The new, shiny "Stuff I Have/Would Ban" thread!

[FireLance]

I only banned Double-Weapons except Staffs and Spiked Chains (need feats for them and are still weaker than the other ones). The new ones from Eberron seems also ok, but the original Double-Weapons made to many other weapons (-combinations) obsolete.

The real disadvantage to a double weapon is that an enchanted double weapon only grants an enhancement bonus to the off-hand end. Weapon properties and powers conferred by the enchantment only affect the primary end of the weapon. Read strictly, this could be interpreted to mean that when the user scores a critical hit with the off-hand end of a weapon, he doesn't even get bonus damage dice or any other effects that the weapon enchantment would bestow on a critical hit.

 

[Jhaelen]

Banning things isn't being a bad DM - it's being responsible. Less is more.

Making Dms out to be "bad" because they ban things is just this irritating player entitlement that rears its ugly head where WotC want to wrestle away control over campaigns from DMs to arrive at a position maximized for profit: "go ahead and buy all our books; if your DM doesn't like it, tell him or her we said it was okay!"

So threads like this is very useful - chances are if enough DMs ban an item, it suggests it really IS broken.

Well, you know what they say about flies? Since a million flies can't be wrong, everyone should eat ...

I'll take every bet that the number of DMs who don't feel they need to ban anything is a lot larger than the number of DMs who feel they have to. And the number of those who truly _should_ ban anything is even smaller.

Banning things outright has a good chance of indicating a bad DM. The better way to do this is to only ban things that prove to be problematic for your game. Give things a try before you ban them, maybe they're aren't as bad as everyone says they are. Convince yourself rather than letting others do the thinking for you.

Unless have totally unreasonable players, chances are, a player will agree with your judgement if one of his items or powers turns out to be truly overpowered.

Besides, your dislike for anything that may help anyone to make a profit seems to have impaired your reasoning. Some of the most powerful options in 4E are right in the PHB. Just because something is from a later supplement doesn't make it more 'banworthy' than anything from an earlier supplement or one of 'Core' books.

This isn't to say that less _can_ be more. But I'd rather see a DM ban things because something doesn't fit her setting ('No gnomes in my Darksun game - there's been a genocide in a previous age!') than because she feels (wrongly) that something might unbalance her game.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

* Bloodclaw Weapons (AV1)
I haven't read up on the discussions, but I'm guessing the issue here is temporary hp? Perhaps it could be allowed if you got x1 (x1.5 for two-handers) instead of x2 (x3)...

The problem is that the amount of damage you do to yourself is insignificant compared to the damage dealt to the enemy. My fighter regularly attacks 8 times with a +3 Bloodclaw weapon in a combat. He does 24 damage to himself. This does 72 damage to the enemy. Considering I do 1d10+12 damage with my attacks, this is the equivalent of hitting an extra 4 times for free. For the most part, this equals 4 rounds of attacking in exchange for one healing surge. A tradeoff that is more than worth it.

In some battles when I use Rain of Blows twice in the same combat, I've used it up to 15 times in one encounter. 45 damage to me is still one healing surge plus cleric healing after the combat. In exchange for enough free damage to easily kill a monster of my level for free.

If I get some way to get temporary hitpoints(which I don't really have), then it is even better.

For the most part, 24 damage is about 10 damage less than I would take in the 4 rounds of an enemy attacking me. So, basically the weapon can be read as:
Prevent the next 10 damage you would take in order to kill a bloodied enemy.

* Reckless Weapons (AV1)
This really ought to have given a to hit penalty as well. Lots of games have fallen into the trap of paying for more damage with weaker defense; and its abusable in all of them - you simply use this only when you stand a good chance of not being attacked. Then you get extra damage for free.

Yeah, this is partially why it is so powerful. Trading AC for damage is not really a valid tradeoff. But also, the amount of bonus they give is too high.

* Iron Armbands / Bracers of Archery (AV1)
Would you consider halving the benefit, to not make them a must have?

This is my solution as well. I think people would still use them but they would actually consider other items instead if they were half the bonus.

* Phrenic Crown (AV1)
Is this really broken in itself, or just in combination with the broken build of the Orbizard? (Which Wizards haven't fixed YET)

And this build is even a byproduct of combining yet another item together with the class feature. It doesn't get broken until all 3 are brought together.

Powers
* Wiz 5: Grasp of the Grave (Dragon 372)
Hadn't noticed this one. Getting to auto-daze anybody at level 5 do sound powerful. Care to elaborate?

