Rule of Three - 04/18/11

[mneme]

Er...multiclassing the Vampire is a bit natural, isn't it? I mean, your fighter/wizard/rogue gets bit (or starts drinking weird concoctions; whatever); and develops a pale look and a hunger for human/elven/mimic/air elemental (yeah, that's the aspect to vampires that bothers me a bit, though I understand the reasoning behind it) blood...

Letting people swap in to/out of Power Strike seems very cool -- though I'm a bit bothered by the implication of a feat cost, given that PS has more or less exactly the power of an encounter power. I guess it might work as a feat for letting you take encounter powers instead of PS (for an Essential Fighter with more control, or an Essentials Rogue with debuffs instead of backstab), but...

 

[CasvalRemDeikun]

Also, I fail to see how retconning the Warlord so it's now the Marshall makes things clear. Seems to me like they've got their naming convention backwards - the new build should have been the Marshall.

So then what would you call all encompassing class that the Warlord and the Marshal would be part of in the way the Knight, Slayer, and Weaponmaster are all part of the Fighter Class?

The naming conventions are fine if you understand that they are there to categorize the classes.

 

[delericho]

Er...multiclassing the Vampire is a bit natural, isn't it? I mean, your fighter/wizard/rogue gets bit...

Doh! Yeah, that was stupid of me.

So then what would you call all encompassing class that the Warlord and the Marshal would be part of in the way the Knight, Slayer, and Weaponmaster are all part of the Fighter Class?

Honestly, I don't care. But it's a bad thing to have a class introduced by one name in the PHB, and now referred to be an entirely different name that appears nowhere in that book.

If it really bothered them that much, they should have created a super-class (say, Combatant) that included the Knights, Slayer and Fighter, and then another (Warmaster?) containing the Warlord and the Marshall.

If every time the books say Fighter they now mean Weaponmaster (except, of course, for the times when they don't), that's only going to cause confusion.

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

Really, really looking forward to the Multi- and Hybrid-classing update, as well as the stuff on swapping class features. I think it's pretty intuitive as to how it's supposed to work, but until it becomes "official" a lot of DMs wouldn't allow it, and players wouldn't even think to try it.

For example, it's pretty obvious that Backstab and Power Strike should be swappable for class-appropriate encounter powers.

I can't wait to see what kind of trainwreck the Vecna character builder makes out of this change.

 

[WalterKovacs]

Honestly, I don't care. But it's a bad thing to have a class introduced by one name in the PHB, and now referred to be an entirely different name that appears nowhere in that book.

If it really bothered them that much, they should have created a super-class (say, Combatant) that included the Knights, Slayer and Fighter, and then another (Warmaster?) containing the Warlord and the Marshall.

If every time the books say Fighter they now mean Weaponmaster (except, of course, for the times when they don't), that's only going to cause confusion.

It depends entirely on implementation.

It may be something as simple as the feat that allows you to swap an encounter for power strike has, as a prerequisite, that you are a weaponmaster fighter; while the one that let's you replace power strike for a normal encounter power has a prereq of Knight or Slayer.

It's possible they may erratta old fighter feats to refer to weaponmasters instead of all fighters, but a lot of powers that might have that probably reference class features only available to weaponmasters in the first place (marking, combat challenge, etc). There are some feats that have left out prerequisites, and thus end up interacting strangely with essential versions of the class, or multiclassing into the class, or hybrid version of the class, similar to feats for elves or dwarves that interact strangely with revenants/half-elves/muls/etc. [One example, there are some feats that modify elven accuracy that are available to characters that don't have it.]

In general, going over the feat list and tightening up the requirements so you can't take something to modify a class feature you don't actually have, can be very helpful for reducing useless options in the character builder. And, going forward, they might want to make feats that are just for pre-Essential characters, so having a name for them helps in that regard (instead of having a feat that says, for example, "Prereq: Fighter that is not a Knight or Slayer", which would likely have to be errata'd should yet another type of fighter ever come out).

 

[mneme]

Doh! Yeah, that was stupid of me.

It happens. But yeah -- we (mostly) do undestand why the vampire is a class -- but in many ways, it's a class -made- for multiclassing/hybriding, by concept. Because as much as "Vampire Elf" and "Vampire Gnoll" make sense, so do "Vampire Elven Rogue" and "Vampire Halfling Sorcerer".

Honestly, I don't care. But it's a bad thing to have a class introduced by one name in the PHB, and now referred to be an entirely different name that appears nowhere in that book.

If every time the books say Fighter they now mean Weaponmaster (except, of course, for the times when they don't), that's only going to cause confusion.

The thing was, they already had different types of fighter/warlord/ranger. And the classes they were using -were- the iconic names (well, except for Warlord, but hey).

