D&D 4E 4e, Non-Martial Characters, and Limited Feat Choices

[CaptainCoal]

Feats as diversification's reward

I think veteran players of 3.X are going to need to adjust to the new paradigm a bit. The current configuration of feats rewards characters with more diverse stats - possibly their only reward.

Running with random rolls or optimized-for-first-level point-buys may paint you into a corner when it comes to feats. That's probably part of the reason why they recommend the 16, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10 array.
- Marty Lund

I was reading this thread when I arrived at this conclusion. You can either optimize stats-wise (maxing out your three main stats) and take less-than-useful feats, or you can diversify your stats, and use feats to make up for some of that usefulness.

It's a change in the way feats are handled. I will definitely recommend to my players that they look at the feats before they buy their stats, rather than after.

CC

 

[Rystil Arden]

I take it you have a copy of the PHB in some form?

I can't even imagine playing a Cleric that focused almost entirely on powers without the weapon descriptor. Sure you could do it, but it just seems so limiting. Especially when the cleric seems specifically designed to engage in melee combat. My hunch is that as with the race/class combo's, playing against type will result in your character being sub-par in some unforseen at this time way.

It's actually quite effective. The only trouble is one that plagues the Cleric in general, which is that you rarely get to attack diverse defenses--at low levels at least, all the Wisdom ones except notably nigh-useless Cause Fear attack Ref (that said, Wisdom v Reflex is rarely worse than Attack or Str vs Defense, so it's not like you would have gotten more diversity by hybriding).

In exchange for limiting your options away from the weapon attacks, you get the added bonus of more healing with all healing effects, more likelihood to hit with all your attacks and do more damage (all weapon attacks use Str, all the others use Wis, and the Wis ones add +Wis to damage) for various reasons (one reason is you only use your highest stat. The other reason is you might have saved enough points dumping Str to get more Wis than you would have otherwise). Also, if you don't listen to the book and use Con instead of Str for your Fort stat, you get the added benefit of an incredible durability boost over the Cleric who hybrids Str and Wis.

That said, some of those weapon powers are pretty darn awesome, so there's definitely reason to try the other kind too. But if you want to be cloistered, ignoring Str is the way to go. That said, I consider my method and Cadfan's method both viable ways of ignoring Strength (in his, you take just enough for a feat, in mine, you ignore it entirely because you'll never use it). Not ignoring Str, to me, would mean getting a modified 16 in it so you can use it for powers.

 

[Rystil Arden]

What are your characters stats at the moment? The point buy starts you with all 10s and one 8. So if your Str was a 10, it should only cost you 3 points to get it up to a 13.

If I were designing a dwarf wisdom cleric, it would look like this:

Str 13
Con 15 (including racial bonus)
Dex 12
Int 8
Wis 18 (including racial bonus)
Cha 14

You could switch the Con and the Dex scores, depending on whether you prefer to get Astral Fire or Scale Armor Proficiency earlier or later. Both feats are useful regardless of tier, so you could even wait until level 11 and your free +1 to all stats.

Ah, but I wouldn't be willing to accept 8 in Int--a penalty is too low to be reasonable for the concept (as you were mentioning raising my Int before, I know you understand). The three builds I was considering all had Str as the dump stat. The best exemplar for this discussion is this one (The plan would be to bump Cha and Wis at level 4--several Cha based abilities really need to start getting around +3 to start becoming useful).

Str 8
Con 16
Dex 10
Int 11
Wis 18
Cha 15

To get Str up to par from 8 without hurting Wis or Cha would give me Con 12 here after racial. Note that this isn't exactly my build. The PH has rules for negative point buy, so I bought Dexterity backwards to 8 as well, lost a point in Int, and got another point of Wisdom. But that probably won't always be available due to the vagueness of the PH, so better to discuss the above build I think (though of note, using up the Dex points and the level 4 stat raise to boost Wis to 20 is another possibility, one that is nearly strictly better than buying Astral Fire, since it increases to hit and damage both by one for all spells using Wisdom).

