Heroes of Shadow Table of Contents

[Aegeri]

Getting -1 surge, arguably one of the worst racial powers in the game and getting a redundant skill that most of the classes it is good for are getting anyway, makes it an exceptionally poor choice. -1 surge can be argued to not be that significant - though potential healing wise it definitely can be when you consider many strikers are not exactly filled with surges - but what is significant is that it's the only race in the game with an inherent built in penalty. That in itself makes it exceptional and IMO bad design from the outset.

I really hope racial penalties are not common in the races in this book. They are one thing 4E made go out the door with the dodo and their return is a really bad sign.

 

[Incenjucar]

The surge is a meaningless sacrifice. Hopefully what Klaus did with the race makes up for them starting off with a limp, but they're always going to have that limp.

 

[Colmarr]

I wasn't aware that anyone was saying pps and eds were a failure, they seem universal popular concepts.

Ditto.

Were you being tongue-in-cheek Abdul, or is there an anonymous but growing underclass somewhere clamouring for PPs and EDs to be jettisoned?

 

[Aegeri]

I think he probably reads too much of the official forums where that sort of thing comes up (albeit I haven't seen it directly). But I am convinced on the official forums if you claimed your favourite color was blue, you could make a 90 page thread of people arguing purple was superior.

 

[Dice4Hire]

I think he probably reads too much of the official forums where that sort of thing comes up (albeit I haven't seen it directly). But I am convinced on the official forums if you claimed your favourite color was blue, you could make a 90 page thread of people arguing purple was superior.

Only the official forum? BTW, hot pink is sub-optimal.

 

[gyor]

The shade, as previewed, changed a bit from the original thing. When I was assigned to it, the -1 surge was already in place. I was handed the "gray box" and the first paragraph of the description... I changed the racial power to what was previewed and added the description, roleplaying, racial utilities, etc. I think the surge hit worked better in the original thing, but it's not really a dealbreaker. I think the penalty reinforces a certain way to play a shade, which is a race that works best in a more subtle type of campaign where combat is more infrequent.

Thank you for answering. I don't think the lost surge really cripples it at all, I'm surprised that with things like that character op boards that you guys didn't see the dissatifacation that the op crowd would have for it. That being said I personally feel that the shades racial utilities are like a free mullticlass that doesn't take up your multiclass slot or feats so if you have to take one feat to get your surge back big deal.

As for the racial power standard action question clearly it meant to be primarily a non combat power with situational combat uses such as retreating. In fact a party of Shades coud be very interesting. Makes me think of spectural panthers strageties.

My thinking is like changelings Shades will be most effective in a party of thier own kind where you can use thier non combat abilities to change that nature of battles. The irony of shades to is that they excell not in improving sneaky classes but in making none sneaky classes sneaky such as a shade cavalier or wizards.

I'm excited about the release of the book. I wonder fluff wise how your going to keep vrylokas and vamps seperate. My guess is by using thier greek origin of vrylokas as opposed to a bram stroker hollywood flavour for vamps. Plus as the Vrylokas are a race they will have thier own culture perhaps with greek influences.

 

[Aegeri]

As for the racial power standard action question clearly it meant to be primarily a non combat power with situational combat uses such as retreating.

Nobody has given me a single situation this power is superior to just being trained in stealth outside of combat for far - especially considering just how friendly the current stealth rules *actually* for a PC to gain stealth by a reasonable DM. It really does not have any actual benefit outside of combat than what anyone already trained in stealth could do (sometimes for free as a part of doing whatever else they do). Bearing in mind a background makes gaining stealth inherently simple no matter what class you play as.

The irony of shades to is that they excell not in improving sneaky classes but in making none sneaky classes sneaky such as a shade cavalier or wizards.

They don't really benefit a wizard that much, who can stand back and gain total cover/conealment in other more action efficient ways. In addition to this your controller and defender - absolutely 100% key roles in the party wasting an entire round just to become hidden is a genuine waste of their actions. There are so few scenarios this is ever worthwhile that I can say it's practically useless. Noting that becoming hidden is NOT worthless - it's absolutely fantastic - but needing to take such a massive action sink to do so *is* what makes it useless in this scenario.

The point is even these classes can access far superior options that will be more useful more of the time - they don't take the larger cost of their race to do so. Instead only sacrificing something with a very low cost, like a background.

 

[Jhaelen]

Looks like they already released Heroes of Shadow for classic 4th edition classes, am I right?

Open Grave is a book for DMs. Heroes of Shadow is a book for players.

I don't quite get why everyone ganged up on WalkingDad. Everything he wrote was correct (as far as anyone can currently tell):
There is every indication that someone using Essentials classes in their game will be able to make use of 100% of the material in the book and someone not using Essentials classes will not be able to use 100% of the material.

Or does anyone disagreee about that?!

Now, of course this doesn't mean you'd actually _want_ to use all of the material or that you'd absolutely have be able to use all of the material. But that wasn't the point.

As I mentioned in a previous post, deciding to buy or not to buy the book depends on how much of the material is going to be of actual use to _me_. And that is something everyone will have to determine for themselves, regardless if you're using Essentials builds or not.

I mean, I've bought the PHB3, so I could theoretically use 100% of the included material. After reading it I found that I didn't care all that much about psionic classes (except for the monk) and didn't care about Hybrid rules. So, a huge chunk of the book turned out to be useless to me.

 

[Nullzone]

Material that you may not use personally for your characters does as much to at least educate you on how it's used so you can best integrate with players who use those builds as you play. It's shortsighted to just treat the entire section as dead weight, especially if you DM ever in your career.

 

[erleni]

for Klaus: did you design some content for the original Assassin? A PP or ED?
My main interest in HoS is further material for the original class (and not so much for the executioner) as the online support for the assassin has been very limited so far (we have basically no new powers since the original article).