MagicalMaster wrote...
You're overthinking it. Keep it to one melee weapon focus and grab a bunch of feats pre-epic -- can get a ton of combat feats (everything from Imp Expertise to Imp Disarm to Imp Knockdown to Great Cleave) and pick up all of the saving throw feats if you want.
Imp Disarm is nice if it works, but in many places it doesn't, or if it does, KD works just as well. I know one PW where there were KD immune mobs that were disarmable, but even on that mod, those mobs were so rare that it wasn't even worth taking just for them.
The saving throw feats... as I said immunity > saves and it's a better idea to stock up Clarity and Death Ward pots and pro-actively sneak up and KD casters or LOS kite them.
Great Cleave... can't really argue with Dev Crit but I2WF-Kukri-Finesse takes the same amount of feats.
As for Toughness... AC > HP. When you have d10 base HP it's a better idea to raise mitigation.
If you're facing Half Orc Barbarians who can do that at level one, the module is seriously screwed up balance wise. You don't send a PC against a copy-cat opponent at level one where it comes down to RNG.
The Bioware OC did that! Level 3 fighting that one Half-Orc in some house. Was the first of a string of bad experiences.
No, most players actually don't chug Bull's Strength/Bless/Aid potions -- even though doing so would be a large performance increase. It's a difficult thing to realize how un-optimally most people play games. They just get whatever stats they can on gear, drink healing potions when needed, and MAYBE use Clarity potions for mind affecting stuff. They don't even consider constantly using buff potions (which, incidentally, are pretty stupid in my humble opinion).
Then that's not really learning how to play the class is it?
'> And a Cleric would be a more representative experience of playing an effective melee character in NWN.
From a design standpoint, the buff potions are stupid, but I've come to understand D&D is designed from the ground up to be very reliant on magic, even as a non-magic class. In DDO, cast spell items are affectionately called "clickys", and the melee characters tend to hoard entire hotbars of item swaps for clickys to the point of ridiculousness, like Hotkey 1: Equip Haste Cloak. Hotkey 2: Cast Haste on Cloak. Hotkey 3: Re-equip resist cloak of choice, rinse and repeat for Bless, Aid, Divine Power etc etc. Even in a book by Salvatore a Fighter is described as lobbing Fireballs from an amulet.
If you want to fix that, the game world has to spin the a different way, and casters need to stop getting self-cast only steroids that boost melee stats.
High AC with Full Plate (and likely Tower Shield) along with high HP. A level 15 Barbarian shrugs off two damage per hit and has like 10% more HP, but he also lacks a ton of combat feats (human barbarian might have WF, Imp Crit, Exp, Imp Exp, Blind Fight, Toughness, Heavy Armor Proficiency while a fighter could have those along with PA/Cleave/Great Cleave/Imp KD/Imp Disarm/Called Shot/Mobility/Spring Attack/saving throw feats/etc).\\
Likewise, a Dwarven Defender is basically identical to the fighter except they shrug off 3 points of damage per hit and are Sneak Immune.
Etc.
Essentially, non of the other class features have started scaling enough for them to be significantly better than a fighter and dex bonuses aren't high enough to give dex characters more AC.
If a DD or Barbarian tank can survive that at level 15, so can a fighter. We're not talking about epic builds right now, let alone level 40 builds.
Barbarian X/Fighter 1 can have Exp, Imp Exp and Heavy Armor, and that's all the tanking feats he needs.
Invis and Will saves can be handled by a Mage or Cleric casting the relevant immunity spell or pot, and he gets a naturally higher Reflex anyway. If a boss can be KDed or Disarmed or Call Shotted then it doesn't need to be tanked, you can just get a WM to go in and perma-KD it and it will do 0 damage for the whole fight.
Mitigating 3 damage per hit, or 2 damage with a 10% higher HP pool at level 15 is pretty significant though. What does the average mob have at level 15? 18 Strength and a +3 Longsword for an average hit of 11.5? The Barbarian is going to last 33% longer and the DD 35% longer. I'd say that's high enough to make a difference at level 15.
Even a level 20 fighter doesn't reach that point -- and I know that for sure because I usually test stuff with a level 40 fighter as a "baseline" for things.
I know, but the point is that you run out of stuff to take that has as big an impact as say, crit immunity and scaling AC with no cap, or 26/- DR, or +2 Crit range +1 Crit mod and so on.
Did you ever try Siege of the Heavens like I suggested?
It's not a PW
'>
henesua wrote...
I like the plant domain but felt it was inappropriate for a cleric. I left in Creeping Doom and remade the domain around "Vermin" with the Turning Ability afecting Vermin. So far its just 2. Contagion 3. Infestation of Maggots. 7. Creeping Doom. Still a work in progress, but the goal is to make the domains more interesting for more diverse clerics. It kills me that people love to play clerics for their power, and yet in the same breath rightly complain about how boring their over all design is - which has come up a few times in this thread.
Can't say I've seen anyone complaining about how boring Clerics are to play in this thread.
I have to say though, Clerics in 3E are like Ryu in Street Fighter. For one, you can't really have a party without a Cleric, unless you pick his similar but not as effective counterpart, Ken (aka Druid).
For another, it's a balanced class with options that make it effective at any range, in any role, be it melee or ranged damage, physical or magic damage, instant death, tanking, control, support or of course, healing.
For a third, because of that, and because the Cleric has a near-monopoly on one part of the RPG trinity - healing, you can't possibly make Clerics weak without changing how the game fundamentally works. It's like how Ryu is always an above average character in every iteration of Street Fighter because of how central fireballs are to that game.
So they have to be boring. The interesting stuff can go to the other classes, but the Cleric is so chock-full of fundamentals that it doesn't really have room to take anything else without stealing the thunder from another class.
Case in point: I'm going to take a swipe at MM here and say in his Fire Mountain mod, he nerfed a lot of the mage debuffs, but he kept all the Cleric buffs in place and even buffed some of them, like Undeath's Eternal Foe.
Traditionally, a mage is better support because of the debuffs, but when Bigby 5 is nerfed to -4, Negative Energy Burst doesn't drain strength and the Ray debuffs haven't been fixed to be solely Ranged Touch Attack, they can't really do a lot of debuffing. By design, debuffs should be stronger than buffs because debuffs expire when the target dies, while buffs can carry over to the next fight. So when you look at how much of a difference each class makes with regard to making enemies easier to fight, Cleric in MM's mod goes from being above average, to winning the support crown by a longshot, but it came at the Sorc/Wiz's and Bard's expense.
Modifié par Aelis Eine, 22 décembre 2013 - 02:15 .
