Recent content by Benly

This is not so much a benefit in its own right as it is a consequence of the benefit of an unbreakable mark: if you want to have a mark that never goes away, it has to prevent other marks onto that target to avoid the "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation.

Other than Sneak Attack, what really strikes me about the 4E rogue is its utilities. The rogue is the only class where I wish I could trade in some of my dailies for more utilities - rogue utility powers are just fun.

Nope. And if they want, next time there's a chest after that they can smash all they like - but they'll be aware that there's a risk vs. reward element involved. The reward of "less effort expended" by using the "easy" route of smashing it open with an axe is balanced by the risk of there having...

Just a bit of advice: next time they decide to smash open the chest, let them hear the breaking glass inside and find a bunch of brightly-colored shards that Arcana shows as previously having held magic. It may inspire them to think about more subtle solutions.

The way the DMG is written seems to encourage confusion about how scaling DCs work. An average-difficulty Climb check doesn't get significantly easier as you level up. That's why, at any given level, a given DC might be "average": you need an average check to make it. However, climbing up Fort...

Nimble Blade, Wraithblades, Blade of Night, Thieving weapon, basically any sort of rogue-focused melee feat or enchantment. It opens up unconventional options but cuts off a number of quite good conventional ones.

..how would it make Rapier outmoded? The numbers are identical, and there are more rogue-oriented light-blade-only enchantments and feats than heavy-blade-only. Removing the d6 penalty would bring it up to the level of fully viable alternative - you gain some unorthodox options, while losing...

This seems really quite counter to how magic items are intended to work in 4E. Essentially what you're saying is that the boots can only replace your training, rather than supplementing it.

Yeah, they get to spend a feat to make use of that no-feat-cost bonus proficiency, at a penalty. That's.. that's a great deal there, guys. There isn't (or shouldn't be) a binary of flavor feats vs. functional feats. When you do that, what you're saying is "players who want to make their...

Worthy of note, however, is that the dwarven version can be applied to waraxes and craghammers, both of which are much better than any light blade (in terms of raw numbers; feats are of course another issue.) The eladrin version applies only to longswords. If eladrin longsword feats applied to...

Rapiers, as light blades, qualify to be enchanted as Pact Blades.

To me it seems like the real problem isn't how this feat compares to the rapier (each has advantages and disadvantages) but that this feat is flat-out inferior to Weapon Proficiency: Double Sword in nearly every regard - you get the same accuracy and damage die, you get the heavy blade feats...

The thing is that the old-school Slippers of Spider Climbing made actual skill at climbing largely redundant. One of the goals for 4E is to have your items supplement rather than replace your abilities - hence why you only get the old-style Spider Climbing once per day. That said, as others...

The problem with saying "who cares, Twin Strike is too good so it doesn't matter if there's no other functional melee at-will" is that "you can only do one thing every round but it's okay because you do so much damage with it" is awfully reminiscent of the 3E fighter. Look how much damage your...

An important thing to remember is that it doesn't have to be magic to work. This line of logic brings with it the very real risk of indirectly nerfing martial characters by saying it's logical for magical abilities to work on a given monster but not for martial abilities to. (The rogue...