Small annoyances that could / should be finally fixed with the Essentials

[Dannyalcatraz]

Problem is with Astral Fire and the like is that it has two stat requirements to give the same bonus to a limited subset of attacks, while weapon focus has no stat requirement and gives that bonus to pretty much every attack someone has.

Furthermore, the attributes are not evenly distributed - the Cold Acid one comes up a lot for wizards because one of the attributes is Int. Astral Fire? Not so much, as it has two secondary attributes.

Regards,

Yeah- ran into that while designing a Starlock. Star Pact powers are virtually evenly distributed across fire/radiant, cold/acid and necrotic/psychic. Try to take all those feats and you'll see some serious MAD.

 

[eamon]

They could have come up with a new category of bonus (adjustment bonus? Something like that) -- but the point was to differentiate scaling bonuses (which are intended to be category-level bonuses and always scale with tier--with the intent that more or less every character should have a hit bonus from this category at some point--and which, obviously, never stack) from situational bonuses (which typically -should- stack and don't scale with tier). This is interesting--as it it means there's not a slot for making situational bonuses not stack. But as long as they're generally not always present (and -most- situational bonuses are truly situational, exceptions like Nimble Blade aside), it's not a big deal if you can -situationally- get ridiculous hit bonuses.

The problem twofold. Firstly, since scaling bonuses are available at all, they're a required feat; that means that using different implements or weapons (or continuing to use a non-weapon non implement power) becomes a terribly poor choice; this makes a DM's life harder since every character is extremely specialied and your faced with either "coincidentally" having all the right kind of weapons/implements lying around or making them impossible to until the enchantment is transferred (if even possible - not all enchantments go on every weapon/implement).

Secondly, since everyone eventually needs expertise or equivalent for all their relevant attacks; everyone will have (versatile) expertise. That makes other feat bonuses to attack rolls are simply irrelevant. This makes lots of feats (almost) redundant: draconic spellcaster, feyborn charm, gnome phantasmist, Lolth's Meat (totally pointless), Dragonborn Vengeance, Half-Orc Vengeance, Swift Blade Style (for Dual Strike), Mror Stalwart (totally pointless), Bloodied Spear (almost pointless), Improvised Missile, Watchful Guardian...

Many of those feats already are situational. Others had scaling bonuses they never should have had. Frankly, I've yet to see a single advantage of the approach WotC actually took - instead of removing scaling feat bonuses from the 3 problematic feats, they made lots of perfectly fine and even flavorful feats redundant. I spend time and enthusiasm on my characters and so do most others I game with; yet because of the dramatic errata that come out at a regular pace, these chars need story-line jarring remakes every once and a while. Yet playing without errata is hard to do: that means on the one hand forsaking the character builder, and on the other hand accepting obviously problematic feats (say, pre-errata draconic spellcaster, feyborn charm and gnome phantasmist) along with all the other broken stuff around.

 

[Gradine]

My problem is that Weapon Focus/Expertise/what have you are based on weapon groups. If you're a ranger who wants to dual wield two weapon types for flavor reasons (say, hammer+sword), you have to take each feat twice.

QFT. Signature weapons are fine for many heroes, but anyone who wants to have some flexibility (or, for whatever flavor reasons, wants to carry and use multiple weapons) in what they use is screwed over here.

Granted, even without Focus/Expertise/etc. said characters are still left out unless running an inherent bonuses campaign.

 

[Herschel]

This would only be true if expertise made your attack bonus treat your primary stat as an 18, or something similar (which would be interesting, actually!) But, no, it's just a +1/+2/+3 bonus. It has nothing to do with your stats, only with how important hitting is to you.

It would be cooler if it could work like that, but likely open a huge can of screaming worms. And I think it absolutely has to do with your stats, or at least the ability to do things with your stats in a flexible manner.

 

[keterys]

It's actually pretty easy to multiclass into something that uses ki focus, then wear a ki focus and use unenchanted weapons. It's less optimal, but it's a pretty cool option.

 

[mneme]

The problem twofold. Firstly, since scaling bonuses are available at all, they're a required feat;

Yep. By 15, anyway. But to be fair, there's some differentiation in which feat you take.

Secondly, since everyone eventually needs expertise or equivalent for all their relevant attacks; everyone will have (versatile) expertise.

Not really, no. Most characters get Versatile expetise. But exclusive weapon users who want more flexibility do better with Weapon Expertise, Weapon Focus, and Weapon Master, and class/race combos who can use a racial expertise/focus option -gain- some flexiblity and save a feat (or better) by using the feat. A bunch of feats were deliberately made irrelevant when they switched expertise over to a feat bonus; the more interesting ones were rebuilt and are still quite powerful.

