Broken Bits: Battle Captain

Broken Paragon Paths, Part Six
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If there is one game mechanic that has no place in D&D 4E, it is that of adding (or subtracting) ability modifiers to d20 rolls. Be it for an attack, a saving throw or an skill check, the roll of a d20 determines failure or success of an action, and is usually adjusted in tiny increments of 1 or 2 points. And with good reason - since success rates tend to be around 60%, a modifier of 4 points would have a huge impact in the chances, and one above 8 points would virtually assure success or failure.

Coincidentally, primary and secondary ability modifiers most often range between 3 and 9 points, depending on level, so applying them to a d20 roll starts as extremely effective (at heroic) and ends up downright broken (at epic). Today I’m going to talk about Battle Captain, a paragon path whose primary shtick consists in adding Intelligence to your allies’ attacks. Don’t expect that to survive until the end of the article.

As is often the case, most of the features and powers in Battle Captain are fine, or even mediocre, and it is a single crazy element that spoils the path. There are a bunch of minor and conditional ways to improve the accuracy of your friends, like Battle Action (+1 to hit for the team on your action points) and Cry Havoc (another +2, for the first round of combat) that are nevertheless quite handy, and fit nicely with the style of the Tactical Warlord. The attacks are a mixture of area damage and forced movement, also providing a ‘tactical’ feeling but merely acceptable, power-wise. The utility, Bolt of Genius, combines amazing concept (give back an encounter power to an ally!) with hideous implementation (spend a standard action and provoke opportunity attacks!), and is rarely worth spending an action on it. And you could take all that away, and 16th level feature Battle Inspiration would still be a great deal, all by itself.

Although, in theory, you can use Battle Inspiration without Tactical Presence (and the path is actually pretty decent for not-tactic warlords), that class feature improves its effect so much, that few choose to. Basically, it tacks on each of your Inspiring Words (of which you’ll have 3-4 per encounter, at that point) an Intelligence bonus to the target’s attack rolls for a whole turn. So the ally is all but guaranteed to hit with an attack (or more, if there are action points involved) and, as a nice side effect, the warlord can also enjoy autohits with Commander’s Strike for his turn and the following one. This would be a potent tool once per encounter, but in multiples it’s nothing but devastating. For reference, Tactical Presence itself usually provides half the bonus with about half the frequency (roughly 4 times every 2 encounters), and is considered an awesome feature that defines what is arguably the strongest warlord build.

A fix.

I think that the best course of action consists in neutering the dangerous element in Battle Inspiration (the egregious attack modifier), leaving it at a modest level and letting the rest of the path stand on its own (except for a small tweak that will be explained below).

Battle Inspiration 2.0 (16th level): When you use your inspiring word power, allies you heal gain a +1 power bonus to attack rolls and a +1 power bonus to speed until the end of your next turn. If you selected the Tactical Presence class feature, the bonus to speed is equal to your Intelligence modifier instead.

Did you know that Battle Inspiration also grants you a cool bonus to speed? This part was always inevitably overshadowed by the ability to blow up the world, but I think it can do a good job as a signature ability, once you take that out of the equation. Leaving the bonus to hit at a mere +1 matches the rest of the path, joining the host of small modifiers and requiring you to dirty your hands (by combining multiple bonuses and flanking) to improve party accuracy.

While not entirely necessary to have the revised Battle Captain at a playable power level, I’d also suggest the following change to the utility power to prevent it from being frustratingly weak:

Bolt of Genius - Utility 12
Minor Action - Close burst 2
Target: One ally
Effect: The target regains an encounter attack or utility power he or she has already used.

This never had any business costing you an entire standard action, and won’t break anything as a minor, anyway. Having it as a ranged power prevented the warlord from using it in his natural environment (melee), and made little sense from a flavor standpoint. Finally, I’ve reduced the range because I think it should make for more interesting gameplay, though leaving it at 5 would also be ok.

So, there you have it. No longer the one and only perfect path for all things tactical, but quite a solid choice.

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Fatigue: An optional rule for characters without healing surges

Edit (19/10/10): Modified fatigue to affect skill checks

In a recent article, I commented on the shortcomings of healing surges as a player resource, and how I felt existing patches to be lacking. Today I present a house rule I’ve been tinkering with that intends to allow characters to keep fighting after they run out of surges, though at a significant disadvantage.

