Swordmage: Isn't it a little bit unbalanced?

[Aegeri]

Not only this, but if you Con-jack anything but a Battlemind you don't have higher defenses, you have a high AC and Fortitude. You likely have a VERY squishy defense (or two!) enemy controllers/artillery/certain lurkers can abuse mercilessly so most defenders will be sporting 10-11 surges to start with.

Believe me I know this. Pre-MM3 I had to literally make groups of monsters that targeted Reflex and Will to be challenging (they are the poor stats of my former epic parties Fighter and Barbarian respectively). This actually isn't anywhere near as important now and making groups of monsters specifically to abuse these defenses is just being murderous (instead of mandatory to make the game challenging). Noting that I think any defender is utterly bonkers not to have 15 wisdom or charisma by level 21 for Epic Will.

 

[mneme]

Aegeri: not to undervalue your points (the math looks good), but if you're comparing a Shielding Swordmage to a Hospitaler, shouldn't you be assuming the swordmage is a Sigil Carver? (unless there's some -other- optimal paragon path for Shielders, but I didn't see one in a cursory look). Which means that except when the party decided that the penalty box was too punishing, the swordmage was adding +2 (power, alas, but still) to ally defenses in addition to her mark and getting an effective punish that can go off multiple times in a round (if only once per monster) and doesn't interfere with her Aegis. (hmm. That d20 (er, 20th level daily) is going to do incredibly good single target damage, too).

 

[sobchak]

I have a few issues with some your statements Aegeri. Even at epic, not all enemies will be intelligent enough to always decide to not attack the swordmage. The earlier example I gave about teleporting into a vulnerable position and failing to be attacked was somewhat of a mistatement on my part. There were 3 skeleton soldiers and maybe 8 skeleton minions against us. Our shaman decided to be first in, and wound up caught in a trap being attacked by the 3 soldiers while dying. I was able to teleport in and contain and eventually kill all the minions, while burning an action point to mark all the soldiers with sword of sigils. My aegis saved the shaman from dying and helped keep other players from falling unconscious. The only thing I failed at was causing all the monsters to attack me, which was a somewhat unrealistic expectation on my part.

My main points are 1) The swordmage can do a skidoosh of damage to groups of enemies, but does have poor single target damage and 2) The skeleton minions could not just ignore me in that scenario. At the very least half would have to attack, if not all of them as our DM did. They do not possess the requisite intelligence to make such decisions. In your campaign would an epic level creature possessing limited intelligence always decide not to attack a swordmage based on your calculations?

 

[Aegeri]

In your campaign would an epic level creature possessing limited intelligence always decide not to attack a swordmage based on your calculations?

This is an interesting question and subject to another thread entirely as well. There are two judgements that I make when deciding when monsters attack and who, noting that at epic the game is heavily in the PCs favor power and ability wise. Monsters that do not work together die doing very little. So creatures need to have basic tactics 101 or they will fail entirely. However, this is going to be a summary of various "things" that happen. Bearing in mind that I often divide it into creature type, how difficult the encounter should be and what the intent is. Sometimes my monsters act like complete morons and fall completely into the PCs optimal tactics: Because it's a good thing to remind your PCs why they are at epic tier.

I also change all these tactics by tier. You want to be easier on heroic PCs who nobody has heard anything about, while having primary antagonists know something about how these legendary heroes are renowned to fight by epic.

1) The swordmage would not be pulling "threat" on such a monster as he's not doing any damage to it. A fighter, battlemind or similar would nearly always be at. An unintelligent monster that gets hit tends to want to kill whoever hit it for the most damage. The lack of threat of being hit from the swordmage, combined with low damage of their attacks generally means a creature will ignore them. Unintelligent creatures frequently provoke marks and act completely incompetently, usually killing themselves in the process (as it frequently misses whoever it attacks if that character also has high defenses). Unfortunately, the Shielding Swordmage is unique in that it fails to actually present any threat in this manner.

Then again if nobody else was hitting that creature it would be very unlikely to ignore the swordmage and keep flailing away at him. Same with the fact if someone hits it from a considerable distance away, it wouldn't be intelligent enough to disengage. It would only ignore the mark if someone was stabbing it really hard - like a striker or if there was a bloodied PC within reach.

