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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AngryPurpleCyclops" data-source="post: 4721007" data-attributes="member: 82732">No weapon ever gets much play on a battlefield unless there is an advantage granted by that weapon.  Reach weapons had two advantages, striking before the opponent was in range and allowing relatively unskilled and untrained soldiers to kill people with higher skill levels before they could close and take advantage of their superior training. Roman legions/greek phalanx had high levels of training and thus they relied on thrown weapons for softening the target and ubiquitous shield wall for preventing the majority of enemy counter attacks.  Unit cohesion and tactics trump individual fighting styles and weapons.  The average German barbarian was 50-70lbs heavier than a roman legionnaire.  They were extremely formidable opponents in single combat and much more than a match for a single roman and yet they regularly had engagements where the barbarians outnumbered the romans by between and 2 and 10 to 1 odds and the romans still prevailed.  The roman shield is very unwieldy in single combat and yet amazingly effective en mass.  The gladius is probably a disadvantage in single combat but uniquely well suited for reaching around, under or over a shield wall.Drittz sells.  Twin strike is broken adding double attacks to rogues won't fix this but are you arguing the rogues are underpowered?If you allow this, you'll break the rogue and obsolete warlocks to some degree.  Why can't a warlock make an eldritch blast attack with each hand then?  If you make sneak damage only applicable to the first attack this would be a lot better. Along those lines making HQ only available on the first attack would help tone down the problems with twin strike. You're assuming he's jumping on someones back every time he uses the power.  The idea of making two attacks in the same time span others make one attack by default means each attack has less time and therefore is less accurate/effective.  Probably no bonus damage from sneak should be applied.  If your intent is to make your player happy and make the rogue more powerful, you can do what ever you like but don't believe you're making the game more balanced.Don't look at the best case scenario, start looking at worst case when the bonuses get higher the problem becomes worse.  People will seek to take advantage of the loophole. increasing the chance of getting bonus 5d8dmg every round is bad.It's all relative.  You can make a situational argument for any weapon/defense being better.  Shields can be quite effective but they have a cost that's under represented in dnd as well.  Carrying a shield large/heavy enough to be a serious defense to bows is very costly in terms of endurance and speed.this is one such example. The niches are going to get blurred over time as splat books keep offering more options(new classes and powers guarantee some overlap).  Balance is the more pressing concern IMHO.  Rogues have a high dpr already.  Making it higher is probably not a great idea.lets not forget that SA scales to 5d8 and HQ stops at 3d8, rogues out pace all other PHB1 strikers in damage potential and the dagger proficiency advantage already gives them potentially the best chance to hitSneak has some advantages that HQ doesn't.  Rogue have more choice of who to put their sneak damage on than rangers do. Rangers by default must target the closest foe, if this is a minion then HQ is wasted.  If it's a less valuable target than a back line controller HQ is also made less valuable.  HQ also does less damage so making it situationally better makes sense.  All in all they're not horribly imbalanced with each other though twin strike hurts game balance probably.Right.Right.Good stuff, it's the multiplicative factor that often unbalances things in dnd.  Taken out of context there are things that aren't that bad but when combined in an optimized manner things can spiral into broken.lolThis is mistaken.  The staff power has decreasing marginal utility for additional con bonuses not increasing.  Since you can only apply it to one attack per encounter once you reach a point where the odds are pretty good you'll block an attack you get a much lower return on investment by increasing it's range(the marginal utility of con bonus heads towards ZERO).  You might get to be more selective in it's application but if you face an average of 10 attacks in an encounter and it gives +1 to defense you have about an 40% chance of getting to use it.  If the bonus is +2 this climbs to 65%(delta  25%) and if the bonus is +3 the utility is about 80%(delta = 15%) but if you increase to +4 it only goes up to 89% for a marginal utulity increase of only 9%.  94% at +5 and 97% at +6.  This means that after +4 or 5 you have almost no increased utility.  Orb also has a  decreasing marginal utility and despite what orbizard fanatics will have you believe it does not gain a massive utility increase when you reach lockdown in epic.  First the chance that +1 bonus on orb will actually impact any roll is exactly 5%.  Most monsters under the effect of a crushing status will either save or die in about 3 rounds on average.  At heroic and paragon this works out to be about 1 encounter in 7 that a creature with an effect will continue to have the effect because of a single plus 1.  If the creature makes it's first save the effect of orb is zero, if it fails 3 times but all rolls are under 10 the effect of orb is zero, it's only when you get rolls exactly in the orb range that you gain any benefit from orb.  I'm not even discounting for the encounters that you fail to land a status effect on a creature.  Bottom line, getting to plus 3 on the staff seems pretty cost effective but going past that is probably less effective than making your orb power more beneficial.  Orb prior to paragon is a lot less beneficial than staff (the +1 to AC coupled with the interrupt power will likely be useful about 5-10 times more often than the orb power.  So the optimal wizard build will take staff then orb.  (wand has a lot of negatives compared to the other two but that's fodder for a different thread.) I can explain the math of both in greater detail if needed but we're headed down a tangent.the end result of this of all this is that the only way to gain an exponential benefit is in an encounter where both orb and staff get used to good effect.  