It's a darn sight better than the regular old Weapon Expertise.
Weapon Expertise Heroic Tier Benefit: Choose a weapon group. You gain a +1 feat bonus to attack rolls with any weapon power you use with a weapon from that group. The bonus increases to +2 at 11th level and +3 at 21st level.
+1 damage on combat advantage ain't bad, especially if you've got cooperative melee partners for flanking.
@Vi Every game with material released in sequential publications has a bit of power creep. 4e had a power jump when the Essentials books were released, and customized Expertise feats is a major part of it.
Now, if your GM is letting you actually treat your weapon as an implement then you can use it to channel your non-hexblade powers. But they won't be weapon powers, they'll be implement powers and you're using a sword as an implement.
@Vi yeeeah. This is what happens when you start poking the basic structure of the class.
Hexblade powers have both the implement and weapon keywords. I have no idea what your GM has in mind for your enhancement bonuses as you level up, because your sword is nonmagical (mechanically speaking) and you're expected to be using a rod or wand for its enhancement bonuses.
Rod Expertise Benefit: You gain a +1 feat bonus to implement attack rolls that you make with a rod. When you hold a rod, you gain a +1 shield bonus to AC and Reflex. The bonus to attack rolls increases to +2 at 11th level and +3 at 21st level.
Wand Expertise Benefit: You gain a +1 feat bonus to implement attack rolls that you make with a wand. This bonus increases to +2 at 11th level and +3 at 21st level. Also, you ignore partial cover and superior cover on implement attacks you make with a wand.
If you find you want to take advantage of feats or enchantments to do with staves or orbs, there's also...
White Lotus Dueling Expertise Prerequisite: Any arcane class Benefit: You gain a +1 feat bonus to the attack rolls of arcane powers and basic attacks that you make with any weapon or implement with which you have proficiency. This bonus increases to +2 at 11th level and +3 at 21st level. You also gain proficiency with orbs, rods, staffs, or wands.
Rod of the Feywild looks nice, and it's vague enough that it works for Hexblade.
Level 8, so don't expect to get it immediately. Level 3's about the earliest it could drop
Critical: +1d6 damage per plus, +1d10 damage per plus with powers of the fey pact. Property When you trigger your fey pact boon, you can teleport an additional number of squares equal to the rod’s enhancement bonus. Power (Teleportation) Encounter (Move Action) Teleport a number of squares equal to 3 + the enhancement bonus of the rod.
I think maybe I will ask if my DM what he thinks because I think that if the Light weapon Expertise improves his sword and his sword is an implement it should really affect the spell
If you have a +1 Rod of the Feywild, it's an extra 1d6 or 1d10. If you have a +4 Rod of the Feywild, it's an extra 4d6 or 4d10.
@Vi I can see him allowing that, but the feat explicitly says it only works on weapon powers, which means powers with the weapon keyword. So it'd be a GM fiat.
And, well, there are a dozen different abuses for weaplements already. If I were your GM I might allow it, but I'd be clear that I reserve the right to revoke that ruling if at any time I think you're getting cute about it.
(The instant you started looking at trying to access ranger powers, for instance.)
Yeah, generally offhand attacks are part of a class's structure.
2-wpn rangers, for example, get powers that let them make two attacks, one main-hand and one off-hand, but each attack deals slightly less damage than a regular hit would.
They accept this because the deal with rangers is that they get once-per-round bonus damage they can add to a successful hit. So multiple small-damage attacks increases their chance of hitting at least once and applying the bonus damage.
Hexblades are designed to make one larger-damage attack each round, and aren't fishing for hits like rangers.
If you could use a ranger multiple-basic-attack power with your higher-damage warlock at-wills that count as basic attacks, you'd get a lot of funny looks and some amusing damage expressions.
But unless you built around it solely and found a couple other tricks to stack on it, you'd have sunk so many feats and items into being able to do it at all that you'd be doing better damage as a straight hexblade with feats in being a hexblade.
(I actually managed --barely-- to build a magic missile ranger who auto-hit every target in a 3x3 square as a standard action. But his damage per target was pitiful.)
Combining classes usually ends poorly unless you have a specific mechanic juxtaposition in mind.
I did build an astonishing lazy warlord/shaman for a guy who never wanted to ever roll attacks. But that was doing something I don't think the developers ever even thought of.
I went warlord/shaman because only together could they provide enough non-attacking attack powers to fill every slot. It led to feat frustration because nearly every feat only buffed half the character.
Honestly, I've seen amazing and obviously unintended builds commonly in 4e. Especially with all the Essentials splat, there are enough options out there to do a lot of customization.
@Vi That's a balance issue. 4e tries to be able to offer more awesome things by limiting which of them can be combined.