The following house rule extends the healing section in Player’s Handbook, p.293. (and its equivalent in the Rules Compendium - can’t give a page reference since I don’t own the book).

Running out of surges

When you would be allowed to spend one or more healing surges and regain hit points, if you are out of healing surges and not fatigued, you can choose to regain that many hit points instead. If you do, you become fatigued until you take an extended rest.

When you would be allowed to spend one or more healing surges and regain hit points, if you are out of healing surges and fatigued, you can choose to regain that many hit points instead. If you do, you become weakened and grant combat advantage until the end of your next turn. You cannot do this while weakened.

Fatigued:

• Can’t run
• -2 to attack rolls
• -2 to skill checks and ability checks
• -2 to defenses against attacks with combat advantage.

Discussion

The rule above allows DMs to plan for long adventuring days without having the players accidentally forced into an untimely long rest. The intention is that fighting when out of surges is possible and somewhat effective, but not desirable. Inevitably, some characters will be affected more by fatigue than others - a Warlord, for example, could Commander’s Strike all day long regardless by it. Nevertheless, even if a character can somehow minimize the impact of the penalty to hit and the occasional weakening, the defense penalties should still prove painful enough.

I have attempted to cover as many loopholes as possible with the wording, but it is very likely that something has slipped through. As far as I know, this rule allows for fair use of healing potions (which would grant the same number of HP), and prevents exploits related to expending surges you don’t have for non-healing purposes. Any insight on possible improvements would be appreciated.

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Essentials Ranger preview: A farewell to seekers?

D&D Essentials class previews

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

For a long time, Wizards of the Coast has stated that they wouldn’t release a purely martial controller in 4E, to the despair of symmetry-loving fans. However, after a first peek at the Hunter, the new controlling Ranger build to be included in Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms, we can tell that this stance... hasn’t changed all that much.

As it turns out, the Hunter (not to mistake with the Hunter Ranger build from Martial Power 2) not only brings a different role (controller) to the Ranger class, but it also changes the power source! Like the Essentials Assassin before it, the Hunter mixes martial exploits with a different power source - primal, in this case. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, since D&D rangers have a longtime tradition of dabbling in nature magic. Anyway, from what I can see, the primal influence is a minor one, since all the attacks revealed so far lack openly supernatural effects, and the class structure closely resembles that of other Essentials martial classes: no dailies, fixed encounter attacks, and a strong focus on basic attacks for its at-wills. In fact, the only primal elements revealed so far are a series of stances that wouldn’t be that out of place as martial exploits.

Hunters are ranged specialist, being able to choose either bows or crossbows. Accuracy seems to be one of the strong points of the class, with Expertise for the weapon of choice given for free at first level, and a Weapon Talent feature that isn’t shown in the preview but can safely assumed to grant a +1 to hit, like the features with the same name for other martial Essentials classes. They wear leather armor and feature striker-level hit points, their primal heritage apparently compensating for the fragile controller role.

The attack power selection faces the remarkable challenge of performing the controller role without daily attacks, which had historically been a major selling point of controllers, to begin with. The information we currently have is incomplete, but it strongly suggests that hunters will make really fine controllers, and be quite interesting to play, as well. Rather than choosing at-wills, hunters get a fixed array of three attacks, which looks like a letdown at first, until you realize that they play like five different powers - of which at least four are of amazing quality.

The star of the show is, without a doubt, Clever Shot, which consists on a basic ranged attack with a choice of three different controlling effects on a hit. And they are nothing to sneeze at, as they include knocking prone, sliding multiple squares, and slowing the target until it saves. This is a great range of options, both in variety and power level, and the inclusion of save ends effects is unprecedented for an at-will attack, and should provide some cool combinations.

For scenarios where such subtlety isn’t required, the hunter can resort to the more straightforward Rapid Shot, which sacrifices accuracy (of which the class had plenty, anyway) to be able to make basic attacks against enemies in an area, easily making this the hardest-hitting at-will area attack in the game, thanks to the very respectable damage dice of bows and crossbows. Rounding out the package, Aimed Shot is an attack that ignores most penalties to hit, being a decent alternative when a target is invisible or under heavy cover.

