Charge! Should I be worried about this druid?

[Iron Sky]

Based on personal experience, I'd say the charge druid is a valuable member of the melee part of the group (with the option to pick up a few controller powers to use from range). In our game, our druid was too good at charging and had way too much mobility for his own good.

He charged ahead with his 11 speed into the midst of a group of abyssal rifts that were leaking demons two turns before the rest of the party could get two him and died alone.

If he plays smart, then I second what Primitive Screwhead have said.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I'd be suspicious of anyone coming to me with an 'item build.' How effective a character is, and what it's good for/at shouldn't be quite that dependent on the items he happens to have. And, magic items are one of the few areas in 4e where 'power creep' and 'broken' combos are starting to show up. In the normal course of play, the DM decides what items are found treasure, what items can be bought, and when. Thus, you can simply choose not to give out a bunch of stacking items, but rather pick and choose those that you think would be apropriate or interesting without causing any problems in your campaign. When you bring in a character generated at a higher level, you get to choose items, and that's something you should watch. At minimum, I'd be prefer to limit a new character to PH items, only, and maybe not even all of them.

 

[Starfox]

- Claw Gloves (+1d10 vs CA, which is easy if he charges into a flanking position w/ 2 other melee fighters in the party)

Remember, a charge has to end in the first square from which you can attack. I don't think it is at all easy to charge into a flanking position unless the other players really work to set this up - in which case it is them as much as him achieving this. And 4E is supposed to be about this kind of group-cooperative play.

I'd be suspicious of anyone coming to me with an 'item build.' How effective a character is, and what it's good for/at shouldn't be quite that dependent on the items he happens to have. And, magic items are one of the few areas in 4e where 'power creep' and 'broken' combos are starting to show up. In the normal course of play, the DM decides what items are found treasure, what items can be bought, and when. Thus, you can simply choose not to give out a bunch of stacking items, but rather pick and choose those that you think would be apropriate or interesting without causing any problems in your campaign. When you bring in a character generated at a higher level, you get to choose items, and that's something you should watch. At minimum, I'd be prefer to limit a new character to PH items, only, and maybe not even all of them.

I see this the other way - items in 4E are ultra-specific, and very, very many builds - in fact most - depend on a specific set of items to work. Thus we get wish lists and such. Denying a player the magic items his build is centered around nerfs many, many concepts.

 

[Saeviomagy]

23.5 damage on a charge WITH CA is not a great amount of damage. A rogue gets that average with just CA, and he's a lot better at getting it.

That said, I'd disallow the claw gloves as written, purely because they don't limit the bonus to 1/round, which means in future there are some nasty multi-hit combos that they make possible.

 

[Walking Dad]

Looks like he wants to play a striker and not a controller... anytime he plays as 'striker light' he will not do much controlling, so this seems right.

 

[Undrhil]

If he starts really playing this character and realizes that he doesn't like being up close and personal to the people he's charging, he may try to purchase a set of Boots of Adept Charging. These boots have a property which allow you to shift 1 square after charging before your turn ends.

And that's another thing: remember that when a character charges, once that charge is resolved, their turn is over (unless they spend an action point.) So, that might discourage him from charging too often.

My Minotaur Avenger loves charging. Thanks to Power of Skill, he can use Overwhelming Strike as a MBA *and* he has those boots. So, on a successful hit on a charge, I can shift 1 square, pull the enemy 1 square into the square I vacated and then shift 1 square thanks to the boots. Very nice for getting the baddies where I want them to be. And, of course, if they move up, I just repeat on the next turn without the extra 1 sqaure shift from the boots.

 

[DracoSuave]

OH NOES A PREDATOR DRUID BASED AROUND HIS BEAST FORM DOES DAMAGE STOP THE PRESSES THIS IS BROKEN


Wait.

No, that's a secondary striker working as intended.

Move along.

 

[eamon]

There's two things at play here:

1. It's nice to avoid interfering with PC builds. It's a lot more fun to build a PC if you don't have to second guess whether the DM is going to subtly nerf you by not giving you the items your build needs. It also saves the DM time - and, for that matter, makes DM-ing a little more exciting, just because you don't always know exactly what your PC's are going to do.
2. Giving the PC's free reign requires a bit of trust, and group cooperation. This druid is definitely not game-breaking - unless your game involves PCs built to an entirely different standard. If that's the case, your problem isn't the power-level of the druid, it's group balance. That can happen - but if that's an issue, it may be easier to address that head-on, rather than on an ultra-specific level. It shouldn't matter whether someone builds a striker with a controller class, what matters is that everyone in the group is playing the same game.

Really, this is one of the overwhelming strengths of 4e: even the unbalanced stuff tends not to be game-breaking. In 3e, it was trivial to build cheese that would disrupt the game (even accidentally!) - in 4e, particularly in heroic tier, that's really very unlikely. Iron Armbands & Reckless weapons are perhaps imbalanced items, which I'd nerf or ban. But I play in a game where the DM permits them - and although they make the game a little less fun (simply by reducing diversity), they don't cause any real problems. Some players don't have such items, and the game rolls on just fine.

So, I'd say, let the druid build his PC the way he wants to - and if balance problems arise, focus attention as much as possible not on specific build choices, but on overall power level. If optimization is his shtik, direct it in a direction that everyone can enjoy; generally, a leader is often a good role for such players to fill (really, any support role where they shine by letting others shine).

 

[DracoSuave]

Sounds to me like he wants to turn into a bear and charge people for teehee CARNAGEBEAR CARNAGE!


Sounds like he'd have a blast with this, and if he gets excited, that excitement will be contagious.

No one will care except Stop Having Fun Guy that he's not 'controlling' to the optimum. He's a druid, he's doing it right, and having fun doing it.

RAWRAWR should be the battlecry, not 'Hey, why aren't you flame seeding?'

 

[msherman]

Thanks for all the advise, everyone. We played our first session with the druid yesterday, and it seemed to work out really well. I haven't spoken to the player yet away from the table, but I think he had fun.

The claw gloves are gone from the build -- I don't know how they got onto my list, but I'm re-reading all the email I got from the player, and he never mentioned them. But since the PCs are already about to hit 7th, he'll be able to craft those himself soon enough, so I wouldn't be surprised to see them show up real soon. I might help out by giving them a fight with some Fey Panthers next time they pass through a forest.

He started with the totem and the badge, and I gave him the horned helm as treasure in the first fight -- there's a bard in the party who enjoys arcanotaxidermy, so he knew that if the fighter hit the Witherling Horned Horror just right with his Viscious Fullblade, he'd cleave the top of its skull off making a nice hat for the druid.

The party ended up taking more advantage of a choke point on the map than I thought they would, so the fight was a bit too constrained to allow many charges. I think the next fight next time we play will be on a more open map, so he should have more opportunities to really shine with this combo.

He ended up spending about half his time in each form, and got really good mileage out of both sides. There was one really tense part where he'd charged away from the bulk of the fight to go after a lone enemy, and then got bloodied and flanked (Gnaw Demon FTW!) and really scared. He got himself out of danger with the transform-and-shift/shift/chill wind combo, which was great.