Gate Pass Gazette New Class Features Poll

[xiphumor]

you're really underselling advanced artificers, to be honest. it's not just more exploration features - it's a revised version of the class whole cloth, and i think it's better then the official version in pretty much every way that it's not the same.

Well sure, but I thought that was common knowledge. I wanted to draw attention to something folks may have overlooked

 

[steels12]

While I think a lot of the more common choices would be "cool" (Artificers getting more gizmos, sorcs getting picked for being popular, Marshals being picked because they're new, etc, etc), I genuinely think Berserkers SORELY need more class options / features. Their main problem, as someone who's just had a player switch OFF berserker, is that their MAIN CLASS GIMMICK is entirely luck-dependent. Now, of course the trade-off is Furious Criticals are very powerful, but bear in mind you could easily go MULTIPLE fights without even procing your class's MAIN THING. To my knowledge, there's no like "class currency" that they can spend to manually proc a furious critical or anything like that, you just have to be lucky. Almost all of their "roleplay" abilities are hyper situational, which would be more fine if the rest of the class felt bolstered by it. A lot of their subclasses are either "Good but so stable they're boring" or "One really mega-strong ability and then 3 other 'meh' abilities". Berserkers end up feeling like tanks with no taunt abilities. They're most effectively used when you meta-game as hard as possible, and if you don't they end up being very easy to just ignore because they accumulate a lot of health and resist a lot of damage, but have only like ONE ability with any kind of taunt to it. It ends up feeling like the bread and butter of berserkers is just using combat maneuvers and picking classic barbarian abilities, which is something any martial class can do. Of course, this is just my and my party's subjective take based on playing the class since release.

 

[xiphumor]

While I think a lot of the more common choices would be "cool" (Artificers getting more gizmos, sorcs getting picked for being popular, Marshals being picked because they're new, etc, etc), I genuinely think Berserkers SORELY need more class options / features. Their main problem, as someone who's just had a player switch OFF berserker, is that their MAIN CLASS GIMMICK is entirely luck-dependent. Now, of course the trade-off is Furious Criticals are very powerful, but bear in mind you could easily go MULTIPLE fights without even procing your class's MAIN THING. To my knowledge, there's no like "class currency" that they can spend to manually proc a furious critical or anything like that, you just have to be lucky. Almost all of their "roleplay" abilities are hyper situational, which would be more fine if the rest of the class felt bolstered by it. A lot of their subclasses are either "Good but so stable they're boring" or "One really mega-strong ability and then 3 other 'meh' abilities". Berserkers end up feeling like tanks with no taunt abilities. They're most effectively used when you meta-game as hard as possible, and if you don't they end up being very easy to just ignore because they accumulate a lot of health and resist a lot of damage, but have only like ONE ability with any kind of taunt to it. It ends up feeling like the bread and butter of berserkers is just using combat maneuvers and picking classic barbarian abilities, which is something any martial class can do. Of course, this is just my and my party's subjective take based on playing the class since release.

I have similar thoughts about the berserker, but just to temper expectations, the GPG is probably not going to be able to solve that problem, largely because the folks who design for it are freelancers. We can add some additional furious criticals and developed talents and whatnot, but changing the fundamentals of the class is probably more than we’d be allowed to do.

That being said, keep an eye out for my Secrets of the Selkies release in a few weeks. I’m teasing it here, and you can see a sample of a new combat tradition centered on tanking that may help with this issue.

 

[steels12]

I have similar thoughts about the berserker, but just to temper expectations, the GPG is probably not going to be able to solve that problem, largely because the folks who design for it are freelancers. We can add some additional furious criticals and developed talents and whatnot, but changing the fundamentals of the class is probably more than we’d be allowed to do.

That being said, keep an eye out for my Secrets of the Selkies release in a few weeks. I’m teasing it here, and you can see a sample of a new combat tradition centered on tanking that may help with this issue.

That's fair, and I agree it might be easier to strike at the "heart" of the issue with the base class, but that doesn't mean GPG is restricted simply to subclasses or anything. I think one of the higher rated requests from the community for the GPG was alternative rulesets for things, so I don't see why introducing optional class reworks is out of the scope of the gazette. On top of that, new combat traditions like you had mentioned, as well as potential new subclasses that focus more on playing WITH the existing mechanics could also help mitigate a lot of issues. Before my party member switched classes (Since it ended up being easier for everyone involved) I was doing my best to homebrew a subclass focused more on a class currency that could be spent to manually proc furious criticals, just as an example.

Definitely will be keeping an eye out though )

 

[lichmaster]

I have similar thoughts about the berserker, but just to temper expectations, the GPG is probably not going to be able to solve that problem, largely because the folks who design for it are freelancers. We can add some additional furious criticals and developed talents and whatnot, but changing the fundamentals of the class is probably more than we’d be allowed to do.

