Essentials Paladin: Defender’s aura, shift prevention, less choices.

D&D Essentials class previews

Introduction
Cleric - Fighter (Knight) - Fighter (Slayer) - Rogue -Wizard
Druid - Paladin - Ranger (Hunter) - Ranger (Scout) - Warlock

The preview for the Essentials paladin, or Cavalier has been out for some time now, but I hardly found enough newsworthy material to justify posting about... until now. Some lucky player has got hold of an early copy of Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms, and there’s a thread at Enworld with him answering questions about the book, including stuff about the latest iteration of the Divine Defender. We can now make reasonable assumptions on how it will play out, and though I must say I’m not terribly impressed, it still looks like it will be a solid package overall.

The new paladin is simple enough for a half-orc to grasp

The best way to describe the Cavalier is as a hybrid between an Essentials Knight (from which it borrows most of its defender mechanics), and a classic Paladin. The power structure is very close to the traditional at-will/encounter/daily, but certain slots (such as the level 1 daily, and the level 2 utility) have been replaced by class features, and there are too many fixed choices to my taste (including at-will and encounter attacks). On the other hand, all this streamlining has a very clear advantage, in that Cavaliers just work. All too often, when building a pre-Essentials paladin, one was left with the impression that the class was pulling in too many directions at once, making it impossible to end up with an entirely satisfying character. This is no longer the case.

Originally, paladins suffered from a lack of definition regarding ability score requirements. In order to be fully functional, you needed Charisma for your defender punishment, Wisdom to power Lay on Hands and similar features, and Strength to have a decent opportunity attack. Never mind that, as a defender, some Constitution was also advisable. But attempts to support more than two scores usually ended in disaster. Divine Power mostly solved the issue through new feats and powers, but the fact remained that you had to sacrifice some valuable slots in order to achieve basic functionality. Not only that, but any novice player who forgot to take Melee Training or Virtuous Strike for the Charisma build, or Mighty Challenge for the Strength one, was still likely to end up with a poor defender. Cavaliers solve this problem by dropping Wisdom altogether, and requiring just Strength (for attack powers and opportunity attacks) and Charisma (for defender punishment, and extra effects in most attacks).

Two Cavalier builds are provided, named after two paladin virtues: Sacrifice (focused on healing) and Valor (apparently . Each virtue determines one of the character’s at-wills (the other being fixed) and a level 1 feature called Spirit of Virtue. Judging by the progression table, no other powers or features appear to be linked to virtues at heroic tier. However, we know that each virtue’s description takes about 3 pages, so we can expect at least some paragon path elements tied to them, and maybe some heroic elements that are not evident by looking at the table. At any rate, level 1 Cavaliers of Sacrifice will be getting a very nifty Lay on Hands proxy, with a power that lets them trade their Second Wind for a ranged heal, whereas Cavaliers of Valor are stuck with a flat bonus to initiative and surge value.

The defender features will be familiar to anybody who has seen the Knight class. Defender Aura makes a comeback here, a word by word copy of the Knight feature, clearly meant to replace the marked condition for Essentials builds. And complementing it we have Righteous Radiance, a mixture of the knight’s Battle Guardian, and the old Divine Challenge. As a paladin, the cavalier will still punish offending enemies with Cha-based, autohitting rays of divine light, but they will now have no problem handling crowds (since the ray triggers as an opportunity action whenever any enemy within the aura ignores you), as well as enjoying an unprecedented stickiness: shifting enemies will also get hurt.

Oddly, despite being an almost strict upgrade over regular paladin marks (sacrificing a bit of range, but becoming much easier to apply in return), the whole package can’t help but feel like a cheap version of the knight’s feature, having pretty much the same functionality with lower damage output. In fact, the flat radiant damage barely beats what any knight can achieve on a miss. It does have a niche application in making minions miserable (since they get killed instantly if they try to ignore you), but it’s not like they were much of a threat anyways. To make things worse, cavaliers are notoriously lacking in the forced movement department, so they rely on their allies for repositioning enemies, and collecting them inside the aura (which should be a basic strategy for essentials defenders).

That is not to say that cavaliers are not capable defenders - even if their toys are individually weaker than those of a knight, they do get more. Specifically, they have a feature called Righteous Shield which triggers on an ally taking damage, and lets the cavalier absorb the damage instead (true to the Paladin style) while gaining a bonus for the counterattack. Working once per encounter, this is clearly a tool for emergencies that can’t replace a real defender mechanic - but it complements it well. In addition, it gets better at higher levels (there is a Level 7 feature called Improved Righteous Shield), adding a small, build-dependent effect.

