Hello again Buugipopuu!
Buugipopuu said:
Ahahahahahahah. You make funny joke. It good. I laugh. Level 100 is already good enough to gain Shapechange, which is better than any other Divine ability. Miles better. By level 100 you can turn into an Astral Hydra...
Actually Shapechange has a limit of 50 Hit Dice and the Astral Hydra has 115 Hit Dice...plus Shapechange is negated within Anti-magic.
and get a breath weapon that puts every actual damage dealing [Breath] effect to shame, and for fewer DvAs with a shorter cooldown time. Divine Breath x2 gets you 30d3 every 1d4 rounds. Polymorph + Shapechange gets you 8x40d12 every 1d2 rounds. I wonder which one's better.
Actually the Astral Hydra gets each head to breath every 1d4 rounds, not 1d2. As regards the various [Effect] abilities, they may be slightly weaker but they are far more flexible AND remember that multiple uses stack.
And you get Panversal, which is a Transcendental ability, and a bunch of other abilities. Or you can turn into an Elder Quintessence Elemental, and at level 100, with a bunch of class features behind them will utterly annihilate everything even vaguely CR-appropriate. That the Elder Unelemental isn't even that good a form says a lot about how good Shapechange is. And Metamorph can be got at this level too, which makes everything even more insane.
For every uber-build you can create I am sure someone else could come up with a build to defeat that character.
Okay, so that's just one DvA, but then there's the portfolios, which are all over the place. Just try to claim that Entropy (with its 'vulnerability' that's actually advantageous in many cases, the best [Effect] ability, easily the best Quasi-Deity ability, because it affects created undead rather than just summons), isn't much better than most of the others, or that Healing doesn't suck. Its Demi-Deity ability doesn't even do anything unless you're playing with a limited number of pre-3.5 supplements, its weakness is horrendous (especially if you're using touch-range healing), and all of its abilities provide healing, which doesn't contribute to your effectiveness in battle, and is so easily obtained out of battle that the need for a healer seen at low levels disappears.
I'd be the first to admit that the Portfolios are the weakest aspect of the book, but from your above mini-rant you seem to be contradicting yourself...you say that the Entropy portfolio has the best [Effect] ability and best Quasi-deity ability, but overall it isn't much better than the others?
Did you stop to think for one moment that with over 40 portfolios each with 20 powers (yes thats 800+ abilities folks) that maybe, just maybe, every single power wouldn't necessarily be completely equal at every level?
I mean you have already waxed lyrical about Shapechange being the best spell in the game. Are you saying all 9th-level spells are not equal and WotC, with its dozens of designers and editors and hundreds, if not thousands of playtesters messed up and made Shapechange too powerful?
The Epic and Divine (and also the Cosmic, which is technically available sub level 100) Combat Expertise abilities make attack bonus granting abilities more effective at raising AC than anything that directly raises AC.
Parrying is a good way to defend.
All the [Effact] abilities that target things other than HP are miles better than the others, as the resource they target scales linearly with level, while hitpoints scale with the square of level, except Thieving, which deals so little damage as to be useless (and is generally useless as actual wealth acquired with money is pointless when everyone gets scaling artefacts).
Heres the thing though, in roleplaying not everyone wants "TEH UBER". Not every power has to be the best thing ever! Did you ever stop to consider that some people may want the Thieving [Effect] just to have fun with it?
I have abilities in there that let a Rogue steal the writing from a page or snatch the colour from the eyes of a Princess. Probably not as useful to the Rogue as upgrading your Sneak Attack, but maybe a player might see that and think, thats pretty cool. Instead of "Look at how L33T I am with my Supreme Sneak Attack!"
And those are just the most obvious things, and the ones that didn't use any non-core material or even touch on the balance of class features.
Basically, in a nutshell, your argument is that some powers can be better than other powers.
Apparently a lone designer (me) is culpable for not getting 1300 abilities perfectly balanced is a system that transcends Level 1000 play.
BUT, if WotC with dozens of staff and thousands of playtesters can't get about 300 abilities and spells balanced for play that only goes up to Level 20 then they get your seal of approval.
Oh, this is nothing like the kind of optimisation work that created Pun-Pun, the Hulking Hurler or the Wish and the Word. Those things require complex builds, multiple splatbooks (usually crossing edition and campaign setting boundaries in ways that were never intended) and generous interpretations of the rules to become broken.
The Hulking Hurler requires 1 splat book as I recall.
The IH is broken on its own. With just it, the Epic Bestiary, and the SRD.
You haven't proved anything is broken in the Immortals Handbook, you have just said that some powers and abilities are better than others.
Just like feats and spells in the PHB. Some are better than others.
Absolute perfect balance wasn't attained by WotC, I feel a tad hard done by being held to a higher standard than WotC...maybe I should be flattered by that.
Are there a few powers or combinations of powers in the Immortals Handbook that could be abused by power gamers - absolutely!
Usually just by taking single abilities. You can afford Nullification, Enlightened or Abrogate on an item at 72nd level (which is 'wonderfully balanced', you're keen to remind us), and once you've got it, nobody can do anything to stop you. In the case of the two cockblock abilities because they basically stop anyone from doing anything, and in the case of Enlightened, because it lets you bootstrap your way up to becoming a High Lord by casting progressively better Epic buffs to your Int until you can meet the DCs of the spells that grant divine templates.
Are you suggesting there is zero way any character with one of the above mentioned powers can be beaten?
But the real reason behind "DM Makes Something Up" being the default response is that so many abilities are poorly specified to the point where using them goes beyond Rule Zero and into the territory of There Were No Rules So We Had To Invent Some. What does the Morale penalty of Disheartening Dodge apply to? How is 'place of worship' defined in Theopea? What do you have to do to be considered 'hunting' a creature with Telelocation? What does Spell Shot actually do? What does Self Mastery actually let you do? Do the template-granting DvAs increase ECL? Does Moonstruck do so (it gives actual extra HD, after all), how do the Legendary [Creature] abilities interact with bonus HD from class features, dragon age categories, and non-animal creatures? Do High Handed and other Improved Unarmed Strike abilities only function with natural weapons, even though it doesn't say this? What's your effective druid level for Dragon Companion, and is the HD limit before or after bonus hit dice? What does "You cannot change the anyfeat while you have a previous use of the anyfeat in effect." actually mean? Does Sideways Stealing provide any mechanical benefit at all? Do the armour mastery feats affect anything other than armour check penalties (by RAW they don't)? And that's not even going into Portfolio abilities, which are often even more poorly specified and subtly different from other identically named abilities, or combinations of abilities, or Cosmic abilities and above. And this didn't require dozens of designers pulling full-time work like you claim, most of those things become obvious if you actually try to use them under any normal circumstances, because the ability, as written, does not actually provide the Dungeon Master with enough information to use it in a game.
Answer me this, has any WotC book ever needed errata?
