New Essentials Builds!

[Tony Vargas]

Why is it hard to accept they could easily do the same thing with Essentials content?

Possible, certainly. 'Easy,' maybe not. But easy or not, it's something that'll have to be done quite consciously. When builds were more mechanically consistent, any new build was like a 'rising tide lifting all boats,' it might have a few powers heavily slanted for it, but inevitably would include powers other builds might use, too.

Have an article for Rogues with feats for various builds, some for the Artful Dodger, some for the Thief, some open to all rogues. With some new powers alongside new tricks.

That absolutely could be done. It'd just need to be a bit longer than a similar article offering Rogue feats & powers useable by all 4e Rogue builds would have been. Because Tricks are necessarily exclusive to Theives, while Theives are excluded from attack powers, and feats would need to avoid keying off class features, or have different flavors for differently-featured classes, so you'd have to have a Trick and a power that was substantially similar to the Trick, to open the same option up to all builds.

The Pyromancer article presents an entirely new school for the Mage. That's very different from simply providing support for the Mage - you can easily have an article that presents powers that both the Mage and all earlier Wizard builds can make use of.

But claims that it isn't possible to produce support for both Essentials and pre-Essentials material... there is no truth to that, and these articles certainly aren't proof for that sort of claim.

I don't think that claim has been made. It's just that 4e and Essentials builds are going to require, to varying degrees, separate support - maybe in the same article, but still mechanically distinct. The 'new direction' of which Essentials is repesentative includes making classes and builds more mechanically distinct, an inevitably consequence of that being that a greater volume of support material would be required to deliver the same amount of new options to both sorts of builds. That very much 'opens up design space' - another point of the new direction. If it means WotC can get double or tripple duty out of a concept by providing both pre- and post- Essentials ways of doing it, well, that's just more product to put out...

 

[Klaus]

I really liked this new builds, but became worried about one thing: How we use that material into the non-essential fighter and the non-essential wizard?

As I have said in another thread: I really want to see some official WotC words about how to use the essential classes features on the the core classes.

I am worried about we'll never see another article or other material to non-essential classes anymore...

Is it any different from previous articles that focused only on Greatweapon fighters and things like that?

The Essentials builds are brand-new. As such, they have a greater need for support than classes that have been around for a couple of years.

 

[Tony Vargas]

The Pyromancer illustrates something else. It is much easier to add new Essentials-style builds to the game than new 4e-style builds. 4e builds have class features at 1st level, and change only a little as they go up, instead, the player gets choices of powers as the character levels. That means introducing a new build requires not swapping out a class feature or two, but coming up with a couple of apropariate powers for that build for every level at which a power is gained. That's a lot of development work. As we can see with the Pyromancer, the build has a fixed set of features it gains as it levels. These features define the Pyromancer, don't 'cross polinate' with any other builds (thus don't 'support' those builds, but also don't open up broken combo outside the build), and you need only one per level at which the feature is gained - and /no/ new powers are required.

With the task of developing new builds simplified, WotC can produce many more new builds with which to populate future suplements - much like the proliferation of Prestige Classes in 3.5, but without as much risk to overall game balance.

 

[andarilhor]

Is it any different from previous articles that focused only on Greatweapon fighters and things like that?

Yes, it is! One article which focused only on Greatweapon fighters have powers a battlerager fighter could pick, if he decided to. And even the greatweapon fighter could pick a, let's say, Encounter Attack Level 3 power from that article and keep his Encounter Attack Level 1 power from PHBI, and his Daily Attack Level 1 power from MP2.

How the essential classes are structured now, particularly the fighter and the rogue, it's a all or nothing choice.

The Essentials builds are brand-new. As such, they have a greater need for support than classes that have been around for a couple of years.

But, that is my point! The Knight and the Slayer shouldn't be new classes! I agree with you as they can support this new structure, but not forget the "old" (3 years old. hehe) one.

Thats the reason I really hope we'll see a system to adapt essential features into the core classes. This way, if you want to make a core fighter with defender aura, combat agility and some other sources powers, you can!

 

[RodneyThompson]

The thing is, there's already a lot of stuff out there for the staff fighter thanks to the tempest fighter stuff.

