Adventurer's Vault 2 Playtest

[Miyaa]

Re: Orbs. Am I the only one when reading about this thought of those Pokemon balls? Great, so not only has 4th edition put a little Magic: the Game into D&D (Power Cards), now they've added a little Pokemon too.

 

[Kraydak]

What sort of bonuses do the tattoos give for using healing surges? There are a lot of builds (*cough* dwarven battle-ragers *cough*) who could easily afford to burn 5-10 healing surges off the top at the start of a day...

(I've always sort of expected healing surges to go somewhat down the 3E turn undead route, where long term a lot of the use is to power abilities unrelated to their initial implementation)

 

[James McMurray]

Re: Orbs. Am I the only one when reading about this thought of those Pokemon balls? Great, so not only has 4th edition put a little Magic: the Game into D&D (Power Cards), now they've added a little Pokemon too.

Does Pokemon use the balls to pull themselves and some monsters into alterdimensions so they can more easily kill the monsters? If not, you're probably in a small minority.

 

[Nail]

(At the same time, I've seen a few cases where the fights end up in the "entrance" to an encounter, allowing all the cool terrain features to add up to nothing at all, so it doesn't need an orb to pull that off.)

Tangent:

I've seen this happen several times these last 6 months of gaming. The DM has clearly put lots of thought into cool terrain and monster synergies ...but has neglected to think through how the first round of the fight will inevitably bottle up the PCs in the entrance to the cool terrain.

...then most of the actual combat happens in the narrow, confining entrance, with precious little maneuvering/shifting/tactics/cool stuff.

It's a common DM pit-fall --> one I've fallen in myself several times: If you want the PCs to be involved in the super-nifty terrain you've set up let them get through the stinkin' door before you pounce on 'em!

 

[James McMurray]

What sort of bonuses do the tattoos give for using healing surges? There are a lot of builds (*cough* dwarven battle-ragers *cough*) who could easily afford to burn 5-10 healing surges off the top at the start of a day...

Resistance to damage after you spend a surge, extra damage on your dailies, extra healing when you surge, extra damage vs. someone that critted you, and more. For the tattoes tied to surges there are sometimes three tiers, with hero givin 1x the surges you've spent, paragon 2x, and epic 3x.

 

[Nail]

Do these orbs require a hit roll?

...that's my question too.

 

[Nail]

Resistance to damage after you spend a surge, extra damage on your dailies, extra healing when you surge, extra damage vs. someone that critted you, and more. For the tattoes tied to surges there are sometimes three tiers, with hero givin 1x the surges you've spent, paragon 2x, and epic 3x.

Holy-moly.

Are these Daily powers, or properties? (....lemme guess: this was already spelled out above an' I missed it.....)

 

[Kraydak]

Resistance to damage after you spend a surge, extra damage on your dailies, extra healing when you surge, extra damage vs. someone that critted you, and more. For the tattoes tied to surges there are sometimes three tiers, with hero givin 1x the surges you've spent, paragon 2x, and epic 3x.

So, out of curiosity, if a high-con, dwarven durability fighter burns 5 healing surges at the start of the day (still probably leaving him with the same/more healing surges left than a non-dwarven sword-fighter has to begin with), what happens to his Rain of Steel/Unyielding Avalanche damage with the +damage on dailies tattoo?

From the (very limited) info provided, in Epic, a con-focused dwarf can probably spot a non-dwarf/non-con focused fighter 10 healing surges, which could add up to +30 damage/round/enemy with the various auto-damage stances...

 

[WalterKovacs]

On the orb: No attack roll, auto hit on the area burst 2 within 2 (so you have to include yourself, and it's the same size as the area inside the orb.)

On the tatoos: They are all properties, although some have built in limits on how often they happen (first time you get bloodied in an encounter). For the healing surge based ones, the ones that go up per tier are related to "when you spend a healing surge", and they give you more HP or resistance based on tierxnumber used.

The extra damage based on number of surges used adds damage to daily powers, and the other adds damage to attacks that do damage on a miss. And neither of them scale with tier.

In fact, for the tatoos there are 4 "types" - Number of surges used, getting a critical hit scored against you, first bloodied, and when you spend an action point.

 

[Kraydak]

On the orb: No attack roll, auto hit on the area burst 2 within 2 (so you have to include yourself, and it's the same size as the area inside the orb.)

The orbs. Why? Just why? They aren't at the Memory Bottle (thought bottle?) level of bad idea, but still...

On the tatoos: They are all properties, although some have built in limits on how often they happen (first time you get bloodied in an encounter). For the healing surge based ones, the ones that go up per tier are related to "when you spend a healing surge", and they give you more HP or resistance based on tierxnumber used.

The extra damage based on number of surges used adds damage to daily powers, and the other adds damage to attacks that do damage on a miss. And neither of them scale with tier.

In fact, for the tatoos there are 4 "types" - Number of surges used, getting a critical hit scored against you, first bloodied, and when you spend an action point.

So, are there any tattoos which would benefit from burning healing surges preemptively? Even adding just 5 damage to all dailies by preemptively burning 5 surges would be scary if that is how it works (and it almost gives Durability a purpose for everyone other than 8 con wizards).