This rule of three was pretty unsatisfying to me. Question 1 has something that just make me go "Well, why don't you just errata it then?":
The biggest issue I see is that the assassin&
#8217s target sometimes ends up dead before he or she can take advantage of the shrouds. To get around this, I&
#8217d make the shrouds independent of the target. The assassin would build them up, and then use them on whichever target he or she wanted. That&
#8217s just off the top of my head, but I think it would make the class smoother in play.
Yes, that would be rather logical and help a class that severely struggles. Why don't you do that?
Balancing the loss of a healing surge is a tricky matter. It&
#8217s sort of like taking out a loan without any promise that you&
#8217ll have to repay it. When we balance something like this, we have to look at the race&
#8217s role in the game session as a whole. We can&
#8217t just look at combat, as healing surges are a strategic resource.
With that in mind, the shade&
#8217s
racial ability is a powerful tool. A shade traveling in the middle of a group is effectively invisible. At night, a shade can evade detection with ease. While the racial ability&
#8217s standard action cost makes it a suboptimal choice in many combat situations, outside of a fight its at-will usage makes it a powerful, versatile tool. In addition, a smart shade can begin most combats hidden.
I have to call this out as a pure and utter load of complete twaddle. It definitely tells me the designers don't play their own game, because hiding outside of combat is
trivial to achieve in all but the most ridiculously metagamed scenarios possible. At night, anyone can evade detection with ease due to the fact anyone trained in stealth will have the total concealment (or just concealment if hiding out of LoS) to maintain stealth. The shade has no inherent bonus here anywhere from the racial, it frankly contributes absolutely nothing. In the case where you have enemies that can see through darkness, like Darkvision or Low-Light vision it's irrelevant either way. The shade cannot hide any better as these creatures will still pick him out (as the shade - or anyone else actually - won't have concealment/total concealment against these creatures so they see him).
The quite frank point here is that
anyone trained in stealth playing smart
can do the exact same thing. When it won't work
the shade is going to be absolutely no better off whatsoever. Where it isn't going to do the stealthing character any good, such as running into enemies using tremorsense like umber hulks and spiders, guess what?
The shade is going to be in just as much poo.
With regard to hiding in allies, this is laughable again because if you're hiding behind your allies to hide - who are inherently not hiding themselves - what on earth are the guards thinking? Oh there is an odd group of people walking in a strange formation coming towards us, this isn't
unusual in any manner whatsoever. On the other hand a warlock can hide in broad daylight, without needing allies to give him cover and hence look maximally suspicious as well. This is because he can maintain concealment by moving 3 squares with a simple class feature.
This just confirms to me the entire thing was immensely poorly designed. There is some strange interpretation of their own stealth rules going on here - or some weird assumption that there are town guards on every single corner, rooftop and inside every doorway making achieving stealth out of sight impossible. That isn't an assumption I can say any game I've ever run - even ones in monster infested ruins like the old Myth Drannor - have ever made.
I really have to wonder what sort of assumptions the designers think stealth works under - because it is very clearly not the rules in the RC if the shades power gives any benefit.
