Shuriken vs. Hand Crossbow: What's the Point of Shuriken?

[Felon]

Unless you're a thief.

Then Rapier, at +4/1d8, wins over any other melee weapon for ya.

Unless you're a thief with the Versatile Duelist feat.

You know how the designers wanted to prevent sneak attack from being with high-damage weapons? This no-prereq heroic-tier feat undoes all of that. A DragMag feat, natch.

 

[Bold or Stupid]

Unless you're a thief with the Versatile Duelist feat.

You know how the designers wanted to prevent sneak attack from being with high-damage weapons? This no-prereq heroic-tier feat undoes all of that. A DragMag feat, natch.

Just looked up Versatile duelist -

Versatile Duelist

Heroic Tier
Prerequisite: Rogue
Benefit: You gain proficiency with all one-handed, military heavy blades. If a rogue power requires you to wield a light blade, you can use that power with a one-handed heavy blade and can also deal your Sneak Attack damage while using a one-handed heavy blade with that power.

Published in Dragon Magazine 381, page(s) 70.

It says you can use it for powers and sneak attack, not that you treat it as a light blade, so while (with another feat) you can sneak attack with Bastard Swords, this feat seems about even with rapier prof for a PHB Rogue and not all that good for a Thief.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Unless you're a thief with the Versatile Duelist feat.

You know how the designers wanted to prevent sneak attack from being with high-damage weapons? This no-prereq heroic-tier feat undoes all of that. A DragMag feat, natch.

There is nothing incredibly good about Versatile Duelist. It sounds super good until you actually look closely. The feat itself does nothing for you that Rapier Proficiency doesn't do. All it does is let you use a longsword (+3/1d8) vs a Rapier (+3/1d8). You can then spend ANOTHER feat and use a bastard sword (+3/1d10). Contrast this with spending another feat to make your Rapier +4/1d8 instead and you find that the rapier path is actually marginally superior. Most of the heavy blade feats you can now open up aren't really all that exciting for rogues either. HBO for instance may be somewhat useful but not earth shaking for a rogue and is unusable by a thief.

Basically there are no feats that will give a rogue a superior option to a dagger. Any feat chain you follow ends up with the rogue using a weapon slightly better than the dagger, but not better than the dagger will be if the same feats are used to buff the dagger instead. So a rapier rogue, a bastard sword rogue, etc are perfectly viable alternatives, but not in any way unbalanced and Versatile Duelist is a perfect example of the way feats SHOULD work, new flavorful options but no real overall advantage.

 

[Dayte]

There is nothing incredibly good about Versatile Duelist. It sounds super good until you actually look closely. The feat itself does nothing for you that Rapier Proficiency doesn't do. All it does is let you use a longsword (+3/1d8) vs a Rapier (+3/1d8). You can then spend ANOTHER feat and use a bastard sword (+3/1d10). Contrast this with spending another feat to make your Rapier +4/1d8 instead and you find that the rapier path is actually marginally superior. Most of the heavy blade feats you can now open up aren't really all that exciting for rogues either. HBO for instance may be somewhat useful but not earth shaking for a rogue and is unusable by a thief.

Basically there are no feats that will give a rogue a superior option to a dagger. Any feat chain you follow ends up with the rogue using a weapon slightly better than the dagger, but not better than the dagger will be if the same feats are used to buff the dagger instead. So a rapier rogue, a bastard sword rogue, etc are perfectly viable alternatives, but not in any way unbalanced and Versatile Duelist is a perfect example of the way feats SHOULD work, new flavorful options but no real overall advantage.

Also, I believe versatile Duelist would not allow your sneak attack on M/RBAs. Which, with the new rules on dealing sneak attack damage once per turn, drops it another notch.

 

[DracoSuave]

Also, I believe versatile Duelist would not allow your sneak attack on M/RBAs. Which, with the new rules on dealing sneak attack damage once per turn, drops it another notch.

Also, using heavy blades with thief powers is utterly useless for a thief anyways.

Weapon Finesse is not a power.
Thief Weapon Talent is not a power.

Once you've done that, you're pretty much resolved to using Strength-based attacks, which don't allow sneak attack, don't get bonuses to hit and don't get bonuses to damage.