A missing piece of the puzzle is the encounter attack, Disruptive Shot, which appears to be a fixed option to boost attacks several times per encounter like a Knight’s Power Attack or a rogue’s Backstab. The name suggests some kind of penalty to attack rolls for the target, though I wouldn’t be surprised if it actually offered multiple options, like Clever Shot.

Overall, and despite the lack of dailies and the fixed encounter power, hunters seem to offer more strategic options for their attacks than other Essentials martial classes, and actually end up pretty close in complexity, compared to traditional controllers. In fact, there is an additional layer of choice thanks to a feature called Aspects of the Wild, which provides two at-will primal stances (of which you gain more as you level up) which let you switch between different states during combat. So far we’ve been able to see the Aspect of the Cunning Fox, which makes you resistant to opportunity attacks and allows shifting after hitting with an attack, and the Aspect of the Dancing Serpent, which allows you to shift at the end of turn and deal extra damage to isolated enemies.

If anyone was still aching for character building options, there is yet another feature, called Wilderness Knacks, that offers multiple choices - in this case, two skill-related abilities at first level, with additional slots every four levels.

Apart from that, there are a few mystery features left in the heroic progression table, including ‘Close Combat Archery’, which likely allows shooting without provoking opportunity attacks, ‘Reactive Shift’, most likely involving movement during an opponent’s turn, and 'Weapon Mastery', which might boost your Disruptive Shot in different ways depending on use of bows or crossbows, like the fighter features of the same name should give you a flat +1 bonus to damage, like the Knight feature of the same name.

The verdict

I’ve been pretty hyped by the Essentials builds so far, but this one is easily my favourite. I just love the idea of having many different (and potent) at-will attacks, and the range of tricks available covers most of the needs of a controlling character. The Aspects of the Wild are a really cool idea, and mean that you will be choosing between different powers for your standard action and your minor action each turn, providing an unexpected strategic depth. The downside is that, despite Aspects and Knacks, there shouldn’t be that much variety while building the character, but I’m confident that the variety in play will more than compensate for it.

The most painful thing about the Hunter is that, by being a primal-ish controller that uses ranged weapons, focuses on basic attacks, and has a number of mobility-related features, it steps on the Seeker’s toes too much. In fact, it’s hard not to picture the Hunter killing the Seeker, and taking his stuff, and kicking him while he’s down. The fact is, Seekers where deeply flawed, with a decent set of features but lousy powers that made them a failure as controllers. By succeeding in their very same niche, Hunters raise a number of questions about the continuity of Seekers as a class. Will they be supported anymore? With no Primal Power 2 on sight, it would take a major commitment from Dragon articles to bring Seekers up to playability, including a couple of feat patches and a good number of strong powers. Unlikely as that seems, I’m not giving up hope yet. Who knows, maybe one of the drafts I’m preparing to submit could help in that regard...

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

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Healing Surges revisited

Healing surges are among the most game-changing innovations brought to D&D by 4E (and that is saying a lot!), and their contribution to the game has been positive overall. However, their implementation has been plagued by minor, yet significant flaws, preventing them from being completely successful as either party resources or character attributes. Today I’d like to discuss the mechanical aspects of surges, both good and bad, providing an overview of the patches that have come up (from official sources as well as this very site) and paving the ground for yet another (hopefully improved) solution in an upcoming article.

The good stuff:

The positive points of healing surges that stand out the most to me are the concept of making characters responsible for their own healing, the introduction of non-magical healing, and the reduced dependency on PC healers.

1) Healing as drawing from inner reserves.

Under the Healing Surge model, the healed character takes an active role in his recovery. Where previously all the merit went to the healer, now it becomes a joint effort - with both healer and patient spending resources and contributing to the final result. Notably, this means that tougher characters heal better, and can endure healing more times during a day.

Why is this important? There is an obvious benefit in character customization: surge value and the number of surges are new attributes that complement hit points and defenses, being weaker than them but still interesting and relevant, and providing an additional niche for defensive magic items and feats.

