brute force, giving us so many different enchantments that you ended up with plenty of options at any given level, anyway. However, I intend to use a relatively limited amount of items, so making sure that they are distributed as evenly as possible across levels becomes far more important. In today’s article, I’ll explain how I approached this challenge and, in a related note, how I dealt with item rarity.

Why Rarity?

I think it’s worth dedicating a few lines to the subject of rarity. The item rarity rules were introduced in the Essentials books, classifying magic items into three categories (common, uncommon, and rare), and restricting item crafting to just the common ones, to the dismay of more than a few fans. Unfortunately, item rarity hasn’t received much support since then, except for a errata that turned most existing items into uncommons. Which is a pity, because rarity doesn’t work all that well when tacked on an existing system.

On the other hand, designing an item collection from scratch can really make rarity shine. The main advantage, from a designer’s point of view, is that it gives you freedom to create items that would become problematic if PCs could freely craft them, stacking them in multiples or acquiring them for negligible amounts of gold at higher levels. This is most evident in, though not limited to, items with encounter or daily powers. Without a rarity system, any item daily power is prone to exploiting at higher levels, which is why most of these powers had to be released with an abysmal power level. Encounter powers aren’t much better off, since they can easily become at-will powers once a PC can buy a bunch of a given item. By moving these powers to uncommon items, we can forget about these issues, and focus on the items themselves.

The other upside is the introduction of rare items, which are scarce and awesome. Rares cover a middle ground between regular items and artifacts, and in my experience can add a lot of excitement to the process of monster looting.

Assigning level and rarity

As I explained in a previous article, one design decision that I made early on was to have all of my items scale from heroic tier to epic. This was meant to make item lists much easier to navigate for players, but also streamlined the design considerably. Basically, I was left with two item categories with different requirements with regards to level assignment. On the one hand, there are what I call primary items, which is how I refer to anything with an enhancenment bonus: weapons, implements, armor, and neck items. Each of these items would have 6 different versions, ranging from a +1 enhancenment bonus to a +6; internally, I would use the +1 version as a reference for level, so that every primary item would have a level between 1 and 5. On the other hand, secondary items (i.e. everything else) would have 3 different versions, one for each tier. In this case, the level reference would be for the heroic version of the item, and levels would vary between 1 and 10.

When assigning item levels, I followed these rules:
- The total number of items available at any given level should be stable. This meant that I had to spread item levels as evenly as possible, across all tiers.
- Power should grow with level. This is kind of a no-brainer, but I’ve seen too many items in the game miss this crucial rule. Of course, when dealing with wildly different effects, assessing power is far from a hard science, but no item should feel patently weaker than another of lower level. An exception would be that primary items will almost always be stronger than secondary ones. As for different versions of items of the same level, it bears mentioning that primary items don’t always need their additional effects to scale, since increasing the enhancement bonus is usually enough. As a rule of thumb, for these items I tend to give scaling only for powers and properties directly related with damage or resistance.
- Primary items of level 5 need to be scarce and strong. For a primary item, level 5 is a tricky point, since we’re just one level short from increasing the enhancement bonus. It’s difficult to make a level 5 item strong enough for players not to want to automatically replace it with a plain magic item with 1 more point of enhancement bonus. Ideally, the decision between a level 5 item and the level 1 item immediately above it should be a hard one.

I also applied the following rules regarding item rarity:
- Common items should be straightforward, and with few or no powers. At-will powers can be used in a common item, as they can’t be exploited with PC crafting, but daily powers are out of the question. As for encounter powers, they should only appear on worn items (i.e. those you can’t swap during an encounter), since otherwise it’s too easy to use them in multiples as virtual at-wills.
- Uncommons are more complex, can have any power, and are at least as strong as commons. It’s not necessary for all uncommons to be stronger than their common counterparts, but they should never be clearly weaker. This is a point where the official item set often fails, because encounter and daily powers as a base mechanic are generally not as effective as continuous properties. For this reason, I have to put special care in making any power-based uncommon item playable, if not great. Daily powers in particular are usually very difficult to get right.
- Rares should be amazing. A rare item should not break the game, but it will definitely be better than a non-rare of similar level. Rares will typically have multiple abilities, and it is strongly suggested that at least one of them is something exciting that can’t easily be replicated by other items.
- In primary items, average level should increase with rarity. If you look at my lists, you’ll see that most common weapons tend to be in levels 2 and 3, whereas uncommons lie around 3-4, and rares have a relatively high proportion of 5’s.
- Each rarity needs to work on its own. This applies mostly for commons and uncommons - it’s not enough that items as a whole have a uniform level spread and cover abilities for all class roles, but the same has to apply when looking just at the items of one rarity.

