Adventurer's Vault 2 Playtest

[James McMurray]

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).

Yes, that's how they work. Though that durability means the wizard's powers would be doing more damage as well, which is pretty good for a nuker build.

 

[twilsemail]

Unless I'm missing some hidden math somewhere this just equals out to 20-25 extra damamge per day, if you're using a ton of Surges to fuel the tattoo. Where is teh benefit in that? Granted the Damage increases a good deal when you're using area effect powers, but I still think keeping my tail alive is a bit more useful to everyone involved.

"Dwarf, be healed!"
"Sorry, I'm out of healing surges, but wasn't that last hit aweso-Urk!"

Note: the item's description explicitly says "damage rolls" so things like auto-damage stances aren't getting this benefit.

 

[Kraydak]

Unless I'm missing some hidden math somewhere this just equals out to 20-25 extra damamge per day, if you're using a ton of Surges to fuel the tattoo. Where is teh benefit in that? Granted the Damage increases a good deal when you're using area effect powers, but I still think keeping my tail alive is a bit more useful to everyone involved.

"Dwarf, be healed!"
"Sorry, I'm out of healing surges, but wasn't that last hit aweso-Urk!"

Note: the item's description explicitly says "damage rolls" so things like auto-damage stances aren't getting this benefit.

a) The fighter auto-damage stances do damage dice (1W, by and large)

b) If fighters can be expected to work with 11 healing surges in epic (say, the str/wis or str/dex fighters people were talking about in the battlerager thread), then the dwarven high con fighter with 20 healing surges has spares to burn. A *lot* of spares.

 

[twilsemail]

Hunh. You're very right. For some reason I was misremembering those as allowing MBAs against adjacent enemies at the triggering moment. I was thinking the autodamage ones worked like damage auras. My mistake.

 

[Roger]

I think I know to what purpose I'm going to bend the Orb mechanics.

They should work great for big monsters with Engulf attacks.



Cheers,
Roger

 

[WalterKovacs]

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

Assuming they were roll to hit you could end up:

Sending just your friends in.
Sending just the monsters in.
Sending some, but not all of either in.

The risk of the daily power being worthless or outright dangerous would be a bit too high. Having it be "automatic" may seem bad, but the way attacks and defences are set up, you'd be missing much too often for it to be a reliable way to shape to battle. Consider a lot of the zone effects for wizards ... they are "auto hit as long as they are in the area" in some cases as well, this power doesn't do damage directly, so basically it's a powerful zone power that is all effect, little or no damage. It is pretty much a high paragon to epic level power.

 

[Doctor Proctor]

Assuming they were roll to hit you could end up:

Sending just your friends in.
Sending just the monsters in.
Sending some, but not all of either in.

The risk of the daily power being worthless or outright dangerous would be a bit too high. Having it be "automatic" may seem bad, but the way attacks and defences are set up, you'd be missing much too often for it to be a reliable way to shape to battle. Consider a lot of the zone effects for wizards ... they are "auto hit as long as they are in the area" in some cases as well, this power doesn't do damage directly, so basically it's a powerful zone power that is all effect, little or no damage. It is pretty much a high paragon to epic level power.

Yeah, that's a good way to put it. You wouldn't want to end up trapping just yourself and 5 monsters in a 5x5 room for even one round, would you? Especially if it meant blowing your daily to do so?

Honestly though, I don't see this as being particularly broken yet. It could use some tweaking, such as perhaps the terrain being copied inside the orb? The ability to split up the battle and take care of a few opponents isn't that overpowered for a daily I think. The Wizard could just as easily try to use something like Wall of Fire or Wall of Ice to cut off a small group of enemies from the rest of the group until you killed them. Those powers are arguably even more powerful though because you can push enemies into the walls for damage...you can't do that with the orb.

Basically though, unless your players are using some broken combo to be able to use this 10 times a day, it's probably not going to have that big of an effect on your campaign. One thing that could possibly help to limit it if you want is to say it needs to "charge" up. At the start of the day, it's a Close Burst 1 centered on the Wizard. After one milestone it's a Range 1 Burst 1, and then after two milestones you get the full Range 2 Burst 2.

 

[keterys]

Sure, but it could work just like it does now, but change sustain minor to include an Int attack vs Will on all targets other than yourself. If you miss, the target may choose to immediately leave the area as a free action.

Guaranteed one round, after that it gets dicier.

 

[Doctor Proctor]

Sure, but it could work just like it does now, but change sustain minor to include an Int attack vs Will on all targets other than yourself. If you miss, the target may choose to immediately leave the area as a free action.

Guaranteed one round, after that it gets dicier.

That's definitely an interesting fix... If the bad guys start leaving the sphere, it loses it's usefulness. Additionally, hitting that attack with any consistency on a big Solo or Elite will be hard. This means it would be hard to do what some people were worried about and use the sphere to gimp certain high level monsters by pulling them away from their minions. You could perhaps keep him in there for a round or two, maybe three if you roll good, but probably not much longer than that. So I think that might be a good balancing ability.

 

[James McMurray]

Honestly though, I don't see this as being particularly broken yet. It could use some tweaking, such as perhaps the terrain being copied inside the orb? The ability to split up the battle and take care of a few opponents isn't that overpowered for a daily I think. The Wizard could just as easily try to use something like Wall of Fire or Wall of Ice to cut off a small group of enemies from the rest of the group until you killed them. Those powers are arguably even more powerful though because you can push enemies into the walls for damage...you can't do that with the orb.

Walls are temporary delays for the monsters, who can go around or through them. Orbs are a permanent delay. It's still too powerful IMO.