Proposal: Things to be nerfed

I was thinking that having played, and read about the game for a while longer, and since there are characters that are going to leave the lower-end of heroic tier pretty soon (well, relatively to the slowness of pbp), we might begin considering changing a few things that might be overpowered, in the spirit of what has been done already during the approval process.
I'll list a few things that come to my mind right now, I'm sure there should be more:

From AV:
-Bloodiron weapons
-Bloodclaw weapons
-Reckless weapons
-Radiant weapons
These are generally considered overpowered, and in particular, I feel that reckless weapons and bloodclaw weapons should give an item bonus, and that the bloodclaw power should only be usable once per round. The bonus critical damage from the bloodiron should be reduced.


-Rain of blows power (Fighter Encounter 3, PHB)
You know it. Four attacks at 3rd level is just too much.

-Salve of power (wondrous item, AV)
Sometimes I feel these defeat the spirit of the game a bit.

-Righteous rage of Tempus (divine feat, Forgotten Realms PG)
Generally considered broken.

-Expertise feats (PHB2)
These aren't even approved, and I'm not proposing a nerf, but merely an option. There has been an uproar in the community saying that these feats are a "quick fix" and that they're mandatory, so now all characters have 17 feats, not 18.
I don't agree completely, but it'd be quite easy for us to simply add a static bonus to hit to all characters at 5th, 15th, and, someoneforbidmeforevenmentioningthat, 25th level.

-Echoes of thunder (feat, PHB2)
Not really broken, but making it a typed bonus would prevent headaches.

-Save penalties
These go more out of hand the more the level goes up. My proposal is that every feat, power or item giving a penalty to saves gives a feat, power, or item type penalty respectively. I know penalties have no type, but this should be an exception IMO.

If you're interested in this, I can edit this first post when more proposals come out.

The math is in, and from what I've seen expertise feats help smooth over characters without a starting 18 in a stat. They are neither game-breaking nor overpowered.

But why wouldn't a character WITH an 18 take the feat anyway? It's still better than any other feat.

I prefer just giving a free Expertise feat at level 5 instead of a static bonus - that way you still have the flavour of being better with a certain weapon group or implement type, and if you want to generalize you can take more feats.

I don't have any opinion on the other items.

I agree with don, my reasoning was different. Since so many people believe that the math almost requires those feats, and that everyone will take them, and WoTC didn't put out an errata instead of two feats to fix everything, I was merely saying that it'd be much easier for us incorporate the bonus in every character stats at the given levels.

For the moment, however, I think the other issues I mentioned are more important for balance.

Atanatotatos, could you give the source of everything you are talking about? Knowing what book all the items, powers and feats you are talking about would help people look up and then talk about them. Just a thought...

As far as Expertise, the only thing I see it fixing are characters that use non-standard race/class combo's. It helps starting characters have a chance when they don't have a +2 in any of their classes stats. Will most people pick it up sometime? Sure. Bonuses to hit are hard to come by.

But needed? Not even close. Now if you want to GIVE my character a free feat, I'm not going to argue too much against it.

I edited the post with the books.
However, keep in mind that the math scales a bit differently going up in levels. While they're not needed now, except for "suboptimal" builds like you mentioned, they are needed as the game reach paragon or even epic level (just look at a red dragon's defenses grow throughout the tiers).
Granted, we'll probably never reach those levels in a pbp, or at least, not in a short time, but I just wanted to express a thought that I feel is very widespread in the gaming community.

Hurm, a lot of those look familiar.

Anyway I'm pretty much in agreement, but let me go down the list.

Bloodiron: The problem I see with this weapon is why would anyone use a vicious weapon once they can get one of these. On the other hand the problem with a vicious weapon is that you can get something with nearly as high a crit die that actually does something else so why bother with a vicious weapon to start with. Mostly I don't see a problem with bloodiron weapons because they're unreliable and when they do go off they add a decent amount of damage but nothing encounter breaking IMHO. +6 vicious weapons adds an avg of 39 damage on a crit. +6 bloodiron weapons adds 66 damage on avg assuming the monster doesn't die before the start of your next turn anyway.

Bloodclaw: This one is hard to defend, the damage output is pretty crazy. However I actually think it is the more balanced of the two between this and reckless because this at least will seriously kill the user if over used very much. Multi-attacks are really the broken thing there because of the stacking of static bonuses, but they're much harder to get purge from the game.

Reckless: There's no defending this weapon as written in my eyes, because penalties from the same source don't stack...Crap tons of static damage for an almost laughable penalty and it even gets a d8 crit die.

Radiant: My only real problem with this is the interaction with the Student of Caiphon PP combined with an Avenger. The damage bonus is an item bonus so it's not going to stack with something like Iron Armbands of Power, which is presumably the go to item if you're not using this. Radiant damage is nice since a decent subset of monsters are actually vulnerable to it and few resist it, but this weapon is decently more expensive than it's fire and frost cousins. Honestly I think this is less of a problem outside of the SoC interaction than the infamous frost weapon+lasting frost+wintertouched cheese.