I like provoking marks from solos especially, say a huge Heroslayer Hydra, so it ends the combat a bit quicker and makes sure the defender gets some use out of it.

2) By creature type, I use daemons a lot in my examples so their behaviour (especially at epic) is good to bring up: Daemons and other chaotic evil creatures hit bloodied characters first, even if this would provoke a mark if it means killing the PC in question. If you get bloodied and there are demons, they go for you like bloodhounds if possible. They also coup de grace like crazy, so PCs quickly learn you go down around a daemon and it will be lights out. Demons also completely despise Divine characters in my games: They will always kill a divine character if they even remotely get the chance.

Demons fight intelligently, but their decision making process becomes reckless when a PC is bloodied or injured. They risk OAs, mark actions and similar "punishment" for the chance to down or murder a PC. For example they won't realize that killing the Shaman is a better idea than trying to finish off the wounded Avenger (Divine, Bloodied, within melee distance or range of spells/powers).

This can be altered and isn't set behavior as....

3) One difference that I put into my games at epic especially, is that monsters begin to act extremely optimally and intelligently as they are being commanded. Daemon princes, a Pit Fiend, a Molydeus, avatars of monsters like Caiphon and similar all increase monster "intelligence". They fight more optimally, realize more about their environment (using it fully) and such forth. This literally is when the PCs are fighting the personal guard of Orcus, or magically summoned/commanded enemies that are as intelligent as the creator. These monsters work together in perfect unison and completely understand the state of the game. They optimally direct their attacks against the PCs weakest defenses (who are, remember known heroes of legend by epic tier), they know what tactics the PC use and take advantage of the smallest of disadvantages.

This describes maybe 2 out of 10 encounters, only the most important and strongest encounters. Heroic tier monsters almost never ever ever have this level of intelligence, except in the most incredibly rare circumstances.

Effectively you can replace this with: Pure metagaming. This represents creatures commanded by intelligences so far beyond human, they are practically clairvoyant. Given the opponents of epic PCs, it makes good sense.

4) Whatever works. Any human intellect monster, who is paying attention will do what humans will do: If something works they will keep doing it. If punching the mage over and over works, they will continue to do that. If punching the mage over and over fails, they will try something else (or risk taking something else). This depends on the monster: Undead are unlikely to ever get bored. If for whatever reason I was using an epic zombie, it would sit there flailing away at the defender all day without realizing it was doing it wrong.

On the other hand a Balor will get frustrated and tear into something else - even if it means being hit. A molydeus can decide its current course of action is stupid and hit someone else. A star spawn of Ulban will ignore the dominate centric Wizard - who is just a liability anyway - and direct more attacks against the barbarian. Monsters engaged by a defender will ignore the defender when he cannot enforce his mark punishment; if they are intelligent enough to realize that at the time. And so on.

The idea is to make sure monsters are challenging first, but interesting and diverse as well. Star Spawn for example fight amazingly intelligently, given a bit of prediction to what PCs will do (almost unnatural ability to predict in fact). Demons are destructive and are very quick to use coup-de grace the instant they can - this makes them incredibly scary to fight in a difficult encounter. Devils fight simply extremely intelligently, but are not particularly prone to coup-de grace or provoking marks unless it strictly benefits them (Daemons will provoke marks if it at all thinks it will kill a PC).

And such forth. This is a hard question to answer, because I roleplay monsters depending on a huge number of complex variables. The most important of which is to A) Make them fun and B) Make it clearly feel like a group of demons is a DISTINCT threat from a group of devils (for example), which are different to star spawned horrors, which are different to undead and such forth.

Hopefully that is a sufficient answer, but that's a very hard question to answer. In general though, the most difficult situations fall under scenario 3. Those creatures and those encounters, which are my classic "EL+3" hard encounter at epic as well, are where monsters are going to act most optimally. IMO at that point, most optimally means to avoid and ignore the shielding swordmage as much as possible.

Edit: The most simple thing, that I completely forgot is "Will this kill me". If action A will kill me and action B will not, most monsters will take action B. Hence damaging marks are really important to stopping your average creature from deciding "This is worth the risk".