That's pretty much the issue with this power. It doesn't require an attack roll or anything to pretty much paralyze a group of enemies for at least a round. But it IS a daily and the enemies can just spend their action walking out. I think this is one good power. But I don't think it's broken. It's just that a lot of the other Wizard dailes at level 5 are so bad that it sticks out.

Backgrounds
* Anything that gives benefits beyond the limitations in PHB2, so pretty much no backgrounds from FR, Scales of War, or a few other Dragon articles
A given.

Yeah, I'm beginning to see it this way as well. Backgrounds give too much benefit. A +2 to a skill is appropriate. 10 hitpoints is not. It's double the effect of a feat at level 1.


A number of the items above suffer from the same problem as all other static damage modifiers: The more attacks you get the better they are AND the static damage modifiers can add up to more than your actual attacks.

Damage is more valuable the LESS damage you do. This is because it increases your effectiveness as a percentage. If you do 1d4 damage then a +1 damage increases your effectiveness by almost 50%. Damage is actually pretty low in 4e. Which means that small modifiers have a large effect. Which means you have to carefully control the total number of static bonuses available. Ideally the static modifiers will never be more than 50% of the total average damage you are doing. So if you do 1d12 damage, getting static modifiers bigger than +6 is a problem. By the time you are paragon tier, you are normally doing 2d10 on a regular basis, so +13 is about right. By epic tier you are doing 3d10 on a regular basis and +19 is appropriate, and about 4d10 by the end of epic tier, so closer to +26 by the end.

By 30th level, that's about the bonus you get from Stat Mod(8)+Enhancement Bonus(6)+12 from other places. Bloodclaw breaks this by adding +18 by itself at 30th level. Which stacks with the +6 from Iron Armbands and the +3 from Weapon Focus, and a couple other small bonuses you can get from feats.

On the other hand, if you make Reckless give you only +Enhancement bonus in damage(instead of double enhancement), Bloodclaw give 1 for 1 regardless of the weapon you use, and make Iron Armbands half their bonus....then you run into a situation where Weapon Focus+Bloodclaw+Iron Armbands total 12. Which is about right.

 

[Atzilla]

My fighter regularly attacks 8 times with a +3 Bloodclaw weapon in a combat. He does 24 damage to himself. This does 72 damage to the enemy.

Your fighter has 100% hit chance? Nice, but I think the bloodclaw wouldn't be the worst problem of this built...

My Barbarian hits his enemies about 60% of the time - so with bloodclaw always on he takes an average 1.7 damage to deal out 3 extra damage. Considering how much hp some monsters have - this doesn't sound overpowered to me.

 

[KarinsDad]

Powers
* Wiz 5: Grasp of the Grave (Dragon 372)
Hadn't noticed this one. Getting to auto-daze anybody at level 5 do sound powerful. Care to elaborate?

Part of the issue with this is that the power works the same, for all intents and purposes, if a foe is hit or missed. So, auto-daze and auto-damage. To me, this is just bad design.

Additionally, the power affects enemies only. So Defender allies (or the Wizard himself) can lock foes down in it (using other abilities) such that the foes are Dazed and taking damage for the majority of the rest of the encounter. And, there are few ways to stop this. Stunning the Wizard will not stop it since it is not a Sustain, etc.

Plus, the PCs can shelter inside the area (or the Wizard can create a barrier with it) and force the NPCs to come in, or get pounded with ranged attacks (assuming the foes do not have ranged attacks of their own which most monsters at least do not), or run away.

It's not that it's just a little better than other 5th level Dailies, it's a lot better.

 

[KarinsDad]

I'll take every bet that the number of DMs who don't feel they need to ban anything is a lot larger than the number of DMs who feel they have to. And the number of those who truly _should_ ban anything is even smaller.

Sounds like an opinion. We need a poll.

Banning things outright has a good chance of indicating a bad DM. The better way to do this is to only ban things that prove to be problematic for your game. Give things a try before you ban them, maybe they're aren't as bad as everyone says they are. Convince yourself rather than letting others do the thinking for you.

Unless have totally unreasonable players, chances are, a player will agree with your judgement if one of his items or powers turns out to be truly overpowered.

It doesn't have to be totally unreasonable players. Some players are heavy duty powergamers and/or minmaxers. If they come up with a concept and that concept relies on a specific power or item and it does turn out to be unbalanced, then the entire PC combo falls apart. It's not unreasonable that a player would feel disagreeable if their cool idea was stripped away from him after playing the PC for several months.

It's actually preferable for the DM to combine a) banning game elements ahead of time that appear to be overpowered or even against the campaign favor, and b) banning elements later on that disrupt the game.

Not doing a) and only doing b) allows for months of unfairness to the other players when PC Striker #1 is doing 50 points of damage and PC Striker #2 is only doing 25 points of damage.

