New Design & Development: Feats

[Wormwood]

To be blatantly honest, I'm not exactly unhappy they got rid of summoning.

I'll go one extra step and say, YES! I'd be positively thrilled if they got rid of summoning.

Life's too short to wait for the Mister animal companion and summoned woodland speedbumps to take his three turns for every one of mine.

 

[Cadfan]

Also, summoning is a pretty cool concept, and if removing it from the wizard repertoire means a chance to really sit back and do it right, to really make it its own animal, then I'm all for it.

 

[Li Shenron]

What exactly is the problem with summoning?

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

I'll go one extra step and say, YES! I'd be positively thrilled if they got rid of summoning.

Life's too short to wait for the Mister animal companion and summoned woodland speedbumps to take his three turns for every one of mine.

I'd rather summoning work more like, "My friend here would like a word with you."

Make summoners focus on keeping one thing bound, and focus their own abilities on buffing that thing. Make it so that it's easy to keep track of not only the creature's stats, but also the extra actions a summoned creature provides. The summoner should be almost useless without his bound critter, but a holy terror when he's got it.

The benefit to being a summoner is that you could switch between defender and striker as necessary, by summoning different creatures from your short list of creatures that looks less like the Summon Monster I-IX tables and more like the alternate shapeshifting druid from PHB II.

Hell, maybe I should just write the class myself, since I like the idea so much.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

What exactly is the problem with summoning?

Action spam. When you have 7 wolves, 3 dire wolves, a black bear, and your own actions (which probably involve spellcasting), you take up more than your fair share of table time. Also, keeping track of multiple statblocks can become an organizational nightmare if you have large summoning lists, buff effects, summon-enhancing feats, etc.

 

[Ahglock]

I'll go one extra step and say, YES! I'd be positively thrilled if they got rid of summoning.

Life's too short to wait for the Mister animal companion and summoned woodland speedbumps to take his three turns for every one of mine.

Why don't they just remove everything but sticks from the game which characters can beat each other to death with.

This remove everything that didn't work perfectly idea just sucks IMO. If there is a problem fix it, don't remove it.

 

[D.Shaffer]

it seems to me that this IS what they're doing, actually. But some fixes are easier then others. They get the easy fixes out now (PHB) while working on the more problematic ones, to be released later. (Other books)

No one said summoning will NEVER be back, after all.

 

[Wormwood]

This remove everything that didn't work perfectly idea just sucks IMO. If there is a problem fix it, don't remove it.

In lieu of a fixing a problem (and I think Dr. Akward might be on to something), removing the problem entirely is a perfectly acceptible solution.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

"This feat, which changes how you can use a bunch of powers we don't know anything about, is way too good compared to a bunch of other feats we know even less about!"

I can't be the only one who thinks this is silly.

We saw 4 feats. Three of them are boring as hell retreads of feats that were crappy in 3e, and seem crappy in 4e. They dont change your character's abilities can do very much. One of them seems like a no brainer choice, that does seem to have a large impact. It really seems like it should have been a talent. If we arent suposed to comment on what we see, I question the point of the message boards.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

Why don't they just remove everything but sticks from the game which characters can beat each other to death with.

This remove everything that didn't work perfectly idea just sucks IMO. If there is a problem fix it, don't remove it.

The fix would be something along the lines of what happened in complete psionic. you only get one summoned critter to order around at a time. As opposed to now where the party sits with its collective thumb up its butt while 15 summoned dire badgers make a claw/claw/bite against something they need a 20 to hit.