In the power department, having fixed at-wills for each build is a step backwards, in my opinion. At least they managed to get an interesting attack selection... for one of the virtues, anyway. The common, staple attack will be Valiant Strike, a power included in the original PHB that never got the chance to really shine. This time, however, the added stickiness of the cavalier’s defender aura should ensure that groups of enemies stay close to the paladin long enough for Valiant Strike to reach a respectable (about 2-3 points) bonus to accuracy - that’s some cool synergy. As for the virtue-specific ones, Cavaliers of Sacrifice got lucky with Strike of Hope, a healing attack for nearby allies that only gets better in presence of bloodied friends. Its effect doesn’t beat the best equivalent leader powers (i.e. Sacred Flame and Energizing Strike) at the highest levels, but is otherwise very attractive. The same cannot be said about Virtue of Valor’s Vengeful Strike, a respectable damage dealing attack that unfortunately is only useful with nearby bloodied allies. I’m all for conditional bonuses, when well implemented, but turning off one of your two at-will attacks when the condition isn’t available is far from satisfactory.

As for the rest of the powers, the encounter slot is condensed in Holy Smite, a divine version of Power Strike which adds some radiant damage on top of another attack, as well as dazing the target. I can’t say I’m thrilled by the lack of options, but this one is at least solid enough, and actually looks like a significant improvement over Power Strike, which should make up for the class’ shortcomings in other areas. An additional use of the power is gained at level 3, and likely again at 13, like Power Strike. Thankfully, paladins get to choose their daily powers as normal, even though the level 1 slot is missing from the table (perhaps sacrificed in behalf of the Righteous Shield feature?). Apart from that, utilities are mostly unchanged, but the level 2 one has been replaced by something called Restore vitality, which sound very much like a heal-focused utility of some sort.

There’s not much left to say. A mount-related feature at level 4 called Pace of the Virtuous Charger does not actually provide you with a horse, but it improves your riding speed when you do have one. More interestingly, the level 8 feature Spirit of the Virtuous Charger doesn’t really have anything to do with mounts, but provides a significant damage and speed bonus to charge attacks. Paladins lack the mobility to base their tactics on frequent charges, but this is still a very useful tool, for whenever they need to close a distance.

Conclusion

This is not my favourite Essentials class by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s not a bad one, either. Although one of the builds (virtue of Sacrifice) looks compelling enough, the other one strikes me as terribly bland. And the lack of options is almost unprecedented, even when compared to an Essentials martial class: the only build choice a level 1 character is presented is the Cavalier’s Virtue! On the other hand, the core gameplay looks is well thought out: the class will be able to defend all right, with a style that sets it apart from other clases. I really like the Defender Aura concept, even if Knights seem to squeeze more out of it, and just that could be enough to make this worth trying over a regular paladin.

Introduction
Cleric - Fighter (Knight) - Fighter (Slayer) - Rogue - Wizard
Druid - Paladin - Ranger (Hunter) - Ranger (Scout) - Warlock

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Broken Bits: Hospitaler

Broken Paragon Paths, Part Three
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Hospitalers are paladins who specialize in the arts of healing, and they do so thoroughly. They can heal with action points and with Divine Challenge, gain a bonus with Lay on Hands, can activate a utility so that all their hits heal allies for an encounter, and have a daily that heals. Also, just for the sake of variety, there’s an encounter power that hands out saving throws to anyone nearby. All of this makes for a very efficient, focused package, which would be perfect except for a tiny, horribly unbalanced detail.

The problem

A year ago, I talked about the Swordmage’s Aegis of Shielding, and how it was far too good a mark punishment, negating a huge percentage of an enemy’s damage - making an attack against an ally hardly better than not attacking at all. I concluded that the appropiate values for a mitigating mark mechanic shouldn’t be above 50% of the enemy’s damage (rather than the 80+% that Aegis of Shielding routinely pulled off). I’m bringing this up because the Hospitaler paragon path features a mark punishment mechanic that not only compares well with Aegis of Shielding, but actually puts it to shame.

Consider the following:

Hospitaler's Blessing (11th level): When an enemy that you currently challenge makes an attack against one of your allies that does not include you, whether the attack hits or misses, that ally regains hit points equal to one-half your level + your Wisdom modifier.