This makes lots of feats (almost) redundant: draconic spellcaster, feyborn charm, gnome phantasmist, Lolth's Meat (totally pointless), Dragonborn Vengeance, Half-Orc Vengeance, Swift Blade Style (for Dual Strike), Mror Stalwart (totally pointless), Bloodied Spear (almost pointless), Improvised Missile, Watchful Guardian...

Swift Blade Style looks fine in heroic; you train it out in Paragon.
Improvised Missile is fine; it's not redundant with anything. Although it should provide a proficiency bonus, not a feat bonus. It's not -good-, but the feat bonus changes don't affect it.
Draconic Spellcaster, Feyborn Charm, Gnome Phantasmist are fine. They were specifically converted over to be alternatives to the weapon/implement based expertise for dragonborn, eladrin, and gnomes -- and they work just fine in that role for the appropriate classes. The draconic feat is the foundation of the breath weapon specialist build, even. And the feyborn charm feat both gives a nifty secondary benefit and deals nicely with the traditional weakness of this type of power by not restricting your damage types at all. And re Gnome Phantasmist...well, illusions are crazy; they get a huge feat chain that gives you always-on combat advantage (eg, +2 to hit), a crit range of 19-20, and daze on crit in epic, and since most arcane illusion attacks are psychic, you also drop a -2 to hit on anything you hit.
While yeah, mathfix, I don't really see a problem with the expertise feats. Given the way defenses scale upwards compared to attack bonuses, you can either rely on the crazy power bonuses to attack you're going to have for most rounds of combat in an optimized group from early paragon levels onward -- or you can make sure you can go it alone by picking up expertise and specializing a bit. The problem is singular attacks -- because, yes, racial attacks don't scale properly and it's not worth taking a feat to make them do so unless you're specializing in the racial attack enough that it's not just a 1/encounter thing. I'm not sure how much of a problem this is, frankly, as most racial attacks go against a NAD, but the best solutions involve making them auto-scale (more) or making items that boost them available. Wizards' perspective seems to be that it's fine for characters to drift down to about a 25% chance to hit on the low end, or rise to a 75% chance to hit on the high end -- those are still numbers where missing is a real possiblity and buffs and debuffs have real effects. But you don't want a character to have a 95% chance or 5% chance to hit (or, really, to drift out of the 6-15 hitbox--per roll; Avengers may have a 75% chance to hit at 11-or-better, but hit them with a -5 debuf and their chance to hit drops to under 44%!) for an entire combat, or the situational bonuses that make a battle feel dynamic will fall flat or ineffective.

 

[Aegeri]

They should eliminate all the expertise feats IMO.

 

[Saeviomagy]

I would like to see a series of feats that allow you to apply boosts to your attacks that simulate exotic weapon benefits.

ie - a set of feats similar to

Jagged edge
Martial weapon feat
Choose a simple weapon you own. Your attacks with that weapon are now high-crit
You may change which weapon gains this benefit after an extended rest.
A weapon may only benefit from one martial weapon feat at a time.

Precision pommel
Martial weapon feat
Choose a simple or martial weapon you own. Your attacks with that weapon gain +1 to attack rolls.
You may change which weapon gains this benefit after an extended rest.
A weapon may only benefit from one martial weapon feat at a time.

add the same for increasing die size, adding "rogue weapon", reach etc etc.

The idea being that you can simply choose a feat to emulate using an exotic weapon instead of actually having an exotic weapon.

I'd like to see the weapon restriction lines removed from rogue powers. I honestly don't think that you'll see any crazyness if a rogue is still required to use rogue weapons to gain sneak attack damage (rogue powers aren't exactly astounding in terms of raw damage in and of themselves), and it would fix a lot of wierdnesses.

I'd also like to see sneak attack limited to weapons which have a trait instead of the current light blade/crossbow/sling designation. Say... "precise". That would allow a siege crossbow to exist without breaking things: the weapon would simply not have the "precise" trait.

I'd like to see the mace be renamed so it's not identical to the weapon group that it's in.

I'd like a general feat allowing someone to be competent at unarmed combat in a way that lines up with all of the martial classes.

I'd like ki focusses to not require proficiency with ki focus implements to give bonuses to weapon attacks because it's a wierd rule that stops all kinds of interesting (but not necessarily powerful) combinations.

I'd like being charismatic to make a martial character a better leader than being strong.