But the thing is, everything in the past that refers to Fighters, or Warlords, or Wizards still refers to those classes today. It's just that if you're playing a Warlord, you're playing a Warlord Marshal now, and they can now target rules directly at you rather than affecting all Warlords (but anything that talks about warlords still affects you and you can take all Warlord powers). If you're playing a Mage, you can take Wizard powers -- so can a Magister or whatever title they decide to give to implement-based Wizards; most feats and spells and options are available to Wizards -- but there are now things that only work for Mages, and they'll be able to target Implement-based wizards without making Implement Mastery a prerequisite (which might make some things a little easier to express, particularly if the cross-book options include a way to take an Implement Mastery at paragon for mages, or a Mage School instead of a second Mastery for Impelment wizards).

 

[Incenjucar]

Lots of good news here. Not only are they continuing to support multiclassing but even hybrids, AND they're at least acknowledging the demand for supporting neglected classes.

And I agree with Klaus, seekers ARE their own thing, people just don't pay much attention to them because of their - correctable - design flaws.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'd make a witty comment here, but this just speaks for itself. The irony of the answer that they can't support all classes and there IS demand to support ones with hardly any, combined with the fact HoS throws tons of options at two of the best supported classes in 4E primarily is just too amusing.

I do - kind of - agree with the general concept of not adding more classes if they won't support them. The vampires extremely linear design makes a lot more sense in this context.

Don't mean to sound like this is picking on you, but after going through some of the thread over at the D&D community and then I see the same thing here. I think people aren't looking at it in context.

Were they supposed to dedicate HoS only to the Runepriest and the Seeker???!!! I somehow doubt anyone would have been satisfied with that. I suppose the other possibility would have been to just not put out HoS and start over with a supplement for these classes and put that out instead.

I mean I think everyone agrees that Seeker and Runepriest are undersupported. That is kind of inarguable really. OTOH is there really a huge pent up demand for that support? Nobody was clamoring for these classes (well maybe some clamor for a weapon-based controller) before PHB3, but they sure as heck have been demanding Shadow stuff from day one.

So it seems to me that answer #1 makes pretty good sense in context. They WERE going to do HoS. They DON'T want to release tons of new classes. They're saying they would like to finish up with the ones they have out there now vs creating a whole other slew of new ones that probably will be at the end of a reasonably long queue for support.

I mean think about what needs more support right now. Not only Seeker and Runepriest, but there are a number of other classes that really need better PPs, some fixes, etc. I'd say Sorcerer, Shaman, at least some Swordmages, various other builds (Ruthless Ruffian, Swarm Druid, etc). I mean they really need a good 8 or 10 solid articles on various classes to round things out, and that's going to take a decent amount of time and effort to churn through.

Note too that Mike said he was open to more Shadow classes like a pure shadow Necromancer. I think they really just felt that HoS should address what could be addressed while adding as little more support burden as possible.

 

[Jhaelen]

Also, I fail to see how retconning the Warlord so it's now the Marshall makes things clear. Seems to me like they've got their naming convention backwards - the new build should have been the Marshall.

Indeed!

The problem is that WotC would really very much prefer if everyone forgot there existed any classes before Essentials. They want people to think of the Essentials version when they're talking about the Fighter. The Essentials version is to become the default.

They didn't dare to invalidate the older class versions, but they definitely decided to no longer actively support them. Sure, if someone sends a really cool pitch they might decide to publish it as a DDI article but that's about it.
Printed products will ignore the existence of the 'classic' builds. The back of 'Heroes of Shadow' drove this point home for me. It says:

For use with these Dungeons & Dragons Essentials products:
Heroes of the Fallen Lands
Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms
Rules Compendium

So, technically, I really shouldn't have bought the book since I don't have either of these books and haven't used any Essentials material so far.

In a way it's like installing a software on a hardware that doesn't meet the recommended requirements: Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. It's probably going to be awfully slow, look ugly and crash a lot. But that's entirely my problem, since it would work fine if I just upgraded my hardware.

Anyway, that's not actually a discussion I wanted delve into. I appreciate they're making the revised PHB classes available for free on their website, no matter what they're calling them.

 

[Jhaelen]

Were they supposed to dedicate HoS only to the Runepriest and the Seeker???!!!

Of course not. But I would have expected HoS to provide some support for the 'classic' Assassin.

If I was optimistic I would hope for Seeker support in Heroes of the Feywild. But it will never happen. Because just like HoS it will be designed to support only Essentials classes. What they _might_ do is offer a new Essentials Ranger build that reproduces some of the Seeker features that are missing from the Hunter.

The Essentialized Runepriest (i.e. a Cleric build) would have to be in a different supplement, maybe 'Heroes of the Astral Plane'? Actually I wouldn't mind a reinterpretation of the class. Imho, it should really be an arcane/divine class; let's call it 'Runemaster'