Some players/groups prefer to have unlimited mix-and-match potential, and are willing to sacrifice balance for it. My college group was of that mindset.
My current group chafed at 3.5's willingness to allow you to make useless characters, and accepts 4e's limits as necessary for a playground they feel more comfortable being goofy in.
@BESW Yeah, 3.5 did have that problem, but I kinda feel they went too far the other way with 4e, I think they kinda idiot-proofed it in a lot of respects.
@BESW ah, could I then get your opinion on my latest answer? I feel like it has flavors of "you're having fun wrong guys," but I think it's important to express some of the issues with 3.5 and how banning books is not a good solution to them.
OK, since the tags have changed from system-agnostic to dnd-3.5e, the answer to this question has changed. I’m going to state right upfront that this answer is fairly elitist: unfortunately, that is what Wizards deemed best for its game system. Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 was designed to be ...
I'm looking for help making this as... not-elitist as possible?
I don't want to come off as a snob who says you're not allowed to play the game if you haven't mastered it
but at the same time, the system just doesn't work well if you haven't mastered it
@SimonGill Well, they are changing constantly and it's not fair to judge the new thing based on a beta from back before they had anything even nailed down
Brian found a fairly straightforward way to build a 4e dragonborn who can recharge his racial breath weapon every time he uses it, as a result of using it.
DDN has a great and noble goal which I have no expectation they can come close to achieving, and if they do succeed it will most likely fracture the D&D fanbase beyond imagining.
I'm not in any position to test it right now, so I don't have anything to actually say except that in trying to cater to everyone at once, their modular system is going to shatter what little sense of "we're all playing the same game" the fanbase has (what with RAW/RAI, houserules, edition wars, and different playstyles, it's tenuous at best as is).
Moving from one group to another will be literally changing game systems.
Regardless of modular balance (laughable given their inability to balance a single system), it's going to be a social engineering disaster for the D&D franchise. Something like FATE will step in if that happens.
@user119485 Hi!
Glad you could join us. Looks like you'll need a little more rep before you can chat here, but welcome nonetheless.
That seems unlikely. He just signed in a bit ago and is clearly different from you. Got 1 rep in a different SE realm and no rpg account yet that I can see.
@Vi If they can't keep balance straight within a single sourcebook, I have serious doubts about quality control between modules.
@BESW I doubt FATE will be able to step up as the One System to rule them all. The D&D brand is far too strong and the games from the OSR are well placed to claim "We're really D&D, that new stuff just isn't the same."
@KRyan They're even less simulationist than 3.5. Old school games were very much about the player interacting with the environment rather than the character.
@Vi I was very upset when I saw they were folding a subscription into the game, but... honestly I can't be mad given the massive utility of the services.
When I look at old-school D&D adventures, I see a lot less "roll on the table" simulation and a lot more "describe this thing and work it out narratively."
From the days when the walls, floor, ceiling, doors, furniture, rug, coat, coatrack, mirror, and empty space in the middle of a room could all want to kill you.
@BESW I'd say that we're talking about D&D, and that this condition is true of a huge proportion of its players
@SimonGill well, OK, but then it's ignoring everyone who got on board after that and has no interest in the older stuff, so I don't think your initial premise of it taking over after D&D Next's failure is likely to hold up
It's interesting reading back on people's descriptions of why they hated old-school D&D, and seeing things like "wagon trains gathering the dragon hoard" and "orb of annihilation" and of course, "killed by unspottable trap in the Tomb of Horrors" get posted up, which are easily some of my favorite memories of the old systems. Sometimes I suspect we were just playing Paranoia in a D&D setting.
I think it's a matter of how invested you are in your character.
If you've rolled up JOE HERO in 10 minutes and have no real attachment to him, you do not really fear the meat grinder.
But if you're playing the son of a dishonored prince who was exiled after being framed for the theft of several royal art objects who is desperately seeking wealth to fund an investigation to clear the good name of his family, you might have a bit more attachment and reluctance to let him fall into the deadly pit of a billion exploding, rusty, jagged, acid-filled spikes.
@SimonGill First it's important to know what my arguments wouldn't have been: I had no experience in non-3.5 systems and only the vaguest notions of game design theory.
Then... my argument would have been that D&D is not a combat game with cutscenes, because that's certainly not how we played it.
Looking back I can see that we really abandoned the D&D structure in our non-combat gaming, but at the time (and for some of those players, to this day) we felt that the 3.5 non-combat system was robust because it provided us a mechanical means to determine actions we couldn't (or didn't want to) resolve through pure roleplay.
