Wizard Build Suggestions (PHB ONLY!)

[Nifft]

You must not be looking at all of the different ways to get a skill into the stratosphere.

I'm ignorant of this. Have an example to share?

Or, ways to make an Orb Wizard nearly unstoppable against a solo.

This was broken from day 1. It remains broken. Not seeing the creep.

Or, the fact that a Battlerage Fighter is almost immune to minion attacks.

This got fixed in the errata updates.

Or the sheer number of ways of getting conditional bonuses to hit. The PHB had very few ways to get a bonus to hit.

Those are mostly typed bonuses, unless I'm missing something.

- - -

Expertise feats are clearly an example of something bad, but I don't know if I'd call that bad thing "power creep". More like failure to decide how they wanted combat math to work across tiers.

Cheers, -- N

 

[KarinsDad]

I'm ignorant of this. Have an example to share?

As one example:

PHB Stealth:

+5 Trained
+3 feat Skill Focus
+2 power Elven Boots (once per encounter)
+1 to +6 item Elven Cloak or +2 Ring of Invisibility


So, the PHB was limited to +14 (+16 sometimes, which is still very high in a D20 system).


+2 background (background skill boosts did not exist with just the PHB)

+5 unnamed Rat Form Armor (once per day, but still)

+2 to +6 item Boots of Stealth, or +5 Lightstep Slippers, +3 to +6 Shadowform Armor, +1 to +6 Sylvan Armor, etc., etc., etc. The advantage here is that the PC is not forced to use Elven Boots and Cloak, but can mix and match and get other item selection options.

Trickster's Mask (2 rolls instead of 1, ~equal to +3, plus once per day auto-20)

Chameleon Ring (no need for cover or concealment once per day)

+2 power Battlestandard of Shadow

+2 racial Group Stealth

+5 feat Stalking Panther form (druid only)

+5 feat Camouflage (ranger only)

unnamed Secure Encampment (+wis mod during extended rest)


This does not include powers or paragon path/epic destiny abilities. For example, Panther Ancestors can eventually be as high as +8 or even +10 unnamed. Or the number of ways Invisibility can be added now. Or feats like One With Shadow. Plus there are a lot of ways now to acquire concealment.

Also, I only looked in Martial Power, Adventure's Vault, and PHB II. I'm sure there are more elsewhere. Without even cracking open another book, I remember that familiars often give a +2 unnamed bonus to some skills.


And this is only one skill. Granted, some of this stuff is conditional and some of it is not just item based, but the fact remains that people can take these and boost their Stealth (or many other skills) pretty darn high. Higher than what the PHB alone allowed.


Where there only used to be a few ways to acquire a decent stealth skill in the PHB, now there are many ways and it can be higher than just with PHB rules. It's also not just the final bonus to the skill, but all of the associated synergies as well.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

@KD

First of all as Nifft and I have stated before Orb Wizard was ALWAYS broken. It was always TOTALLY broken, not even a little broken. Yeah, there are more ways to do the brokenness in AV1 and some feats can be combined with various things to increase your to-hit and OoIC does make it auto-hit once a day but basically infinitely broken things don't really get more broken and more ways to do the same thing =/= power creep.

BRV fighter WAS in some people's opinions OP at low levels. Epic tier and even paragon tier BRV actually gets pretty lackluster. It was more of a dependency on the situation as you could easily build encounters that made a BRV fighter practically worthless. However it was a serious DM inconvenience that it was easy to create a character that could steamroller a lot of melee centric encounters. So it was fixed. It is thoroughly fixed at this point and is now in some ways actually BETTER at higher levels than it was before. It certainly plays better.

As for skill bonuses... Generally speaking once you hit a certain point with a skill bonus its pretty pointless to jack it up even further, although there are some exceptions specific to certain builds and in general a really outrageous Arcana skill bonus can be justified for some characters. Stealth beyond +16 (actually you CAN do better with just PHB but you got the major bonuses) does what for you? At that point you're at least into paragon and so you have another +6 or more (and even higher with ability score boosts) from level which means you're into the +20's range. There is simply no low paragon tier creature that is going to see you EVER unless it rolls 17+ and you get a 1. Yup you can jack that even further using AV1 and PHB2 stuff but its pointless. Even the most stealth focused character imaginable would be idiotic to burn more feats and valuable items on a higher bonus. For all practical purposes you are just infinitely stealthy. Infinity +N is still infinity.

The same is pretty much true for the other skills. Most of them will only ever be used either vs standard DCs where anything past a +10 static bonus is almost guaranteed success or in a skill challenge where again the DCs are standard. There are a few cases where you could use them in combat opposed and then you might gain some marginal extra utility from certain ones but you're way past the point of diminishing returns even with what's available in the PHB.

