Excerpt: Multiclassing (merged)

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Yep 1/encounter you can throw a little magic missile that does less damage than your weapon (because your int is lower) and has a lower chance to hit (because your int is lower).

Oh yeah, really feeling the fighter/wizard in this version

Why do you want to play a Fighter/Wizard and still choose a low INT? Pick a reasonable INT, get a free magic missile per encounter with your Arcana skill training, and then you'll take the later feats to really get some magic in your sword-fighting.

As for the novice/acolyte thing, I can understand that WOTC was concerned about cross class synergies, so they made a feat the cost of branching into other power trees. What I don't understand is why they though it needed to be 3 feats to get 3 powers. How about 1 feat to get access to all 3? You still have to be high level, you still have to give up your regular powers, unless you multiclassed just right you'll likely have a weaker ability score for those powers, and you still paid a feat. Seems like a much more reasonable tradeoff to me.

I am not sure why it had to be 3 feats, either. It might have to do with the generally lower power of feats.

Since retraining is included per default, and also a lot more flexible then the 3E PHB II, this also sheds an interesting light on feats. You will exchange feats that turned out to be unsuited by default, and you can eventually replace Heroic Tier feats with Paragon Tier feats.

 

[Ximenes088]

Yep 1/encounter you can throw a little magic missile that does less damage than your weapon (because your int is lower) and has a lower chance to hit (because your int is lower).

What fighter's going to multiclass for something he can do better by throwing an axe? He'll take Fireblast for his per-encounter and suddenly get a minion-killing AoE effect.

 

[Green Knight]

What fighter's going to multiclass for something he can do better by throwing an axe? He'll take Fireblast for his per-encounter and suddenly get a minion-killing AoE effect.

Is Eldritch Blast a choice for Pact Initiate? If so, a Fighter could get himself a nice 1d10 ranged damage Encounter Power.

 

[DonAdam]

Surely a fighter/wizard would have a decent Int. Especially since it can sub for a good Dex now. And don't forget that trained Arcana probably includes various functions like detect/read magic and the like. As was said above, take the AoE spell rather than magic missile.

So for 1 feat, seems pretty good.

I hope you can take an array of cantrips instead of just one spell.

The giving up a feat for swapping makes intuitive sense to me. If powers were designed to be mixed and matched willy nilly, why bother having multiple classes in the first place?

The only thing that worries me so far is the 2-weapon fighting concern. It shouldn't require being a ranger.

 

[Plane Sailing]

I quite like the way this is presented, but I'd love to know the reasoning behind certain decisions.

For instance

- why are gaining powers from a different class so expensive? You've already spent a feat to multiclass, why additional feats to swap one of your perfectly good powers for one of those perfectly good powers?

- why the apparent difference in what is gained from multiclass feats, as in some of them give an at-will power as a per encounter power, others give a per encounter power as a per day power, and the wizard one seems rather open-ended as it doesn't specify what kind of power you get (at will or per encounter). I could guess at-will but...

- what happens if a fighter or rogue or whatever wants to be a two weapon fighting character - how does that work (maybe there is a feat for it?)

Cheers

 

[neceros]

I'm not sure if two weapon fighting requires being a ranger. I just believe the ranger is more adept at it.

 

[One Horse town]

And losing 1-3 feats in the process.

Nor necessarily. I presume that you could decide to re-train the Novice feat to acolyte at 8th level or above, thus upgrading the power you can utilise. That could mean (depending on how re-training works), that you gain a power that can be used more often, for just the intitial 1 feat instead of spending 2 feats to get 2 abilities. It's a choice to make, if indeed re-training works like that. The same with the adept feat. Maybe you can re-train up to that at 12th or above. So you get just 1 (good) ability for the expenditure of 1 feat. You won't be as effective as you would if you spent 3 feats, but you only spent 1 feat, so it's a trade off on how much you want to multi-class.

This all hinges on how re-training works, however.

 

[Graf]

Well, there's a lot of fancy talk there about kicking system mastery in the teeth and making any combination work equally well, but it doesn't look likely to work out that way.

