Kinda annoyed!

[akbearfoot]

I think I am just annoyed at the seemingly arbritrary refusals...If we go to town and spend 40 days of down time and have a Sorc who can greater teleport us to anywhere on the planet basically, it seems really dumb to get to the book-keeping session where we audit ourselves and do our leveling up and shopping and then I'm told that I can't find anything on my 'wishlist' that will actually help.

On second thought, it doesn't really feel arbritrary at all. My character has 2 major weaknesses. His low attack bonus, and extremely inadequate ranged attacks. Pretty much any recent request for buffs or items that increase my attack score gets the veto.

I get the difficulty the DM has with balancing an encounter between the power gamers that hit the bad guys for 100+ damage in a round, and the role-player sort of 'do what sounds cool' players that can only do 30 pts of damage on a lucky hit. At the same time, those players fun doesn't come from their enjoyment of combat. Where as the 'roll' players get pretty much all their kicks from crazy fights where we get our butts kicked, but dish out even more in return. When the monk whiffs on 6 of like 7 attacks in a round, he's pretty bummed, and likewise when I am missing 2 or 3 strikes in a row in combats that only last 3 or 4 rounds, then I feel pretty useless.

+25 to hit does not feel like very much where we are at, and it certainly feels wimpy versus the big single target fights we have had thus far. We rely very heavily on flanking bonuses, 'aid' rolls, and in my case re-rolls via maneuvers to actually manage to hit stuff. When the 2 main melee guys in the party both need 15+ rolls to hit the monsters it is not good.

Oh, someone asked earlier if we had a UMD character to read those scrolls I was looking for. Yeah, both our Sorc and rogue have high UMD. Getting them to actually use the skill for my character is another story

 

[StreamOfTheSky]

Is Leadership feat to get a cohort devoted solely to buffing and making magic items for you not an option?

I get the difficulty the DM has with balancing an encounter between the power gamers that hit the bad guys for 100+ damage in a round, and the role-player sort of 'do what sounds cool' players that can only do 30 pts of damage on a lucky hit. At the same time, those players fun doesn't come from their enjoyment of combat. Where as the 'roll' players get pretty much all their kicks from crazy fights where we get our butts kicked, but dish out even more in return. When the monk whiffs on 6 of like 7 attacks in a round, he's pretty bummed, and likewise when I am missing 2 or 3 strikes in a row in combats that only last 3 or 4 rounds, then I feel pretty useless.

You can optimize and still role play. The people who don't care about role playing and are willing to do crazy rules intent limbo with their character's feat/etc... selection choices are "munchkins." Most power gamers are not like that. Frankly, I think from what little I've heard that you're far from the worst off anyway. Monk is just a cruddy class (worst one in core) in general, and IMO the most item dependent one in the game, I can only imagine how much he's hurting. At least you have maneuvers to reduce item dependency a little (Insightful Strike to replace weapon damage, DM saving throw counters to shore up a weak save, etc...). And oh man, the rogue. Judging by what I've read about the undead content in AoW I hope he took Penetrating Strike or Death's Ruin variant, otherwise....good gods...

+25 to hit does not feel like very much where we are at, and it certainly feels wimpy versus the big single target fights we have had thus far. We rely very heavily on flanking bonuses, 'aid' rolls, and in my case re-rolls via maneuvers to actually manage to hit stuff. When the 2 main melee guys in the party both need 15+ rolls to hit the monsters it is not good.

Yeah, the melee characters at high levels should be almost auto-hitting on their first attacks, barring penalties from Power Attack and the like. If all he does is single enemies, maybe that changes in order to keep fights competitive. Do you have or can you acquire Lightning Throw maneuver? I personally love that one for coolness alone. It's not the BEST damage you can be doing, and the area attack nature of it is semi-wasted on just one foe. But, just the fact that it ignores AC and turns your attack into a reflex save is a huge versatility boost when AC's proving too hard to crack. And it's guaranteed to do at least 1/2 damage unless the enemy has Evasion. If the enemies have piles of natural armor, Emerald Razor and the Stormguard Warrior tactical feat (for the tactic to do touch attacks for big damage next round) can also help to exploit that. I guess what I'm trying to say is...you have options, and god do I pity the monk.

 

[akbearfoot]

Actually our monk is very solid. I know monks are supposed to be really terrible compared to other stuff, but I wouldn't want to fight him.

Warforged monk/Fist of the Forest
Has the highest attack bonus in the group, the highest AC(touch too) the highest average saves, has the most attacks, has as many hit points as the next 2 highest characters combined. And his natural attacks bypass almost all DR except evil and Epic. He also does the most damage on average of anyone in the group, if he gets to full attack. Each one of his hits does around 25-35 damage and he gets like 7 attacks a round. So even though he usually misses half the time, he still usually hits 3-4 times.

We actually have a lot of house rules in place to make things easier to compensate for not having a cleric(or primary healer at all really). Higher death threshhold, 4th edition style healing surges, and action points are a bit more versatile....also fear effects are toned down. We all agreed it was LAME to walk into a room and have to make 4 or 5 fear saves each or be out of the fight(and probably dead). Also we all have some sort of freebie magic item that has been growing in power as we level, like weaker weapons of legacy w/o penalties. The rogue gets to crit/sneak attack undead normally because of his thingy. I have a fairly cool magic sword and a 1 level discount on the major Djiini bloodline.

Now I've hijacked my own thread, lol. But it's fun to share

 

[irdeggman]

We actually have a lot of house rules in place to make things easier to compensate for not having a cleric(or primary healer at all really). Higher death threshhold, 4th edition style healing surges, and action points are a bit more versatile....also fear effects are toned down. We all agreed it was LAME to walk into a room and have to make 4 or 5 fear saves each or be out of the fight(and probably dead). Also we all have some sort of freebie magic item that has been growing in power as we level, like weaker weapons of legacy w/o penalties. The rogue gets to crit/sneak attack undead normally because of his thingy. I have a fairly cool magic sword and a 1 level discount on the major Djiini bloodline.

These are where the DM is "making up" for the availability of higher leveled magic items.

The infamous "house rules" that almost all campaigns possess invariably hold the key to why a DM runs a game the way he/she does.

 

[irdeggman]

It's just the framework of the world has become cumbersome at this point. I don't think our characters are undergeared or not powerful enough. We've got a warforged monk/FotF. Shifter Druid/Moonspeaker, Pathfinder based Destinied Sorcerer, pathfinder based Rogue/Shadowdancer, and my character which is a Warblade/swordsage/Master of 9.

With a party of this make up I am amazed you have survived this long.

No ability to turn undead, only the druid is a divine caster (that limits things a lot - buffs, spontaneous healing, etc.), only spontaneous arcane casters (this limits things tremendously since the "spells known" will limit you drastically), your primary melee PC is weaker than most at straight melee.

When I ran this adventure path (in Eberron but open to requests from my players) I gave them some "helpful" background on the adventure path before they created their PCs - basically a really "deadly" adventure path and a lot of undead.