Rule of Three and THEMES! FINALLY THEMES!!!!

[UngeheuerLich]

Actually, mike is right IMHO:

If halfling´s second chance was worded: a hit that bloodies or drops you unconscious it would not be nerfed a lot, but it was clearer how it is intended: a second chance. Maybe it could incorporate the maritial power feat by default...

 

[Nahat Anoj]

Regarding immediate actions, I do think those powers need an overhaul. In addition, for simplicity's sake I'd like to fold immediate actions in with opportunity actions. Or, rather, I'd like to give everyone one immediate action per turn, and opportunity attacks would be a form of immediate action.

I am aware this would require changing many powers that require immediate actions, particularly immediate action attacks. This "fix" may have to wait until a major revision or a new edition.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Agreed. Say what you like about Wizards, and this forum has said it all before now and will say it all again, but this is a valid point. They ARE starting to listen to the players.

I bolded the most important part of your post.
The problem was not that wizards not tried to listen, but that they tried to react to theorycrafters without real practical experience.
That they listened to powergamers on Cons that believed, divine challenge was overpowered, because te best tactic was challenge and hide...

Wizards became a lot cooler. Pulling back things and accept a temporary reduction of content. Accepted beeing flamed on for not putting out content in time and start producing quality content again.

If there is a time to compare it to WOW, it is now: It looks like their agenda for online contents follows the blizzard rules of delivering:

IT IS DONE WHEN IT IS DONE.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Regarding immediate actions, I do think those powers need an overhaul. In addition, for simplicity's sake I'd like to fold immediate actions in with opportunity actions. Or, rather, I'd like to give everyone one immediate action per turn, and opportunity attacks would be a form of immediate action.

I am aware this would require changing many powers that require immediate actions, particularly immediate action attacks. This "fix" may have to wait until a major revision or a new edition.

Add free reactions and free interrupts when you are at it.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

WRT rangers in particular the issue is really Twin Strike being broken, not IR/II powers in general. When you have an at-will that is basically an encounter power it breaks the logic of the trade-off. Normally the logic would be something like you can take a regular encounter power which does substantially more damage than an at-will, OR you can take a triggered power in place of it which does at-will level damage, meaning you actually suffer some kind of measurable DPR reduction and in trade get to dish out damage a bit more up-front. Still a good trade, but not clearly always superior. By the ranger having basically an at-will encounter power there is no trade-off, you would be perfectly effective without encounter powers to start with, so the triggered stuff becomes just extra front-loaded damage output, a no-brainer.

In general though I agree, triggered powers are annoying. Maybe the best overall design fix for that would be to give every character a single slot for such powers. Maybe level 1 encounter powers should simply ALL be triggered powers and they should be the ONLY level where those appear. So everyone has one and only one of them. You can burn the thing early on in every fight, or hang onto it. The trigger then doesn't have to be something esoteric like taking a crit, going to zero hit points, etc. IMHO those kinds of super conditional triggers just make a power a bad choice, so effectively making all the triggers that way would just remove triggered powers from the game anyway. Nobody is going to take a power like that when they can instead get a nice solid encounter power they will always get to use.

Another option, since everyone will have themes from now on, would have been to make the level 1 bonus theme power the one triggered power you get. This would be a strong theme-establishing power and since you'd have no choice about taking it, nor can it be traded out etc, then even if it was highly conditional it wouldn't matter.

But yeah, this kind of thing is too late to fix in 4e. Even Mike's suggestion would require total rewrites to a LOT of powers. This isn't going to happen. I'm not even really sure why he's spending his time thinking about stuff that can't actually be fixed...

In any case I still think the sheer proliferation of vast numbers of effects that require tracking, many with fairly complex rules attached to them is more problematic than triggers. Again though, this will never be fixed in 4e...

 

[Mummolus]

If you want to see immediate actions being abused, play in a party with a battlemind, ranger, and artificer. I've seen first-hand how annoyed our DM can get with it (I'm the battlemind in such a scenario), because against anything but a solo the players are effectively taking more turns than the monsters and getting hit less as a side-effect (against a solo lightning rush becomes significantly less effective, depending on the tactics at work). It's bad enough that we recognize it and apologize whenever we interrupt, even though it happened completely coincidentally.

 

[Viking Bastard]

Wait, the Class Compendium article is subscribers only? I was somehow under the impression that all the CC stuff would be free.