2) Healing not tied to magic

If I had to name the greatest single contribution of the surge mechanic to the game, I’d point to the Warlord. Linking healing to a character’s endurance and resolve means that healing effects no longer need to be strictly magical - allowing things like Warlord healing, and the Second Wind ability. These could still exist in a game without surges, but they would probably feel more forced. More importantly, though, is the fact that you could build a fully functional D&D party in a setting with no magic whatsoever - an all but impossible feat in earlier editions of the game.

3) Healing less dependant on the leader role

Before the creation of surges, the only limiting factor to a party’s daily healing was the number of leaders in it or, alternately, the amount of potions (and, more likely, Wands of Cure Light Wounds) available. Having more of these characters or items could greatly increase the number of encounters you could survive during a day. Having none of them meant you were doomed.

This cannot be emphasized too much: before 4E, you couldn’t play without healing magic. Not for long, anyways. A group might get along without melee specialists, and perhaps even without a wizard, but lacking the ability to cast Cure Light Wounds meant certain death. Coupled with some less than fortunate leader mechanics (since healers were expected to spend almost all their actions and resources in unexciting healing spells) meant that someone was often forced to take one for the team, and play a cleric even if he didn’t want to, just so that the group could advance.

Now that we have surges, and limited self-healing via Second Wind, and hit point recovery during short rests, playing without a leader is a real option, if not an optimal one. Not that leading is such a sacrifice anymore, as they can be real fun to play, but the added flexibility is definitely welcome.

The bad stuff

The main flaws in the implementation of surges are related to their application as a character and party resource. Lack of healing surges ending a player’s adventuring day is a major issue here, and leads to strong fluctuations on their value as character stat depending on who is the most fragile member of a party. Finally, a non-critical problem that is nevertheless annoying is the lack of support for encounters against worn down parties.

1) You can’t fight without surges.

This is the root of the problem. The character who runs out of healing surges is down for the day at the moment he’s dropped to 0 HP. At this point, the only alternatives are either forcing a long rest, or have the party leave the unconscious PC behind, and keep fighting without a member. Both interact poorly with adventures on unsafe locations (where it wouldn’t be credible to either sleep, or leave a fallen comrade), and the first one can lead to unusually short adventuring days. As for fighting without a party member, it may be more acceptable from a narrative point of view, but it isn’t a lot of fun for the guy who gets to sit without playing! So more often than not, the compromise is to rest regardless of location or time constraints, so as not to screw the fallen players.

2) Fragile PCs are a party bottleneck.

Because one fallen PC is often enough to bring a party to sleep, the role of surges as a character resource tends to be very uneven. Simply put, most of the times you don’t care about who will be the second character in a party to run out of surges - because you won’t get to that point. It’s only the most fragile member that matters, so everyone else’s surges tend to become irrelevant. Investing feats or items to gain additional surges thus ranges from a vital strategy (if you are the softest PC) to a mostly pointless exercise (if you are anyone else).

3) Tough PCs don’t shine

As a corollary of the previous point, it doesn’t pay to go out of your way to build the toughest character on earth. More Hit Points are always welcome, but extra healing surges are usually worthless once you are more resilient than the guy next to you. Or, as the joke goes, you don’t need to run faster than the dragon - outrunning your friend should do the trick. This is particularly aggravating because it makes surges a survivability stat that players who want to specialize in defense should ignore. It completely misses its target.

4) Exhausted parties don’t fight

Right now, it’s difficult to tell certain stories in a D&D campaign due to the fact that adventuring parties don’t grow weak or tired as they fight more encounters - they become unconscious. So if, for example, a DM wants to present a race against time (“rescue the princess in 3 days”), there is not much that PCs can do to delay long rests, other than losing people along the way. Likewise, it’s usually not practical to have a villain ambush the players when they have spent most of their resources and about to rest - because he won’t be fighting vulnerable heroes, but unconscious ones.

Overall, I get the impression that a model where surgeless characters became crippled but still capable of contributing to the party (and enjoying the game) would play much better than the current one.