I agree it has great utility I disagree that you will see significant improvement in this effect beyond a certain point. This is a fallacy.  There's two flaw in the argument.  First how long is long enough on maintaining a lockdown effect?  One of the orb arguments is that getting a perma lockdown on a solo has huge value.  If you lock it down for 3-5 rounds it's probably dead or it's encounter utility is crippled by the fact that the rest of the monsters are likely dead or severely impaired.  Second, once again the marginal utility of each round of lockdown decreases unless you try and factor in a hold that exceeds the encounter.no where does it say that staff must be wielded in a two hands as an implement.  staff crushes wand by an order of magnitude in utility.  staff can have multiple impacts per encounter.  The incremental gains of each +1 on orb are VERY small, the incremental gains on wand are linear and VERY OFTEN USELESS.  Wand is not applied after the roll like staff which makes it's utility linear and relatively small.   Orb often has NO effect on any saves in an encounter.  It's only utility is in the exact range it covers.  So if the save would have already failed it has zero effect and if the save makes it by more than the range it has zero effect.  There are a lot of variables that need to be factored in to really analyze these utilities but wand is seriously flawed with respect to the other two.  Wand used after the roll would be roughly equal to staff.  Before the roll is crippling when compared to the other 2.  You're arguing about a build you like but not arguing inline with the actual math.terrible at control or terrible at damage?  being able to remain at range and select any 9 square block in a 484 square area is a lot  better than any 9 squares in a 49 square area.  Moving to get twave into a place of action can put the wizard in harms way.  If you're immobilized or dazed twave's utility can easily drop to zero when scorching still has it's full utility.  I'm not arguing twave is bad, I'm not even arguing that scorching is better I am however arguing that twave is not "ESSENTIAL" to all wizards.we're no longer comparing scorching to t-wave.  Most players are playing below paragon and at-wills have decreasing utility with increase in level because more dailies and more encounters mean less uses of at-wills.  Ray of frost with two feats has arguably a better effect.  You're also not only counting on 3 feats but 4-5 pumps or an initial stat build that hurts the pc in other ways.  It's a good thing that reaching this is costly since it is a powerful at will, how is this broken?  Why would we seek to make a very strong effect more powerful.Clearly the push intent is to move away from the direction of the force.  It should be errata'd to be from origin but logically a lot of people surely house rule this.  Committing to 4 feats, 18 wisdom, 15 dex for a wizard is not cheap.   nor does you applying a host of associated costs to the build in order to get a marginally better power.  It still will not yield anywhere near the damage of scorching over the life of the pc.  Nor will it clear as many minions.  Your argument is really poor.  Orb wizards are focusing on control so they should see a beneficial impact of pumping wisdom. Once again my eladrin staff wizard can use orb/reach to great effect.  The increasing range of the move with wisdom is a good thing. I don't feel crippled that my slide is only 2, that's a cost I accept to have a better staff.  You're basically saying lets have no secondary stat on orb.  The idea is that there are different builds not that they're all the same.  The secondary bonuses for wizards being spread among other stats is good.Total concealment is only -2 at range 1. (pg 281 of dmg) How many encounter per day will have a significant ranged combat portion?  How many other dailies need the use of your minor?  Is wall better than sphere?  If you're 9th level and above you might have 3 or 4 sustainable powers that do damage, how often will wall of fog be of use then?  dimension door is likely to be useful as often as wall of fog and it doesn't need a minor.  Levitate, dispel, disguise self all have significant effects on the game.  Invisibility is a little to limited for my tastes because the range is terrible and the duration sort of worthless.  I like wall of fog I just don't think it's as good as you're making it out to be unless you're facing archery encounter after archery encounter.   Why?  Pushing 2 is just as good as pushing 4 most of the time.  I totally understand that +4 is better but that's a cost of other choices you make.  You seem to be making the emotional "I want my wizard to have it all with no opportunity costs" argument.  DnD character building is all about opportunity costs.  Arguing that t-wave is mandatory for optimal build wizards is a ludicrous.  It's not even in the top 5 powers in heroic.  It's a very good power, lots of wizards will get high utility from it, but having 1 less square of push is not "critical" and even not using the power at all is not a detriment to many builds.  My build focuses on lots of ongoing damage, destruction of minions and high AC to support the rogue in melee for CA opportunities and to get between the zap cleric and powerful melee types.  I'm not a twave hater and many times I wish I had it, but my dm has monster leaders run away when the battle turns against them so having ray often helps me catch them and scorching does a lot more damage than wave.still only -2 from adjacent.There's a lot of anecdotal evidence in this.  There are many many instances where reach weapons did dominate and comparing weapons vs roman legions is not a good metric for DnD.   also depends on if you'll be facing one attacker or many and the type of weapons they are employing. great points.The power of the laminated recurved bow made both shields and armor nearly worthless. Nor do they need to be.  DnD combat is an abstraction at best.  Since having death possible on any roll is bad for a RPG (the painful end of many role master characters will attest to this).  It's hard to even argue about "realism" when we're using hit points and not tracking hit location.</blockquote>

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