Battlerager Vigor limiting it - ideas?

[Stalker0]

Personally, I think I'd like BRV to work as follows:

Battlerage Vigor:
Once per round when you make an attack, you may treat that attack as Invigorating. If you're already attacking with an Invigorating power, you gain double the normal temporary hit points on a hit.
If you have temp hp, you deal +1 damage with all melee attacks. If you're wearing chainmail or lighter armor, this bonus increases to +2.

Clean, simple, and solid....I like.

 

[Elric]

How the devil is he getting up to 35 THP?

THP's from Invigorating powers stack, the THP's that Battlerager Vigor grants when you're hit don't stack.

The only way he should be getting up to double-digit THP's is if you're hitting him 1) less than once per round, and 2) hitting him for less than his Con modifier.

You only need one of these. Suppose you have a BRV fighter against a single low-level monster. The fighter uses Crushing Surge every round, and he almost always hits, gaining Con mod (plus some for Improved Vigor feat) each time. The monster rarely hits the BRV fighter, so on average he's gaining temp HP each round.

Say, fighter hits 80% of the time and gains 5 temp HP each time. The monster hits 10% of the time and does 10 damage each time. So the fighter gains 4 expected temp HP per round and only loses 1.

However, this type of situation seems rare. You'd have to be using awfully weak monsters.

 

[Garthanos]

Change the way it stacks invigorating temp too, and I'd probably no longer find BRV offensive at least.

Instead of halting the stacking (not everyone thinks that brv feature is broken either) an idea comes to mind.... how about having nice reasons for them to voluntarily reduce their temporary hitpoints. Tie some powers to reducing your own thp as an effect. Essentially you are reversing whatever mind set you tapped in to for your invigorating thp ... these could be described as calming instead of invigorating and to ameliorate the constitution is all a brv needs we could give them Wisdom secondary parameters. ;-).

Perhaps A precision attack (which makes sure strike look as silly as it is) or one which ups the odds of a critical... wisdom mod central to the amount of thp you can spend in these perhaps)

Perhaps a battle style feat which allows a power attack to be done without the -2 on the accuracy if they spend thp to get it. That might work for anybody with a source of temporary hitpoints mix in something else because that is very minor.

sort of inspite of the above idea....
I really like the self hypnosis battle trance skinning of the thp gained .. no he doesnt have to roar .... he focuses his mind in to a glacially calm state... till the pain disappears his brv bonus damage is from brutally targetting the enemy soft spots which he only does when in trance state.

 

[Stalker0]

1. Battlerager Vigor tends to break when you get a character who pumps his constitution specifically to pump the vigor ability (14 strength, 20 constitution dwarf brv fighter, etc). When a character uses a relatively normal build (18 strength, 14 or 16 constitution), it is much less broken.

I actually think BRV is more broken when you don't build specifically for it. If you max your con and drop your armor for the damage bonus then you've given up a significant amount of offense and AC in order to get those extra hp.

To me the strongest BRV build is a regular hammer fighter (high strength, decent con) where you subtract -1 to attack and add BRV.

 

[Kzach]

Math hurt brain. Me no like hurt brain.

Me likey keterys solution.

Me playtest and make whiny player who only likes a character if they're invincible, suck it up.

 

[keterys]

Temp hp persist until you rest - getting up to 35 meant he hit with something like 6 or 7 Invigorating powers before resting.

It isnt a don't attack me defense until your adversary starts noticing you arent slowing down...

Which they notice almost immediately... much like having maximized AC can often backfire for a defender, so too can BRV.

'Okay, so I'm at -2 to attack against anyone but him... but his friend who is doing twice as much damage (striker of some sort) I need to roll an 8 to hit normally (so a 10), whereas I need a 16 to hit him, and he appears to be much tougher, on top of that?'

So if enemies figure out that it's more effort to kill the BRV than it is to kill, say, _two_ of his companions, they'll ignore him until it's more convenient. Or realize they're doomed and take other steps, which is more of a trump card

 

[Garthanos]

Math hurt brain. Me no like hurt brain.

