What is your thoughts on multiclassing?

[DM-Rocco]

I generally like many of the multiclass options in 4e and one thing worthy of a mention is the flexibility it offers over a campaign rather than just in any individual situation.

Multiclass characters love to level up! Every time you level up you can swap all your multiclass powers for other powers in addition to being able to retrain, which provides all sorts of options.

For example a character with 3 power swap feats in fighter could upon leveling, after finding that the player of the recently dead cleric has decided to roll up a wizard, swap all 3 powers at once to 3 that provided a healing or regen benefit such as boundless endurance and victorious surge

The next level the party discovers they are about go on an adventure to fight undead so the same character retrains the mc feat to maybe paladin and then swaps 2 powers to radiant smite and martyrs retribution which deal radiant damage (still str based) and the other power back to their original class (i'll let you worry about the back story)

A couple of levels later the undead adventure is over and the character swaps back to fighter taking some now higher level powers

This flexibility is very hard to gain in any other way - effectively being able to change up to 4 powers per level up including retraining.




I agree that losing the AP bonus and other abilities is not made up for by the swapping of the at will but I disagree that the powers are understrength. A 7th level encounter, 10th utility and 19th daily is about right for a paragon class. Most paragon classes have 1 cool, 1 ok, and 1 pretty meh power I'd say. At least with paragon multiclassing you can pick the best. Lets be honest - all powers are far from equal

To continue the fighter theme, imagine a paragon class with rain of blows, strength from pain and quicksilver stance. You would snap it up (we're all powergamers right ;-) )if it had even a half decent AP power to go with it (of course it doesn't which is a shame).



I reckon thats just because there are 5 classes which key off strength with lots of secondary CHA and WIS effects. And only two of INT. Hopefully PHB2 will improve this



By 10th you can get about 25% there, by 20th its close to 50% and in epic you can make it to nearly about 85%. You can create a fighter which has no fighter encounter powers, no fighter daily powers, 4 fighter utilities and 1 at will. Meanwhile it has 4 encounter and 4 daily powers from up to 3 other classes and 3 utilities from 2 classes. The main problem is having to wait until epic to do it

Are you reading that correctly?

When I read the power swap feats you can only swap one power from your base class, not freely pick between all your powers over time to swap them all out.

 

[resistor]

However, in 3E multiclassing your fighter-gone-wizard will suck for all eternity because he'll always be a step behind in access to spells and caster level.

That's not a problem that 4E multiclassing has, you'll never be behind those who didn't multiclass.

I completely agree that both have advantages. I was merely relating my experience of being burned by a similar system in the past. I would totally be down with having both methods, for instance.

And in fact I like it that a fighter/wizard is different from a wizard/fighter.

See, I absolutely HATE that distinction. Why can't my character become primarily wizard if he stops practicing his sword drills and focuses all his time on studying spellbooks? Sure, he'll be behind wizards who started younger, but forcing him to remain primarily a fighter is much, much worse.

 

[DM-Rocco]

I completely agree that both have advantages. I was merely relating my experience of being burned by a similar system in the past. I would totally be down with having both methods, for instance.



See, I absolutely HATE that distinction. Why can't my character become primarily wizard if he stops practicing his sword drills and focuses all his time on studying spellbooks? Sure, he'll be behind wizards who started younger, but forcing him to remain primarily a fighter is much, much worse.

I agree with you on that too.

I understand the need to not front load the multiclassing system by giving proficiencies and all class features, but I think there should be a solution over time to offer all class features to a multiclass character and not just a taste of one of them once a day.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

See, I absolutely HATE that distinction. Why can't my character become primarily wizard if he stops practicing his sword drills and focuses all his time on studying spellbooks? Sure, he'll be behind wizards who started younger, but forcing him to remain primarily a fighter is much, much worse.

And this is one of my primary complaints about the 4Ed system replacing the 3Ed system.

Sometimes, I honestly do decide to do just that- not because of some pre-planned PC level plot, but because I wanted to take the PC in a different direction (usually because of campaign developments). That 4Ed forces me to remain primarily the first class my PC took bugs the living colossus out of me.

 

[Plane Sailing]

I was trying to ask everyone, not just you, what prerequisites do you think a feat should have to gain an additional power? Obviously an attack encounter, utility and attack daily power would have different level requirements and it would have to be limited to being only taken once and most likely be a paragon or epic tier feat. Does that make more sense now?

Oh, I understand better now!

Hmm. Prereqs for a feat to gain an additional power. Is that an additional power over and above what you normally have at your level? I almost think that whatever prereqs you gave it, it would be a 'must-have' power as soon as it became available!

