... Bow Mastery.. for free?

[Alabast]

Melee mastery feats have stat prereqs because each melee weapon class has a stat associated with it, as listed in the fighter section of the PHB. Because fighters don't often use bows, bows are left off of this list.

Giving the Bow mastery feat a dex prereq could also work against a potential future class that uses bows but uses, say, wisdom as its primary attack stat. There's no need for it, anyway, since a master archer character is likely to have a very high attack stat any way, so it's really a non-issue.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Except we could argue that the same logic holds for the melee mastery feats. There are likely to be characters, archers for example, that might want to up their melee attack capability some to bring it more in line with the rest of the party for those cases where they really should draw a sword, or for some reason CANNOT attack with a bow.

It gets more complicated as well when you factor in the new feat that lets you substitute a different stat as a primary attack stat. WotC seems to have come to the conclusion that they've undermined a lot of potential builds due to stat splitting and the attendant loss of flexibility that characters get. Now they seem to want to move in the direction of mitigating that, which is why I think bow mastery doesn't have prereqs.

I do not believe they will however errata away the prereqs for the other weapon mastery feats simply because they are not 'broken' in a strict sense. They seem to be following a logic of only issuing errata for cases where the rules themselves are mechanically broken, ambiguous, or unworkable. Nothing is broken about weapon mastery feats. It might be BETTER if they didn't have prereqs, but they don't issue errata to fix general game design flaws, as the Expertise feats seem to prove. If they did go down that road then the scope and number of errata would be infinite and 4e with errata would be virtually a whole different game than 4e without errata, and 90% of the players out there will never bother with errata or even know it exists. So you can expect all non-broken things to stay the same, and all game balance type issues to be addressed only by addition of new material, unless it is just a single number on one power or something that requires adjustment and the problem is really serious.

 

[WalterKovacs]

It finally hit me.

My group of character is going to be hitting level 9 tonight, they've been playing since the start.

When you made a level 1 character using only the PHB, you knew which stats you needed at level 1 to be able to get axe mastery, or heavy blade mastery, etc. While Dex would be a given, there was no way to know what bow mastery would be.

So, since PHBII is new, and would likely be used by existing characters (especially bow mastery, it's mostly for rangers, possibly rogues that now have some feats to help them use ranged weapons with sneak attack, but the characters in the book are mostly melee or spellcasters) they didn't want prerequisites that would basically screw over existing characters because they were made without knowing what the prereq would be. It could be the reason there is so little in the way of stat prerequisite feats in PHBII.

 

[KarinsDad]

It finally hit me.

My group of character is going to be hitting level 9 tonight, they've been playing since the start.

When you made a level 1 character using only the PHB, you knew which stats you needed at level 1 to be able to get axe mastery, or heavy blade mastery, etc. While Dex would be a given, there was no way to know what bow mastery would be.

So, since PHBII is new, and would likely be used by existing characters (especially bow mastery, it's mostly for rangers, possibly rogues that now have some feats to help them use ranged weapons with sneak attack, but the characters in the book are mostly melee or spellcasters) they didn't want prerequisites that would basically screw over existing characters because they were made without knowing what the prereq would be. It could be the reason there is so little in the way of stat prerequisite feats in PHBII.

Doubtful. Based on what we have seen, I seriously doubt that the designers delve that deeply into these topics. We do, but that's because there are hundreds (or even thousands) of us to drill into these topics.

In the case of the designers, I think it is pure marketing. Bigger, better, badder sells. It's as simple as that. Many of us have been discussing bigger, better, badder since the 2E days and nothing has changed. 2E splat books introduced balance and power creep, 3E splat books introduced balance and power creep, and 4E splat books will introduce balance and power creep.

To get a higher percentage of people to buy product, that product has to look cooler, better, easier, etc. than previous product.

I really do not see this as something altruistic that the designers tried to do for players of current PCs. They did it to sell product. And rightfully so, they have to survive in the market. DMs just have to take the brunt of managing it if it bothers them for their individual games, just like always.

 

[AngryPurpleCyclops]

Except we could argue that the same logic holds for the melee mastery feats. There are likely to be characters, archers for example, that might want to up their melee attack capability some to bring it more in line with the rest of the party for those cases where they really should draw a sword, or for some reason CANNOT attack with a bow.

The inverse is not true. Being weak at melee is not the same as being weak at ranged. You can always attack with a bow. You can move and attack with a bow in most cases. Melee types can be COMPLETELY prevented from attacking at all by a flying creature for instance. You're still plenty hosed in that you'll not get to use any of your powers because they're all melee powers but at last you have a chance to hit.

It gets more complicated as well when you factor in the new feat that lets you substitute a different stat as a primary attack stat. WotC seems to have come to the conclusion that they've undermined a lot of potential builds due to stat splitting and the attendant loss of flexibility that characters get. Now they seem to want to move in the direction of mitigating that, which is why I think bow mastery doesn't have prereqs.

could be but I think it's more likely to be by design, they probably realized that melee attackers are already very disadvantaged in a lot of encounters.

