New Design & Development: Feats

[Wormwood]

I noticed that too.

Prediction: MS and Hide have been combined into Stealth.

Petty as it may sound, one of my chief concerns about 4e was that that Spot/Listen and Hide/MoveSilently would still be separate skills.

So...yay!

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

If the explanation is "You're a better fighter", TWF doesn't make you so. If all your fighting prowess is coming from your spells, then you're no different from Bob the Knowledge Cleric in a fight, except that you can make two attacks with more likelihood of missing than him.

That is not the fault of the Cleric, it's the fault of TWF.

But that's not the point.

The point is, as the premise was presented, if you WANT to play a sub-optimal TWF dual-hammerin' dwarven Cleric build, it is EASIER AND BETTER to just take TWF than it is to take 2 levels of Fighter.

Because if you take 2 levels of Fighter, you are two levels behind access to the kick-ass cleric spells that have put clerics on the undisputed top of the heap where they've been for YEARS.

Here endeth the lesson.

 

[Rechan]

The point is, as the premise was presented, if you WANT to play a sub-optimal TWF dual-hammerin' dwarven Cleric build, it is EASIER AND BETTER to just take TWF than it is to take 2 levels of Fighter.

Because if you take 2 levels of Fighter, you are two levels behind access to the kick-ass cleric spells that have put clerics on the undisputed top of the heap where they've been for YEARS.

So your complaint is that you can't play a suboptimal fighter without becoming a suboptimal cleric? You should have all the strengths of the cleric PLUS your sub-optimal feat selection?

 

[Mad Mac]

So every D&D game everywhere now needs to have an "Order of the Golden Wyvern" AND every D&D game everywhere needs to constrain that the ONLY way to get this mechanical ability is to join this order?

That's a fair opinion. If you don't like the Wizard Orders you're going to have to rewrite them at some level. I just don't get people talking about the feat being horribly misnamed. It's perfectly descriptive of what it is, an organization based feat. They had similar feat chains in SW Saga for Jedi/Sith traditions, and even a more limited form of them in other products, like the Druidic Orders in Eberron.

If you hate Golden Wyvern, then change the name. If you hate Wizard orders or traditions, period, make them generic feat chains. But at least understand why the feat has the name it does. It's driving me crazy seeing everybody baffled by the fact an organization based feat chain isn't called "Spellsculpt" or something.

 

[billd91]

I wonder... "Golden wywern" maybe the PHB name, with the attached IP, but sculpt spell may be the SRD name, OGL.

That would be even worse than using the name golden wyvern in both places since now you'd have a disconnect between one version and the other and that means lack of clarity.

Personally, I very much prefer my feats and powers to be relatively clearly named for what they do rather than have some flowery label that has no direct meaning. Sculpt Spell or even Exclude Area would be far clearer to work with as a DM handling several NPCs at a time.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

So your complaint is that you can't play a suboptimal fighter without becoming a suboptimal cleric? You should have all the strengths of the cleric PLUS your sub-optimal feat selection?

I don't have a complaint.

Meaningful choices are good. It appears that feats like TWF, Spring Attack, etc. are being re-dedicated and siloed off into classes. That might be good for streamlining difficult decisions for newer players, but it is indisputably bad for player choice overall.

I made a rather simple observation in response to Klaus that it is better design to allow the player the choice of just taking TWF instead of forcing him to multiclass into fighter.

Your rebuttal was that it was preferable to multiclass into fighter to make up for the shortcomings of the cleric (which, as I pointed out, are actually the shortcomings of TWF).

And yes, quite frankly, as you put it: that's a noob suggestion. Slowing down your caster progression is a sub-optimal choice on a much more staggering scale than TWF.

 

[Imaro]

Is that the extent of your rebuttal? "LOL NOOB"?

The cleric is a contender in a fight because they have decent HP, can wear armor and can cast many buff spells. The dwarven cleric of the war god and the nerdy cleric of the knowledge god have the same capacity for fighting.

If the Dwarven cleric just takes TWF, then he's not a better fighter, he can just take two weaker attacks compared to the nerdy cleric's one.

Uhm...wouldn't the domains they took affect this as well? Just sayin, a "war" cleric is going to be a better fighter than a "knowledge" cleric.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

Uhm...wouldn't the domains they took affect this as well? Just sayin, a "war" cleric is going to be a better fighter than a "knowledge" cleric.

I am not 100% sure he's 100% familiar with the cleric class.

 

[Badkarmaboy]

If it's at all like Saga, TWF will still be a feat. I think all this anger over class restrictions might be a bit premature in general. While there was some interesting mechanical info given, there was not nearly enough to say their "straitjacketing" character creation.

 

[Kahuna Burger]

That's a fair opinion. If you don't like the Wizard Orders you're going to have to rewrite them at some level. I just don't get people talking about the feat being horribly misnamed. It's perfectly descriptive of what it is, an organization based feat. They had similar feat chains in SW Saga for Jedi/Sith traditions, and even a more limited form of them in other products, like the Druidic Orders in Eberron.

If you hate Golden Wyvern, then change the name. If you hate Wizard orders or traditions, period, make them generic feat chains. But at least understand why the feat has the name it does. It's driving me crazy seeing everybody baffled by the fact an organization based feat chain isn't called "Spellsculpt" or something.

No offense, but perhaps people wouldn't have such negative reactions (I don't see anyone "baffled") if the feat actually gave any indication that it was the wizard order based feat you are calling it. Like say an [order] tag, a prereq line "entry into the Order of the Golden Wyvern, no other [order] feats" or any other hints besides using the same bit of flavor text as another article which folks may or may not have read.

This whole 5 blind men describing an elephant strategy of advertising 4e isn't impressing me, and if they say "Here are four examples of feats taken from the latest draft of the 4th Edition Player’s Handbook," I expect that to mean that they contain the information we would need to use them, including the extra info you seem to be assuming about it being a special class of Order feats and requiring membership in an organization or tradition (at least in the form of a tag or prereq).