Thanks, guys, you've ruined Haste for the rest of us.

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Damn dem cheaters, they wrecked my wizard for spite.

They didn't just wreck your wizard.

There goes my strategy #1 and I have no alternatives.

You have no alternatives? What happened when someone Slowed you?

Spells should be nice, not required

Now I have to return back to relying on my friends to play a part in battle, damnations.

Which is a good thing. After all, if your other friends aren't contributing, then they aren't having fu.

What was wrong with the baddies blasting us with 2 cones of cold, it was countered by the baddie being hasted and slowing us easy... but he could only do it for the one encounter in which he fought us and if he ever fought some other pcs he would run out of spells.

Perhaps the baddie was a gelugon, who couldn't cast Slow.

What spell do I now have to always turn to without fail at the beginning of battle, oops are you all sleeping?

Time Stop? Oh wait, that's probably getting nerfed too

Now I'm forced to use the quicken feat@!

LMAO!

Thanks WOTC, I'm going to have to suck o my dm to let me have the BROKEN old version to keep my lame pc playable.

So you believed that the old Haste was broken, and yet you used it? There's a term that... it starts with an "M".

I'm not sure why your PC is lame without Haste. Could you post his or her stats here?

 

[Ferox4]

Okay, poor idea

"At leasts it gets you out in the open air."

Nix aging....

 

[Bastoche]

Re: Re: bump Haste to 4th level and bring back the aging effect

Well, consider the problems.

Biggest problem: dragons. Woohoo! An intelligent dragon will take haste as a third level spell ASAP and cast it over and over every day until she's a great wyrm.
Second problem: elves. Whereas a human will think long and hard before casting haste, elves won't care much. They can cast it hundreds of times before they notice the effects. To a lesser degree, dwarves and halflings will have the same attitude. I'm not sure this is a positive game effect.

I actually kind of like the balance method in Baldur's Gate II: hasted characters are fatigued once the spell wears off. The problem with this trick, however, is that it encourages hit-and-run tactics, encourages PCs to engage in one big encounter every day, rather than have lots of smaller ones. Although some campaigns work well with this structure (it's how I tend to run my games), it is counter to the style that the rules generally encourage -- the CR system, for example, encourages about 4 encounters every game day.

Daniel

Remember also that in BGII, there was haste which gave one extra attack and double speed and improved haste which doubled your attacks and was at 6th level IIRC.

I say make a 3rd level haste that double your speed, gives +4 to AC and give one extra attack and make a greater haste which is just haste but at 5th level. Not 4th because of wands IMO. NO AGING !!!

 

[Shard O'Glase]

Re: i'm not sure quickened for sorceror will be in

...except that, apparently at the Winter Fantasy seminar...

quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A long hard look was taken at meta-magic feats. In the end they are not being changed because the proposal did not have enough time to be play tested and the fix could have been worse than the relatively minor problem it would fix.

Gah, I am getting less and less enthused for the revision the more I hear.

 

[SimonMoon5]

Seriously, though, SimonMoon5's whole argument was that wizards suck without Haste because mid-level fighters can do 120 to 150 points of damage per round. That's such a wild claim that I think it's reasonable to ask him to back it up.

I didn't say "wizards suck". I said wizards can't keep up with the damage that fighters do. This was meant to imply, as others picked up on, that this makes wizards pick only "save or die" spells, which is somewhat bland.

For the 120 to 150 points of damage, my personal experience has been with an archer character who is both a Deepwoods Sniper and an Order of the Initiate of the Bow. "Core Rules Only" fanatics might not accept that as valid, but he does way more damage than my Incantatrix ever could. And that's with "Old Haste".

In another game I'm in, a player has a half-orc barbarian. How much damage could he do at 14th level? He started with a 20 STR, so by 14th level, he should add +3 to it from level advancement. He already (at 11th level) has a +4 STR item, so let him keep that, for a 27 STR when not raging. When raging, that's a 31. With a greatsword, used two-handed of course, assuming a +4 (with greater magic weapon), that's a base damage of d10+10(str)+5 (half again str) +4(weapon) for d10+19, an average of 24.5. If his three attacks hit, that's 73.5 points of damage. And that's without min-maxing really.

Give him a weapon which is a base +1 flaming shocking frost weapon (with GMW later cast on top of that), that will add another 3d6 (average 10.5) damage per hit, adding 31.5 per round, for a total of 105 points of damage per round.

Hmm, so now I need to justify another 15 points of damage, huh?
If I say "power attack for 5, for three attacks" that would do it, but then someone would counter that his other attacks might not hit. Let's see... what else can I add to him...

Oh, yeah, instead of a 14th level barbarian, make him a 10th level barbarian/4th level fighter so he can pick up weapon specialization, for an extra 2 points per attack, making his total damage for the round 111.

