Forked Thread: Blade Cascade official errata: It's now reasonable

Forked from: Blade Cascade official errata: It's now reasonable

Celtavian said:

Blade Cascade [Revision]
Player’s Handbook, page 109
On the Attack line, replace the second sentence with “Alternate main and offhand
weapon attacks until you miss or until you make five attacks.”

http://www.wizards.com/dnd/files/UpdatePH.pdf

No more arguing with your players over Blade Cascade. Wizards moved quickly on this ability. Makes me even more happy with 4th edition that they aren't going to let broken abilities stand for very long.

Click to expand...

As I thought, Blade Cascade was going to be one of the first powers to be nerfed soon as was too good to live, but now I find it good, but not a Cascade of blows anymore...

Im not good at crunching numbers, but I think they could have made something like this to let the player think they could do a lot of attacks, and limiting it too so Orcus can now sleep without fearing the ranger...


Blade Cascade (Houserule) : Alternate main and offhand weapon attacks with a -1 penalty (cumulatively) to each attack until you miss (STR vs AC first attack, STR - 1 vs AC second, STR - 2 vs ac third and so on)

This way you continue attacking until you miss, but each attack is more dificult than the previous one... I have not done any numbers, but I think this will limit the number of attacks practically at 10 with some luck, pretty powerful but not game breaking...

What do you think ?

In fairness, Blade Cascade still has a "cascade of blows" feel. How many powers let you (potentially) make 5 attack rolls in a round?

wujenta said:

Blade Cascade (Houserule) : Alternate main and offhand weapon attacks with a -1 penalty (cumulatively) to each attack until you miss (STR vs AC first attack, STR - 1 vs AC second, STR - 2 vs ac third and so on)

This way you continue attacking until you miss, but each attack is more dificult than the previous one... I have not done any numbers, but I think this will limit the number of attacks practically at 10 with some luck, pretty powerful but not game breaking...

What do you think ?

Click to expand...

Bad idea. To an average ranger, this will simply make the power worse. It's not that easy to make work in the first place, and if you raise the miss chance, all those rangers which generally will hit no more than 5 times on average anyhow will face a severe decrease in the power's effectiveness.

But, to an abusive ranger, your change will simply pose an additional challenge, but not an unsurmountable one. With the right tactics, and help from party members, temporary attack bonuses for just one attack can get _very_ high. For obvious reasons, each extra attack bonus will on average allow one extra hit presuming the character is collecting rerolls possibilities. Now, you won't be able to one-shot orcus, but you will be able to deal obscene amounts of damage with one hit; and 4e is not in general a game in which fights take only a round or two. attack bonus granting powers were, in general, not granted with the intention that each extra bonus point grants an entire extra attack, and this means that a whole bunch of powers all of the sudden become massively more attractive.

You might end up with a party which can trivially defeat solo's way above their level. And what for? The errata as published works fine.

Anyone who makes a character with the sole purpose of abusing Blade Cascade is never, ever going to be happy with that character.

I thought I'd just leaf through the warlord to illustrate how trivially easy it is to get massive attack roll boosts...

A tactical warlord grants 1/2 int bonus to attack rolls of chars using an action point. A human ranger could use another +3 bonus from action surge. The creature might be flanked for another +2. The warlord 1 encounter power warlord's favor can grant a bonus of 1+int modifier. At level 16 such a warlord could have int 7, so that's a +3 from plain tactical presence, another +8 from favor, +2 from flanking, +3 from action surge. Of course you've tried an armor splinter for 2+wis penalty to attack roll on the opponent, say, for a penalty of 6 (and this armor splinter is almost certain to hit due to the warlord's favor). If the warlord misses, maybe the cleric's at-will righteous brand will grant you a solid power bonus to attack rolls... maybe somebody made him prone for another +2... let's see, that's effectively an attack roll of +24. At that point, you'll be hitting except if you roll a 1, for very many iterative hits - which is why you have collected rerolls, right? Maybe one of your allies is a warpriest?

And of course, possibilities for breakage will multiply with each released splatbook of dungeon magazine. No, you want a max to the number of times you can hit, instead ;-).

Arbitrary said:

Anyone who makes a character with the sole purpose of abusing Blade Cascade is never, ever going to be happy with that character.

Click to expand...

Which is a good reason not to encourage it. And in any case, you don't need to make a character solely to abuse cascade of blows, boosting attack rolls is easy when your party composition is right - no need to go out of your way to achieve that.

No, you really don't want to make cascade of blows worse for normal situations and broken if the party happens to contain a warlord and a warpriest (or several) - or whatever else will enable large bonuses, eventually.

Edit: imagine you were that ranger, not necessarily esp. boosted for blade cascade, but you have a warlord and a warpriest in the party: either you have a bad cascade of blades (which rarely hits), of you first buff up with the warlord, and use the warpriests reroll to have a decent chance to completely obliterate a foe. That's not a fun power. And it's really swingy to... it's unlikely to go wrong, but woe to the DM that confronts them with an overlevel solo creature - it'll usually die fairly easily, but if the set-up fails for some reason, they'll be hopelessly outclassed (can you say TPK or obvious DM fudging?)

The WotC errata works much much better.

IMO, Blade Cascade has been nerfed just a bit too much. I'd have put the limit at 7 or 10 attacks, perhaps. My reasoning is that a fighter at level 3 could get 4 attacks via Rain of Blows, and Blade Cascade at level 15 should be much more powerful, especially because Strikers are meant to be high damage dealers. As it is, 5 attacks is only marginally better.

Scalding said:

IMO, Blade Cascade has been nerfed just a bit too much. I'd have put the limit at 7 or 10 attacks, perhaps. My reasoning is that a fighter at level 3 could get 4 attacks via Rain of Blows, and Blade Cascade at level 15 should be much more powerful, especially because Strikers are meant to be high damage dealers. As it is, 5 attacks is only marginally better.

Click to expand...

Blade Cascade is much more powerful. Each attack inflicts 2[W] damage and doesn't require you to be using a light blade, spear, or flail.