And in the skill system we found such granularity that defining a character's ability to a very fine degree was not only possible--it was necessary, thus giving us a close template of his potential, skill, and attitude to draw on even if we weren't rolling the skills in question.
To which I would argue - there is very little direct support in the systems of the game for non-combat solutions. The reward cycle is entirely based in killing stuff for their stuff. All adventures (including the sandboxes) are filled with combat encounters, with boxed text helping you to get from one to another.
@SimonGill I've been overusing 4e adventures. Until.... two sessions ago? Probably 4/5ths of the campaign has been re-skinned modules.
My current group found the 3.5 granularity of skill ridiculous, lamenting how silly it was that limited skill points could result in a man who could avoid being seen but was unable to keep quiet.
Both my groups approach character creation as a minigame, but the second group found it irritating to the point of madness that in 3.5 it was so easy to utterly fail to create a character with even basic competence.
In 4e if you put your highest stat in the right skil and use armor and items you're proficient with, you're competent unless you try really hard.
Can anyone recommend a good tool for keeping track of maps? I want to run an Eberron setting game, and I'd like to use the map, but add quick notes and such as the game progresses.
I've been looking into using the Google Maps API, to also add directions and distance calculation, but that's a bigger project, so I was looking for something faster.
@SimonGill Agreed! Do some searches for previous questions, and if they don't work for you add one of your own with your particular requirements. I've got a couple ideas but no practical experience.
@William'MindWorX'Mariager All of the above, yes.
I guess what I'm saying is that talking with my old college group about 4e, and looking at my current group's joy at switching to 4e, helped me realize that system superiority is entirely about group needs.
@BESW I really like the Google Maps approach, but I need to convert the maps to work with longitude/lattitude and understand how I render the map. From what I could gather, I need some sort of wrapping since Google Maps only understand planets. Might be me misunderstanding though.
I may think 4e is the superior system, but I know there's a group out there for whom it utterly fails to meet their needs, and I can't tell them they're wrong for playing in a way that PF better supports.
@William'MindWorX'Mariager That.... sounds almost like a GIS.SE question. But I honestly don't know if it is or not.
@BESW This is going to sound snarky - but if someone doesn't like 4E, then they're better off going to an OSR game or to an entirely different system. It's not like there aren't enough out there!
@SimonGill I'm very tempted to agree, but... I can't speak for that group anymore, except that they're happy in PF and have invested a lot of time and effort in the 3.5-and-clone systems.
You can say "sunk cost fallacy" all you like, but it's emotionally true even if rationally silly.
Can anyone recommend a good tool for keeping track of maps? I want to run an Eberron setting game, and I'd like to use the Eberron map, but be able to add quick notes and such as the game progresses. Something similar to Google Maps.
I have already considered using the Google Maps API, but I wan...
Speaking of group styles, my group loves sandboxy games, so we went and made our own system. No classes, just various skills. Most difficulty stuff is borrowed from 3.5/4.0 and ability rolls are the good old 4d6dL.
@Cat I strongly suspect that one issue is that 3.5 doesn't really have any rules for non-combat outside of very specific areas, whereas 4e introduces the skill challenge.
The skill challenge is a catch-all mechanic for non-combat encounters where you want something more structured than RP, but there are two problems with it.
First, it's tempting to use it where you really shouldn't, replacing RP with skill challenges.
Second, it's got a lousy implementation. The base mechanic is boring and the numbers weren't crunched well so your chance of success varies wildly from nearly-guaranteed to nearly-impossible, and not in a predictable way.
I've been using Stalker0's version and we have a lot of fun.
Yeah, I think I've shied away because 1) it's expensive to buy a new set of books and more importantly 2) I don't want to play a game where combat takes hours to resolve
In the end, I bought PF books with my "fun money" this xmas and am looking forward to trying the "newish" system
Hopefully, a lot of the more broken mechanics from 3.5 are resolved by the PF system.
I was hoping to invest in DnD next, but wasn't impressed with what I saw of the early playtest
@Cat This is a good point. I suspect one reason my college group didn't get rubbed raw by 3.5 was that there was a kind of mutual unstated agreement not to touch the sharp edges. Possibly helped along by a total disinterest in powergaming.
Anyway, when I finally get "good" at this gaming thing, perhaps I'll develop many of the same frustrations, but for now I'm a generally happy camper merely for the fact I have a group of folks eager to game with me
Yeah, I'll be on gaming hiatus while I'm at school for the next three months, and then back to my parents place. Fortunately, I know gamers with their own places who can host.
OK, since the tags have changed from system-agnostic to dnd-3.5e, the answer to this question has changed. I’m going to state right upfront that this answer is fairly elitist: unfortunately, that is what Wizards deemed best for its game system. Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 was designed to be ...