Although I love what this feature does, the numbers are way off. If an enemy hits, a lot of damage gets mitigated: barely a few points below what Aegis of Shielding prevents, though it actually catches up at level 30. That alone would be enough to get worried, but there’s more. The figure below illustrates the math of an attack where Hospitaler’s Blessing triggers:

The blue and red curves above show a monster’s average damage on a hit, as calculated here (though the formulas haven’t been updated to post-MM3 standards yet) and the amount healed by a Hospitaler with a starting Wisdom score of 16, respectively. As you can see, they are pretty close - the orange curve shows the difference, which is the net damage dealt on a hit, and it approaches zero. That is bad enough, but only tells half of the story. Look at the green curve at the bottom. It plots the net damage contribution of the monster’s attack, assuming a hit chance of 50% (which is reasonable, if not generous, after accounting for the mark penalty). Since Hospitaler’s Blessing works on missed attacks as well as hits, the formula to use is:

Final average damage= Hit chance * Net Hit Damage - Miss Chance * Hosp. Blessing Heal

As the net hit damage was almost null, and the amount healed is close to the damage that would be dealt on a hit, we find that, the attack will, on average, heal more damage than it deals, with the net healed amount being slightly below the monster's damage per round. Not only is the current monster’s turn negated, but it will need almost a whole turn’s worth of attacks to compensate for the damage healed.

This figure shows the same scenario, but with the values presented as a percentage of monster damage. The blue and red lines represent the healed amount, and the net damage on a hit as a percentage of monster hit damage. The orange line is the average contribution of the attack, after accounting for the misses, as a percentage of the monsters’ original damage per round.

Keep in mind that this will need to be adjusted, for the better, once you apply the Monster Manual 3 damage increase for monsters. Nevertheless, from my current estimations of the change, this should alleviate the problem, but fail to remove it.

As additional considerations, I should mention that Hospitaler’s Blessing outperforms traditional mark punishment in other ways, such as requiring no action to work, theoretically working on an unlimited number of attacks from the challenged enemy, and still allowing you to deal Divine Challenge damage as normal. Yes, if you thought the mark violation scenario was bad enough for the offender, you should still add a bunch of radiant damage to the mix!

A solution

The amount healed by Hospitaler’s Blessing needs to go down, there’s no way around it. New heal values should, under no circumstance, reduce a (non-minion) monster’s expected damage to negatives. In fact, an ideal solution would cut the average damage of the offending monster about in half, after considering the damage healed on a miss attack. Assuming 50% hit rates after mark penalties, this means that the heal should be worth 1/4 of the monster’s hit damage, more or less.

The simplest approach is to remove the half-level bonus to heal, and just keep the Wisdom modifier:

Hospitaler's Blessing, mk.2 (11th level): When an enemy that you currently challenge makes an attack against one of your allies that does not include you, whether the attack hits or misses, that ally regains hit points equal to your Wisdom modifier.

This yields numbers closer to our expectations. The new damage figures would be as follows:

Note that because the heal applies to both hits and misses, its total contribution is much greater than what the numbers initially suggests. In this case, a monster attacking through the mark will see its damage reduced to about 40% of the original amount - a very strong decrease. In fact, this is a bit more potent than we had intended, but within acceptable margins. Also, once we apply the MM3 increase, it should be just about on target.

This fix leaves Hospitaler’s Blessing strong enough to be an effective deterrent (monster attacks became much less effective than without it), without preventing enemies from being able to inflict damage to allies altogether. This, in conjunction with the remaining path features, makes Hospitaler a very competitive, but no longer unfair path.

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Broken Bits: Champion of Order

Broken Paragon Paths, Part Two
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Champion of Order is a very irregular paragon path for paladins, providing some great benefits, some very questionable ones, and the ultimate encounter attack. As slayers of all that is chaotic (which apparently means demons and elementals), Champions of Order complement their general purpose abilities with enemy-specific bonuses that are not always as effective as one would expect.

Because, yes, the path gets a lot of things right, but its 16th level feature? It’s a cruel, sadistic joke. Champions’ Hammer lets the paladin ignore the resistances (all of them!) of elementals and demons he attacks (but not those of other enemies). The catch is in the paladin’s power list, and those creatures’ typical resistances - they don’t match at all! With rare exceptions, paladins only tend to deal two types of damage: radiant, and untyped steel. On the other hand, most demons have the ‘variable resistance’ ability, which protects them from their choice of acid, cold, fire, lightning or thunder. Meanwhile, elementals usually have a bunch of resistances for damage related with their origin - which, as far as I know, never includes Radiance. So the feature is utterly useless, because there is never any relevant resistance to ignore!