At that point, just roll a slayer.

 

[Ryujin]

Shuriken weigh less than dagger or HCB, a big factor for a rogue who might need to watch his encumbrance.

... except when a power can be used at range, and there is some benefit from a feat or power specifically for using a light blade

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Also, I believe versatile Duelist would not allow your sneak attack on M/RBAs. Which, with the new rules on dealing sneak attack damage once per turn, drops it another notch.

Yeah, this is true. I had a BS rogue in my game using VD and a bastard sword. The new SA rule wasn't in effect back then. I'd say about the only thing it did for her at all was a slightly improved MBA (since the character had a high STR she actually had pretty good MBAs).

It is another one of those options that for a specific character build works OK, but it is really a pure flavor option. When I first looked at VD I thought it might be a bit strong, but the math pretty well works out with rogues, that +1 dagger to-hit is just so valuable that no other option can really overshadow it mechanically.

And yes, DS, VD is pretty much worthless for a thief, I agree. There might be a way to tweak things enough to make it usable, but I can't think of a way off the top of my head.

 

[Neonchameleon]

There is nothing incredibly good about Versatile Duelist. It sounds super good until you actually look closely. The feat itself does nothing for you that Rapier Proficiency doesn't do. All it does is let you use a longsword (+3/1d8) vs a Rapier (+3/1d8). You can then spend ANOTHER feat and use a bastard sword (+3/1d10). Contrast this with spending another feat to make your Rapier +4/1d8 instead and you find that the rapier path is actually marginally superior. Most of the heavy blade feats you can now open up aren't really all that exciting for rogues either. HBO for instance may be somewhat useful but not earth shaking for a rogue and is unusable by a thief.

Indeed. Using Versatile Duelist for a bastard sword vs a dagger for a regular rogue means that you are spending two feats to trade a 1 point penalty to hit for +3/[w] damage. (This doesn't work at all for Thieves). You get six feats at heroic tier. Two of them are going to be Expertise (Light Blade being obviously strong) and Backstabber if you have any interest in damage at all. A third is almost certainly going to be some sort of multiclass feat. So you're using two of your three unclaimed heroic feats to do gain +3 damage at -1 to hit - and without Light Blade Expertise or a decent ranged attack bolstered by Expertise unless you have the All Weapons Expertise feat (when Light Blade Expertise starts to overhaul you). That's ... viable. But hardly great.

The core problem was always the Superior Crossbow. +3/1d10 for one feat (that worse yet can take crossbow talent) rather than two. And a long ranged weapon at that. It was in all ways superior to the hand crossbow - and post MPII did three points extra damage over a dagger with minimal drawback.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Indeed. Using Versatile Duelist for a bastard sword vs a dagger for a regular rogue means that you are spending two feats to trade a 1 point penalty to hit for +3/[w] damage. (This doesn't work at all for Thieves). You get six feats at heroic tier. Two of them are going to be Expertise (Light Blade being obviously strong) and Backstabber if you have any interest in damage at all. A third is almost certainly going to be some sort of multiclass feat. So you're using two of your three unclaimed heroic feats to do gain +3 damage at -1 to hit - and without Light Blade Expertise or a decent ranged attack bolstered by Expertise unless you have the All Weapons Expertise feat (when Light Blade Expertise starts to overhaul you). That's ... viable. But hardly great.

The core problem was always the Superior Crossbow. +3/1d10 for one feat (that worse yet can take crossbow talent) rather than two. And a long ranged weapon at that. It was in all ways superior to the hand crossbow - and post MPII did three points extra damage over a dagger with minimal drawback.

Yeah, that crossbow was always an issue. It started strong and just got better and better. I would still say though that the HCB wasn't made obsolete by it. The Load Free and one-handed nature of the HCB always made it a good flexible option. Even without any of the one-handed reloading tricks at least it gave you a shot at someone using better than 5 range before everyone closed. While certainly inferior as a sniping weapon to the SCB it was still usable, so if you're mainly a melee rogue it has been a good balanced option. With the CS and added stuff in MP2 though SCBs have gotten a bit extreme, so I'm glad it got nerfed back.

 

[Plane Sailing]

Style.