But perhaps certain elements should be flagged up as being "Deprecated" or "Unbalanced". For my money though, I would happily watch as WotC took a stiff brush to the game and swept out all the bits that don't work (anymore, if they ever did), have been superceded or are unbalanced.

They could flag elements as 'deprecated' and make them not show up in the CB by default, unless you've already chosen them. Objectors can be pointed towards the 'Show deprecated material (not recommended)' check hidden somewhere.

 

[Riastlin]

First as to the original topic:

1. Yay! Glad to see themes coming in a wide scale. Personally, I think they are a nice way to differentiate characters without making things too complicated.

2. Honestly, I think WotC is between a rock and a hard place here. Sure, some feats, etc. would be easy to handle (like the previously stated Weapon Expertise (Heavy Blade)). But many others are simply not good as opposed to obsolete. I think perhaps the goal should be to update the obsolete so that they at least read like the choice that obsoleted them (like Heavy Blade Expertise), while perhaps worrying about the options that are simply "not good" later (or perhaps throwing a "deprecated" tag on them).

3. Its nice to see them taking an honest look at their game (even if its just one person) and saying "Hey, this could have been implemented better." I think it reaffirms that they are at least trying to make the game better. Obviously one person's "improvement" is another's "step backward" but I do think WotC is trying to do the best they can, and Immediate Actions are certainly one area that can cause all kinds of headaches -- particularly when monsters have triggered actions it can really get crazy.

As for immediate actions in general, here's my experience. The ranger in the group I run tends to use Combined Assault (or whatever the Battlefield Archer power is called) at the first opportunity he gets. Its rarely designed to finish off a creature, or hit the creature that appears to be particularly problematic, etc. That being said, he also does not have Disruptive strike, so at least he's not simply trying to up his DPS. The Swordmage on the other hand has Dimensional Vortex (and another similar power that pushes the attacker -- can't recall the name), and often struggles with when to use it. For the most part though, she's resorted to waiting for either a) a crit, or b) a time when getting hit would cause the ally to drop. Of course, part of the problem the swordmage has here is that since they are immediate actions, they would prevent her from using her Aegis should a marked target attack an ally and she is often pretty good about marking a target and then backing away from it so that it cannot easily attack her.

Obviously each person's experience will vary but I think the idea behind what Mike is suggesting is that you wait for something "major" to happen in the battle to pop the interrupt. This is probably how they were initially intended, just not how they are always used. A single interrupt in and of itself isn't so bad, but as the PCs get to higher levels, the number of interrupts and triggered actions can really start to add up fast. I've seen situations where a single PC's attack resulted in three or four triggered/immediate actions and after resolving all of it we were like "Uhh, so who's turn is it again?" Obviously this was a rare case, but it was also in heroic, so I can imagine it getting worse in paragon and epic tiers.

 

[Kinneus]

I just plain don't understand the logic of #2. I can understand keeping underpowered feats around, sure... maybe somebody's attracted to the flavor of it, why not. But feats that are strictly obsolete?

What's the flavor difference between Weapon Expertise (Heavy Blade) and Heavy Blade Expertise? "No, I want my character to get hit by attacks of opportunity a lot! It's part of his background!"

Or what about Human Perseverance versus Resilient Focus? This is a particularly malicious one, because Human Perseverance is a feat that somebody could easily mistake for being "good"... but only if they were utterly unaware of Resilient Focus, which is strictly better in every single way.

Do the devs honestly believe that somebody out there would pick Human Perseverance over Resilient Focus for roleplay reasons? If a player told me that he wanted to pick Human Perseverance over Resilient Focus because he wanted to "you know, just really experience what it's like to be a human, you know?" I'd back away slowly.

Underpowered feats are more or less fine, although I wish I didn't have to wade through a dozen of them for every one decent feat. But feats that are frankly, clearly, 100% obsolete? Get rid of them! They're traps and eyesores and propogators of rules mastery, which is something I thought 4e was supposed to get rid of.

 

[Jhaelen]

Or what about Human Perseverance versus Resilient Focus? This is a particularly malicious one, because Human Perseverance is a feat that somebody could easily mistake for being "good"... but only if they were utterly unaware of Resilient Focus, which is strictly better in every single way.

Indeed. I wasn't aware that Resilient Focus exists. After looking it up I know why: It's an Essentials feat which aren't allowed in our game.

Which reminds me: When will the Online Builder get the ability to filter sources back? Saving campaign settings was such a brilliant and important feature of the old Character Builder!