Me likey keterys solution.

Me playtest and make whiny player who only likes a character if they're invincible, suck it up.

I think you have a wierd idea about what constitutes math

Me NO like accounting ... so unless we throw out thp entirely im toast
But I can put up with accounting if I get a LOT of bang out of the results....(hence the idea of finding ways to spend thp on some other effect ;p)

I like house rules that maintain CLOSE connections to the original as possible and dont throw out babies in the bath water... for instance a sim of pain resistance from adrenaline rushes caused by threat of injury to self.

The house rule I presented here only has one step more than the raw one and that is a simple comparison.
1) Compute real hitpoint loss (you do this with every method which hasnt discarded thp).
2) Compare it your battlerager vigor value (the raw amount of thp brv gives you) and use the lesser of the two as the thp provided by brv.

Then again my group doesn't optimize... or at least hardly at all so I am unlikely to ever have to deal with mr invincible man. . Good luck with that. I could make a cool character concept with your altered brv.. but I would definitely be skinning it as invoking my Battle Trance because Keterys rule makes it quit feeling like fear/anger induced pain resistance.

 

[keterys]

Out of curiosity I was glancing at some stuff from the games I'm running that have a BRV fighter in it - he gets 5 temp each time I hit him. They ran into some Boneshard skeletons recently. They needed a 13 to hit him and effectively dealt 7.5 damage to him instead of 12.5 to his allies. With a hp pool of about 60 that means it takes about 4 hits to bloody him, and 8 hits to take him down - if given a surge and using his warforged resolve, I believe that actually turns into 12 hits to take him down. With a 40% chance to hit, that's edging up towards _30_ attacks needed to take him down, though in truth the 1.5 crits would slice off a few attacks.

In comparison, their strikers are hit on a 6 (8 with mark) and have 38 hp, falling down in just over 3 hits or about 4 attacks, 5 with them given a surge.

Thankfully boneshards are stupid, but you can see how it's easy for more intelligent enemies to decide to not fight a battlerager when it doesn't seem to work out.

And that's without even considering low damage enemies or invigorating stacking, which the house rules discussed here have been addressing. That's the 'optimal world' in which an enemy hits hard enough that BRV is used up entirely.

 

[Garthanos]

Temp hp persist until you rest - getting up to 35 meant he hit with something like 6 or 7 Invigorating powers before resting.

not when I DM ... that's end of the encounter bub.(the rush ends when the rush ends... no artificial extending it)

Which they notice almost immediately... much like having maximized AC can often backfire for a defender, so too can BRV.

yes sure both can and will ... I would say almost immediately is not reasonable.

'Okay, so I'm at -2 to attack against anyone but him... but his friend who is doing twice as much damage (striker of some sort) I need to roll an 8 to hit normally (so a 10), whereas I need a 16 to hit him, and he appears to be much tougher, on top of that?'

BRV might look like
"I keep knicking and bruising and knocking him in to the scenery but he keeps coming back like he wasn't even hurt, he looks like he is kind of hurt but it isnt slowing him down by a long shot in fact I cant wipe that bloody smile off his face... what is up with that?"

It doesnt really sound as obvious as the AC dude who doesnt get knocked around.... though admittedly dwarves dont give ground... so maybe the archetypal over optimized brv fighter... doesnt fit my description... I think a lot would.

So if enemies figure out that it's more effort to kill the BRV than it is to kill, say, _two_ of his companions, they'll ignore him until it's more convenient. Or realize they're doomed and take other steps, which is more of a trump card

Sure it can happen overly defensive defenders tend to fail to defend... but then there is the Shieldmage.... the one misnamed as a swordmage.... his team is coated with defense. (now fight the minions)

 

[Garthanos]

38 hitpoints versus 60 ....and he's Warforged....
sigh BRV sounds like it has very little to do with the differences

He pops back to life midstream like nothing was wrong with him even without brv. The smart enemy experienced at fighting WF might know that is the nature of WF.