The Magic Item Reset (V): Armor

2011-04-29T02:42:00.006+02:00

Updated (v1.1) 26/06/11

After looking at the offensive gear, here are some options to protect the PCs

Magic Armor - Level 1+ Common Armor
Lvl 1 (+1); Lvl 6 (+2); Lvl 11 (+3); Lvl 16 (+4); Lvl 21 (+5); Lvl 26 (+6)
Enhancement: AC

Nimble Armor - Level 2+ Common Armor
Lvl 2 (+1); Lvl 7 (+2); Lvl 12 (+3); Lvl 17 (+4); Lvl 22 (+5); Lvl 27 (+6)
Enhancement: AC
Property: This armor has no check penalty.
Property: You can use this armor’s enhancement bonus instead of your Strength, Constitution or Dexterity modifier when making Acrobatics, Athletics, Endurance, Stealth, or Thievery checks.

Delver's Armor - Level 2+ Common Armor
Lvl 2 (+1); Lvl 7 (+2); Lvl 12 (+3); Lvl 17 (+4); Lvl 22 (+5); Lvl 27 (+6)
Enhancement: AC
Property: You gain a +2 bonus to your first saving throw each encounter.

Armor of Resistance - Level 3+ Common Armor
Lvl 3 (+1); Lvl 8 (+2); Lvl 13 (+3); Lvl 18 (+4); Lvl 23 (+5); Lvl 28 (+6)
Enhancement: AC
Special: When this item is created, choose one of the following damage types: fire, cold, lightning, thunder, acid.
Property: You gain resist 5 against the chosen damage type.
   Level 13: Resist 10.
   Level 23: Resist 15.

Razor Armor - Level 3+ Common Armor
Lvl 3 (+1); Lvl 8 (+2); Lvl 13 (+3); Lvl 18 (+4); Lvl 23 (+5); Lvl 28 (+6)
Enhancement: AC
Property: When an enemy scores a critical hit against you with a melee or close attack, it takes 1d10 damage.
   Level 13: 2d10 damage.
   Level 23: 3d10 damage.

Shimmering Armor - Level 4+ Common Armor
Lvl 3 (+1); Lvl 8 (+2); Lvl 13 (+3); Lvl 18 (+4); Lvl 23 (+5); Lvl 28 (+6)
Enhancement: AC
Property Your ranged and area attacks don't provoke opportunity attacks.

Juggernaut Armor - Level 4+ Common Armor
Lvl 4 (+1); Lvl 9 (+2); Lvl 14 (+3); Lvl 19 (+4); Lvl 24 (+5); Lvl 29 (+6)
Requires: Chain or higher.
Enhancement: AC
Property You gain resist 1 all.
   Level 14: Resist 2.
   Level 24: Resist 3.

Bramble Armor - Level 2+ Uncommon Armor
Lvl 2 (+1); Lvl 7 (+2); Lvl 12 (+3); Lvl 17 (+4); Lvl 22 (+5); Lvl 27 (+6)
Enhancement: AC
Power (Daily)Minor Action. Until the end of the encounter, enemies that hit you take damage equal to 2 plus the enhancement bonus of this armor.

Dwarven Armor - Level 3+ Uncommon Armor
Lvl 3 (+1); Lvl 8 (+2); Lvl 13 (+3); Lvl 18 (+4); Lvl 23 (+5); Lvl 28 (+6)
Requires: Chain or higher.
Enhancement: AC
Power (Daily) Minor Action. You spend a healing surge.
Property: You can use a +4 bonus instead of your constitution modifier when making Endurance checks.
Level 13: +7 bonus.
Level 23: +10 bonus.

Reinforcing Armor - Level 3+ Uncommon Armor
Lvl 3 (+1); Lvl 8 (+2); Lvl 13 (+3); Lvl 18 (+4); Lvl 23 (+5); Lvl 28 (+6)
Enhancement: AC
Property: When you are hit by an attack, you gain a +1 power bonus to AC until the start of your next turn.

Stoneskin Armor - Level 4+ Uncommon Armor
Lvl 4 (+1); Lvl 9 (+2); Lvl 14 (+3); Lvl 19 (+4); Lvl 24 (+5); Lvl 29 (+6)
Requires: Cloth, Leather, or Hide.
Enhancement: AC
Power (Encounter)Minor Action. Special: You must be bloodied. Effect: You gain 5 temporary hit points.
   Level 14: 10 temporary hit points.
   Level 24:: 15 temporary hit points.