When you made a level 1 character using only the PHB, you knew which stats you needed at level 1 to be able to get axe mastery, or heavy blade mastery, etc. While Dex would be a given, there was no way to know what bow mastery would be.

have to agree with karinsdad, this seems very very unlikely. They're not designing the entire game system to handle where certain campaigns may or may not be. This isn't even on the table as a consideration for a serious developer.

In the case of the designers, I think it is pure marketing. Bigger, better, badder sells. It's as simple as that. Many of us have been discussing bigger, better, badder since the 2E days and nothing has changed. 2E splat books introduced balance and power creep, 3E splat books introduced balance and power creep, and 4E splat books will introduce balance and power creep.

agree here too though I don't think this feat is particularly unbalanced. In fact I think it's designed to prevent unbalancing by preventing it from adding to "real archers" advantage over "situational archers".

 

[KarinsDad]

have to agree with karinsdad

Get out of town! Are you feeling ok? Maybe something you ate.

 

[WalterKovacs]

They want to increase sales.

So, there are feats in the book that are useful to class/race combinations outside the book. Weapon/Implement Expertise is the most obvious example, but the bow mastery is another example. If nothing else, making it usable to characters that were created without knowing the prerequisites for it makes it more appealing to those players.

It doesn't have to be altruism. If you want to sell a few more books it's probably better to have powers you can use with the character you have, not the character you need to build to use them properly. The whole retraining concept seems to be built to make it easier to make use of new books because the new feats and new powers can be introduced as soon as you level. Having the new feats not require you to plan out your stat/feat matrix from level 1 just helps in terms of making the feats immediately useful.

 

[KarinsDad]

The whole retraining concept seems to be built to make it easier to make use of new books because the new feats and new powers can be introduced as soon as you level. Having the new feats not require you to plan out your stat/feat matrix from level 1 just helps in terms of making the feats immediately useful.

Seriously WK, the concept to take away prereqs to allow current PCs to take the feats without changing stats probably never entered their minds. You had to have an epiphany for it to enter your mind. I do not think they are making game mechanics decisions to placate players of current PCs. Instead, I think they just screwed up and did not follow their original design guidelines. I write software for a living and I see it all of the time. People write code that works, but it doesn't follow the original design goals and eventually the code gets harder to maintain because not every person working on a project does the extra due diligence required to do it correctly (BRV is a prime example where minions were never considered when those rules were written). Good enough really is good enough for most people in their jobs. Why would WotC designers be any different than a significant percentage of other employees in other fields? I wouldn't be surprised if some of these new "features" aren't errataed in the future. PHB II is not even on the shelves yet and people are finding other questionable design decisions within it, not just feat prereq ones.

 

[WalterKovacs]

Seriously WK, the concept to take away prereqs to allow current PCs to take the feats without changing stats probably never entered their minds.

Honestly? That seems a bit hyperbolic. They never said, while designing the feat with something like 21 DEX and say ... 17 WIS "hey, would anyone even take this?"

They likely never heard a single person talk about how you need to figure out every stat dependent feat you want before hand when you intially build your character and plan your stat bumps accordingly.

You had to have an epiphany for it to enter your mind.

That epiphany involved me playing the game instead of just talking about it. When I sat down to play the game I remembered that, your stats, which you can't retrain, determines what feats you are allowed to have. It wasn't so much an epiphany as something I wasn't thinking about as I wasn't building a character/levelling a character at the time.

I do not think they are making game mechanics decisions to placate players of current PCs. Instead, I think they just screwed up and did not follow their original design guidelines.

The original design guidelines that themselves had a number of screw ups like the stealth rules, skill challenges, Non AC defenses that required feat patching, attack progression tha required feat patching, and controllers that didn't know what controllers were?

I write software for a living and I see it all of the time. People write code that works, but it doesn't follow the original design goals and eventually the code gets harder to maintain because not every person working on a project does the extra due diligence required to do it correctly (BRV is a prime example where minions were never considered when those rules were written). Good enough really is good enough for most people in their jobs. Why would WotC designers be any different than a significant percentage of other employees in other fields? I wouldn't be surprised if some of these new "features" aren't errataed in the future. PHB II is not even on the shelves yet and people are finding other questionable design decisions within it, not just feat prereq ones.

Of course by 'correctly' you mean, the way the original design was done. However when the original design in this case was buggy and incomplete, it's hard to say that the PHB achieved the design goals. While it's possible that things like this are examples of something slipping through the cracks, it's also possible that this is something closer to the original design goals than the rest.

Or it actually is good enough, and they won't bother errata'ing bow mastery or the other mastery's because it isn't an issue so great as to cause problems of imbalance or disrupting the design goals of the game.

There may be mistakes elsewhere (the fact that they didn't avoid issues like khopesh's doubling up on expertise is a glaing one) but that doesn't necessarily mean that bow mastery is one of them.

 

[cmbarona]

Honestly, the lack of prereqs could be due to any combination of these.

The real question is where to go from here. I'm more and more in favor of retroactively updating the PHB based on stuff in the PHB 2. I'd prefer to see stat prereqs removed for the PHB mastery feats.