I would not allow an Int penalty for this character, so your exact build is not in discussion, but let's compare to this as-similar-as-possible-to-your-proposal-without-8-Int build:

Str 13
Con 15
Dex 10
Int 10
Wis 18
Cha 15

It does give a few more feats, but it only opens up Light Shield and Scale. There's still a large dearth of options out there.

 

[Cadfan]

I take it you have a copy of the PHB in some form?

I can't even imagine playing a Cleric that focused almost entirely on powers without the weapon descriptor. Sure you could do it, but it just seems so limiting.

Nope. But someone copied short descriptions of the heroic tier feats into the forum, and of the two cleric sub-classes, one is spells (wisdom), and the other is melee (strength). So I'm going for it.

 

[Rystil Arden]

That the "weapon" powers were substantially stronger than the non-weapon powers didn't pop off the page at me, but I wasn't really looking for that. I actually figured making that house ruling would be pretty easy, with the only potential problem being that the game now seems to EXPECT cleric's to be on the front line, only a square behind the defenders.

Allowing the javelin to be used would let my player keep his cleric in the middle of the group where he likes to be, but who knows how that would screw up "game balance" if things are so tightly constrained as to expect the cleric to be in a specific spot in every encounter.

During the first game with the pre-gens I had to explain to him a couple of times that while he's used to playing his character a particular way, 4E expects him to do something different and that he should just go with it if he wants to see what the new edition is supposed to play like.

Ah, sounds like you only got to see the pregens, whereas my GM has the PH. The reason that the melee powers look crappy on the pregen Cleric is that the pregen Cleric was designed in an incredibly stupid way--the melee powers use Str, and the pregen Cleric has poor Str. Thus, they look unimpressive because they use a bad stat.

Here's a good example--

Cleric at-wills:

Lance of Faith does 1d8+Wis and gives an ally +2 to hit that enemy. Usually that will be 1d8+4 damage for a Wis Cleric and a +2 to hit.

There's also a brand one for the Str Cleric. It's melee only but it does 1W+Str and gives an ally +Str to hit that enemy. For a Str Cleric (and if a Dwarf, you'll probably be Warhammering), that'll often be 1d10+4 (maybe more with Weapon Focus, etc) and a +4 to hit for the ally. Twice as big of the same bonus.

Also, (assuming again that Wis Cleric has 18 Wis and Str Cleric has 18 Str, both after racial bonuses of course), the Str Cleric has a level 1 Encounter that does 2d10+4, marks the enemy (not sure why the Cleric is marking things, but okay), and heals an ally. It only marks and heals if it hits, or else I might have thought about taking it with my Wis Cleric just to get an extra heal, since it's the only 1st level encounter heal.

For dailies, they can get a nasty strike that does 2d10+4 and ongoing 5 fire damage that you can't save against unless you stop attacking and take your turn to try to put out the fire.

I don't remember that much else right now, except I remember being particularly impressed by the melee Cleric's level 5 daily: As a minor action, you buff up your weapon. Now, for the whole encounter, it does 1d6 bonus radiant damage and causes any enemy who is struck by it to take -2 to AC. Combined with even your puny at-will, that's an effective +6 to hit for one ally and +2 to hit for all others. Combined with something better than an at-will, it's crazy nice.

 

[Mirtek]

+1 to hit can make you hit 10-15% more often.
You aren't interested in how many times you have tried to attack (100 in the examples). You are just interested in how many of the attacks actually hit, because that is what is going to affect how much damage you do over time.

Example:
Monster AC 20
Player to-hit 5
Chance to hit 30%
After 100 attacks he has ~ 30 hits

Monster AC 20
Player to-hit 6
Chance to hit 35%
After 100 attacks he has ~ 35 hits


35/30 = 1.17, in other words 17% more hits.