Although it would go against normal design it would be interesting if it had 'minima' prereqs though... so you couldn't get it if your relevant "attack ability" for the power was too high, but you could if it was below a threshold. A way of rewarding those PCs who are not super-optimised out the wazoo in their primary ability by allowing them additional flexibility. That might even work nicely, as it would make optimising your primary attack stat a choice rather than a necessity

Cheers

 

[Mathew_Freeman]

See, I absolutely HATE that distinction. Why can't my character become primarily wizard if he stops practicing his sword drills and focuses all his time on studying spellbooks? Sure, he'll be behind wizards who started younger, but forcing him to remain primarily a fighter is much, much worse.

And this is one of my primary complaints about the 4Ed system replacing the 3Ed system.

Sometimes, I honestly do decide to do just that- not because of some pre-planned PC level plot, but because I wanted to take the PC in a different direction (usually because of campaign developments). That 4Ed forces me to remain primarily the first class my PC took bugs the living colossus out of me.

I think that's something that you'll have to bring up with your DM - you are, after all, fundamentally changing the nature of the character in terms of how they interact with the world.

I'd be happy for one of my players to rework their character from the ground up like this (although I'd probably insist they took the relevant multi-class feat for their "old" class and kept it for a few levels) but "taking the character in a different direction" by wanting to change their original class is just not something that's supported in 4e.

It seems to me that the reason multi-classing works the way it does now is that "stopping doing your sword drills and studying your spellbook more" is not sufficient to change from fighter/wizard to wizard/fighter. Not without, say, several years of retraining yourself. Becoming a Wizard isn't easy, any more than becoming a Fighter is - it takes a long time and the vast majority of your focus in life to achieve this.

Suddenly being able to swap over wholesale isn't something that I'd like to see players be able to do (see earlier notes on how OotS parodied this). However, if the group has a big period of downtime that can cover the change, then I'm all for it.

What I don't believe is that this sort of thing should be in the rules as written - although it could have been handy for it to have been in the DMG under advice on what to do if a player wants to change.

Maybe there will be something in the DMG2 about it.

 

[Prism]

Are you reading that correctly?

When I read the power swap feats you can only swap one power from your base class, not freely pick between all your powers over time to swap them all out.

Its in the bit on power swap feats on p209. Any time you level up can change your power swap feats for any other power that qualifies either from your base class or the mc class. So if you had all 3 feats thats a fair bit of swapping if you want to

In addtion if you retrain your multiclass feat to another base class you open up a lot of flexibility

 

[Felon]

Paragon multiclassing as presented is terribly weak, losing the AP bonus that is built into all PP's, and only learning understrength powers.

Agreed. Multiclassing characters are done a great disservice.

 

[Jhaelen]

I think that's something that you'll have to bring up with your DM - you are, after all, fundamentally changing the nature of the character in terms of how they interact with the world.

That's similar to what I would have replied
If a player told me he was unhappy with his choice of character class, I don't think I'd object if he created a new character to represent the character's change of nature.

Suddenly being able to swap over wholesale isn't something that I'd like to see players be able to do (see earlier notes on how OotS parodied this). However, if the group has a big period of downtime that can cover the change, then I'm all for it.

What I don't believe is that this sort of thing should be in the rules as written - although it could have been handy for it to have been in the DMG under advice on what to do if a player wants to change.

Well, in 3E PHB2 not only included rules for retraining, to swap feats, skills and spells, there were also recommendations how to handle more profound changes, like changing race or character class. Basically, some kind of quest/ mini adventure was required.

Another idea how to solve the problem could be found in 'Tome of Magic'. A multiclass shadowcaster/X could trade one of his levels in class X for a level in the shadowcaster class when leveling up (in addition to gaining another shadowcaster level).

Working together with her DM, a player should generally be able to find a reasonable approach to make the changes. I'm not sure if this situation is common enough to require a complete ruleset.

 

[Najo]

And this is one of my primary complaints about the 4Ed system replacing the 3Ed system.

Sometimes, I honestly do decide to do just that- not because of some pre-planned PC level plot, but because I wanted to take the PC in a different direction (usually because of campaign developments). That 4Ed forces me to remain primarily the first class my PC took bugs the living colossus out of me.

This is actually the worst part of the 4e mutliclassing. Characters cannot evolve or have radical life altering events without DM intervention. The 3e system was more conductive to this, as seen in Star Wars saga. Luke Skywalker doesn't start out as a Jedi Knight. He is a fringer, then pilot then jedi, then jedi master. How do you do that with a 4e character?

With that aside I like most of the 4e multiclassing elements. I just wish you could combine classes a bit more like in 3.5 without the breaking that occured.

Also, subjective opinions aside. Most of the studies done by the standard bunch of number crunchers here and on wotc's boards have found that 4e multiclassing is balanced and even characters that use all of the paragon and feat options to take multi class powers do not fall behind in power level from single class characters.