This is all coming down to my intense dislike of prejudging things broken. DM's who have Word documents detailing rules, powers, classes, and feats that they have 'altered' without ever seeing them in action. I believe in giving your players the benefit of the doubt. I think that in most cases this PP will be taken by a Melee Paladin. They are Weapon keyword powers, after all.
If players were perfectly amenable to altering options that they have been using in play, "trying things out" would be easier to do. I've seen some horrendously overpowered characters in non-4e games, who were recognized as such by the group, presumably because the discord that would be created by forcibly returning the character to a reasonable power level would be too severe.
WotC has issued a lot of errata for 4e and much of it has lined up on the same problematic issues identified by DMs already. That, say, Bloodclaw Weapons haven't been errata'd yet (it seems likely they will be in the future) is no reason to let them run rampant in the meantime. Individual DMs can and I'm sure some do go overboard on this stuff, but there are good reasons to spell this out in advance.
And regarding solos. DMG Guidelines suggest giving solos multiple opportunities to act, and creating situations where they get actions above and beyond 1 standard, move, and minor. All of the Solos that I have encountered have had multiple methods of applying status effects that would invalidate this mark. Forced movement, stuns/dazes or the prone condition. Again, this might not be the case in 100% of the Solo statblocks, but it is my experience that this is a general rule.
Forced movement isn't going to invalidate the mark on its own; forced movement will leave a solo monster close enough to be within javelin range. Prone won't really do the trick either; the Paladin can still pull out a Javelin- it's inconvenient to do so while prone, but maintaining Dazed + Weakened on a solo is clearly worth it. Looking at MM1 solos in the 11-15 range, the Hydra can't do anything of note about it, but it's a terribly designed solo so it's not a great example. The Dragons in that range have Fearful Presence and maybe one other ability that can negate it. Fearful Presence is an encounter power, though, and using it to defend against Certain Justice requires saving it for that occurrence.
If you can alter the way you run a game significantly, so that a potential problem issue goes away, that
doesn't mean that the issue isn't a problem. For example, someone who lives near an airport may spend money sound-proofing his house. Let's say he does so and the airplane noise becomes imperceptible. It doesn't follow that the noise from airplanes isn't a problem- he had to spend money, which he wouldn't have had to spend if the airplane noise wasn't present, to address the issue.
Analogously, altering the way you run a game significantly is a cost in and of itself. I'd say that having the dragon save Fearful Presence to try to escape from Certain Justice is rather significant, given that it involves the GM metagaming his major villain's actions to precise knowledge of how his character's powers, which haven't even been used yet in he encounter, operate (and if Fearful Presence fails, many dragons have no solution besides flying >20 squares away).
To sum up:
- I agree that it could be misused.
- I would like to give players the benefit of the doubt.
- Most Solos can handle themselves.
- Megaoverpowered is overstating things.
Jay
If you have players who take in on themselves to avoid balance problems, game balance issues would be much less severe in general. I'm not so pessimistic to think that this applies to only a tiny minority of players, but I'm not so optimistic to think it's an overwhelming majority either.