I would love to play a staff fighter who blocks and parries with his staff

Double-ended defensive weapon that effectively gives the same bonus as carrying a light shield isn't enough? (Staff Fighting feat)

trips people up

Knockdown assault isn't good enough?

or pokes them in the eye

Blinding strike isn't enough?

and occasionally breaks his staff in half on someone's head and switches to double stick fighting.

You're right, I didn't give you that one, because I'm not sure I want to create powers that let you voluntarily break your weapon in half.

But that's not what we got here. All we have is a few minor boons that do not (IMO) make up for the deficiencies of using a two handed +2 proficiency 1d8 weapon. Reach does make up for it a bit, but I'm not sure it's enough. I feel that this article written in the style of Dark Sun class builds would have been much better.

For two feats you've got +1 reach, a single weapon that gives +2 to hit, d8 damage on both ends (only a ranger with TWF can get +3/d8 in both hands, but is two weapons so he has to keep both weapons enchanted), and if you take Tempest Technique you get an additional +1 to AC and a +1 or +2 bonus to damage. Not to mention that a quarterstaff also counts as a two-handed weapon, opening up all of those powers for the fighter as well.

By contrast, the two Essentials builds need the class features in the article for the staff to be a viable option compared to the weapons that get weapon mastery class features.

The thing is, there's already a lot out there for non-knight/non-slayer fighters out there that make the staff very viable. It doesn't need as much to give it a lot of options, since Martial Power and Dragon material cover a lot already.

 

[Klaus]

Yes, it is! One article which focused only on Greatweapon fighters have powers a battlerager fighter could pick, if he decided to. And even the greatweapon fighter could pick a, let's say, Encounter Attack Level 3 power from that article and keep his Encounter Attack Level 1 power from PHBI, and his Daily Attack Level 1 power from MP2.

How the essential classes are structured now, particularly the fighter and the rogue, it's a all or nothing choice.



But, that is my point! The Knight and the Slayer shouldn't be new classes! I agree with you as they can support this new structure, but not forget the "old" (3 years old. hehe) one.

Thats the reason I really hope we'll see a system to adapt essential features into the core classes. This way, if you want to make a core fighter with defender aura, combat agility and some other sources powers, you can!

You can still take the feats presented in this article, and by simply taking Staff Fighting (which has an easy Wis requirement) you can use the staff effectively with any Fighter. A Tempest fighter is perfect for this, but it also works for Battleragers and Greatweaponers (specially since you can switch between using the staff as a two-handed weapon and using as a double weapon).

 

[I'm A Banana]

Double-ended defensive weapon that effectively gives the same bonus as carrying a light shield isn't enough? (Staff Fighting feat)
...
Knockdown assault isn't good enough?
...
Blinding strike isn't enough?

I'll start off by saying I basically agree that being disgruntled about staff support is kind of a goofy thing to be disgruntled about, IMO.

But I think you've hit closer to Mengu's underlying problem, because why wouldn't these be enough? What are they missing? Why didn't he see them as solutions? Assuming he's a well-educated D&D player, why didn't these ideas propose themselves?

Possibly, it is because there's nothing special about doing those things with a staff, compared to just doing those things with your two-handed bastard sword/greataxe/sword-and-board/whatever. There's no incentive. There's no payoff. I do it with my staff, and I'm just like the guy who does it without a staff, give or take a feat or two. There's nothing different, unique, or special about it. I don't feel like a staff fighter, I feel like any other fighter, except I spent my feats to use an unorthodox weapon.

I think you run into this problem more frequently when you're basing powers on effect rather than on method, so it requires a bit more attention, a bit more work to go back and make sure that you get a little special kicker for doing what you'd clearly want to do as a staff fighter, something that leads the player by the nose and says, explicitly, this will be cool to do. To make incentives to play to archetype.

I think Mengu perhaps doesn't see what's so cool about it, just given the mechanics.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't think that claim has been made. It's just that 4e and Essentials builds are going to require, to varying degrees, separate support - maybe in the same article, but still mechanically distinct. The 'new direction' of which Essentials is repesentative includes making classes and builds more mechanically distinct, an inevitably consequence of that being that a greater volume of support material would be required to deliver the same amount of new options to both sorts of builds. That very much 'opens up design space' - another point of the new direction. If it means WotC can get double or tripple duty out of a concept by providing both pre- and post- Essentials ways of doing it, well, that's just more product to put out...