Invulnerable Armor - Level 5+ Uncommon Armor
Lvl 5 (+1); Lvl 10 (+2); Lvl 15 (+3); Lvl 20 (+4); Lvl 25 (+5); Lvl 30 (+6)
Enhancement: AC
Property You take no damage from missed attacks.
Power (Daily)Immediate Interrupt. Trigger: An attack hits you. Effect: You take no damage from the attack. Until the start of your next turn, you take half damage from attacks.

Ghost Armor - Level 2+ Rare Armor
Lvl 2 (+1); Lvl 7 (+2); Lvl 12 (+3); Lvl 17 (+4); Lvl 22 (+5); Lvl 27 (+6)
Enhancement: AC
Property:Your attacks ignore the insubstantial trait.
Property: You gain resist 5 necrotic.
   Level 12: resist 10.
   Level 22: resist 15.
Power (Encounter) Minor action. You gain phasing and insubstantial until the end of your next turn.

Dragon Armor - Level 5+ Rare Armor
Lvl 5 (+1); Lvl 10 (+2); Lvl 15 (+3); Lvl 20 (+4); Lvl 25 (+5); Lvl 30 (+6)
Enhancement: AC
Special: When this item is created, choose one of the following damage types: fire, cold, lightning, thunder, acid.
Property: You become immune against the chosen damage type.
Power (Encounter, Fear): Minor action. Close burst 3. Targets enemies in burst. Until the end of your next turn, the targets gain a -2 penalty to attack rolls and grant combat advantage.
Property (requires extended rest): You gain a +2 item bonus to your healing surge value.
   Level 15: +4 item bonus.
   Level 25: +6 item bonus.
(A property that requires an extended rest only works if you have worn the item without interruption since your last extended rest).

As usual, any feedback will be greatly appreciated.

Previous: Implements Next: Neck Items

Index

The Magic Item Reset (IV): Implements

2011-04-27T01:43:00.009+02:00

Continuing with my standalone magic item collection, here are the magic implements.

As usual, any feedback will be greatly appreciated.

Magic Implement - Level 1+ Common Implement
Lvl 1 (+1); Lvl 6 (+2); Lvl 11 (+3); Lvl 16 (+4); Lvl 21 (+5); Lvl 26 (+6)
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls.
Critical: +1d6 damage per plus.

Reaching Implement - Level 2+ Common Implement
Lvl 2 (+1); Lvl 7 (+2); Lvl 12 (+3); Lvl 17 (+4); Lvl 22 (+5); Lvl 27 (+6)
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls.
Critical: +1d6 damage per plus.
Property: Ranged and area implement attacks made with this implement gain a +2 bonus to range.

Implement of Fear - Level 2+ Common Implement
Lvl 2 (+1); Lvl 7 (+2); Lvl 12 (+3); Lvl 17 (+4); Lvl 22 (+5); Lvl 27 (+6)
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls.
Critical: +1d6 damage per plus.
Property: When you hit with an implement melee or close attack using this implement, the target can't flank until the start of your next turn.

Healing Implement - Level 3+ Common Implement
Lvl 3 (+1); Lvl 8 (+2); Lvl 13 (+3); Lvl 18 (+4); Lvl 23 (+5); Lvl 28 (+6)
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls.
Critical: You or an ally within 5 squares can spend a healing surge.
Property: When you hit with an implement attack with this implement, you or an ally within 5 squares gain a power bonus to healing surge value equal to the implement's enhancement bonus until the end of your next turn.

Overwhelming Implement - Level 4+ Common Implement
Lvl 4 (+1); Lvl 9 (+2); Lvl 14 (+3); Lvl 19 (+4); Lvl 24 (+5); Lvl 29 (+6)
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls.
Critical: +1d4 damage per plus, and the target is pushed one square per plus.
Property: You gain a +1 untyped bonus to the distance you push, pull or slide creatures with implement attacks using this implement.

Implement of Friendly Fire - Level 3+ Common Implement
Lvl 3 (+1); Lvl 8 (+2); Lvl 13 (+3); Lvl 18 (+4); Lvl 23 (+5); Lvl 28 (+6)
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls.
Critical: +1d6 damage per plus.
Property Implement attacks made with this implement gain a -2 penalty to attack rolls against an ally. Damage dealt to allies with attacks using this implement takes a penalty equal to twice the implement's enhancement bonus.