The patches

A solution of sorts has been provided for healing surge woes in the form of Comrades’ Succor, a level 1 ritual that allows for surge transfer among teammates. Leaving aside the fact that releasing a game-changing ritual through an obscure Dragon article hardly seems like the most intelligent strategy, we have to admit that this works. More or less.

Healing surges as a shared party resource (which is what this ritual achieves) certainly mitigates the problem of fragile characters forcing early rests, allowing for longer adventuring sessions. But it also takes away some good things. The ritual itself is an obviously magical solution (so fully martial parties are out of the question), and having a party-wide pool of surges makes each individual surge even less valuable - so feats like Durable and powers like Cure Light Wounds become downright terrible.

I think the houserule I suggested in a previous article was slightly better, in that it didn’t allow free trade of surges, but use of other characters’ surges for off-combat healing. This meant that PCs still could run out of their own surges - they’d be able to fight, but lose access to on-combat healing, becoming extremely fragile. This way, each character’s surges remain important, though less so than under the original system.

Having played with this houserule for a year now, I can say it’s an improvement but it still doesn’t convince me. Among other things, the sharing of resources doesn’t mesh well with the dynamics of our campaign, where the player lineup shows great variance from one session to the other. In a following article, I’ll talk about a different idea for surge management that I’ve been toying with lately.

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October errata: Spirit Companions, Cunning Sneaks, and little else

The days of world-changing errata seem to be coming to an end. When the Essentials line was announced, we were told that we'd have a few months of drastic rules updates to clean up the game for the new books, and a much lower rate of changes, afterwards. Having read the September advance, I was hoping that this month would bring us one last glorious round of fixes, addressing major stuff like the psionic power point system.

Well, I was wrong. The latest document only includes a handful of changes of note, plus a bunch of typos, and I'm inclined to think that this is the kind of revisions we should expect in the future. That is, apart from the stuff that is directly being rewritten on the Essentials books.

Anyways, here are the two relevant fixes:

- Shaman spirit companions can no longer be dismissed and conjured again with a single minor action. Placing spirits on the battlefield isn't completely trivial anymore, and should be a bit more interesting from now on.

- The rogue Cunning Sneak class feature now works with any kind of movement, not just move actions. Move-related attacks should now be much more useful for stealthy rogues.

And that's it. I'd still like to see an official document with the changes to classic monster stats, but they may be waiting for the release of Monster Vault, for that.

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Monster Workshop: The White Dragon

With the new monster design guidelines brought by Monster Manual 3, I’ve been looking for opportunities to adapt classic foes to the new, deadlier format. Unfortunately, my turn to DM our regular campaign is still a few months away, so I haven’t been able to put this into practice. That is, until our DM brought to my attention that we would be fighting a Dragon encounter (as he needed the minis from my home). That immediately put me into tinkering mode.

It is obvious that Dragons are an Essential very important part of the D&D game, and I love them as much as the next guy, but this specimen was from the first Monster Manual, and these are known to have... issues. Granted, it is still possible to have awesome encounters playing a MM1 Dragon by the book, but these become more and more difficult the higher level you are. At least we weren’t talking about a soul-crushing Black Dragon, but it was probably the next worst thing: a White. As a Solo Brute from MM1, this dragon has extremely high chances of providing underpowered, repetitive encounters, so something needed to be done.

White Dragons are among the weakest of the Chromatics, but the MM1 version is overkill.

Fixing It

What’s wrong with the White? To answer this, we can take a look at the statblock of a level 9 Adult White Dragon. The following issues come up:
- It’s an old-fashioned brute. This means that its accuracy is lacking, so it will be missing more often than not, and has almost no chance of bringing down any self-respecting defender.
- It’s an old-fashioned solo, so its defenses are higher, and its damage expressions lower than those of more modern monsters of its type - making encounters longer, and less threatening. Also, it has no special mechanic to resist stunning and similar effects, so it can be easily neutralized with the right powers.
- It lacks the MM3 damage boost, which has made higher level monsters far more deadlier, and much better adjusted to the PCs’ power level.
- It has a miserable power selection. Most dragons have, even at lower levels, some unique special power and/or a tail attack that triggers as a reaction to enemy movements. The White gets none of these. To add insult to injury, it’s only special ability of note is Dragon Fury, which grants an extra attack after hitting with two claws. The problem being, this is an inherently unreliable (and kinda weak) mechanic, which only gets worse when you put it on a Brute with lousy accuracy!