Edit2: Completely missed this question sorry.

Which means that except when the party decided that the penalty box was too punishing, the swordmage was adding +2 (power, alas, but still) to ally defenses in addition to her mark and getting an effective punish that can go off multiple times in a round (if only once per monster) and doesn't interfere with her Aegis.

Ouch, you need to be adjacent for the +2 bonus and while that is solid, it really opens you up for "Horrific AoE" murder. Given, as I've mentioned a lot, most of the powers that will drop/cause major complications are bursts that is a terrible idea. It also stacks the party up nicely for auras and automatic damage effects. That's going to be useful at best when monsters don't have bursts or area attacks: But could well get the party in trouble.

Punishing Sigil is really good though and is exactly the sort of power the Shielding Swordmage will need (this PP is solid for that alone, the powers are good as well). An OA is better than an immediate interrupt and easily gets past the "Doesn't get killed" part. Ignoring the Swordmage with the ability to make an OA, regardless of reach would be quite difficult. Personally, a shielding swordmage with that PP I think would go from useless at getting attention to probably being almost unignorable for most creatures without issue. Especially because it will prevent multiple attack powers from healthy creatures with sigil of safety. The only complication is getting bunched up in epic is a genuine trap. The Cleric in my last epic campaign had Divine Phalanx. I cannot name another power that PCs have I've seen in epic tier that almost killed the party more. It grouped them up for powerful effects nearly every single time.

It was delicious. Every time he used it, I could bring out the bursts and blasts and drop 3/5 party members. If it wasn't for his immediate reaction healing feat, that let him use healing word when a party member dropped to 0 they would have screwed themselves multiple times. When Demonomicon came out, they were extremely lucky I had finished and balanced most encounters. I didn't use soul stealer until the end of the campaign, so on several occasions one of those PCs would have been knocked unconscious immediately after healing.

 

[sobchak]

Thanks for such a comprehensive answer. I can't say what I would do in controlling monsters as I have not been a DM. At least not for a very long time. I wonder if you will be able to continue your use of coup-de-gras with demons with the new higher monster damages. I played a long campaign in 2009, and it seems that the damage is much more lethal now in the new one I just started. Different damage rates, different DM, so it is hard to tell. In the 2008 campaign I almost always felt in control of encounters. With the new damage scales, when someone makes a mistake things spiral out of control very quickly. The oppurtunity to use coup-de-gras may become much more frequent. An argument could made against using it at all. I will say that I would apply it only in very rare circumstances.

I still think you ignore the swordmage damage potential against groups of massed enemies. With your tactical perspective, I wonder whether a group taking burst damage would try and kill the attacker or disperse. Ignoring a swordmage who is spreading a lot of damage around groups with ally friendly bursts, especially while the allies are hacking away will quickly end a battle. Granted, it is not focus fire, but it is effective.

I have to play more games with the swordmage and my new group to ultimately decide how effective it is.

 

[mneme]

Ouch, you need to be adjacent for the +2 bonus and while that is solid, it really opens you up for "Horrific AoE" murder. Given, as I've mentioned a lot, most of the powers that will drop/cause major complications are bursts that is a terrible idea. It also stacks the party up nicely for auras and automatic damage effects. That's going to be useful at best when monsters don't have bursts or area attacks: But could well get the party in trouble.

Punishing Sigil is really good though and is exactly the sort of power the Shielding Swordmage will need (this PP is solid for that alone, the powers are good as well).

Indeed to both (why I referred to the "penalty box" here; +2 to to all defenses (and being protected by Punishing Sigil) is really good, but it's easy to overshoot, box up the party and have a monster hit everyone with a burst 1 stun/sleep effect. Still a -really- great bump over the typical Shielding Swordmage package.

Hmm. Actually, Booming Blade also looks great when you're locking down a single enemy, as it more or less grants you an auto-hit basic with really good damage (substantially lower than your actual basic...but auto-hit) if the enemy tries to escape. That plus sigil carver (so the options are "your buddy, at -4 and drawing an OA", "a ranged ally, drawing an OA", "a distant ally, drawing auto-damage and maybe an OA (and with a -BIG debuf on its damage) unless it can charge", and "you") sounds pretty nice.