Attuned Implement - Level 4+ Common Implement
Lvl 4 (+1); Lvl 9 (+2); Lvl 14 (+3); Lvl 19 (+4); Lvl 24 (+5); Lvl 29 (+6)
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls.
Special: Choose one of the following damage types when the implement is created: Acid, Cold, Fire, Force, Lightning, Necrotic, Poison, Psychic, Radiant, or Thunder.
Critical: +1d4 damage per plus, or +1d10 damage per plus with attacks of the chosen type.
Property You gain a +1 untyped bonus to damage rolls with implement attacks of the chosen type using this implement.
   Level 14: +2 bonus.
   Level 24: +3 bonus.

Implement of Imposition- Level 2+ Uncommon Implement
Lvl 2 (+1); Lvl 7 (+2); Lvl 12 (+3); Lvl 17 (+4); Lvl 22 (+5); Lvl 27 (+6)
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls.
Critical: +1d6 damage per plus.
Property: When an implement attack made with this implement inflicts an effect that a save can end, the target takes a -2 penalty to the first saving throw made against it.
Power (Daily). Free action. Trigger: An enemy saves against an effect caused with this implement. Effect: The triggering enemy rerolls the saving throw.

Implement of Ruin- Level 3+ Uncommon Implement
Lvl 3 (+1); Lvl 8 (+2); Lvl 13 (+3); Lvl 18 (+4); Lvl 23 (+5); Lvl 28 (+6)
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls.
Critical: +1d8 damage per plus.
Power (Encounter): Minor action. Effect: The next implement attack you make with this implement this turn deals an extra 1d6 damage.
   Level 13: 2d6 damage.
   Level 23: 3d6 damage.

Storing Implement - Level 3+ Uncommon Implement
Lvl 3 (+1); Lvl 8 (+2); Lvl 13 (+3); Lvl 18 (+4); Lvl 23 (+5); Lvl 28 (+6)
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls.
Critical: +1d6 damage per plus.
Special: When the implement is created, choose one level 1 encounter implement attack power that can be used as a standard action, from a class that is proficient with this implement.
Power (Daily). Standard action. You use the chosen power.
   Level 13: Encounter attack power of level 7 or less.
   Level 23: Encounter attack power of level 17 or less.

Implement of the Initiate - Level 4+ Uncommon Implement
Lvl 4 (+1); Lvl 9 (+2); Lvl 14 (+3); Lvl 19 (+4); Lvl 24 (+5); Lvl 29 (+6)
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls.
Critical: +1d8 damage per plus.
Special: When the implement is created, choose one level 1 at-will implement attack power that can be used as a standard action, from a class that is proficient with this implement.
Power (Encounter). Standard action. You use the chosen power unaugmented.

Implement of Explosions - Level 5+ Uncommon Implement
Lvl 5 (+1); Lvl 10 (+2); Lvl 15 (+3); Lvl 20 (+4); Lvl 25 (+5); Lvl 30 (+6)
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls.
Critical: +1d8 damage per plus to the target and all enemies adjacent to it.
Power (Encounter) Minor action. The next time you use a burst or blast implement attack power with this implement this turn, if it is an at-will or encounter power, increase the size of the burst or blast by 1.

Prismatic Implement - Level 3+ Rare Implement
Lvl 3 (+1); Lvl 8 (+2); Lvl 13 (+3); Lvl 18 (+4); Lvl 23 (+5); Lvl 28 (+6)
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls.
Critical: Choose any damage type. The target takes +1d12 damage per plus of that type, and you charge the implement with that type until the end of the encounter.
    (Damage types are Acid, Cold, Fire, Force, Lightning, Necrotic, Poison, Psychic, Radiant, and Thunder)
Property Once per round, when an implement attack made with this implement damages an enemy, you can choose one damage type dealt by the attack. After the attack, you charge the implement with that type until the end of the encounter.
Property: You gain a bonus to damage rolls of implement attacks made with this implement equal to the number of damage types charged in the implement.
    Level 23: The bonus is equal to twice the number of charged types.
Property: You gain resist 2 to all damage types charged in this implement.
    Level 13: resist 4.
    Level 23: resist 6.