Leaving that aside, we have a lot of good stuff. In Defense of Order (level 11 feature) is a very nice complement to your Divine Challenge which lets you make opportunity attacks against challenged enemies ignoring your mark, and doubles up as a demon and elemental slaying feature. And slay it does - this time the bonus isn’t any nonsense about resistances, but a brutal amount of extra damage! The action point feature, Champion’s Action, is nothing to call home about, but can be handy, as it reduces enemy defenses for a whole turn.

The utility and daily powers are decent enough, letting you double up on your Challenge, and deal a bunch of damage while weakening a target, respectively. With what’s been mentioned so far, we’d have a solid, if unimpressive path. And then there is the battle-ending encounter, Certain Justice. Don’t let the name deceive you, as it’s anything but fair.

The problem

You don’t get encounter powers better than this one. Nor probably dailies, for that matter:

Certain Justice

Attack: Strength + 4 vs. AC

Hit: 1[W] damage. If the target is marked by you, it is also weakened and dazed until it is not marked by you.

This is a highly accurate attack, that severely cripples the target... for the rest of the encounter. Well, technically there are ways to prevent a paladin from maintaining a challenge, so it might not last as long... but, on the other hand, there are also plenty of alternate methods to mark a target, that do last the whole battle. So we’ll assume, for now, that the monster is screwed. Badly.

There is a reason why powers don’t usually have negative conditions lasting forever, and certainly not for encounter attacks - it’s way too effective. A monster hit by Certain Justice is not completely helpless, but it might as well be: with the damage output cut in half, and daze reducing its turns to maybe charging and often doing nothing but move, even the most fearsome foe becomes a lot more manageable. This is great when it catches a standard enemy, abusive when it wrecks an Elite, and wins the encounter right there if it nails a Solo.

Really, Solos just go to a corner and cry. It is true that these monsters often have severe design problems, but I don’t think it is possible to make a solo capable of overcoming a direct hit from Certain Justice, short of granting immunity to weakening and dazing. Unless the solo is resistant to marks, I guess. Now THAT would be mean.

The solo encounter is the best case scenario, but neutralizing any non-minion monster in one hit will be enough to heavily disrupt any game. This needs to go.

A solution

Certain Justice’s duration needs to be cut, this much is, well, certain. Nevertheless, I think we should make sure it remains strong, since it is the defining element for a path that otherwise doesn’t offer too much in the way of features. Also, the Champion’s Hammer feature is a good candidate for improvement, once the path’s power level isn’t warped by an unfair encounter attack. I would make the following revisions:

Champion’s Hammer, mk.2 (16th level): The target of your Divine Challenge takes a -2 penalty to saving throws against conditions that you create. Your attacks ignore the resistances of demons and elemental creatures.

Certain Justice, mk.2

Attack: Strength + 4 vs. ACHit: 1[W] damage. If the target is marked by you, it is also weakened and dazed (save ends).

This makes Certain Justice an encounter power with a strong ongoing effect, which is rare enough, and provides the path a strong mechanical theme: Inflict nasty conditions that a save can end. The revision of Champion’s Hammer now synergizes well with the rest of the path, and encourages building a character around it. Also, the no-resistance clause makes a bit of sense now, since many of the rare paladin attacks dealing typed, non-radiant damage actually deal ongoing damage, so you’d be likely to pick them.

What do you think? The path goes from being a one-trick pony (with a hell of a trick!) to something more consistent and, in my opinion, interesting. Also, I think it ends up at a very playable, yet reasonable level.

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Full Charisma Paladin: Improving your divine class in two easy steps

This is a simple rules modification to fix what I view as a Paladin's greatest problem, its division in two subclasses: one with Charisma, the other with Strength, both with too few power choices. It consists on the following:

1. Change all Strength-based Paladin powers to use Charisma instead. If there is any secondary effect that triggers off Wisdom, change it to use Strength.
2. Change Divine Challenge so that the damage bonus depends on Strength modifier, rather than Charisma.

As an example, this is how the revised level 1 powers would look like (details ommitted for clarity):










The following features would also change:

After this change, the Paladin is still left with two builds using different attributes: the Avenging Paladin has Charisma and Strength, while the Protecting paladin uses Charisma and Wisdom. Class features will be more evenly distributed among builds, as Avenging will have the better challenge and Protecting specializes on Lay on Hands. This supposes a great improvement for the previously handicapped Avenging build, at the cost of a decrease in power for previous Charisma specs.

The most important gain, however, is in the number of available powers, as Valiant Strike and many other powers, including most dailies, can now be used in any build. The use of cross-build powers is also much easier, as the main ability score remains the same.