Wasn't there a poll for alternate class features?
I don't know if there are policies regarding what articles in GPG can do, but having entirely different branches of class features seems to me a more powerful approach to modify classes than adding yet another archetype

 

[xiphumor]

Wasn't there a poll for alternate class features?
I don't know if there are policies regarding what articles in GPG can do, but having entirely different branches of class features seems to me a more powerful approach to modify classes than adding yet another archetype

I think that would be a more feasible pitch in places where alternatives already exist. E.g. There was an article with new warlock pacts a bit ago, but you would be hard pressed to do something like modifying the way rage works.

 

[lichmaster]

I think that would be a more feasible pitch in places where alternatives already exist. E.g. There was an article with new warlock pacts a bit ago, but you would be hard pressed to do something like modifying the way rage works.

Rage would be challenging, but replacing Furious Critical with something else wouldn't, as it interacts mostly with itself and the weapons.

The point is that IMO rage is fine and should be the main feature of the berserker, but doing big crits should be something that all martial focused classes may choose to specialize in, each with a different flair.

What if Furious critical became it's own Combat Tradition?

 

[lichmaster]

While I think a lot of the more common choices would be "cool" (Artificers getting more gizmos, sorcs getting picked for being popular, Marshals being picked because they're new, etc, etc), I genuinely think Berserkers SORELY need more class options / features. Their main problem, as someone who's just had a player switch OFF berserker, is that their MAIN CLASS GIMMICK is entirely luck-dependent. Now, of course the trade-off is Furious Criticals are very powerful, but bear in mind you could easily go MULTIPLE fights without even procing your class's MAIN THING. To my knowledge, there's no like "class currency" that they can spend to manually proc a furious critical or anything like that, you just have to be lucky. Almost all of their "roleplay" abilities are hyper situational, which would be more fine if the rest of the class felt bolstered by it. A lot of their subclasses are either "Good but so stable they're boring" or "One really mega-strong ability and then 3 other 'meh' abilities". Berserkers end up feeling like tanks with no taunt abilities. They're most effectively used when you meta-game as hard as possible, and if you don't they end up being very easy to just ignore because they accumulate a lot of health and resist a lot of damage, but have only like ONE ability with any kind of taunt to it. It ends up feeling like the bread and butter of berserkers is just using combat maneuvers and picking classic barbarian abilities, which is something any martial class can do. Of course, this is just my and my party's subjective take based on playing the class since release.

I agree with you that as it is one of the class's main features is very luck dependent.
In part this can be mitigated by party tactics, the right selection of weapons, other maneuvers etc, but in this regard the class seems to be designed to appeal more to the "gambler" type of players.
I also agree that this can be a source of frustration for some, and it's why I think no major class feature should be luck dependent.

I'm toying with the idea of replacing Furious Critical with something like

Vengeful Strikes: your enemies will learn soon that whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

When you're hit by a melee or ranged attack, you can decide to focus your rage towards one of the enemies that hit you. On your next turn, if you hit the enemy you focused on, you deal additional damage equal to the damage they inflicted you, up to a maximum of 5.

Alternatively, you can inflict the dazed condition.

This can then scale up in amount of damage, be spread upon multiple enemies, inflict other conditions, target distant enemies, act in retaliation to spells and other effects etc.

I like this idea as it leverages the berserker's natural tendency to get close and personal without much fear (thanks to the amount of HP and the resiliency given by rage), adds a component of risk/reward, and is very reliable, provided the enemy still wants to target you after they discover the consequences of doing so. It also marries naturally with the core concept of a berserker, IMO.

 

[xiphumor]

I agree with you that as it is one of the class's main features is very luck dependent.
In part this can be mitigated by party tactics, the right selection of weapons, other maneuvers etc, but in this regard the class seems to be designed to appeal more to the "gambler" type of players.
I also agree that this can be a source of frustration for some, and it's why I think no major class feature should be luck dependent.

I'm toying with the idea of replacing Furious Critical with something like


This can then scale up in amount of damage, be spread upon multiple enemies, inflict other conditions, target distant enemies, act in retaliation to spells and other effects etc.

I like this idea as it leverages the berserker's natural tendency to get close and personal without much fear (thanks to the amount of HP and the resiliency given by rage), adds a component of risk/reward, and is very reliable, provided the enemy still wants to target you after they discover the consequences of doing so. It also marries naturally with the core concept of a berserker, IMO.

I think these kinds of substitutions would probably work better for a 3PP product. Introducing them as official options makes for trickiness when trying to play with archetypes that play off of such features.

 

[Pedantic]

I like this idea as it leverages the berserker's natural tendency to get close and personal without much fear (thanks to the amount of HP and the resiliency given by rage), adds a component of risk/reward, and is very reliable, provided the enemy still wants to target you after they discover the consequences of doing so. It also marries naturally with the core concept of a berserker, IMO.

That's thematically cool, but it feel like it exacerbates the berserker's existing tanking problem. Why should anyone want to keep hitting the character who's resistant to damage and gets retaliatory effects? It feels like really you want to do provide the inverse sort of effect, because it's already so beneficial for the berserker to get hit (relatively to any other attack target) because of rage.