As far as situational feats and even to a certain extent static bonuses from feats and items on attack/damage rolls the vast consensus is they undershot in the PHB and the increases here were yes in a sense you could say "power creep" but more like "this is the way it was intended". They were just obviously conservative starting out while they got some experience with the system. It would have been a LOT worse to have dumped lots of extra bonuses into the core rules from day one when they had a lot more limited experience with the system.

The few things that really did cross the line like Bloodclaw and Reckless have been nerfed down to acceptable levels. Yes high level characters CAN stack up a pretty impressive damage output, but its hard to say that's bad. There were ways to do it even with PHB1 (there was a ranger build that was doing like 200 point hits at level 30 with just PHB stuff). Considering at that level your opponents have often 1000+ hit points, not really a big problem. With ALL the books and fully decked out as the errata stands now a similar build might do maybe 250 damage on a hit and there are a couple more ways to repeat the attack than there were before.

There are still one or two things that I think will cause problems like OoIC and IMHO the Astral Seal and whatnot but they're pretty few and far between and don't blow the doors off things. Most PCs are going to be just a BIT more effective at dealing damage and have some cool new options, but they aren't game breaking or really way out of line with what was possible to start with. I'd call that "option creep" myself and while you might consider it bad it has a really nice upside in making the game more fun for the players.

And that's the final thing. The game is more fun for everyone with the various power books and PHB2 etc in the mix. PHB1 alone was OK, but play was a bit limited. There's no danger of melting your game down to use all the books. Certainly not even faintly close to what would happen if you did that in 3.x or 2e or 1e. Its just not comparable.

 

[Danceofmasks]

Well, then here's an exercise for you:

Hypothesis: Option creep, if options are more or less on par with each other, will result in diversification.

Sounds good, no?

Take 10 of your builds, say, at level 20.
Take a look at the feats and equipment.
Considering how many more options there are now, if they don't have proportionally fewer choices in common than they did in times of nothing-but-PHB, then you have power creep.

 

[Elric]

Well, then here's an exercise for you:

Hypothesis: Option creep, if options are more or less on par with each other, will result in diversification.

Sounds good, no?

Take 10 of your builds, say, at level 20.
Take a look at the feats and equipment.
Considering how many more options there are now, if they don't have proportionally fewer choices in common than they did in times of nothing-but-PHB, then you have power creep.

While "an assortment of builds have more feats in common than they used to" might be a sufficient condition to indicate power creep, it doesn't seem even close to a necessary condition.

 

[Danceofmasks]

Uhh, that's not what I said in the slightest.

What I actually said, is that
IF you now have access to twice as many feats, you ought to have half as many feats in common.
IF you now have access to three times as many feats, you ought to have a third as many feats in common.

 

[Elric]

Uhh, that's not what I said in the slightest.

What I actually said, is that
IF you now have access to twice as many feats, you ought to have half as many feats in common.
IF you now have access to three times as many feats, you ought to have a third as many feats in common.

Edit for clarity
And if this is the case, then there isn't power creep? If characters have more feats than this in common, it's an indication of power creep? If characters have fewer feats than this in common, it's an indication of "power decay"?

 

[Danceofmasks]

No, I'm not trying to prove anything, hence I'm not using my own builds.

'cos I know for a fact my own builds actually have more feats in common than they used to ... and I know there's been a lot of power creep.
The number of power sources have increased. The number of classes available has multiplied.

Look, yet another character uses a fullblade.
Look, yet another spellcaster uses a staff of ruin.

No, what I'm asking is for Abdul or whomever wants to, who claims there's been NO power creep, to prove that they've been burying their heads in the sand.

 

[Elric]

'cos I know for a fact my own builds actually have more feats in common than they used to ... and I know there's been a lot of power creep.

I wouldn't take feats in common as a measure of "power creep." Power creep on existing well-built characters is essentially inevitable. As more material is released, the weakest existing abilities are replaced by stronger new abilities.

It's obvious that power creep is happening with this kind of "within character comparison." To get an idea of the extent of power creep, compare the strength of a well-built character with PHB-only to a well-built character of the same class [since otherwise this comparison could not be performed] built with the full range of published material. It's substantial.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

I am still at the position i have. In 3.5 you could look at some books and throw them away because you got options so much better that it was retarded... (some FR books, exalted deeds thing, stacking of psionics and magic...)

I don´t consider the first 4 complete books very power creepy... but that could be because i am not willing to let rule masters destroy my game...

Stacking save penalties would actually be not so bad, if all those save penalties would only work on the first save or penalties from items don´t stack. Easy fix, really.

The only issue i have with 4th edition is the "say yes" mentality. During the game, say yes is the best advise, but when it comes to character building i just say no sometimes...

I don´t allow dragon content until i am sure it has the same standards as the books.

So until now, i see no considerable INTENDED power creep. Maybe an intended OPTION creep with slightly unintended power creep. But WotC is willing to fix issues with errata.

I only consder it power creep if you make new option more powerful on purpose to sell more books (like trading cards which get stronger from edition to edition so that you always need to buy the next ones to be on par with the rest)