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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5711555" data-attributes="member: 2067">Out of combat, they are phenomenal.[sblock=ShadeWonking]Auto-training and a +2 in Stealth gives any shade who cares to remove their armor a +7 bonus before ability scores are factored in. While their bonus could certainly be higher, it doesn't really need to be. Their racial ability, combined with darkvision, means all they have to do is <a href="http://www.wizards.com/dndinsider/compendium/glossary.aspx?id=314" target="_blank">wait for night to fall</a>, or <a href="http://www.wizards.com/dndinsider/compendium/glossary.aspx?id=166" target="_blank">wait for it to rain</a> and they can Stealth forever, seeing enemies without being seen themselves, regardless of other abilities. Warlock and Rogue and Assassin powers can further enhance it. A Shade can already cross open ground without loosing stealth quite easily. All that open ground has to be is lightly obscured (e.g.: most things other than broad daylight or bright artificial light). If they ALSO had this ability, they might be effectively perma-stealthed (depending on if it was at-will). If they had this ability instead, they wouldn't be able to use partial concealment to gain stealth.Wording it with durations in combat terms is problematic since a shade, as designed, wouldn't be getting into combat as often. Turns are irrelevant when you're not tracking initiative.A Shade can already start an encounter hidden, assuming they don't come out of hiding in order to start the encounter. Surprise round?And that's assuming the Shade wants to start an encounter. The design theory goes that a Shade doesn't WANT to start an encounter -- they want to AVOID encounters entirely, through the use of stealth. I don't know why they'd need yet another +1 to Stealth. It's not as if the game doesn't already have a problem with out-of-control skill DC's rising into the stratosphere because that seems to be the only place bonuses go anymore. A Shade who wants to pimp out Stealth clearly can just as well as anyone else, and then can use it in more circumstances to boot. By the time they're at level 1 with +7-11 (after backgrounds, feats, themes, not to mention Aid Another or a party with a half-elf) they're already well above the ability of most level 1 monsters to detect them. A Shade's stealth modifier might not be bigger than anyone else (who pimps the thing), but it's much more versatile, since they can use it nearly constantly -- all it needs is night, foliage, fog, rain, or indoors with some fungi or a candle. Anywhere they're not in bright light is a situation where they can Stealth, and typically beat a monster's Perception (though not always, if they get a bad roll, or the monster has a good one), even if they're a paladin.[/sblock]But regardless of the specificities of Shade stealth, the intent was pretty clearly telegraphed. It's clearly hard for 4e to think outside the terms of turns and encounters, even though the intent was to think outside of those terms. This is one of the (several) reasons I feel that a 5e, at some future point, is fairly inevitable: the game needs to be able to be presented in a way that doesn't rely so much on combat encounters, in order to serve the needs of those players who never really relied so much on combat encounters, who maybe prefer a more 1e style of class balance across an adventure, where there are classes that are good at combat, classes that are good at exploration, classes that are good at investigation, and classes that are good at interaction, Funny how that meshes up with the Fighter/Thief/Wizard/Cleric split, eh? Almost like it was designed that way....<img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/ponder.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":hmm:" title="Hmmm    :hmm:" data-shortname=":hmm:" /><img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/laugh.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":lol:" title="Laughing    :lol:" data-shortname=":lol:" /></blockquote>

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