Is there any downside? Does this modification take away anything special from the Paladin class? In my opinion, the differentiation between builds is as good as before, if not better: with the change to Divine Challenge, there is a clear healing build and a damage build (rather than a full build and a crappy build, like before).

So, what do you think? Are we really improving the class? Have I missed anything? Let's discuss.

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D&D class overview (IV): The not-so-awesome

The second tier of classes, which I'll talk about today, are mostly fine except for a few significant issues. While they can certainly be played, and enjoyed, I believe they would vastly improve if these issues were addressed. Let's take a look at the Fighter and its balance problems, the featureless Wizard, and both Clerics and Paladins with their crippling multiple main ability scores.

I find identifying classes in pictures rather difficult, and not just because of resolutions as tiny as above.

I should start by admitting I'm a Fighter kind of guy. Shield Fighter, to be more specific. The first archetype I try in most games is the highly defensive melee guy. However, don't think that I'm blinded by favoritism when I state that the Player's Handbook Fighter is a brilliant design. I particularly like how it offers not just 2 different builds, but 2 x N: two fighter weapon talents and N different types of weapon (including three very viable choices in heavy blades, axes and hammers, as well as a smattering of lesser varieties). These multiple levels of choice are a great idea, and something that I'd really like to see generalized.

While the Player's Handbook material alone would have the fighter as an almost flawless class, this changes, for worse, with Martial Power. Don't get me wrong, I think MP is quite a decent supplement, and it adds lots of goodies for all martial classes, fighters included. It's just that it has a few important blunders regarding balance, and they are all fighter related.

The most obvious offender is the Battlerager Vigor class feature. For builds with low to average constitution it's merely a better choice than Weapon Talent. On more optimized characters, however, it is a powerhouse that grants near immunity to melee attacks. Slightly less problematic, but still dangerous, is the Tempest Fighter build. This build, coupled with double weapons from Adventurer's Vault and a careful feat selection, is capable of damage outputs that rival those of most strikers, being second only to optimized Rangers. I do believe that most of the blame lies in the double weapons, but the at-will power Dual Strike should also be closely examined.

Another Fighter 'gem' from MP is the paragon feat Marked Scourge, which is almost unreachable for other classes through multiclassing, boosts Fighter damage even more, and becomes just insane when dual wielding. Finally, no discussion on Fighter balance would be complete without mentioning the 3rd level encounter power from PHB, Rain of Blows. Official interpretations on this poorly formatted power (which I disagree with) state that it can deal between 2 and 4 attacks, which translates in an absurd amount of damage, rivalling most daily powers, even at Epic levels.

Wizards, more than any other class, are entirely defined by their powers. It's not just that they have an amazing selection of them, with excellent choices available both for the at-will, encounter and daily categories. Rather, it's because what they lack: class features.

Cantrips and Spellbooks, while cool and flavorful, are virtually useless in combat. Implement Mastery, on the other hand, is quite useful, and would make a great secondary feature. What is missing here is a core, combat related feature. Any other class would fill this spot with some role-related feature, but there is no such thing for controllers. As a result, the class feels slightly lacking in efficiency and uniqueness, even if the awesome powers sometimes make up for it. There are also worrying implications with multiclassing, as other classes with actual features can gain access to those wizard powers.

To make things worse, even the humble Implement Mastery isn't fully taken advantage of. No power in the wizard's repertoire references neither the wielded implement nor the chosen mastery, making this build choice largely irrelevant. Furthermore, secondary ability scores are worthless, with the exception of Wisdom being used for two at-will powers. Other than that, and the Implement Mastery power, we find that Wisdom, Constitution and Dexterity mean nothing to the Wizard.

Despite these problems, added to their blatant lack of feats, wizards work fairly well. But they definitely can be improved upon.

We are left with Clerics and Paladins, which to me present the same concern: they offer two options for a main ability score, and have that as the only variable to differentiate builds. As I explained previously, multiple main ability scores just don't work. But even if they did, the build options in these divine classes would still be very, very wrong.

It's bad enough that class features stay the same from one build to the other. What is completely un acceptable, though, is that one build's abilities affect these features while the other one's don't. Wisdom Clerics have Healer's Lore, but Strength Clerics get nothing. Likewise, Charisma Paladins gain a bonus to Divine Challenge, and Strength Paladins cry (though both have Wisdom-powered Lay on Hands). You could argue that Strength provides better basic attacks, or whatever. The fact is, in order to use one of your class builds, you have to give up features without getting anything in return!

Oh, and there is no 9nth level daily power for Strength Paladins. The designers must really dislike strong divine characters.

Next: The less-than-awesome!
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