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Assassin, Battlemind, and Vampire
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<blockquote data-quote="keterys" data-source="post: 5738905" data-attributes="member: 43019"><p>It's mostly because of how horrible assassin powers are and how quickly enemies die. Let's compare an assassin to a thief for a moment:</p><p></p><p>Thief will do 3d8+2+Everything with combat advantage and an extra +1 to hit, turn in turn out, and add 1d6/tier & +3 to attack to most of its attacks.</p><p></p><p>If you assume the assassin places and invokes one shroud each round, he'll do 3d8+Everything with encounter powers and 2d8+Everything with at-wills. So, basically 1 die of damage and a bunch of accuracy less than the thief.</p><p></p><p>So, let the shrouds move for free. That's just making their rounds of effort not waste. Let them build up shrouds while hidden. It's a niche case that perfectly suits the assassin, so let it happen occasionally with burning a valuable feat spot. So that covers those two bonus feats, which leaves three suggested changes - Lethal Shroud, Bonus when not invoking, and the Brutal equivalent.</p><p></p><p>The Bonus when not invoking is to make the assassin not suck worse than a non-striker while building up their stack. It's only a partial mitigation, but it at least helps at the start of combat or AP rounds.</p><p></p><p>Lethal Shroud is basically a game tax on assassins. They did some math on how far behind they were, and made a feat to help address it. It's vital to the class, and pretty much needs to go in.</p><p></p><p>The not really brutal on invoking shrouds is to make it fun to build up to 4 instead of just burning at 2. Mathematically it's just not a big deal... it increases a d8 from 4.5 average to 5.25 average, only slightly better than Brutal 1, but a lot faster. Let's say you invoke 4 shrouds on a 3d8 attack, setting their minimum dice result to 4. 7d8 attack, goes from minimum 7 damage, average 32.5, max 56 to minimum 28 damage, average 36.75, max 56... gain of 4.25 damage on a "big" nova. It's barely noticeable on a shroud 2. But it's a very "feel good" power that accentuates their primary tactic - build up a big stack, smash the enemy.</p><p></p><p>Edit: It should perhaps be noted that you couldn't do exactly what I said for one fairly stupid reason - Vorpal Falchions / Daggers. But I've been safely ignoring them for a while, so I'm going to keep at it <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink ;)" data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> Which is to say, you'd want to use careful language that didn't alter the dice result in any way, but let you count dice rolls of less than your # of shrouds as equal to your # of shrouds when totaling damage, but the dice roll result stays the same.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="keterys, post: 5738905, member: 43019"] It's mostly because of how horrible assassin powers are and how quickly enemies die. Let's compare an assassin to a thief for a moment: Thief will do 3d8+2+Everything with combat advantage and an extra +1 to hit, turn in turn out, and add 1d6/tier & +3 to attack to most of its attacks. If you assume the assassin places and invokes one shroud each round, he'll do 3d8+Everything with encounter powers and 2d8+Everything with at-wills. So, basically 1 die of damage and a bunch of accuracy less than the thief. So, let the shrouds move for free. That's just making their rounds of effort not waste. Let them build up shrouds while hidden. It's a niche case that perfectly suits the assassin, so let it happen occasionally with burning a valuable feat spot. So that covers those two bonus feats, which leaves three suggested changes - Lethal Shroud, Bonus when not invoking, and the Brutal equivalent. The Bonus when not invoking is to make the assassin not suck worse than a non-striker while building up their stack. It's only a partial mitigation, but it at least helps at the start of combat or AP rounds. Lethal Shroud is basically a game tax on assassins. They did some math on how far behind they were, and made a feat to help address it. It's vital to the class, and pretty much needs to go in. The not really brutal on invoking shrouds is to make it fun to build up to 4 instead of just burning at 2. Mathematically it's just not a big deal... it increases a d8 from 4.5 average to 5.25 average, only slightly better than Brutal 1, but a lot faster. Let's say you invoke 4 shrouds on a 3d8 attack, setting their minimum dice result to 4. 7d8 attack, goes from minimum 7 damage, average 32.5, max 56 to minimum 28 damage, average 36.75, max 56... gain of 4.25 damage on a "big" nova. It's barely noticeable on a shroud 2. But it's a very "feel good" power that accentuates their primary tactic - build up a big stack, smash the enemy. Edit: It should perhaps be noted that you couldn't do exactly what I said for one fairly stupid reason - Vorpal Falchions / Daggers. But I've been safely ignoring them for a while, so I'm going to keep at it ;) Which is to say, you'd want to use careful language that didn't alter the dice result in any way, but let you count dice rolls of less than your # of shrouds as equal to your # of shrouds when totaling damage, but the dice roll result stays the same. [/QUOTE]
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