 

[eamon]

Yep. By 15, anyway. But to be fair, there's some differentiation in which feat you take. Not really, no. Most characters get Versatile expetise. But exclusive weapon users who want more flexibility do better with Weapon Expertise, Weapon Focus, and Weapon Master, and class/race combos who can use a racial expertise/focus option -gain- some flexiblity and save a feat (or better) by using the feat. A bunch of feats were deliberately made irrelevant when they switched expertise over to a feat bonus; the more interesting ones were rebuilt and are still quite powerful.

Deliberately undermining the game is nevertheless undermining the game - whether it was deliberate or not has no bearing on whether it was wise. When I said everyone takes (versatile) expertise, I meant that everyone takes either versatile expertise, implement expertise and weapon expertise.

Swift Blade Style looks fine in heroic; you train it out in Paragon.

Assuming you have expertise, then for Dual strike (as mentioned) swift blade style is a +1 bonus to attack and damage rolls for OA's. That's probably worse than blade opportunist right off the bat. Except you don't get the bonus always, you get it only after using dual strike and only if both attacks hits... it's pointless.

Improvised Missile is fine; it's not redundant with anything. Although it should provide a proficiency bonus, not a feat bonus. It's not -good-, but the feat bonus changes don't affect it.

I see your point - fair enough. My perspective is that the alternative, which is to grant everyone +1/+2/+3 at levels 5/15/25 rather than the current incarnation of expertise, renders this feat actually playable across levels.

Draconic Spellcaster, Feyborn Charm, Gnome Phantasmist are fine. They were specifically converted over to be alternatives to the weapon/implement based expertise for dragonborn, eladrin, and gnomes -- and they work just fine in that role for the appropriate classes. The draconic feat is the foundation of the breath weapon specialist build, even. And the feyborn charm feat both gives a nifty secondary benefit and deals nicely with the traditional weakness of this type of power by not restricting your damage types at all. And re Gnome Phantasmist...well, illusions are crazy; they get a huge feat chain that gives you always-on combat advantage (eg, +2 to hit), a crit range of 19-20, and daze on crit in epic, and since most arcane illusion attacks are psychic, you also drop a -2 to hit on anything you hit.

These three feats are the problematic feats before the expertise errata; changing expertise again would clearly necessitate changing them too. However, I don't think you can reasonable consider the feats relevant as is, which is a shame. Draconic spellcaster is probably the strongest of the tree and may be fine - however, the feat is equivalent to Weapon focus unless a caster only has a particular damage type in his arsenal, in which case it saves a feat slot. The other two are not fine, however - these are not usable by builds that can reasonably exclusively use their spells, and as such expertise is still necessary. Which means they degrade to a conditional damage bonus that doesn't stack with weapon focus. It's particularly hilarious for the illusion line since some of these don't have damage rolls at all; if it's what you want, you might as well consider a weapon and weapon focus. These feats are generally redundant at best; and in the case of gnome phantasmist almost certainly unattractive - despite being the only meaningful feat support for the gnome illusionist. To be clear though, I'd much rather see these three feats disappear entirely together with expertise than maintain the status quo. Heck, if the get rid of the scaling bonus and don't fix expertise I'd be happier since at least it makes house-ruling expertise easier.

While yeah, mathfix, I don't really see a problem with the expertise feats. Given the way defenses scale upwards compared to attack bonuses, you can either rely on the crazy power bonuses to attack you're going to have for most rounds of combat in an optimized group from early paragon levels onward -- or you can make sure you can go it alone by picking up expertise and specializing a bit. The problem is singular attacks -- because, yes, racial attacks don't scale properly and it's not worth taking a feat to make them do so unless you're specializing in the racial attack enough that it's not just a 1/encounter thing. I'm not sure how much of a problem this is, frankly, as most racial attacks go against a NAD, but the best solutions involve making them auto-scale (more) or making items that boost them available. Wizards' perspective seems to be that it's fine for characters to drift down to about a 25% chance to hit on the low end, or rise to a 75% chance to hit on the high end -- those are still numbers where missing is a real possiblity and buffs and debuffs have real effects. But you don't want a character to have a 95% chance or 5% chance to hit (or, really, to drift out of the 6-15 hitbox--per roll; Avengers may have a 75% chance to hit at 11-or-better, but hit them with a -5 debuf and their chance to hit drops to under 44%!) for an entire combat, or the situational bonuses that make a battle feel dynamic will fall flat or ineffective.

Attacking NADs or not matters for monsters (since not all PC NADs scale well), but it doesn't matter for PC's - monster NADs scale just as well as AC, and the difference is about 2 (i.e. common weapon proficiency bonus). Expertertise isn't a good fix because it's too specifically tied to a particular weapon or implement for no apparent reason. There is an easy fix; simply grant an unnamed bonus at levels 5/15/25 and drop the feats entirely.