Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Buugipopuu" data-source="post: 5775443" data-attributes="member: 41173">Neither of these things are stated in the ability write up (the only HD limit is 2x the user's).  You explicitly have Divine abilities ignore antimagic (Shapechange the DvA doesn't actually reference the Shapechange spell, and it's Su, not Sp).Slightly weaker?  You're calling 60 damage slightly weaker than 2,080 damage?  And no, the effect abilities are not more flexible than Shapechange.  Even taken six times (for 6 DvAs compared to Shapechange's 2), you're still restricted to one damage type.  Shapechange lets you deal damage from pretty much every damage type printed, which is flexibility that's useful.First, I haven't actually been talking about "über-builds".  Everything I've mentioned so far is actually assuming core-only and basically no optimisation beyond 'Take this one broken ability'. And second, that has no bearing on balance.  A balanced game would have a large proportion of its abilities see use in the course of normal play.  Force Field and Regeneration just don't ever get taken because there's almost no circumstances in which they'd be better than the standard set of Unknowing/Heavenly/Whatever Mind/Soul, Learned Spell Immunity and Perfect Initiative that are practically required to accomplish anything.  Read that sentence again.  That's not what I said.No, I stopped and thought for a moment and rewrote the Portfolios section to make the most egregious offenders back in line.  It took about an evening.I haven't mentioned the Shapechange spell, or even talked about casters at all.  I explicitly stated that I wasn't touching on the casters vs melee argument, precisely because you'd say this.  Every balance issue I mentioned was carefully selected to be one introduced by your book.  Shapechange as a spell caps out at low HD, so is actually perfectly fine at Epic, because you can only turn into relatively weak monsters (and there's no RAW way of improving it).  The Shapechange DvA is uncapped, and so continues to be broken right through the game.And how is this a defence of the balance of the IH?  Say you're a Monk Greater Deity, and are pretty poorly optimised, so only have Wis 64 and you want to improve your AC.  You could take Unknowing Body, the AC-boosting ability, and get +16 AC.  Or you could take Unknowing Mind, Cexpertise for the increase in your Attack Bonus (+30) and even without the ratio-boosting DvAs get +32 AC, and still have the option of converting it back to attack bonus if you think you're not in danger of being hit.  AC boosting abilities are not balanced against attack bonus boosting abilities.So you're admitting that they're underpowered, but have role-playing applications?  That's not well-balanced.  In fact, the fact that not everyone is concerned with power is why it's even more important to make the abilities balanced.  If they were, players could take whatever they thought was fun and not risk accidentally making themselves useless to the rest of the party.It's not even hard to think of in-combat applications for Sideways Stealing, but since they have no rules, its "DM makes something up" time.  I've had players annoy wizards by stealing the text from their spellbooks, and fighters by stealing the edges of their swords.  Bypassing Prismatic Spheres by stealing their colour, rendering them powerless.Did I ever say that WotC was fine?  WotC's representatives aren't coming into this thread and claiming that 3rd edition is 'Wonderfully Balanced'.  I am aware of the balance issues in 3.5e.  And you're massively understating the scale of the issues here.  I haven't even touched on '1300 abilities' or 'level 1000 play'.  This is just the issues present at level 100 and below (well, probably between levels 30-100, prophet-level balance isn't that much worse than 3.5e, but that's mainly because they don't qualify for most of the good abilities.), since those are the only ones you're still claiming are balanced.Nope.  You need War Hulk from the Miniatures handbook (which is pretty fringe as far as 'core' material goes) and Hulking Hurler from Complete Warrior.Again with the 00"could be abused by power gamers" thing.  I haven't even talked about actual abuses and power gaming yet.  And you seem to be massively unaware of just how huge the gulf in power between an even vaguely optimised character and an unoptimised one is.  In 3.5, core only, I think you'd be called insane if you asked someone to make you a 10th level human fighter that could take on ten other 10th level human fighters with equal wealth but no optimisation*.  A 60th level Lesser Deity Human Fighter can very easily be optimised (and not even using any of the really dirty tricks, like Cosmics on items) to take down ten on one, or even twenty on one odds with the same restrictions (and he probably wouldn't even take significant damage doing so).  That's not "some abilities are more powerful than others", or "there's potential for power gamers to abuse the system", that's "even a small difference in the skill level of the players means they're totally incapable of playing the same game".  If you want me to prove it, I will.  I'll make three 60th level Lesser Deity Human fighters, one naïvely built but superficially viable, one well optimised one that can take down 10 of the weak one, and one "power gamer" one which demonstrates the gulf between what you think is power gaming, and what power gamers actually come up with.And, if a representative of WotC comes along and starts making claims about how amazingly balanced 3.5th ed is, you can be sure that I won't be giving him an easy time.*No optimisation, as opposed to deliberately sabotaged characters.  I'm talking the Sample NPCs in the DMG, rather than, say, a Fighter with all his feats in Weapon Focus for weapons he doesn't own, with all his points put into Intelligence, but no Int-based skills.  And all his wealth spent on lasagne and tiramisu, when he doesn't even like Italian food.No, I'm saying that a build that features one of those abilities will beat 90% other character concepts (not builds, concepts) without even being very good at anything else.  Nullification is the worst, since a pure caster, monk or fighter cannot beat someone with Nullification, no matter what they do, unless they're massively higher level, also have Nullification, or have Abrogate and the other person does not.I'll answer that by pointing out that when a product has needed errata, at least some of the time, that erratum has been published, and usually within four years.</blockquote>

Verification