New Excerpt: Battle standards.

[Ed_Laprade]

Uh, Ed, the battle standard is an encounter power. There will be no replanting.
-blarg

Um, oh yeah. My bad. But that just makes it worse, doesn't it? You can't replant it, but the enemy can uproot it and then plant it for themselves. (Unless I've missed something about how powers or magic items work, which is certainly possible as I don't have a group to play with!) A nice idea, but how well will it work in practice?

 

[blargney the second]

Uh, Ed, the encounter power is intrinsic to the item itself. Once it's been used for the encounter, nobody can use it again. They can steal it, but that's about it.

 

[Scribble]

Um, oh yeah. My bad. But that just makes it worse, doesn't it? You can't replant it, but the enemy can uproot it and then plant it for themselves. (Unless I've missed something about how powers or magic items work, which is certainly possible as I don't have a group to play with!) A nice idea, but how well will it work in practice?

Yup... part of the price of the bonus is that you have to protect it... You can't just plant it and go. Presents some interesting tactical issues and choices.

Obviously it would be pretty silly to plant the thing in the middle of a wide open battlefield... But lets say you're doing things like:

Fighting ship to ship?
Defending a castle?
Holding a room? (where you can keep people from getting in and gettinmg the standard.)

Even just fighting across a chasm or river.

Or you might just decide the bonus is worth having to "hold the line" so to speak...

 

[Vael]

Also, the Solitair sure didn't seem like it gave anywhere near enough of a benefit to be worth over a million gold.

YMMV.

Mine varies a great deal. An extra action per encounter is pretty darn potent, especially since it interacts with your paragon path action point features and your action point feats.

 

[That One Guy]

So... I like it. The article and its stuff. It didn't wow me, like some other things have. But, it was still a nice little preview of some cool features. I'm really thinking of allowing characters to use battle standards as spears or something, and allow them to raise their standard to allow the zone to be created where they are next round (Y'know... before a charge, but to have the zone actually form somewhere useful). I do dig the Solitaire's ability to build momentum for awesomeness. I hope there are a lot of useful items that trigger on crits at all levels... but I sort of doubt it. Hope, though.

 

[Ed_Laprade]

Mine varies a great deal. An extra action per encounter is pretty darn potent, especially since it interacts with your paragon path action point features and your action point feats.

If it were guaranteed each encounter maybe. (Bear in my that I haven't been able to actually play the game, darn it, so I have no feel for how it would translate into fun play.) But it only works on a crit. Good enough if combat takes many rounds, not so good if they are usually short.

IMHO, of course.