The monster is for instance a hobgoblin soldier vs either:
A paladin with 16 str and a battleaxe
A fighter with 16 str and a battleaxe and talent with one-handed weapons

Let us say you have a monster that needs 35 hits to die.
The paladin would need 117 attacks to get the 35 hits that kill the monster
The fighter would need 100 attacks to get the 35 hits that kill the monster

To shorten it a bit:

Without the +1: 30% hit chance
With the +1: 35% hit chance
5/30*100 = 16,7% increase in hit chance

PS: The most extreme case would be:

Without the +1: 5% hit chance (20 only)
with the +1: 10% hit chance (19-20)
1/1*100 = 100% incease in hit chance

 

[Cadfan]

You can't take Scale Armour. Not enough Con. That's the annoying thing about it. Str instead of Con only really nets you the one feat and is otherwise a hose.

See I knew that in my head, but then I screwed up writing it down. My bad, I hoped that I had edited that post before you saw it. Guess not.

Strength helps with a few other things- skills, opportunity attacks, extra attacks granted by powers of allies, etc. You're right that its not a major boost. But it isn't worthless, and it only cost me 3 points. Those 3 points invested in Wis would have gained me only a 19 Wis instead of an 18. In my build, without points in Con, it also improves my Fort save.

(The only change--if you lower Cha to 13 and boost Con to 13 (and put another point elsewhere), you can even take Scale Armour too). It's a bit cookie-cutter.

I considered that, but I guess I don't care about the Con enough to do it. I don't have a full power list, but I'm operating on the assumption that Cha boosts a fairly large number of cleric powers. If it turns out that its not that important, I'll drop it to 13 and boost Con. As for whether this is cookie cutter, we're only really talking about ability scores for given subclasses with given races. I'd expect some cookie cutter effect at that point. Variety is going to come from powers.

Ah, but I wouldn't be willing to accept 8 in Int--a penalty is too low to be reasonable for the concept (as you were mentioning raising my Int before, I know you understand).

What about dumping dex down to 8? If you're not going to put in 13 points to get Astral Fire, its not doing you anything that Int wouldn't do.

Str 13
Con 15
Dex 10
Int 10
Wis 18
Cha 15

It does give a few more feats, but it only opens up Light Shield and Scale. There's still a large dearth of options out there.

I don't know, I think there are good options. Scale + Light Shield is a good start. I'd toss in a renamed Channel Divinity feat- the names are mostly fluff, so if the feat's benefit makes logical sense, your DM should allow it. There's no balance based reason not to.

You could also drop Dex to 8 and Con to 14, and boost Int to 13. Dex isn't doing anything for you anyways, Con 15 instead of 14 isn't a major difference, and this would improve your Reflex defense, your facilities at rituals, and allow you access to Jack of All Trades, which is probably the most efficient way at broadening your social skills and your ritual use abilities.

Or instead of that, you could drop Cha to 14, Con to 14, and boost Dex to 13. Again, this boosts your reflex defense, and opens access to Astral Fire.

Beyond that, I'd urge reconsideration of Toughness, Alertness, and other generic boosts. I don't consider these to be poor choices for spellcasters. No one has total control over whether they're going to be surprised, or caught in a threatened square, or damaged. These are good, generic things to shore up in a character.

 

[Cadfan]

While we're at it, since you've seen the books- what powers do the cleric subclasses grant? You know, in the way that a Str Rogue gets +Str to sneak attack, and a Cha Rogue gets +Cha to AC versus opportunity attacks? I haven't been able to figure this out from anything that's been leaked on the forum, or from the pregens.

 

[Rystil Arden]

I considered that, but I guess I don't care about the Con enough to do it. I don't have a full power list, but I'm operating on the assumption that Cha boosts a fairly large number of cleric powers. If it turns out that its not that important, I'll drop it to 13 and boost Con.

