D&D 4E Making the Character I Want to Play in 4e (Long)

[dimonic]

I would agree with the ranger/fighter combo, but I would say it should be fighter/ranger.

You won't get nearly enough or the right skills with this way round.

 

[Ximenes088]

Make a straight rogue and use a greatsword that just happens to have shortsword stats. Poof, problem solved.

That is the problem, right? It's unbalanced to be doing two-handed greatsword damage combined with rogue sneak attack, and there's no guarantee that there'll be any feats in 4e to let you make a two-handed weapon into a sneak-attack-allowed one. Let's assume that no such feat exists.

Your rogue knows how to use a greatsword to make sneak attacks and use other light-blade only rogue attacks. He needs to use a tighter, more precise style when he's wielding it that way, however, so it ends up having the same combat stats as a shortsword when he does it that way. He can loosen his style and go for raw damage, but doing so takes him a little time- coincidentally, the exact amount of time that would otherwise be necessary to sheath a shortsword and draw a greatsword, were he carrying both. A minor action, maybe, and he doesn't get the greatsword perks of proficiency unless he's actually proficient in Greatsword.

A long piece of steel versus a short piece of steel is fluff. Fluff can change with no effect on balance, provided the mechanics beneath it are not altered.

 

[dimonic]

Class: The character is a striker. He moves around and does a lot of damage to one target. He isn't a defender, and I don't want to lock anything down. The only thing about the rogue I don't want is the little, jabby melee weapon. The only thing I want from the fighter is the greatsword. Grabbing some fighter powers through multiclassing seems like what I'll need to do if I want him to use a greatsword and have it feel like a greatsword or maybe to get any greatsword usable powers at all.

Weapon (or ZOMG Sneak Attack with Greatsword!): It's not that unusual, it has come up in pretty much every Rogue preview article thread I've read on the half-dozen boards I lurk. I can't recall playing with anyone that had a multiclass fighter/thief or fighter/assassin that didn't use at least a longsword in 1e and in third, greataxes, greatswords and falchions were everywhere for any multiclass rogue that could use them. If your assassin wanders around court and kills nobles in their sleep, then yeah a greatsword seems out of place. If he kills dragons, giants and other stuff, often needing to fight things on the way that are either well armed or big, then using a greatsword or greataxe is a no-brainer. Even the assassin prereq in 3.5 is to kill "someone" - which is a very wide range in DND. It isn't limited to a guy in a castle somewhere.

If your rogue wants to go kill a 60' dragon with a 10" knife, knock yourself out. I don't mind that the system supports that. But trying to somehow argue that you can't do more damage when you have a combat advantage with a greatsword than when you don't have combat advantage at the same time is kind of lame.

So you want a striker like build with a greatsword. The Ranger is the best start because you will start with the weapon proficiency and almost as many skills as the Rogue. All the rogue powers so far have light blade as prerequisites, so I think you are SOL regarding sneak attack. However, the Ranger is a pure striker, and Hunter's quarry is less circumstantial than sneak attack. An extra d6 each round is decent - especially on top of the greatsword.

Then you can stack up on feats that amplify the greatsword, or the Hunter's quarry ability.

 

[Leatherhead]

If your rogue wants to go kill a 60' dragon with a 10" knife, knock yourself out.

I always though a halfling stabbing a ancient red in the foot with a pocket knife for massive damage to the vitals was rather silly. I guess dragons must have have allot of arteries near the surface of their skin in their legs for that to work.

 

[Kordeth]

I always though a halfling stabbing a ancient red in the foot with a pocket knife for massive damage to the vitals was rather silly. I guess dragons must have have allot of arteries near the surface of their skin in their legs for that to work.

Which is why the appropriate way to describe such an attack is the halfling scampering up the dragon's leg like a monkey on a tree, grimly hanging on even as the beast tries to shake him off, only to plunge the knife into a vulnerable spot on the dragon's neck where the scales frill away, then leaping off to land in his original square.

 

[mxyzplk]

(with Half-Orc and Barbarian out, he's just glad male is still an option).

I LOLed at this!

 

[muffin_of_chaos]

Not quite--sneak attack specifies that you can use it only once per round, action points notwithstanding.

Fair enough. 24-88 is still an impressive amount of damage for one round for a 1st level dude, and critting for 58 with a Daily seems broken.

 

[malraux]

Make a straight rogue and use a greatsword that just happens to have shortsword stats. Poof, problem solved.

That is the problem, right? It's unbalanced to be doing two-handed greatsword damage combined with rogue sneak attack, and there's no guarantee that there'll be any feats in 4e to let you make a two-handed weapon into a sneak-attack-allowed one. Let's assume that no such feat exists.

Your rogue knows how to use a greatsword to make sneak attacks and use other light-blade only rogue attacks. He needs to use a tighter, more precise style when he's wielding it that way, however, so it ends up having the same combat stats as a shortsword when he does it that way. He can loosen his style and go for raw damage, but doing so takes him a little time- coincidentally, the exact amount of time that would otherwise be necessary to sheath a shortsword and draw a greatsword, were he carrying both. A minor action, maybe, and he doesn't get the greatsword perks of proficiency unless he's actually proficient in Greatsword.

A long piece of steel versus a short piece of steel is fluff. Fluff can change with no effect on balance, provided the mechanics beneath it are not altered.

Yup. If you want the sneaky striker type character, relabeling a lesser weapon seems to be the best option. Though you might not want to limit it to specifically the short sword. The rapier stats might fit the concept better, or some other proficiency requiring weapon.

 

[SSquirrel]

Someone mentioned not expecting certain feats, I believe the current quote is that the 4E PHB has 3x the number of feats of the 3.5 PHB. I don't know that they will have one that allows 2H weapons for Sneak Attack (it always seemed broken in 3.x to me too), but it may well.

 

[Einan]

Magic 4e Eightball says it's too early to say. We don't have enough of the PHB to be able to state anything with any degree of certainty about what we can and can't do with builds in the new edition. I do fear, however, that the response from the game will be something along the lines of: "Oh, you want to play that? That'll be supported in 2010 with the release of the Player's Handbook 5: Electric Bugaloo edition."

But I could be wrong. I hope I'm wrong. I really really do.