Reading this, you might get the impression that we’d be better off creating a new monster from scratch, and to be honest that isn’t too far off. But there are still some redeeming qualities, which we should make sure to preserve:
- It’s a DRAGON. Dragons are awesome by definition, and players will be willing to forgive a lot of things just because of it.
- Dragon Breath is always cool (no pun intended). This one deals no damage on a miss (which is unfortunate, given the aforementioned lack of precision), but slows and weakens enemies - something that goes well with the elemental cold theme, and is actually quite effective.
- The extra damage on an opportunity attack looks a bit too soldier-ish to me, but it is unique and kind of useful, so I guess we should do something with it.

Ok, that wasn’t too long. Anyway, from this analysis, I’m inclined to implement changes that go a bit deeper than merely adjusting defenses, hit bonuses, and damage to MM3 values. This guy could do with some new powers and traits, and a couple of tweaks on the existing ones. Also, I couldn’t wait to try something like the following in action:

The beautiful killing machine above is an official-ish new design that was handed out at the last GenCon, as reported at EnWorld. It is clearly built to present a serious challenge, and to be fair has a couple of things (Acidic Blood + Shroud of Gloom) that look a bit too overpowered to my taste. But I think it would make an amazing framework for any Dragon re-design, so I’m going to steal from it. Shamelessly.

The following ideas would fit well in our White Dragon:
- Action Recovery. A simple trait to prevent stun-locking, which covers most, but not all of the solo-crippling conditions (leaving a few weak points) and still lets players get some (but not too much) value from their stuns.
- Instinctive Devouring. Concentrated awesomeness. A limited extra action that goes a long way towards making dragon fights dynamic and competitive, and also helps fight stuns.
- The concept of Acidic Blood (though not its implementation). A lethal ability that only works when the dragon gets bloodied adds a lot of variety to the encounter.
- Miss damage on Bite attack. This is a small detail, but makes the main, hard-hitting attack a more serious threat to even the most armored warrior. Also, it adds some punch to the opportunity attacks.
- There is no Frightful Presence, which to me always looked like a waste of time as it made both parties skip a turn.

With that in mind, I came up with the following version:

So this looks way different from the original. Damage has got a significant boost (following the new formulas), which coupled with the increase in accuracy makes the new dragon pack quite a punch. You shouldn’t hear complaints of fights dragging with this one. Defenses also went down, so that AC is now very weak (as suits a brute), and fortitude is strong but no longer overwhelming. Frightful Presence got killed.

What about the new abilities? Instinctive Devouring and Action recovery were added without changes. I toned down the extra attack in Dragon’s Fury (which doesn’t come up too often, anyway) to compensate for the added bite from Instinctive Devouring. I tried to play into the improved opportunity attack idea, and added Bloodied Reflexes as the encounter-changing trait (since threatening reach had great synergy with strong OAs), and also a Tail Slam that triggered off enemies not moving. The idea would be that many of the dragon’s abilities work to hinder PC mobility, but the dragon punishes its enemies if they stay in the same place. I admit I borrowed some inspiration from that other game, but don’t tell anybody.

The new Dragon, in action

How did this play out? I brought the new version to my DM, with a few warnings about untested power and risk of TPK, which only got him more excited. So we went to play the encounter, which had an amazing poster map, with a mix of fear and curiosity, and...

...and we role-played our way out of the fight. Brilliantly, in fact. The dragoness was kind of receptive to dialogue, and our usually slash-happy party took to the (skill) challenge, in what was one of the greatest game sessions we ever had, from a narrative point of view. We convinced the monster to let us borrow a piece of its treasure, which was vital to the plot, in exchange for some services. It was fun, and memorable. And a bit of an anti-climax.

All right, it was a complete anti-climax! The DM was torn between pride (for an undeniably succesful session) and letdown (for the lost chance for mindless violence). He mildly suggested a couple of courses of action that would lead to the epic battle he craved, but the adventurers would have none of that. It was a happy ending, of sorts.