Implement of Transferred Fate - Level 4+ Rare Implement
Lvl 4 (+1); Lvl 9 (+2); Lvl 14 (+3); Lvl 19 (+4); Lvl 24 (+5); Lvl 29 (+6)
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls.
Critical: The target takes 5 ongoing damage per plus (save ends).
Property: When you hit an enemy with an implement attack with this implement, until the end of your next turn the enemy takes a -2 penalty to saving throws, and an ally you can see takes a +2 power bonus to saving throws from effects caused by that enemy.
Power (Encounter) Free action. Trigger: You hit an enemy with an implement attack using this implement. Effect: Choose one effect on you that a save can end. You can make a saving throw against it. If you succeed, the enemy is afflicted by that effect.

Implement of Deadly Accuracy- Level 5+ Rare Implement
Lvl 5 (+1); Lvl 10 (+2); Lvl 15 (+3); Lvl 20 (+4); Lvl 25 (+5); Lvl 30 (+6)
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls.
Critical: +1d10 damage per plus.
Property: When you hit with a melee or ranged implement attack with a single target using this implement, for every 5 points in which your attack roll exceeds the targeted defense, you deal an extra d4 damage.
   Level 13: extra d8 damage.
   Level 23: extra d12 damage.
Power (Daily) Minor Action. You gain a +5 power bonus to your next attack roll with this implement.

Previous: Weapons Next: Armor

Index

The Magic Item Reset (III): Weapons

2011-04-25T10:53:00.006+02:00

Updated (v1.1) 26/06/11

Having explained why and how I designed a standalone set of magic items to replace the existing ones in D&D 4E, I can proceed to show them to you. Here are the magic weapons.

Note: These items are intended to be used instead of the official ones, rather than alongside them. They should present a complete and varied, if small, array of abilities for PCs of all kinds. Whether or not I succeeded in that task is a different matter ;)

It should also be taken into account that the items have been designed with the item rarity system (introduced in the Rules Compendium) in mind. I believe they present the best (and only) attempt at exploiting the potential of this system, to date. In case you hate item rarity for whatever reason, you can still use them with the old rules, with a couple of caveats. In particular, rare items are (definitely!) not balanced with non-rare items, and should be dropped altogether. In addition, some uncommon items may be problematic in multiples due to spammable encounter or daily powers.

The item stat block has been slightly modified from the one presented in the books, for brevity and clarity.

Any feedback will be greatly appreciated.

Magic Weapon - Level 1+ Common Weapon
Lvl 1 (+1); Lvl 6 (+2); Lvl 11 (+3); Lvl 16 (+4); Lvl 21 (+5); Lvl 26 (+6)
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls
Critical: +1d6 damage per plus

Throwing Weapon - Level 2+ Common Weapon
Lvl 2 (+1); Lvl 7 (+2); Lvl 12 (+3); Lvl 17 (+4); Lvl 22 (+5); Lvl 27 (+6)
Requires: Melee weapon
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls
Critical: +1d4 damage per plus
Property: This weapon counts as a heavy thrown weapon with a range of 3/6

Mage’s Weapon - Level 2+ Common Weapon
Lvl 2 (+1); Lvl 7 (+2); Lvl 12 (+3); Lvl 17 (+4); Lvl 22 (+5); Lvl 27 (+6)
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls
Critical: +1d6 damage per plus
Property: When making a weapon basic attack with this weapon, you can use your highest ability modifier instead of the one you would use normally for the attack roll.
(Your modifier for the damage roll is still determined as usual)

Winged Weapon - Level 2+ Common Weapon
Lvl 2 (+1); Lvl 7 (+2); Lvl 12 (+3); Lvl 17 (+4); Lvl 22 (+5); Lvl 27 (+6)
Requires: Ranged or thrown weapon
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls
Critical: +1d6 damage per plus, and the target is knocked prone if it is flying
Property: Ranged and area attacks with this weapon deal extra damage equal to its enhancement bonus to creatures that are flying.

Healing Weapon - Level 3+ Common Weapon
Lvl 3 (+1); Lvl 8 (+2); Lvl 13 (+3); Lvl 18 (+4); Lvl 23 (+5); Lvl 28 (+6)
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls
Critical: You or an ally within 5 squares can spend a healing surge.
Property: When you hit with a weapon attack with this weapon, you or an ally within 5 squares gain a power bonus to healing surge value equal to the weapon’s enhancement bonus until the end of your next turn.

