D&D 3E/3.5 Ripping Hong Off (or, remake the Sure Striking enhancement for 3.5e)

[Spatzimaus]

Against any creature it's worthless, since, like any other weapon enhancement, sure striking can only be placed on weapons with an existing +1 enhancement bonus, which is already sufficient for overcoming any DR of the form n/magic.

Only if you assume they're doing away with /+X type DR entirely. If it's still possible to have 5/+3 DR (especially on backward-compatible stuff) then it's still useful. The Lesser Sure Striking would be able to bypass /+5 DR, effectively.

But you're right, it does get much less effective if /magic is the only way to do that in 3.5E. For Technik's concept the same applies: saying "penetrates DR as +1 or +2 higher" is meaningless in this case.

Hmm, how about move the Blunt/Slashing/Piercing down to +1 then? And combine Material and Alignment into one.

So it's:
Lesser (+1): Magic and Damage Type-based (Slashing, Blunt, Piercing)
Greater (+2): and Material-based and Alignment-based
Epic (+4): and everything else (Epic, DR 1/-, object hardness)

That might be a bit too good, allowing a +2-cost enchantment to bypass so much, but it's still only as powerful as the 3E +1 enchantment was, so no biggie. The important thing is to keep the Material ones at +2; those will be the most common DR, I think, so they shouldn't be trivial to bypass.

 

[Technik4]

Here are Andy's views (on my latest version):

I wouldn't use the enhancement change--seems like a lot of complexity for little payoff, since a weapon's enhancement won't matter (except for the initial +1, or +6 for epic).

Effectively, then, this weapon will deal 5 extra points of damage to a creature with DR (at a cost of +2) or 15 points of extra damage to a creature with DR (at a cost of +4).

I'd never give up 2 points of enhancement for an extra 5 points of damage to some creatures. I'd be better off hitting 10% more likely and dealing 2 more points of damage every time. It *might* be worth +1.

And giving up +4 of enhancement? That's a huge cost--I'm hitting every monster 20% less often in order to do some extra damage to the occasional critter with DR. It *might* be worth +3, though that's debatable.

If you fight a lot of DR creatures, you're better off packing the right weapons in the first place, or simply having a bane weapon for the type of creature you fight most often (I'd much rather have a demonbane weapon and deal the extra 2d6+2 points of damage to all demons, regardless of their DR, than the lesser sure striking weapon).

Andy Collins
Senior Designer
Wizards of the Coast Roleplaying R&D

 

[Technik4]

I started some other threads, check em out:

Andy Collins: http://pub36.ezboard.com/fgameschat19968frm10

Monte Cook: http://pub58.ezboard.com/fokayyourturnfrm13.showMessage?topicID=4657.topic

Technik