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Message: <blockquote data-quote="keterys" data-source="post: 4970672" data-attributes="member: 43019">And an incorrect one.Yep. It's actually a lot more complex than you might think - for example, things have many spots to get screwed up and there's limited staff, so a lot of things like items in Adventurer's Vault come from freelancers, get inadequate testing, aren't read by key people, etc. Every single product has a slight amount of slippage, whether it's Rain of Blows, Blade Cascade, Battleragers, Righteous Rage of Tempus, or what. Well, even ignoring what they end up, the _first_ interesting part is that you're able to give out different arm treasure at all. As it currently stands, from level 6 through 15 you may as well not give out any arms items at all, until you get up to that next tier of armband. The more item slots that happens for, the less interesting treasure the DM can give out. Now, there's certainly plenty of cool weapons and armors to give out... but again, it's not like this one item _breaks_ the game, it just _harms_ the game.Of course they can. They just didn't do that. On purpose. I imagine that if they'd gone that route we'd instead be arguing about a different item that gave +6 to damage, when we already had the perfectly decent baseline of a bracer giving +2 to damage and a 1/enc kickass bull rush, or whatever.After all, it's just +6 to damage (or +4 relative), that's not exactly going to break the game!Has it ever occurred to you that if you dislike many of the base principles of the game, dislike the entire principle of item balance, etc... that perhaps your views would be better served _not_ in a thread by those looking for what items don't fit within those base principles? Perhaps they'd be best served in the house rules campaigning for a lot more cool items? I know I've seen those threads before and they're often interesting.Or perhaps in a different thread of which are the best and most optimal items that have been published, where armbands can be championed as a good example thereof?Indeed. And since you ten or so slots to fill and three tiers, that's not a bad benchmark to at least begin to compare things. After all, at 10 * 3 = 30 you're already twice as powerful as feats.That is _one_ option - the other option is to have daily effects of decent power, encounter effects of lower power than that, and persistent effects (properties) of even lower value. For example, things like +1d6 damage to all opportunity attacks and charges. Or Gloves of Giantkind that let you throw things in a decent way and let you get a bonus to damage each encounter. Or Luckbender's that let you reroll damage once per encounter. There's a lot more options than one crappy power once a day.That's a fallacy, of course... it's entirely possible to have reasonable daily powers that don't suck. For example a 1/day attack reroll and 1/day free healing surge.No, because balance is set by an intended standard. The problem with the armbands isn't that they break the game, it's that they're so much better than everything else. If everything else were as good, there'd be no problem at all.It's actually a lot more dealable than that. From a game design standpoint, it's really not that hard to make logical decisions on where you want things to be to get how much audience or have other effects, and keep things within rough guideposts. Of course, the more product you put out, the harder it is to police that material, and some things slip through. And then you can consider errata, but errata is something you generally reserve only for the furthest and most damaging outliers.You don't  really like how magic items work in this system and you don't really like or fully understand how they balance, so an attempt to rectify things to work with the established system doesn't sit well with you. If the entire game changed to add items that did fit that center of balance, it would make you happier.It's just not what this thread is about.</blockquote>

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