Vicious Weapon - Level 3+ Common Weapon
Lvl 3 (+1); Lvl 8 (+2); Lvl 13 (+3); Lvl 18 (+4); Lvl 23 (+5); Lvl 28 (+6)
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls
Critical: +1d12 damage per plus

Energy Weapon - Level 4+ Common Weapon
Lvl 4 (+1); Lvl 9 (+2); Lvl 14 (+3); Lvl 19 (+4); Lvl 24 (+5); Lvl 29 (+6)
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls
Special: Choose one of the following damage types when the weapon is created: Acid, Cold, Fire, Force, Lightning, Necrotic, Poison, Psychic, Radiant, or Thunder.
Critical: +1d10 damage of the chosen type per plus.
Power (At-will): Minor Action. All damage dealt by weapon attacks with this weapon is of the chosen type. You can dismiss this effect as a free action.

Overwhelming Weapon - Level 4+ Common Weapon
Lvl 4 (+1); Lvl 9 (+2); Lvl 14 (+3); Lvl 19 (+4); Lvl 24 (+5); Lvl 29 (+6)
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls
Critical: +1d4 damage per plus, and the target is pushed one square per plus.
Property: You gain a +1 untyped bonus to the distance you push, pull or slide creatures with weapon attacks using this weapon.

Defending Weapon - Level 2+ Uncommon Weapon
Lvl 2 (+1); Lvl 7 (+2); Lvl 12 (+3); Lvl 17 (+4); Lvl 22 (+5); Lvl 27 (+6)
Requires: Melee weapon
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls
Critical: 1d4 per plus, and you gain a +2 untyped bonus to all defenses until the end of your next turn.
Power (Encounter): Minor action. You don't grant combat advantage until the start of your next turn.

Extending Weapon - Level 3+ Uncommon Weapon
Lvl 3 (+1); Lvl 8 (+2); Lvl 13 (+3); Lvl 18 (+4); Lvl 23 (+5); Lvl 28 (+6)
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls
Critical: +1d6 damage per plus
Power (Encounter): Minor action. Until the end of your next turn, the reach of this weapon increases by 1, and the range of this weapon increases by 5.

Snap Shot Weapon - Level 3+ Uncommon Weapon
Lvl 3 (+1); Lvl 8 (+2); Lvl 13 (+3); Lvl 18 (+4); Lvl 23 (+5); Lvl 28 (+6)
Requires: Ranged weapon
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls
Critical: +1d6 damage per plus.
Power (Encounter). Opportunity Action. Trigger: An adjacent enemy provokes an opportunity attack from you. Effect: Make a ranged basic attack with this weapon against the triggering enemy.

Rending Weapon - Level 4+ Uncommon Weapon
Lvl 4 (+1); Lvl 9 (+2); Lvl 14 (+3); Lvl 19 (+4); Lvl 24 (+5); Lvl 29 (+6)
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls
Critical: You make a basic attack with this weapon as a free action. You gain an untyped bonus to the attack and damage roll equal to the weapon’s enhancement bonus.

Feinting Weapon - Level 4+ Uncommon Weapon
Lvl 4 (+1); Lvl 9 (+2); Lvl 14 (+3); Lvl 19 (+4); Lvl 24 (+5); Lvl 29 (+6)
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls
Critical: +1d8 damage per plus.
Property: When you miss with a weapon attack using this weapon, you gain a power bonus equal to the weapon’s enhancement bonus on your next damage roll against the target.

Keen Weapon - Level 5+ Uncommon Weapon
Lvl 5 (+1); Lvl 10 (+2); Lvl 15 (+3); Lvl 20 (+4); Lvl 25 (+5); Lvl 30 (+6)
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls
Critical: +1d8 damage per plus.
Property: When making a weapon attack with combat advantage, this weapon scores critical hits on a roll of 19-20.
Level 25: the critical hits are scored on a roll of 18-20.

Weapon of Light and Shadow - Level 3+ Rare Weapon
Lvl 3 (+1); Lvl 8 (+2); Lvl 13 (+3); Lvl 18 (+4); Lvl 23 (+5); Lvl 28 (+6)
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls
Critical: +1d8 necrotic and radiant damage per plus. Until the end of the encounter, all damage dealt by your weapon attacks with this weapon is radiant and necrotic.
Power (At-Will): Choose radiant or necrotic. Your weapon attacks with this weapon gain that keyword, and all damage dealt by them is of the chosen type.
Property: When you hit with a radiant weapon attack with this weapon, an ally adjacent to the target gains temporary hit points equal to the weapon’s enhancement bonus. When you hit with a necrotic weapon attack with this weapon, you gain temporary hit points equal to the weapon’s enhancement bonus.

