To be totally fair, such an item would be the same as a Healing Surge plus some resource to use that surge (i.e. the PC still takes the damage, hence, will often have to be healed an additional time in combat). And, the item would gradually give the damage over the course of 10 rounds. Plus, such an item would only do 40 damage instead of 60 if used with a shield, etc.
True, but so far my experience with my fighter who has had his Bloodclaw weapon for about 4 levels now is that I can Bloodclaw every round of the combat without every worrying about going down enough hitpoints that I need healing during the battle. I normally wait until the end. I believe there has been one combat where I started taking enough damage that I stopped using Bloodclaw.
And most people with shields don't take Bloodclaw weapons. It isn't overpowered when it is 2 for 1. Only when it is 3 for 1.
How much damage does your 12th level PC do without it? 20 dpr per round (including misses)? Now, it's 26 per round.
No, he does an average of 9 damage a round(1d10+10=15.5*0.6=9.3, 12.6 on rounds I use a 2[w] atttack) including misses. It adds 5.4 more. That's a good amount of damage. But it's only part of the problem. My Iron Armbands also add 1.2 damage per round. The total of the two means that 41.5% of my damage comes from those two items on rounds I use a 1[w] attack(For a 71% increase in damage).
If I use Rain of Blows, I get 3 attacks at 1d10+5. Average 10.5*0.6=6.3. Three times is 18.9. Meanwhile the Iron Armbands+Bloodclaw combo adds 19.8 damage. This gives a 105% increase in damage by having these items.
So, the 260 hit point monster takes 10 rounds to defeat instead of 13.
Assuming I lose 41.5% of my damage, it means that a monster takes 14 rounds to defeat instead of 10. 4 rounds of a monster hitting you is a fairly big deal.
For me, alone to kill a 260 hitpoint creature using the numbers above, it would take approximately 28 rounds(16 rounds with the Bloodclaw and Iron Armbands, saving me 12 rounds). Let's assume a group of 5 people who do equal damage. It takes about 5.6 rounds to beat it. Or 3.2 rounds if all of those can add Bloodclaw and Iron Armbands. Or less than 2 rounds if they all use action points.
Keep in mind that if you split those 260 hitpoints amongst 3 creatures, it is likely that one or two of them are for sure dead in the first round meaning they never get to act.
But, how much damage would the Barbarian take back from the monster in 3 rounds? He takes 30 with the item (his choice of course). The monster in 3 rounds could easily do nearly that much.
In 4 rounds(as I figured out above), the Brute I used as an example does 32 damage in the 4 extra rounds it has. 54 damage if it is bloodied for those 4 rounds. Either way, you save at least a bit of damage. And the monster could have encounter powers or recharge powers that do more damage the longer it survives, so killing it faster is always better.
Plus, there's always swing damage. IF the monster hits with all 4 of its attacks while its bloodied it does 90 damage on an average roll and easily over 100 on a good roll. Easily enough to take someone down. You want to avoid that by giving it as few actions as possible.
So, the problem with Bloodclaw is action economy.
The Barbarian (or some other PC) would have taken that damage anyway. The damage is merely a footnote.
The problem is how quickly multiple of these more potent items stack and drop an encounter from 10 rounds down to 6 rounds, hence, using even fewer resources per encounter overall.
I agree. This is the main problem. Too much damage stacking together causes the number of rounds the battle lasts to become very small. In a very small battle, the PCs need to use less of their resources and the monsters have less chance to use their recharge powers and their interesting attacks. It's also less satisfying to defeat monsters so quickly.
But that's not the entire problem. The other side of it is that the difference between someone who takes these items and those who don't can be close to double damage. It sucks to sit down at a table as a newbie and not know about Iron Armbands or Bloodclaw and show up with a character who does half the damage of everyone else at the table. This is especially true when people start combining some other combos that you don't know as well. Add in Dual Implement Spellcaster, Two Weapon Fighting, and Lasting Frost cheese and the damage difference between two level 12 characters can be even bigger than that.
My goal is to make it so there's not one best choice. I understand that something will always be the best - so my end point is kind of arbitrary - but cutting off the extreme tail of the curve at least leaves a wider variety of competing items near the top.
