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General Tabletop Discussion
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How to do a 4e Spellthief?
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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 4669130" data-attributes="member: 82106"><p>Yeah, it might be possible to build a class that uses the concept of "Life Stealing", as you've outlined. There are still some serious issues though.</p><p></p><p>Consider: When you remove the ability of a monster to use a power, that IN AND OF ITSELF is a pretty useful benefit. Thus any OTHER benefit the character gets from this needs to be VERY minor. The problem then is that if say the Life Stealer burns an encounter power, what would it be able to do with it? It obviously cannot gain an encounter power of its own, that's too good. OTOH it makes no sense from a game mechanics standpoint to give the character an at-will in return since at-wills are already AT-WILL. Using a daily to steal a monster encounter power use would work, you can now 'recharge' an encounter power of your own and that might work, but even high level characters have a pretty limited number of dailies.</p><p></p><p>That sort of says to me that the power stealing aspect is going to HAVE to be pretty limited in scope just from a game mechanics standpoint. It would be a kind of neato trick, but you could only play that trick once in a great while.</p><p></p><p>The other fundamental issue that would need to be overcome is that a LOT of monsters simply don't have any sort of powers that would be much good to steal. I suppose there is likely going to be A monster in each encounter with something worth stealing. However will it really be likely the character is going to have a viable opportunity to use this much? If the character has to make a weapon type attack to do the steal that means they will have to get up close to the BBEG monster that has good powers, and do it FAST because it makes little sense tactically for most monsters to hold off on using their encounter/recharge powers. In 99% of the battles I've run the monsters generally tend to blast off with their big guns on round 2 or so. Why should they really wait? Is the DM now going to be faced with thinking "yeah, if I use the BBEG's best power right away I'm nerfing the stealer..." It is rather putting the DM in a position where he has to almost do the party a 'favor' to make the class really viable.</p><p></p><p>Those problems may be less acute at higher tiers where everything has oodles of powers and characters often have plenty of abilities that let them move freely about the battlefield, but at low level a stealer is going to be hard to run. </p><p></p><p>You could 'chrome' a bunch of basically existing marshal powers. In other words maybe you could have a daily that does 2[W] damage and lets the pc gain 1[W] in temphp or something. Its pretty close to Comeback Strike in effectiveness. Modeling on Spinning Sweep would give you something like an encounter power that does 1[W] and allows you to trigger a surge. </p><p></p><p>Another idea that might work is 'keyword stealing', if a monster has an attack power with keyword Fire then you could steal his power and add a Fire keyword to one of your attacks. HS stealing might also be viable, technically ALL monsters have at least 1 HS. Stealing it would do basically nothing to weaken the monster, but it would give you a valuable resource you could use later. AP stealing OTOH seems too nasty at high levels and worthless at heroic. </p><p></p><p>The final challenge is going to be coming up with enough of these stealing powers. A class needs something like 80 odd powers. Given the narrow scope and constraints of a stealer it may be a tough job to come up with enough stealing effects to make a good class. (Personally I think this is 4e's biggest weakness, the game doesn't scale well because EVERY class requires an entire list of unique powers. It would be a stronger system if powers hadn't been 'attached' to specific classes and instead formed a single list or lists by power source with some sort of keyword based mechanism to filter out which class can use what).</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 4669130, member: 82106"] Yeah, it might be possible to build a class that uses the concept of "Life Stealing", as you've outlined. There are still some serious issues though. Consider: When you remove the ability of a monster to use a power, that IN AND OF ITSELF is a pretty useful benefit. Thus any OTHER benefit the character gets from this needs to be VERY minor. The problem then is that if say the Life Stealer burns an encounter power, what would it be able to do with it? It obviously cannot gain an encounter power of its own, that's too good. OTOH it makes no sense from a game mechanics standpoint to give the character an at-will in return since at-wills are already AT-WILL. Using a daily to steal a monster encounter power use would work, you can now 'recharge' an encounter power of your own and that might work, but even high level characters have a pretty limited number of dailies. That sort of says to me that the power stealing aspect is going to HAVE to be pretty limited in scope just from a game mechanics standpoint. It would be a kind of neato trick, but you could only play that trick once in a great while. The other fundamental issue that would need to be overcome is that a LOT of monsters simply don't have any sort of powers that would be much good to steal. I suppose there is likely going to be A monster in each encounter with something worth stealing. However will it really be likely the character is going to have a viable opportunity to use this much? If the character has to make a weapon type attack to do the steal that means they will have to get up close to the BBEG monster that has good powers, and do it FAST because it makes little sense tactically for most monsters to hold off on using their encounter/recharge powers. In 99% of the battles I've run the monsters generally tend to blast off with their big guns on round 2 or so. Why should they really wait? Is the DM now going to be faced with thinking "yeah, if I use the BBEG's best power right away I'm nerfing the stealer..." It is rather putting the DM in a position where he has to almost do the party a 'favor' to make the class really viable. Those problems may be less acute at higher tiers where everything has oodles of powers and characters often have plenty of abilities that let them move freely about the battlefield, but at low level a stealer is going to be hard to run. You could 'chrome' a bunch of basically existing marshal powers. In other words maybe you could have a daily that does 2[W] damage and lets the pc gain 1[W] in temphp or something. Its pretty close to Comeback Strike in effectiveness. Modeling on Spinning Sweep would give you something like an encounter power that does 1[W] and allows you to trigger a surge. Another idea that might work is 'keyword stealing', if a monster has an attack power with keyword Fire then you could steal his power and add a Fire keyword to one of your attacks. HS stealing might also be viable, technically ALL monsters have at least 1 HS. Stealing it would do basically nothing to weaken the monster, but it would give you a valuable resource you could use later. AP stealing OTOH seems too nasty at high levels and worthless at heroic. The final challenge is going to be coming up with enough of these stealing powers. A class needs something like 80 odd powers. Given the narrow scope and constraints of a stealer it may be a tough job to come up with enough stealing effects to make a good class. (Personally I think this is 4e's biggest weakness, the game doesn't scale well because EVERY class requires an entire list of unique powers. It would be a stronger system if powers hadn't been 'attached' to specific classes and instead formed a single list or lists by power source with some sort of keyword based mechanism to filter out which class can use what). [/QUOTE]
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