• NOW LIVE! Into the Woods--new character species, eerie monsters, and haunting villains to populate the woodlands of your D&D games.

Vorpal Uber Weapons?!?

A few points here:
1) Do you honestly believe that they examined the system well enough math-wise to warrant a claim of intention? The fact that Careful Attack and Twin Strike are both "options" for the Ranger destroys any credibility to that argument.

2) You claim to look into the rules and divine the "intent" of the designers, especially on "easy" issues like this. You cannot claim to be able to know what the designers intended. Especially in situations like this. Just because you think it is "broken" doesn't mean "the designers intent" was different from what the rules truly are. Don't claim you know what they intended based on your evaluation of how "broken" it is, do it by showing us textual evidence of intent. Designer intent is not retroactive based on how it happens to work within the game, nor how you think it will be "broken" in a game.

3) Beyond that, does this supposed "intent" of the designers you claim to know even matter? If you want to houserule it, that's perfectly fine. Just don't yell at the rest of us for talking about the RAW, what is actually written.

Are questioning my numbers? Because I believe I've adequately shown that that 2d weapons do get an unfair advantage as opposed to their 1d counterparts. I've also gone into some reasoning why my reading into the way it should be played is probably what the designers intended.

So instead giving me reasons why the 2d weapons should gain the advantage you would rather quote the "RAW" defense. When in other threads in here its been demonstrated the "RAW" was not what the developers intended.
 

log in or register to remove this ad

And here I thought the big issue with vorpal weapons was that, on a crit, since the damage is automatically maximized (i.e. no rolls involved) you can't (by the RAW) get the vorpal effect to kick in, and thus have high odds of doing sigificantly less damage than a weapon that has a +xDy effect on a crit.
 

Are questioning my numbers? Because I believe I've adequately shown that that 2d weapons do get an unfair advantage as opposed to their 1d counterparts.
Adequately? Read your table again. 2d4 (6.25%) gets less as a % than 1d10 (10%) does, not more. Even if 2d4 got more, so what? According to your table the difference amounts to 1/2 a point of damage per hit, trivial at anything beyond 1st or 2nd level. It's not even worth computing at Epic, when you actually get Vorpal. Also, if single-die weapons were advantaged over two-die weapons, would we even be having this discussion? It seems to me that vorpal makes otherwise sub-par weapons useful, which is a good thing, otherwise nobody would touch a falchion.
 

A few points here:
1) Do you honestly believe that they examined the system well enough math-wise to warrant a claim of intention? The fact that Careful Attack and Twin Strike are both "options" for the Ranger destroys any credibility to that argument.
[/I].

I'm not sure what your upset about these 2 powers? 1 gives you (+2) to hit. The other allows you 2 attacks against either 1 or 2 targets.
 

I'm not sure what your upset about these 2 powers? 1 gives you (+2) to hit. The other allows you 2 attacks against either 1 or 2 targets.

Er... my point is that Twin Strike is strictly better than Sure Strike except very, very situational circumstances. That would be: You need either a 19, 20, or 21 to hit with Twin Strike and you don't care about damage whatsoever. If either of those is untrue, Twin Strike is better. Usually ridiculously so. If they examined it even slightly using statistics, this would be immediately evident.
 

Adequately? Read your table again. 2d4 (6.25%) gets less as a % than 1d10 (10%) does, not more. Even if 2d4 got more, so what? According to your table the difference amounts to 1/2 a point of damage per hit, trivial at anything beyond 1st or 2nd level. It's not even worth computing at Epic, when you actually get Vorpal. Also, if single-die weapons were advantaged over two-die weapons, would we even be having this discussion? It seems to me that vorpal makes otherwise sub-par weapons useful, which is a good thing, otherwise nobody would touch a falchion.

The boost for "RAW" version is the bottom 2, so its 25%. And did you disregard or ignore this part?

Now apply the Vorpal effect the way I believe they intended it and the 2d weapons are more in line with the rest. Yes sligthy subpar but don't forget you accepted the fact that by rolling 2d4 instead of a d8 your avg. damage is superior as well as more consistent but you will not hit the highs or lows as often.

