Quick question: too powerful?

[Oats]

Blinding Hex
A shimmering bolt of energy strikes your foe, and forces their eyes shut.
At-will ♦ Arcane, Implement, Psychic
Standard Action, Ranged 10
Target: One creature
Attack: Charisma vs. Willpower
Hit: 1d4 psychic damage and the target is blinded until the end of your next turn.
Increase to 2d4 damage at 21st level.


As a first-level at-will, is this too powerful? I'm guessing easily yes, but would like some input.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

As an at-will? Yeah. Figure you hit 50% of the time roughly, basically you have one enemy at -5 to-hit and granting combat advantage on average all the time. The low damage helps some, but you're going to use it on your strongest enemy, and there are always ways to add static damage.

The other question is what class are we talking about here? I'd say it is probably least broken as a wizard at-will simply because wizards really have a lot fewer static damage modifiers they can stack up at lower levels. Sorcerer or Warlock will trivially do an extra die or two of damage, probably more.

I'm not sure its really feasible to use a condition as strong as blindness on an at-will regardless of what else it does. The problem with at-wills and conditions is since you can spam that thing out there every turn the condition really needs to be something fairly mild.

 

[Flipguarder]

I believe there is an at-will somewhere that gives a -2 to attack rolls for the same amount of time.

Generally lowering the damage done by a power and adding additional effects is a bad idea for power-editing/creating, since conditions can be super powerful in 4e.

 

[Oats]

That's what I thought, mostly, thanks for the input. Maybe I'll make it an encounter, or possibly just make blindness equivocal to a -2 on attack rolls.

As for what class it's for: I'm making a custom class, the Hexer. It's my first go at something like this, so there's likely going to be a few balancing issues.

 

[Garthanos]

sounds like a paragon path of warlock ;-), I actually refer to the warlocks curse as a hex. (Curses were always long term plot heavy things). For me a hex is a quick spell effect that might be fairly light weight like a touch of bad luck which enhances another more active effect

Also note there is an eyebite power in the warlock arsenal.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think the safest and simplest technique would be some reskinning of existing at-wills. There is a pretty wide range of choices and you can always make some fairly trivial modifications without any issues. Damage types can vary, fluff obviously, maybe even some changes in ranges and area of effect. Combine that with some unique class mechanics and it should give you enough leeway to make things work the way you want.

 

[Oats]

I find myself doing that a bit; simply reskinning existing powers. But for some reason it just seems creatively cheap to me, even if I do mix it up some. But it is fairly difficult to strike that balance between originality and mechanical exactness, so I have to concede here and there. Especially since I've never done this before.

I may post the rest of the class (I've done the class features, and most powers up to level 7) for feedback, but I'm reluctant to do so because I'm sure most of it will be overpowered nonsense.

 

[Oats]

I'm mostly done with the heroic tier (haven't done much in the way of Level 9 and 10 powers), and the general class outline. I've changed the class name to "Witch," and changed some things up (including advice incorporated from here).

I was wondering if anyone could take the time to look over it and see if there's anything blatantly unbalanced? As a heads up: I never meant to intend to release this for public consumption, it's mostly just a pet project of mine for use by folk in my campaign. So I want to see if it's all kosher before I let them loose on it. Also, I've borrowed a few powers from various sources. I would give credit where it's due, but again it's mostly just for personal use so I didn't find it necessary.

Link:
Witch - Google Docs