Energy Burst Weapon - Level 4+ Rare Weapon
Lvl 4 (+1); Lvl 9 (+2); Lvl 14 (+3); Lvl 19 (+4); Lvl 24 (+5); Lvl 29 (+6)
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls
Special: Choose one of the following damage types when the weapon is created: Acid, Cold, Fire, Force, Lightning, Necrotic, Poison, Psychic, Radiant, or Thunder.
Critical: +1d12 damage of the chosen type per plus to the target and all enemies adjacent to it.
Property: You gain resist 5 against the chosen damage type.
Level 15: Resist 10.
Level 25: Resist 15.
Power (At-will): Minor Action. All damage dealt by weapon attacks with this weapon is of the chosen type. You can dismiss this effect as a free action.
Power (Daily): Minor Action. Until the end of the encounter, weapon attacks with this weapon deal an extra d6 damage of the chosen type.
Level 15: d10 damage.
Level 25: 2d6 damage.

Vorpal Weapon - Level 5+ Rare Weapon
Lvl 5 (+1); Lvl 10 (+2); Lvl 15 (+3); Lvl 20 (+4); Lvl 25 (+5); Lvl 30 (+6)
Enhancement: Attack rolls and damage rolls
Critical: +1d12 damage per plus.If you rolled a natural 18, 19 or 20 on the attack roll, you deal+2d12 damage per plus, and roll a d20. On a roll of 18-20, the enemy takes double damage from the critical hit.
Property: When you bloody an enemy with a weapon attack with this weapon, the enemy makes a saving throw. If it fails, the enemy is crippled until the end of the encounter. Choose an effect: while crippled, the enemy is slowed, or it takes a -4 penalty to damage rolls.
Level 15: -7 penaly.
Level 25: -10 penalty.

Next: Implements

Index

The Magic Item reset (II): How many items?

2011-04-24T21:09:00.005+02:00

Having determined that the current list of magic items is flawed, and decided to build my own one from scratch, removing all the clutter and keeping just the interesting stuff, there is a major question that needs to be answered: how many magic items does the system require? The main goals of this new item list is to offer a varied and fun experience without overwhelming players with options. Also, my resources as a standalone designer are limited, so I’ll tend to err on the side of brevity. With that in mind, what is the absolute minimum amount that would still provide an acceptable degree of variety?

We can answer this by looking at the parcel system described on the Dungeon Master’s Guide. We’ll forget about the new rarity system for now, though I’ll tackle that in a future article. Anyway, the DMG tells us that for a typical 5-man party, each level of adventuring should be rewarded with 4 magic items and enough gold to buy 2 more. This means that the party will see 6 items per level, 60 per tier, and 180 over the course of its whole career. Likewise, each PC will have 1.2 items per level, 12 items per tier, and 36 items total until he reaches his epic destiny. Not all of these will be wholly different items, as the primary slots of items (weapons, armor, and neck) get upgraded frequently, often with higher level versions of what a PC already has, but this should be a decent guideline. Also, we’ll ignore about the effect of consumables and rituals, because these tend to screw the game economy a lot.

I find it most useful to examine these numbers over the course of a whole tier, and on a per slot basis. We have 9 main item slots in the game: weapon/implement, armor, neck, arms, hands, head, feet, belt, ring. Wondrous items don’t take up a slot, but they could be considered as an extra slot or two. For each of these slots, we’ll want an item per PC per tier, except for primary slots, which require two. Overall, this nets us about 12 item slots to fill in a tier for each PC, which very conveniently fits the item supply from the parcel system, as described above. However, this shows us a very important point: it’s not enough to have high raw numbers of items in the systems, they also need to be evenly distributed across slots. Our example 5-man party would require 5 different items for each slot, at the very least, in addition to the 60 total items per tier.

This minimum limit of 5 items per slot and 60 items in total per tier is useful as a reference, but won’t play all that well: all parties will end up seeing the same items, and item repetition across PCs will be too frequent. That said, a multiple of that may be good enough. For now, I will settle with a number slightly above twice this minimum, which I’ve found out to provide an acceptable level of variety, while keeping the treasure list very accessible for players to look up. The fact that it’s low enough to make item design a manageable task was also a considerable upside, of course.

I ended up with 120 items for each tier, with the following slot distribution:

- Weapon: 15

- Implement 15

- Armor 14

- Neck 13

- Feet 10

- Belt 10

- Head 10

- Arms 13

- Hands 10

- Ring 9 (no heroic rings)

Wondrous items and consumables are still unfinished at the time of writing this. Distribution across levels and rarities is an interesting topic, which I’ll cover on a future article.

Maximizing the impact of items.