At low levels I agree with you the actual damage is minimal but at high levels when you're rolling multiple [W] the actual damage is noticeable.

How is a Falchion a sub-par weapon?
 

Are questioning my numbers? Because I believe I've adequately shown that that 2d weapons do get an unfair advantage as opposed to their 1d counterparts. I've also gone into some reasoning why my reading into the way it should be played is probably what the designers intended.

So instead giving me reasons why the 2d weapons should gain the advantage you would rather quote the "RAW" defense. When in other threads in here its been demonstrated the "RAW" was not what the developers intended.

I guess my question here is who says various weapon enchantments have to be perfectly the same across every weapon they can be put on? what's wrong with a particular weapon being a better vorpal weapon than a different one? Most of them are, this one is just a little different.
 

So applying Vorpal as RAW the 2d4 and 2d6 gets 2x the bonus in % that a 1D8 or 1d12 would get. But everywhere else the higher the average roll the lower % increase in damage you get from Vorpal.
Your numbers are very close to the one I got, but I think you're missing something. It's not the number of dice, it's the die type. d4s get a bigger proportional benefit whether you're rolling 1, 2, or 10 of them, d12s get a substantially smaller benefit.

There's no way to 'fix' that.

The variation you propose doesn't fix a disparity, it just reverses it. Instead of 2d4 gaining twice the benefit of d8 it gets half the benefit. That's not making it more 'balanced' it's just tilting the 'imbalance' from one to the other. And, your variation is even harsher for a 2d6 weapon. I can't recall the weapon scaling chart off hand, but it would become positively laughable if there are two- or multiple-die larger-die weapons that might exist.

I understand that the mechanic is not perfectly even-handed, and that can seem 'unfair' or 'imbalanced' but it's a simple mechanic that can play out in a fun way for a certain (dice-happy) kind of player. While the damage increase may seem dramatic, for the level of magic item in question, it's really rather meager.

Finally, 2d weapons already behave statistically differently from other weapons. A longsword or greatsword has a linear damage distribution, it's as likely to roll 1 or maximum as to roll either side of average. A falchion, OTOH, is more likely to roll exactly average (5), than to roll maximum, and never rolls a 1. That makes it a more consistent damage-dealer, which is desireable to some, and undesireable to others. On average, it'll deliver more damage when Vorpal, because Vorpal will come up a lot more often, but, when it does, it won't add a whole lot more damage. Vorpal on a long or bastard sword, OTOH, won't come up as often, but when it does it will sometimes do dramatically more damage in a single hit. If you're trying to punch through a monster with high DR against your vorpal weapon, the latter may actually do more damage, and it's also more likely to dramatically finish off or one shot an enemy. If you're grinding through a high-hp/low AC monster, without DR, OTOH, the 2d weapon will whittle it down faster.

In 3e, monster-vs-player balance was such that PCs could expect to win most fights 'on average,' so more consistent weapons, like the 2d6 (19-20x/2) greatsword, were generally better for PCs than swingier ones, like the 1d12 (20/x3) greataxe. In 4e, monsters seem to hit more consistently, and players less so, so I'm not sure if the same will hold true - the advantage that PCs have seems mainly to be healing, and, of course, thier greater variety of powers.
 
Last edited:

Against an opponent with DR, you always want the highest variance weapon. If you look at two weapons with approximately the same average damage the higher variance one does much more net damage after subtracting DR. For those of you who have played a Hero System game, that's why killing damage is generally better than normal damage.
 

Er... my point is that Twin Strike is strictly better than Sure Strike except very, very situational circumstances. That would be: You need either a 19, 20, or 21 to hit with Twin Strike and you don't care about damage whatsoever. If either of those is untrue, Twin Strike is better. Usually ridiculously so. If they examined it even slightly using statistics, this would be immediately evident.

I agree that not all powers are created equal but that isn't quite the same as the discussion here. I guess if you wanted something more inline in strength with Sure Strike. They should have said when used against 1 target you only get 1 roll to hit for 2[W]. Therefore Sure Strike hits more often but Twin Strike hits for more damage so its more of a choice.
 

Into the Woods

Remove ads

Top