Take the Student of the Sword feat, for instance. If there are a limited number of attack bonus boosting feats--even if many of them are better than Student of the Sword, it's still an obvious power choice for a warrior type. And no matter how often the designers pretend that healing word 1/day is as good as +1 to hit, there are a lot of characters for whom the +1 to hit is going to be a lot better. (Marking, etc, we'll wait and see on, but +1 to hit is an obvious and obviously useful benefit).

I like the way you're trying to analyze but I think there are some other ways to look at it...

What's wrong with having the "weapon focus" of the game be "you have fighter training"? Sure it may be a bit better than another featon the "must take list" but 1) it makes sense that if you're studying everything about fighting you study fighting with fighters 2) it prevents other-multiclassing (a disadvantage -- again you spend all your time practicing poking things with long pointy things you don't have time to learn other classes).

Also, healing word triggers someone elses healing surge. That's a useful power at epic levels. Not bad for a 1st level feat. Heck, the power could be called "you get an extra healing surge as a minor action" which is the dwarf power.

Conversely, the power trading feats have a long road to hoe in order to avoid being traps for the unwary. If they work as described in the article, a character who takes a power trading feat gives up a feat and a power to get a power that wouldn't normally be available to him. Now, if everything works as advertised and all powers are equal (no really, I'm trying to be serious here, WotC designers said it, it must be so), then the character who sticks with his ordinary class powers gets a feat and a power but the character who wants to trade simply ends up short a feat in comparison. What is most likely to happen is that there will be a couple powers that are significantly better than other powers (at least for certain types of characters) and that characters who use the power trading feats to gain those powers will be somewhat stronger than they would without the power trading feat. At the same time, players who make more suspect choices will end up with a power that doesn't really help them do anything that needs doing and will have wasted a feat for the privilige of gimping their character like that.

Obviously some powers will be sub optimal for certain characters. That's why you get to swap again, for free every level. So someone could pick a flavorful power that doesn't work well, have the character learn from the experience and go pick something more useful.

I know that FL has been mentioning the pay twice thing, I may just be being contrary but there are really only two ways to balance the system.

1. Balance toward the middle (so even a fighter with 13 int benefits significantly from getting magic missile)
2. Balance toward the high end (so a tactical warlord with 20 int doesn't benefit too much from taking RoF (or whatever the best wizard power is)

You can't really have a system that allows both of these things and also where stat choices matter.
3.5 swung wildly around gimping most combinations in an (ultimately failed) attempt to cut the power of the extremity.

And the power gap between of the extremity and "normal" (or, god forbid, core-only) characters was/is vast.
Ultimately I think they have to expect that people will optimize and eye the upper rung carefully. One of the best ways to limit that is a "pay to play" system where you give up some awesomeness from your class to get access to another.

 

[Fallen Seraph]

I'm not sure if two weapon fighting requires being a ranger. I just believe the ranger is more adept at it.

*Nods* I agree, I am thinking perhaps since one of the Class Features of the Ranger was: Fighting Style, why couldn't other classes use the same list of Fighting Styles, just the Ranger has the Build that gives bonuses to two weapon fighting.

 

[malcolm_n]

"Any time you gain a level, you can alter that decision. Effectively, pretend you’re choosing the power-swap feat for the first time at the new level you’ve just gained. You gain back the power that you gave up originally from your primary class, lose the power that you chose from your second class, and make the trade again. "

So at 4th, I can get my encounter power and if i don't like it i'll trade out for another at 5th. When I get a brand new encounter power, I could trade out my 4th level power and get that one while getting back my fighter ability.

At 30th level, paragon aside, I'll have a max level Wizard encounter, daily and utility power; and I'm a rogue... Rawr. and i still get the next lowest level of rogue powers to keep me okay.

To answer a question of conan earlier; yes, we can make conan. Having read many of the books, I'd place him as a barbarian with MC Rogue, at least early on. In his later years, he was more like a fighter/rogue, which would easily explain the ability to retrain.