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Displacement - a bit wussy eh? Mirror image too...

ferratus said:
I was as glad as anyone when Vancian casting was axed, but I have to admit I do like my wizard to carry around a spellbook. You could leave it for rituals I suppose...
As Dausuul said, they still prepare their Dailys, one would assume this involves a spellbook, although it will likely be one half empty spellbook as opposed to 15 full ones.
 

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Campbell said:
I just happen to find the latter more exciting than the former, and the designers of 4e apparently agree since they sacrificed elements of strategic play that have existed for a long time in order to ensure that tactical play was more exciting.

This presumes a motivation on the part of WotC that we have not been told. We know they wanted it to be a faster game, but less strategy more tactics might be a byproduct of how they designed rituals or something (e.g. long duration spells might now be rituals), not necessarily their primary motivating factor. We cannot really say without having sat in on the design meetings.

One thing that we have not seen so far which I will be a bit bummed if they have none of it is the Once Per Day or Once Per Encounter all encounter Buff. Sometimes, it is fun to buff yourself up mid-combat. There's a lot of one round type buffs that we have seen so far for 4E, the mechanics of which I find problematic at best (e.g. "I get +2 because of the Paladin." "No you don't, you got that last round and it ended" "No I didn't" "Yes you did, you just did not use it, you Second Winded instead" "Oh yeah").

With the sheer number of bonus abilities that last for a single turn, there will be confusion at some tables over it. I would have preferred more methods of giving an ally a buff for the rest of the encounter and fewer single round (or single attack) buffs (or penalties) where not only does it need to be kept track of (like a entire encounter buff), but when it ends also needs to be kept track of (which does not happen with an entire encounter buff and means more bookkeeping).

The amount of bookkeeping in the game due to Marks, Single Round Buffs, Synergies, Combat Advantage, Bloodied, Effects on various powers, etc. are going to become problematic for many tables, especially at higher levels.

One advantage of strategic over tactical is that it's easier to have bonuses written down ahead of time. By adding more short duration (i.e. one or few rounds) tactics to the game, it also added more in combat bookkeeping which will take some getting used to for many players.
 


If I would house rules those two spells with a minimum of changes in order to keep the 4e essence and power level, I'd do the following:

Displacement
Effect: The attacker must reroll the attack roll. The lower of the two rolls applies.
(it prevents the spell from giving another chance for your attacker to crit you)

MIrror Image
Effect: Three duplicate images of yourself appear in your space, and you gain a +6 power bonus to AC. Each time an attack roll misses you-by being higher than your unmodified AC but lower than yout new AC-or hits you, one of your duplicate images disappears and the bonus granted by this power decreases by 2.
(when you cast this spell, note down your new AC right next to your normal AC)
 


Majoru Oakheart said:
I just don't ever see a time in 4e where the wizard says "They are storing all the treasure in the vault in the middle of the castle? Yawn. I put up stone skin, improved invisibility, displacement, greater mage armor, shield, mirror image, energy immunity to all 5 energy types, and fly, then for the next couple of minutes virtually nothing can hurt me. I scry and telport into the vault with enough time to load the entire treasure into a portable hole and teleport out. If they have the vault warded against teleport somehow I'll just have to use passwalls, disintegrates, or dimension doors to get in."
Best feature of 4E.
 

ainatan said:
If I would house rules those two spells with a minimum of changes in order to keep the 4e essence and power level, I'd do the following:

Displacement
Effect: The attacker must reroll the attack roll. The lower of the two rolls applies.
(it prevents the spell from giving another chance for your attacker to crit you)

Meh. I think people are making far too much of this crit possibility. One time in twenty you'll get a really bad result. Big deal- that happens all the time, even in 3.5e. Ever have your fatespinner decide to reroll that Will save of 17 because the die roll was a 2 and he wanted to be ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that he passed the save, only to roll a 1 and later find out the DC was a 16?

Bad luck happens, even in real life. Things that are supposed to protect you sometimes wind up being the things that harm you. If you want to minimize this then hold displacement back for an honest-to-God emergency, like against a will attack that controls your character like Sleep (where a crit is meaningless) or against an actual Crit that has already been rolled.

MIrror Image
Effect: Three duplicate images of yourself appear in your space, and you gain a +6 power bonus to AC. Each time an attack roll misses you-by being higher than your unmodified AC but lower than yout new AC-or hits you, one of your duplicate images disappears and the bonus granted by this power decreases by 2.
(when you cast this spell, note down your new AC right next to your normal AC)

Far too fiddly. Even in 3.5e, the images had a dirt-poor AC that was trivial to hit by the time the wizard hit 5th level. I WOULD change this, because not protecting against reflex attacks makes no sense, but the rest of the spell sounds fine to me. Less powerful than 3.5e, yes, but that's not a reason to change it.
 

Puggins said:
Far too fiddly. Even in 3.5e, the images had a dirt-poor AC that was trivial to hit by the time the wizard hit 5th level. I WOULD change this, because not protecting against reflex attacks makes no sense, but the rest of the spell sounds fine to me. Less powerful than 3.5e, yes, but that's not a reason to change it.
The reflex thing has to interact well with both specifically targeted attacks, like the Rogue attack that is dex v reflex, but also with area of effects. I'm ok with Mirror Image not interacting with attacks against reflex because if it does interact with them, then logically an area of effect explosion should pop all your mirror images.
 

Cadfan said:
The reflex thing has to interact well with both specifically targeted attacks, like the Rogue attack that is dex v reflex, but also with area of effects. I'm ok with Mirror Image not interacting with attacks against reflex because if it does interact with them, then logically an area of effect explosion should pop all your mirror images.

That's why I said would change it, but didn't mention any specific change- I'd LOVE to find an elegant distinction to those two. The closest I have is "any reflex attack that targets a singe creature," which is passable, I suppose.
 

Dausuul said:
Not saying you're wrong, but what's the source for this?

The five-page rules glossover that came from the D&D Experience, which got released on the boards in early March. I had to go look at my downloaded copy myself to double check, but apparently this is different from 3e. I don't knwo where the link is, though.
 

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