Right, basically if you want to support both Essentials AND non-Essentials builds there needs to be a good bit more crunch provided. It gets CONFUSING too. I mean I'd take my group as a fairly typical example of average players. Some of the people that have played in the group obviously had a pretty good detailed grasp of 4e rules, but 2/3 of them DON'T. They certainly understand the rules of the game (mostly) and they understand their character, but they don't have a ton of splatbooks and when they look at all the options in CB their eyes cross.

Look for instance at 2e. Yes you had SOME options when you decided to make a character with concept X, but basically there was a pretty clear path to doing it, you took X, and Y, and Z. There weren't a lot of heavily overlapping classes and even when 2 classes overlapped some (like say Barbarian and Fighter) each one was plainly designed for certain archetypes. You MIGHT consider for a bit whether your big tough bruiser with a claymore was going to be a Fighter or Barbarian, but it is nothing like the analysis you're going to want to do in 4e at this point.

I just think by rehashing existing concepts the game is becoming a tangled web of options that the average player is just NOT going to want to navigate through. I'm SURE the players in my game are already past that point, and they haven't even seen (maybe even heard of) Essentials. The next time one of them decides to make a character they are not just going to have an already rather extensive set of options from the PHBs, splatbooks, and DDI stuff, but ALSO a whole other somewhat overlapping set of options from Essentials. Ones that work SIMILARLY but not exactly the same and do some things better or worse than what they have now. I am just not really sure what we gained here.

What we GOT is that even optimistically if we just don't bother with Essentials then half our DDI content from now on is useless to us, AND people will be wading through tons more stuff in CB that is either confusing them or just getting in their way.

At more abstract level what we are also seeing is just the same ground being covered again. If Essentials didn't exist we really wouldn't have needed either of the two articles being discussed here. Yes, a couple of the feats in each one are interesting for non-Essentials characters, but as others have already said you could make a decent staff wielding ranger or tempest fighter already. There was just recently a whole article on fire magic for PHB wizards. It feels like the game is going in circles instead of just giving us really NEW stuff.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

I'll start off by saying I basically agree that being disgruntled about staff support is kind of a goofy thing to be disgruntled about, IMO.

But I think you've hit closer to Mengu's underlying problem, because why wouldn't these be enough? What are they missing? Why didn't he see them as solutions? Assuming he's a well-educated D&D player, why didn't these ideas propose themselves?

Possibly, it is because there's nothing special about doing those things with a staff, compared to just doing those things with your two-handed bastard sword/greataxe/sword-and-board/whatever. There's no incentive. There's no payoff. I do it with my staff, and I'm just like the guy who does it without a staff, give or take a feat or two. There's nothing different, unique, or special about it. I don't feel like a staff fighter, I feel like any other fighter, except I spent my feats to use an unorthodox weapon.

I think you run into this problem more frequently when you're basing powers on effect rather than on method, so it requires a bit more attention, a bit more work to go back and make sure that you get a little special kicker for doing what you'd clearly want to do as a staff fighter, something that leads the player by the nose and says, explicitly, this will be cool to do. To make incentives to play to archetype.

I think Mengu perhaps doesn't see what's so cool about it, just given the mechanics.

Something like a staff fighting fighting feat?

If you use a staff with those associated powers, you also do x

@ Moridin: is it possible to add such a style feat to this article? (Assuming it doesn´t already exist)

 

[andarilhor]

You can still take the feats presented in this article, and by simply taking Staff Fighting (which has an easy Wis requirement) you can use the staff effectively with any Fighter. A Tempest fighter is perfect for this, but it also works for Battleragers and Greatweaponers (specially since you can switch between using the staff as a two-handed weapon and using as a double weapon).

Claudio, your missing my point. I really liked the Staff Fighter and Pyromancer articles. But, since its release, 4E has been about options. One of this options was take a entire build with all choices already made for you or mixing features and powers and making a "new build", "your build".

The essential classes, particularly the martial ones, take away this option. Or you pick the entire build or this build has nothing to you. I understand which this works for new players. Too much options put then confuse. But this not work for old players (and for not so old, 3 years ago, too).

So, my request is some ruling to use the essential features into the core classes, so this very separation be no more! A fighter is a fighter. Knight, Tempest, Slayer, Greatweapon, are builds of the fighter, not entirely new classes.

I have created some houserules for that, but would prefer to see some official statemente about this from WotC, just that.

Hoping have made myself clearer now...