Hmmm. Nine points to go. Well, let him improve his str enhancing item from +4 to +6. That will make his raging str a 33, and will make his damage from str go from +10+5 to +11+5, an increase of only +1 point per hit, for a total of 114 points of damage per round.

Six points of damage left to justify. He crits on a 19 with the greatsword. Give him improved crit so that he crits on a 17. That will approximately double his damage (except for the flaming frost shock part) about 20% of the time. So all the 114 (except for 31.5) is doubled about 20% of the time. So, let's add 20% of this 82.5 points of damage...That adds 16.5 points of damage.

So, that makes his total damage per round an average of 130.5. No splatbooks, no non-core rules. How's that?

 

[Trine]

And I say good luck hitting with every attack every round. Try running that through one of those combat calculators with various AC's to see how likely it is he'll be able to do all of that all of the time.

 

[SimonMoon5]

Even the Tome and Blood bladesinger (the easiest character of this archetype to make functional) is dramatically effected by this rules change. Before, he could have a good armor class to make up for his suboptimal damage. (Longsword one handed). Not anymore. At best, he'll have a mediocre armor class. With Polymorph self, he can be somewhat viable, but take that away and all you have is a fighter who doesn't deal much damage and can only get a mediocre armor class a limited number of times per day.

Well, bladesingers at least get to cast a spell a round as a free action which can include True Strike, which in combination with Power Attack, can be quite useful.

So, again, this character type is useful only because he can cast more spells per round...

 

[SimonMoon5]

Consider this WRT that cone, though: you don't use AoE spells against a single target, not by preference.

Yeah, but you don't often get to pick your fights. If there's an army of evil out there, great. How many armies are lurking in dungeons? (And recall the motto of 3e, "the return to the dungeon"?) For those who say that damage spread among multiple targets is just as good as damage done to one opponent, which would you rather have: a spell that does 500 points of damage to one target or a spell that does one point of damage to 500 targets? Are they really going to have the same usefulness?

Damaging lots of foes is not as useful as doing the total damage to one individual, unless the horde of foes is very weak, weak enough to die from the damage, in which case, the foes probably did not pose a challenge anyway, so the method of defeating them is fairly irrelevant. In combat situations, is not the most useful tactic going to involve trying to gang up on one opponent rather than spreading damage to a variety of opponents? I think so, because the sooner that you take down one foe, the sooner he'll stop doing damage to you.

But maybe in a fight with several opponents, you'd[*] rather attack each foe once before heading back to the guy that you damaged the first time? I wouldn't.


[*] I don't mean you specifically, but instead anyone who thinks that a fireball that does 50 points of damage spread among 5 targets is as useful as 50 points of damage done to one target.

 

[SimonMoon5]

And I say good luck hitting with every attack every round. Try running that through one of those combat calculators with various AC's to see how likely it is he'll be able to do all of that all of the time.

Feh. Should I take the wizard's damage and calculate how often it will "hit" thanks to Spell Resistance? But anyway...

He's got a base +14/+9/+4 attack. He's got +1 to hit for Weapon Focus (since I already decided he's got Weapon Specialization). He's got a +4 weapon also. He's got a 33 strength, so that's another +11 to hit, making his attacks +30/+25/+20. I really don't think he'll miss that often.

 

[Pax]

Re: Re: Re: Quickened for sorcerors

For that matter, I hope they remove the full-round casting time for sorcerors using metamagic feats - because as it stands now, metamagic seriously sucks for sorcerors.

You're kidding, right?

Metamagicks MULTIPLY the sorceror's already-impressive tactical flexibility.

Try this sometime: Sorceror (20) (replace sorceror levels with prestige classes to taste if you like). The spell Know Protections from MoF. All five Elemental Substitutions. Scads of elemental-tagged damaging spells

...

Defy someone to come up with a creature, aside form obscene SR and/or outright immunity to magic and/or especially immune or resistant to damaging spells, which said sorceror CANNOT manage to put down in near-record time.

BEing able to determine EXACTLY which element(s) the target is vulnerable to (or at least not resistant/immune to), and throwing exactly that sort of damage at them with every spell and spell-level available to you, is nothing to be sneezed at.

...

A wizard might get caught with fire-based damage spells facing a fire-resistant enemy, even if s/he has ElSub(cold) or the like. Said wizard sees a decrease in utility/effect for said fire-based spells.

The Sorceror just starts ElSub-ing his/her spells, and sidesteps the resistance entirely.

...

Frankly, sorcerors get more mileage out of metamagicks than wizards do ... just as wizards get moremileage out of item creation feats than sorcerors do. IMO at least.