Building a thiefy warlock? Or a magey rogue?

[MwaO]

That CAN be true, but generally speaking you can just pick the 2nd or 1st best power choice of your own class. There are specific cases where a given class, or at least some builds, have weak options at a given level. In that case its not such a bad deal, but there are plenty of classes where that's unlikely.

It is almost always true with a couple of specific exceptions - and even then, that's usually because a PC wants feats from a class so badly that they don't care about the power swaps. I'm not talking about the 2nd/1st best choice of a particular level - I'm talking about the class as a whole. Each class(for the most part) has about 1-4 truly standout crazy useful encounter options and no class manages to cover all the Heroic Tier choices well - everyone has multiple relatively 'weak' choices in comparison to those 1-4. Even Fighter, Wizard, and Warlord.

Examples:
Quicksilver Motion(Monk 6) - every melee PC who hasn't picked up some other option should want this.
Serpent's Cunning/Eagle's Splendor(Druid 6) - get +1 to hit, +2 to your most useful skills, and either a free skill or a +1 to Will.
Dimensional Vortex(Swordmage 3) - dominate as an interrupt.
Demand Justice(Invoker 6) - opponent made a save? Interrupt and force them to roll again.
Vengeance is Mine(Warlord 1) - opponent attacked you because you had them marked? Hit them once yourself and give a friend a chance to pound them. Or Disruptive Strike to instead negate their attack, especially if Wisdom is your secondary stat.
Mantle of Unity - assuming a well-rounded party, give everyone about +9 total to defenses for a round.
About five different 'make a minor action attack' options.
Rain of Blows - make 3 attacks
Flame Spiral - make 3 attacks

If you can't get something out of there that drastically improves a PC, just wait until level 16 rolls around, where Cloak of Courage(give entire party a surge's worth of temp hit points at the end of a short rest as an encounter) or Borrowed Confidence(roll twice for all attack rolls) shows up.

 

[Joshua Randall]

MWaO, your challenge now is to build a PC that can use as many of the powers you listed above as possible!
(You may want to make a new thread if you really do this.)

 

[Roseweave]

The thing is that there are so many feats now and a lot of them do pretty cool stuff. To Multiclass you need to take a feat, then 3 more feats. And you can't(AFAIK) control the order in which you take them, so if you're MCing into a striker class for more damage and you don't want a crappy utility, too bad. Even if there's a BETTER option at a particular level that's available to you, is it really worth at least one feat slot just for a slight advantage? Not to mention lack of synergy.

Multiclassing is difficult and they wanted to avoid how messy it was in 3E, but I don't know if they did a very good job of it. Some of the individual MC feats are cool and almost always worth taking, but they shouild have thought about it a bit more. I Agree that MCing does seem to be simultaneously too weak and too OP depending.

 

[MwaO]

The thing is that there are so many feats now and a lot of them do pretty cool stuff. To Multiclass you need to take a feat, then 3 more feats. And you can't(AFAIK) control the order in which you take them, so if you're MCing into a striker class for more damage and you don't want a crappy utility, too bad. Even if there's a BETTER option at a particular level that's available to you, is it really worth at least one feat slot just for a slight advantage? Not to mention lack of synergy.

Yes. Absolutely yes. To paragon multiclass, yes, you need 4 feats. If you just want the MC feat and the encounter attack power swap, that's just two. Just want encounter attack and utility? That's three. Just utility? That's two. And most MC feats are reasonably strong, some are just great(Resourceful Leader, Battle Awareness as two really powerful examples)

The advantage is not slight. It might be confusing to implement at times, but it is not slight. Simply because there are powers that are *that* fantastic and I've made a handbook listing most of them, categorized by stat...

 

[Roseweave]

Ok, I'm maybe feeling a bit more confident about doing a non-Hybrid multiclass character...

 

[Joshua Randall]

For giggles I looked all my characters in the Builder. 17 characters and 13 of them have multiclass feats -- of the 4 who don't, 2 of them are 1st level and haven't been able to multiclass yet; of the 2 remaining, now that I look at them, they would arguably be better optimized if I did take multiclass feats instead of what they currently have.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

For giggles I looked all my characters in the Builder. 17 characters and 13 of them have multiclass feats -- of the 4 who don't, 2 of them are 1st level and haven't been able to multiclass yet; of the 2 remaining, now that I look at them, they would arguably be better optimized if I did take multiclass feats instead of what they currently have.

The base MC feats are ALWAYS a better option than simple skill granting feats, and almost always can be used to do something better than MOST other general feats. Obviously you want Expertise and maybe a couple others more than a base MC feat, but not by that much, if at all.

The swap feats you can take in any order, so if you JUST want a daily from another class, its just one extra feat beyond one you probably wanted anyway (you just have to wait for level 10 to take Adept Power). PMCing just has one big problem, you don't get any AP feature from it, like you do from a true PP. This CAN be huge. PPs also generally have a couple other nice features, but its really the AP features that you generally miss. So, between the 4 feat cost and the somewhat lesser advantages of PMC vs PP its really mostly one of those things where if you're a half-elf and/or a bard, then its nice, and maybe there's a couple other arguable builds, but you'd ALMOST always be better off at that point being a hybrid and then taking a nice PP.

I've always thought that PMC just needed one minor extra 'kicker' to make it really a good deal, something to compensate for the lost AP feature.

 

[Roseweave]

Man can't believe it's been so long since i last posted in this thread.

As predicted we're about to start the new game, so I had some new ideas:

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?496456-How-do-Dagger-based-sorcerers-work