Eventually, we were convinced to play the battle, out of campaign continuity, for research purposes (ah, the sacrifices I make for my beloved readers!). And... it was a definite improvement over the original monster (which we would have annihilated), but it wasn’t quite the challenge I expected it to be.

Now, it is true that the dragon make some strategically questionable decisions (such as spending its Dragon Breath against a single Fighter - and missing- , or using action points at not-quite-optimal times), and that the DM was overly cautious with using terrain effects against us after my warnings of TPK-risk. And our PCs were fresh after an extended rest and, not fearing future encounters nor permanent death, they blew a zillion dailies at the poor creature. But it should have been more threatening.

What happened was that a well armored, melee heavy party surrounded it (with a fighter to lock it in place), making it almost impossible for it to move away or cover several of them with a breath attack. There was some mild debuffing involved (of the -2 to hit variety), which even with the increased hit bonuses made it pretty hard for the dragon to hit the marking fighter - and switching targets wasn’t much of an option because they were also well armored, and as hard to hit after counting the mark penalty. So the dragon took a beating, scratched the adventurers without ever threatening to knock one down, and died.

Tail Slam was usually spent on the fighter and failed to make much of an impact. A domination effect was shrugged off by Instinctive Devouring (to great sadness from our Bard), but not before preventing a whole turn’s worth of opportunity attacks just after Bloodied Reflexes had kicked in. In fact, it didn’t get to make an opportunity attack in the whole encounter. Overall, it wasn’t as dynamic as it should, and proved that the dragon could still gain some more power. Back to the drawing board.

The Dragon Strikes Back

After playing with it, I feel that my dragon still left a few things to be desired. First of all, it didn’t have many things to do during combat. I had expected that the opportunity attacks combined with tail slam would lead to a mini-game of PCs moving away with the dragon chasing them, but that didn’t work out well. And, although I don’t miss Frightful Presence, it is true that removing it left few attack options.

What I wanted was some way to move PCs around. I increased the number of slowing attacks, and added a trait called Deadly Cold, to push slowed enemies that the dragon hit. I also wanted to have some way to boost attacks, so the new ability also granted combat advantage against slowed enemies. Having Dragon Breath be able to fail completely was too much of a letdown, so I gave it half damage on a miss. Finally, I made Tail Slam trigger as an opportunity action (so it would work against ALL adjacent allies), and had its attack target fortitude. I got rid of the extra damage on opportunity attacks, because they were pretty brutal to begin with.

This is the version I’d play today.

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Essential Assassin

"We’ve charted a new direction in class design with the Essentials products" - Bill Slavicsek, Essential Cleric preview.

The Executioner Assassin is new build (though it actually includes two sub-builds) for the assassin class, with a format inspired by the Essentials books, brand new mechanics, and a couple of twists in the resource system. Executioners are strikers that use both the shadow and the martial power source, making them the first build in the game with multiple power sources.

Ever since the first Essential previews, we have wondered what that "new direction" would mean for future classes. We will still have to wait for a complete answer, but it is easy to tell what it means for the assassin class: freedom. This is a build full of wacky design ideas, often breaking the (somewhat rigid) structure we have come to expect from a 4E class description, though keeping the underlying core intact. More or less, anyway.

The first thing that caught my eye about the assassin rules is that they are unexpectedly interesting to read. I love reading page after page of powers as much as the next guy, but even I have to admit that the original 4E format sometimes comes off a little dry. Following the new Essentials style, the Assassin has additional flavor text and descriptions for every feature and power, in just the right amount (a single paragrapth at a time) to spice things up without getting boring. Moderately extensive writeups for race-specific assassins, such as humans or drow, are also included.

The power progression feels familiar, yet special. You get at-will, encounter, daily and utility powers as with any other (non-Essential) class, though there are a few caveats. All of the non-utility powers are written so as to be build-specific, so that the Executioner can't benefit from previous assassin attacks, and vice versa. The at-wills available are different for each Executioner sub-build, and you can actually gain more as you level up. The daily powers keep their usual number and strength, but have been reflavored as special poisons which the assassin can craft and use each day. Also, they have been grouped by tier, so that at level 9 you can choose among three level 1 poisons, where previously you would have powers of level 1, 5 and 9. There is a slight mechanical change in that it looks like you'll be able to use multiple instances of the same poison each day, but other than that it is the same as traditional dailies, with a very cool flavor. And then, there is the encounter power.

