Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 4034136" data-attributes="member: 3146">Two steps forward or five steps back. It will all depend upon what powers they actually give to the different weapons. The advantage of the 3.x weapon chart is that, other than the exotic weapon master's flurry ability with the spiked chain, none of the weapons were really that different in their mechanical effectiveness. When my 10 strength, non-melee focused cleric cast holy sword on his lesser rod of extend spell and used it as a +5 holy club, I only averaged 1 point of damage less than if I had pulled out a heavy mace and cast holy sword on that. Had I been packing a morning star (the best one-handed simple weapon), it would have made a similarly small difference. Likewise, I have a fighter in Living Greyhawk who has specialized in Heavy Mace. At the moment, that's slightly suboptimal (the idea was to get Three Mountains Style, but I'm not sure he'll ever play the three more mods necessary to let him play with both Three Mountains Style and Shield Charge/Shield Slam). However, the difference between that choice and the optimal ones is only one point of crit range or multiplier. Not a big deal. Consequently, players felt (or at least I felt) more free to make weapon choices based upon style rather than mechanical advantage. Now, when you start making the choice of weapon more mechanically significant, you have more opportunities to screw up and make one weapon that is simply mechanically better. The Exotic Flurry ability of the Exotic Weapon Master class did that for the spiked chain. If they're not careful, "fighters get cool powers depending upon the weapon they use" could turn into "weapon X gives the coolest/most powerful powers, so every fighter uses it; if you see a PC with a different weapon, they're not a fighter."We'll see how the designers manage to pull that one off, but their rhetoric (lots of talk about "cool" and active disparaging of "balance") does not lead to optimism in this regard.</blockquote>

Verification