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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Doctor Proctor" data-source="post: 4694402" data-attributes="member: 78547">I just don't understand why you're all so bothered by this.  What's the point in even taking shield if you have no idea what defense was being attacked, or how hard the hit was.  Heck, why not have the DM keep track of HP too?  Should the PC's really know how close they are to death?  Isn't that metagaming?  </sarcasm>The fact is that racial powers and other abilities are not comparable.  Bold =/= other abilities that grant saving throw bonuses, and Nimble Reaction =/= Defensive Mobility (especially since they actually stack).  I play a Dragonborn, for example, and I get an encounter Breathweapon attack.  It's not as powerful as many of the Wizard Encounter powers, so where's the outcry over that?There's no outcry because I'm a Fighter and that's the only way I'm going to be getting a Close Blast 5 attack.  There's no rule that I'm aware of that specifies any  sort of balance between class and racial powers, so why are we arguing about it.  They're different, deal with it.As for Shield itself though, I think this is a bit ridiculous that we're even discussing this.  There is no official ruling, and if some DM wants to play "gotcha" with his players, let him (even though the creators said that they were trying to get rid of "gotcha" powers...).  Of course, I would also expect that you will see a DRAMATIC drop in the usage of shield in those games...As for my group, our DM tells us what he rolled.  So he says stuff like "Does a 23 hit your AC", and I say "yep".  I don't see a problem with this as it makes the game flow a lot faster and gets rid of those "gotcha" powers.  I also wouldn't be bothered if I hit one of the monsters and said "Does a 23 hit your AC" and the DM said "Well it would, but I used an interrupt power to boost my AC against that attack, so you miss".Under the rule that some of the posters are using where a Wizard wouldn't know if Shield would work or not, would the DM follow the same rule in the case of interrupt powers?  Does he give all the monster AC's to the PC's to track so that they don't have to tell him what their hit roll was in order to make him guess at the effeciveness of the power?  Somehow I doubt that...which to me, makes it sound like we just have some very controlling DM's who want to have all the information and give none to the players, thus setting up a huge power imbalance between the PC's and monsters.  If that's the game you want to play, then go ahead.Edit: One last thing...  One of the false assumptions that's being made here is that the Halfling will be using Second Chance (seriously...it's not WIND) as frequently as the Wizard.  This is false.  Part of the reason that racial powers aren't balanced against class powers is that a race can take any class.So, if you have a Halfling Fighter (not as crazy as it sounds considering the Halfling Bounder PP in Martial Power) or a Halfling Rogue, they would get hit a lot more than the Wizard.  In the case of the Fighter, he might be getting attacked 20 or more times per encounter...I know my Fighter sometimes does.  In these cases, crits can actually happen quite frequently.  You can very easily set up some conditions such as "don't use Second Chance unless there's a crit or I'm below 25% HP" to determine when you should use it, which really increases it's effectiveness a LOT.Another thing is that you can combine Second Chance with other powers, which is something you can't do with Shield.  Imagine, for example, a Halfing Wizard.  He uses Shield to block one attack, but the second is a crit.  Well, he can use Second Chance on that crit and take no damage during that round!  Or he could be a Fighter using Shielded Sides when he's hurt and surrounded, and then save Second Chance for any attack that makes it past Shielded Sides.  Doing so further increases it's utility because the enemy as less than a 50% chance to hit because of the AC bonus from Shielded Sides...so it's got a much better chance of negating the attack.  Shield can't really do that though because it's a typed power bonus and won't stack with other abilities like Shielded Sides (in the case of multiclass Wizard/Fighter that was trading a higher level Utility to get Shielded Sides, or vice versa).</blockquote>

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