did anyone try the heroes of shadow preview at PAX?

[Aegeri]

That's not how an executioner does good damage. They do good damage by hitting things with melee basic attacks mostly. Their at-wills are niche scenario powers that you use only every so often when they are relevant/useful. The executioner in my Dark Sun game does terrific damage and death strike has been consistently useful. I'd love to see the character to see what they did with it, because in my experience the executioner is really hard to make absolutely terrible. It's far and away better as an actual striker than the terrible oAssassin.

And durable on a fragile class, which is built on a race with an inherent -1 penalty to surges is not an illogical idea.

 

[Vael]

The Executioner, as it was printed in the December Dragon, was quite impressive. Daily poisons with non-combat utility, a very potent melee basic attack, with a single massive damage encounter power and a handful of situational, but interesting at-wills. We have a 16th level Executioner in our home campaign, and while he may not have a great variety in his powers, he's a straightforward and effective character that does his job.

 

[keterys]

I played the executioner at DDXP and it was quite decent, though its abilities were slightly scattered so simply missing the "deal an extra d8 damage with weapon attacks" might have totally misrepresented the class.

At that level, the 'kill anyone with 10 hp or less' ability is a very nice kicker, and the 1/enc 2d10 extra and... I want to say... _5_ poison uses... quite solid indeed.

I seem to recall dealing 2d4+1d8+bonuses damage every round (I was good at sneaking to get the garotte attacks in), while grabbing and silencing enemies, with an autohit followup attack if things actually lived that long. The highlight of the adventure for me was garotting an enemy and going -
IC: "If you wish to live, beg for mercy"
OOC to the DM: "By the way, this attack silences him."
Just a level of evil badassery I don't usually get to do on the PC side of things

 

[Mengu]

A body of mine was there and played the blackguard.

I wish I had a lot of spare bodies like that to send to conventions. How do you manage? Cloning? Hypnosis? Psychotelepathic projection?

 

[gyor]

I wish I had a lot of spare bodies like that to send to conventions. How do you manage? Cloning? Hypnosis? Psychotelepathic projection?

Hahaha I sure he meant buddy. Still it would be cool if he could do that. The possiblities...

 

[Dice4Hire]

I wish I had a lot of spare bodies like that to send to conventions. How do you manage? Cloning? Hypnosis? Psychotelepathic projection?

Actually, he sent your body. Weird, huh?

 

[Neverfate]

I played the executioner at DDXP and it was quite decent, though its abilities were slightly scattered so simply missing the "deal an extra d8 damage with weapon attacks" might have totally misrepresented the class.

At that level, the 'kill anyone with 10 hp or less' ability is a very nice kicker, and the 1/enc 2d10 extra and... I want to say... _5_ poison uses... quite solid indeed.

I seem to recall dealing 2d4+1d8+bonuses damage every round (I was good at sneaking to get the garotte attacks in), while grabbing and silencing enemies, with an autohit followup attack if things actually lived that long. The highlight of the adventure for me was garotting an enemy and going -
IC: "If you wish to live, beg for mercy"
OOC to the DM: "By the way, this attack silences him."
Just a level of evil badassery I don't usually get to do on the PC side of things

Unfortunately this sounds exactly like the class presented in Dragon magazine a few months ago. I say unfortunately because it can't come close to the damage output of the thief, or most other Essentials strikers.

The only interesting thing is the out-of-combat poisons (the in combat uses add very little to their overall damage output). Which I got to use 0 times in LFR.... The rest of the class was a poor-man's thief at best (you ended up multi-ing into rogue for feat support anyway).

Also, this more or less means "exclusive" Dragon content is being reprinted almost exactly to fill books (at least add something, like they treat all weapon die as 1-die-size larger or ANYTHING that will let them assassinate things in combat), so I'm sure that will make plenty of people grumpy (and DDI subscribers are plenty grumpy as is).

Maybe they'll get exclusive feat support. . .

 

[Neverfate]

I wish I had a lot of spare bodies like that to send to conventions. How do you manage? Cloning? Hypnosis? Psychotelepathic projection?

I'ma 7th level battlemind to be precise. Body Double. Quite handy.

 

[gyor]

I had some cool new powers, I'll try and get a scan up for the character sheets in a little bit. I'm not sure how good the pregens were made, my wizard had Improved Initiative and Durable as feats. So... Ugh.

The Drow Assassin didn't really seem to have ability to do much damage. It looked like doing the garrote attack, and sustaining it was doing the most damage.

Thank you. Getting scans of the characters would be cool.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

I wish I had a lot of spare bodies like that to send to conventions. How do you manage? Cloning? Hypnosis? Psychotelepathic projection?

And i held exactly that commentary back for more than one day... shame on you to pick on him like that...