But I'd rather see a DM ban things because something doesn't fit her setting ('No gnomes in my Darksun game - there's been a genocide in a previous age!') than because she feels (wrongly) that something might unbalance her game.

I think the sign of a good DM is when he's capable of doing both.

If possible, avoid problems before they come up in the game system.

 

[Obryn]

<stuff>

You can go ahead and think I'm a bad DM - you've never played with me, so I'll take your opinion for what it's worth.

I don't believe that everything in the game is made well. Fortunately, there are only a few things that I think are problematic. I'm snipping off the outliers - the most egregious things. Generally, these are the items that every single character would have. (Seriously, how many Barbarians, given a choice, don't take a Bloodclaw weapon? How many of any melee character, given a choice, would rather have a Bracer other than the Iron Armbands?)

While I can always not include these things during play, I have new characters come in semi-regularly, and this is a pre-emptive fix to make sure new characters don't have hugely better equipment than the existing characters. And yes, I trust my players, but I also trust they'll take the best stuff for their new characters.

As to why I'd do it ahead of time - I don't want there to be a problem in my game that I later need to fix. If something is broken for 4 sessions, those 4 sessions could have been improved by not having the broken thing to begin with. It's a risk I'm willing to take.

-O

 

[Garthanos]

A different kind of fix idea
People tend to fix ... wizards must have expertise feats.... by giving it to everyone.... what if blood claw weapons were handled similarly?
?In other words if the ability to spend hit points to make a stronger attack was given to everyone? It could be skinned as heavily exerting ones self, or even potentially resulting in muscle strains or using luck agressively... or similar...

Well just a thought... multi-attack damage being overly boosted by it is probably the problem rather than it being better than other options.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Your fighter has 100% hit chance? Nice, but I think the bloodclaw wouldn't be the worst problem of this built...

My Barbarian hits his enemies about 60% of the time - so with bloodclaw always on he takes an average 1.7 damage to deal out 3 extra damage. Considering how much hp some monsters have - this doesn't sound overpowered to me.

Obviously I negated hit chance for that particular example. But even assuming that with hit chances it means that you average 1 damage to you for every 2 you do to an enemy, that still means that in 10 rounds of combat, you've taken 30 damage to do 60 to the enemy. Assuming my level 12 character, that's my healing surge value.

If you had an item that said "Spend a healing surge to do 60 damage to an enemy" that you wouldn't take it? And that it wouldn't be kind of overpowered. Especially considering if everyone had one, we could just spend 2 healing surges each and defeat the entire encounter.

Besides, when I use my bloodclaw weapon, I attempt to stack all the modifiers in my favor when I do so. Most often, I get the Cleric to Righteous Brand while I have combat advantage. Then I have +25 to hit. I hit on 3s against level 12 Soldiers with that bonus to hit. 2s against everything else.

It's that damage stacks quickly. A level 12 Brute has 150 hitpoints. If there are 3 people in the party with +3 Bloodclaw weapons, each of which can attack twice during the same round(on average due to Rain of Blows, Ranger attacks, some Barbarian powers, Action points, etc) and they all hit(let's assume best case scenario, easily possible if the creature is dazed or everyone has flanking), the Bloodclaw bonus damage alone does 54 damage. This almost definitely kills that creature in one round of attacks after adding in all the actual damage from the attacks.

Compare that to a group that decided to take non-bloodclaw weapons of the equivalent level and there is virtually no way for that group to kill that Brute in one round.

 

[keterys]

If Bloodclaw is balanced, removing it from the game is no big deal, people will just use something else.

If Bloodclaw isn't balanced, then no harm removing it.

Removing things like the bracers is tougher since nothing else fills its role, but it mostly reduces damage across the board _while allowing another choice to be valid_. Suddenly some people might consider using a magic shield, for instance.

Grasp of the Grave is just a horrible spell, and the game is well rid of it. In some groups it's not abusively horrible, but in others... We actually discussed it last night at a game where the players were talking about how broken it was, and I noted that it would probably be dealable if the daze ended when you left the zone. Still totally brutal with fighters and being knocked prone, though, they pointed out. Maybe if it affected PCs too...

But there are actually _lots_ of valid reasons to remove things from the game, as long as it's not a kneejerk response. Those reasons can vary from 'I like being able to give out magic items for a couple item slots without people ignoring them' to 'I don't want most combats settled during the first round AP-massive damage nova' and anywhere in between. All sorts of valid gameplay reasons.

Course, some of us also play and run LFR, in which your table might 2-round curbstomp almost every fight _or_ risk a possible TPK, depending on how well they know their magic items.