So, once we know we are going to run with a low item count, how can we make sure that it all works out? I tried to follow these guidelines:

- Make each item count. As a rule of thumb, every single item should be useful (though not necessarily optimal) for at least one PC in a typical party.

- Avoid clearly superior options. There is no point in coming up with a dozen cool items for a slot, if one of them is blatantly stronger than the rest. I did make an exception for rare items, of which I will talk at a later point.

- Avoid narrow designs. The more different PC builds that can benefit from an item, the better. This means that no item should reference or require specific races, powers, or features. However, we can still make gear that synergizes particularly well with certain builds.

- Loosen up requirements for weapons, implements and armor. Related to the previous point, I think that most weapon enchantments should work with any kind of weapon, and the same applies to armor enchantments, which should at most be restricted to either light armor or heavy armor, rather than specific types. In the case of implements, the existing design actually assigns a different item slot for each category of implement, leading to huge redundancy. To avoid this, I’ll use a generic implement slot, with enchantments that can be applied to all types of implement.

- Everything scales. Under the current design, all primary items (i.e. those with enhancenment bonuses) scale, but many secondary ones (boots, gloves, helms, etc.) do not. This means that secondary slots are usually crowded with lots of items that are only useful for a short level range, which often have slightly tweaked versions with different names at other tiers. This is an inefficient use of items that I won’t be able to afford; for this reason, all of my secondary items will scale every 10 levels and have three different versions, for heroic, paragon, and epic play (except for rings, which will remain unavailable at heroic). In addition all primary items will cover the full range from +1 to +6, which gives more consistency and makes a better use of design resources.

- Use customizable items. Armor of Resistance is a design I love, because it effectively aggregates 9 different magic items (one for each type of damage you can resist) in just one item with additional options. By contrast, Fire Weapon and its elemental brethren (Cold Weapon, Lightning Weapon and so on) are terrible from a system clutter perspective, since they repeat the same concept over and over with minor variations. For my items, Armor of Resistance will be the model to follow, whenever possible.

Next: Rarity and Level

Index

The Magic Item reset (I): Why I hate magic items

2011-04-22T02:59:00.006+02:00

Forget about feats, powers, or paragon paths. The most bloated, cumbersome and fun-killing part of D&D 4E are the magic items. For a game that is basically about killing monsters and taking their stuff, picking treasure too often feels like a chore rather than a reward. Today I will discuss why I feel this way about one of the sacred pillars of D&D, and in subsequent articles I will present my ideas on how to improve this situation.

It’s the item selection

To be clear, my gripe is not against the basic framework of the item system, which I find rather solid and well thought out. Nor am I opposed to the much maligned rarity system introduced by the Essentials books - on the contrary, I see it as an elegant solution which had the misfortune to come out three years too late, receiving zero support. No, the problem that plagues magic items lies in an element that is much harder to fix: the selection of items sucks.

It’s not that there aren’t fun, interesting items out there - but, to get to them, you have to filter through overwhelming amounts of junk. One of the stated design goals for items in 4E was to de-emphasize the importance of a character’s equipment (at least, compared to previous editions of the game), and while I consider this a noble purpose, it led to too many worthless pieces of gear. Even worse, a small minority of items were inadvertently (I assume) implemented with a much higher power level, overshadowing all the filler, but also the few interesting options that also existed. Ironically, this turned the process of choosing an item into a treasure hunt of sorts, with players digging through piles of stuff in order to find the rare gem.

This is compounded by the fact that a lot of items have very narrow applications, only being useful for characters built in a specific way, and sometimes even referring to specific class features - which is a compelling idea, but reduces even further the percentage of useful stuff for any given character. This approach requires printing huge amounts of items in order to provide minimal support for each possible build - and, given the wild variance in item power level, it implies that some classes will randomly get much more mileage out of their gear.

To sum up, the main problems I identified were the following:

Most items are terrible.
A very small fraction of items are extremely strong.
Items are too narrow.
There is just too much stuff.

Unlike other game issues I have previously addressed in this blog, this just isn’t something that can be addressed by houseruling a few dozen (or even a few hundred!) items. The sensible solution would be to just give up on it, and either accept the tedious searches to compile each wishlist, or eschew magic items altogether in favour of inherent bonuses. But why be sensible, when you can be bold? I decided to try out a radical approach, which would require considerable efforts and was highly likely to end up as flawed as the original implementation: I would forget about the existing item list, and create a new one from scratch. I called this the Magic Item Reset. In future articles, you will see the design process I followed, and what came out of it.

Article index

1. Full item list

2. Item lists by slot

3. Optional rules

4. Articles on design