This is where the assassin deviates the most from the norm, but I think it's more than worth it. Rather than choosing up to 3 different encounter powers, the executioner assassin has Assassin's Strike, a single encounter attack which improves as you level up. The trick is that Assassin's Strike deals roughly the same extra damage as the three encounters put together. In one fell swoop. This single, devastating attack really captures what an assassin is about, to me, and feels about right, power-wise. The loss in build and play options is somewhat compensated by the additional at-will slots, and the inevitable gap in power level (compared to classes that have 3 attacks with weird effects) is left to fill by class features.

And there are a LOT of class features. True to the Essential template, the assassin class has its own progression table for each tier, with new features spread out across levels. The partial switch to the martial power source is evident here, in that there is less emphasis in shadow illusions and teleporting (one of the cooler things about the old assassin), and more plain acrobatics and physical prowess. Features that let you land gracefully on a fall, or create clever disguises are examples of this mundane theme, though shadow magic becomes more prominent as you level up. This way, the paragon tier brings an extremely nice little feature with no combat implications but great story potential; called Shadow Coffin, it allows you to magically capture an enemy corpse, to hide your tracks or use it later as proof of death.

Oddly, for all the color and inventiveness that is present in other areas, the main striker feature is as bland as it gets: an extra d6 added to all weapon attacks. This is functional but boring, and would be a bit of a letdown if it wasn't complemented by one of the most awesome and flavorful offensive mechanics I have seen in quite a while: the Death Attack. Gained at level 3, Death Attack lets you automatically finish off enemies with less than 10 hit points (a threshold that increases as you level up) after you damage them. This seems quite potent, and fun, and more than justifies calling this build the Executioner - bloodied enemies will fall quite easily at your hands, and there is a potential for one-shotting enemies at lower levels that not even a barbarian would match.

The executioner also succeeds in an area where the previous assassin design felt lacking - the use of weapons. Both builds are proficient with ki focuses that allow an assassin to wield effectively any tool at hand. However, the original version of the class did little to incentivize the exotic weapons one usually associates with assassination, so the optimal style of play consisted in swinging brutish two-handed blades - not the most fortunate flavor match. The executioner fixes this by having weapon-specific attacks. A lot of them, in fact, and for many different weapons.

Each of the new assassin at-wills is associated with a specific weapon, such as the kukri, blowgun, or shuriken. These have long been (rightfully) regarded as crappy weapons, weak even when compared with the humble dagger. However, by having at-wills specifically tailored from them, the assassin can squeeze power out of them like no other class in the game.

For example, the kukri power lets you charge and deal 2[W] damage (at-will!), which after accounting for that weapon's terrible damage die ends up roughly equivalent to an attack with a heavy weapon such as a Mordenkrad. The blowgun attack deals miserable damage by itself but is more accurate than any other at-will in the game, making it great in combination with poisons, Assassin's Strike, or Death Strike. Or all of them thrown together - there is no such thing as overkill, for an assassin.

Also, if these specialized weapons and maneuvers fail, you're still free to make basic attacks with the heaviest stick you can find. Executioners are able to use their dexterity for basic attacks, swap weapons with ease, and switch from melee to ranged attacks without effort, so they should be able to have a much more eclectic fighting style.

And that's about it. As with other Essential classes, there are no class-specific feats in the article, though I'd be surprised if the generous array of feats for the classic assassin didn't hide several gems (without feature requirements) for the new build. The class is presented as a Beta version, so that playtest feedback can be sent before the final version is compiled in November. Nevertheless, my initial impression is that, barring a couple of typos and the odd table, the class is highly polished - more so, perhaps, than the previous assassin. The power level looks well adjusted, the mechanics appear to be quite fun, and the whole package is full of personality and flavor. The class framework is definitely unorthodox, but isn't really all that far off your regular 4E striker, in its core. I don't know if I'll have the chance to play with the class anytime soon, as my turn to DM our campaign comes closer, but I'd definitely recommend it.

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