I had a full power list at the time of creation. I can promise you that for powers people would want to pick (not counting the secondary of turn undead to push them one space further--the damage of turning is still Wis based), the only one that uses Charisma from levels 1 through 4 is the at-will that gives Cha + 1/2 level temp HP (it does less damage than Lance of Faith, though, and you miss out on the nice +2 to hit). That's still a reasonable use of Cha, but it's the only one (note that Cause Fear and Command both use Cha, but they are terrible uses of your turn because they require you to spend your standard action to maybe inconvenience the enemy slightly for one round). You'll probably want to pick up the Con, I wager. It's a big boost.

What about dumping dex down to 8? If you're not going to put in 13 points to get Astral Fire, its not doing you anything that Int wouldn't do.


I don't know, I think there are good options. Scale + Light Shield is a good start. I'd toss in a renamed Channel Divinity feat- the names are mostly fluff, so if the feat's benefit makes logical sense, your DM should allow it. There's no balance based reason not to.

You could also drop Dex to 8 and Con to 14, and boost Int to 13. Dex isn't doing anything for you anyways, Con 15 instead of 14 isn't a major difference, and this would improve your Reflex defense, your facilities at rituals, and allow you access to Jack of All Trades, which is probably the most efficient way at broadening your social skills and your ritual use abilities.

Or instead of that, you could drop Cha to 14, Con to 14, and boost Dex to 13. Again, this boosts your reflex defense, and opens access to Astral Fire.

Beyond that, I'd urge reconsideration of Toughness, Alertness, and other generic boosts. I don't consider these to be poor choices for spellcasters. No one has total control over whether they're going to be surprised, or caught in a threatened square, or damaged. These are good, generic things to shore up in a character.

These are all modifications to your own suggestion, though. Yes, it makes it better than your initial suggestion, but I'm not actually proposing following your initial suggestion Look at my actual build instead. The losses are much more substantial (For instance, you point out that going down from 15 to 14 Con isn't major--that's true, but in my build, I have 16).

I actually already have all the social and ritual skills I need (Diplomacy, Bluff, Insight, Religion, Arcana--I don't really want or need Intimidate or Nature), so Jack of All Trades will not help me with them (remember, it only gives bonuses if you're untrained, and I'm trained in those).

And Alertness is a poor choice compared to Skill Training Perception. Now that I know that you don't have the PH and are basing this on short descriptions, I think I understand better why you seem to be very apt on most issues but just totally off-base with just a few--it's lack of knowledge more than anything else.

Skill Training Perception gives +5 to Perception. Alertness is +2 to Perception and then no combat advantage to enemies when you're surprised. It's much better to have an additional 15% chance not to be surprised at all than it is to try to mitigate slightly the penalty of being surprised (and honestly, the Combat Advantage is only a big deal against a fraction of the enemies who have Sneak Attack-like features).

I'd toss in a renamed Channel Divinity feat- the names are mostly fluff, so if the feat's benefit makes logical sense, your DM should allow it.

That could be cool--Raven Queen's Blessing could be made quite easily to fit with the fluff I'm using for Sehanine as the goddess of Twilight and the edge between two states. But I'm actually pursuing the similar route of getting a Dark Fury that applies to radiant damage (if I could have used the feat as an evil cleric, it is clearly balanced to allow clerics to use it, so why not allow it for good?). Also, I've come up with some homebrewed variants of Sehanine's Reversal that the GM might prefer (my favourite is the one that applies any time you succeed at a non-death save, but you have to make an attack vs Will to apply the condition, rather than requiring a Natural 20 and being automatic).

 

[Rystil Arden]

While we're at it, since you've seen the books- what powers do the cleric subclasses grant? You know, in the way that a Str Rogue gets +Str to sneak attack, and a Cha Rogue gets +Cha to AC versus opportunity attacks? I haven't been able to figure this out from anything that's been leaked on the forum, or from the pregens.

Nothing. Absolutely nothing, which is why you couldn't find it. Being one Cleric subclass or the other is merely a state of mind. They do have very different power selections though (within one side or the other, however, the power choice is often obvious).