Rain of Blows: Well...there aren't even any ranger powers that give this many attacks anywhere near that level. The weapon limitation is somewhat annoying but it's not like flails and spears are really all that light on damage. If you're building for this power it's too good and low enough level that it's too easy to regain additional uses. Pretty much every melee char op build I've seen abuses this in some form or another. The only thing I can really say in its defense from the player side of the table is it's hella fun to drop it on something. Suggestion, remove weapons restriction, make it a daily.

Salve of Power: Either really great or downright broken depending on your low level dailies, and there are quite a few dailies that this abuses. Getting an extra use of a low level daily is cool, but the fact that you can have multiple of these and they're relatively cheap makes it horribly busted when combined with things like Rain of Steel. I suppose you could make it so that someone can only be affected by the power 1/day, but easiest just to get rid of it IMHO.

Righteous Rage of Tempus: Well it's pretty much better than any of the other Channel Divinity feats so that says a lot right there. However I think Avengers really need this feat in a bad way since they're so lacking in any kind of nova prowess (without some pretty beefy multiclass building, which probably used RoB anyways or some kind of Half-Elven Avenger in name only abomination) which is a significant detriment to their role as a striker IMHO. Suggestion make this Channel Divinity an Avenger Class feature or an Avenger only feat without any kind of deity restriction. , it's a good hard choice between this and Divine Guidance as I'd say they're roughly on par.

Expertise: I feel required to take this feat because missing sucks. I'm not fond of a feat tax to fix a math error no one wants to own up to. On the flip side disallowing it or making it a freebie to everyone ensures that the hit gap between melee and spellcaster stays firmly in place. If you're a high accuracy class there are more interesting things to take so you're unlikely to have it until at least mid paragon, but then we're back to the same old same old. Blah. Also of note there is a similar feat in the works for weapon and implement split classes in the works for the PHB3 I believe. Suggestion, either completely drop it and its kin, or just give out a +1,+2,+3 heroic/paragon/epic bonus to hit. The ones that need that to hit the most are the ones split between weapons and implements everyone else is pretty much only going to be using their implement group or weapon of choice so you're either making people make a non-choice or punishing those that really need it most.

Now for one of my own. Echoes of Thunder, seriously who came up with this one?

Thank you for the sources.

Expertise: I've played 1 - mid 20's and never seen this NEED for expertise. Some people are way too fond of figuring out the math and not actually playing the game. They need to put down the spreadsheet and pick up some dice...

Rain of Blows: You have to have a 15 dex and use a certain weapons to use it. And it's 3 attacks. The secondary attack says 'Secondary Attack:Strength vs. AC' unlike the first that says 'Attack: Strength vs. AC, two attacks'. If someone got the requirement for the power by 3rd I say more power to em.

Bloodclaw Weapon: Can do a bunch more damage in exchange for hurting you. 'shrug' seems fine. You should note that it deals damage for every attack not every power use so using this weapon ability on all of rain of blows would cost you 3 times the bonus in HP damage for 2 or 3 times the damage done. And since the damage can't be 'reduced or prevented', it's not even that useful to poeple that get temp HP. All in all a good way to get yourself killed but overpowered?


Bloodiron Weapon: Requires a crit to do anything. Seems fine.

Reckless: I don't even know what would be thought of as a problem...

Radiant Weapon: Something's wrong with this?


Salve of power: A 10th level item that lets you regain 5th or lower daily back once a day? Seems a fair trade for one of your magic items.


Righteous rage of Tempus: The only one listed that comes close to needing nerfed. You stack enough crit effects together and make it so you know you're going to crit at least once per encounter... At least you have to hit with the attack, so it's not guarantied. I'd say it should be fine until you get pretty high in level, but by then the 'math' says you have a hard time hitting right?

Echoes of Thunder: ? Sigh... Source please!!!

Yeah I see we agree pretty much on everything Oni. Well except on RRoT for Avengers, I think Avengers are fine, expecially with a bit of multiclassing (half-elf total multiclassed avengers are outrageous). I'd ban the feat outright, it's just too good.

I don't remember Echoes of thunder right now, I think it's a warlord power? Where is it from?

Elec:uhmm... I agree with "play more and rwly less on spreadsheets" but... have you played much mid-high level? Some of these things you regard as balanced really get crazy past a few levels... I mean crazy crazy.

Atanatotatos said:

I don't remember Echoes of thunder right now, I think it's a warlord power? Where is it from?

Click to expand...

Echoes of Thunder is a feat from PH2. "When you hit with any thunder attack power, you gain a +1 bonus to damage rolls until the end of your next turn. The bonus increases to +2 at 11th level and +3 at 21st level."