The Gaming Den

How did they fuck things up this badly in 4th Edition?

After about level 11, when wizards don't have to worry about running out of spells anymore, a party of 4 orb/staff wizards is just complete and utter pwnage.

Like, there's no other party array that can even compare to the beatdown this party inflicts. 4 Wizards. Said party MAY want a Battle Captain depending on how much their DM dicks around but it's certainly not /necessary/.

Back to the drawing board.

How do they win the game?

I bet it involves DnD4.0 Sleep (which doesn't put anything to sleep, actually, though folks often confuse it with a spell from Dungeons and Dragons)...4 such wizards, along with the orbs, would have pretty decent chance of shutting down Orcus and all his associates.

The only thing that even matters in 4th edition is juggling. Wizards get the best access to juggling at all levels. Also they have an at-will (cloud of daggers) that does automatic damage (and may also affect other squares, depending upon what the hell you think the text means).

So against any vaguely level appropriate enemies you can each just dump a bunch of mezzes in turn while everyone else spams Cloud of Daggers and enemies will run out of hit points at about the same time as you run out of encounter abilities in the party. Which is convenient, because at that point your enemies probably didn't get a lot of "turns" and now they are all dead.

You can make a decent case that you can extend the lifespan of the party by replacing one of the Wizards with a Cleric because Healing Word is "so good" but whatever.

-Username17

Well, that is a bit different. Best 3.5 party was Cleric, Druid, Wizard, Artificer. Or if you're assraping WBL via Planar Binding or whatever, sub the Artificer for one of the other three since the main reason he's there is for super cheap gear.

How do they win the game?

Be an orb wizard. If someone in your party is going to be a Battle Captain (and someone should, since they're usually better than clerics), put a 20 in your Wisdom. For this exercise, we're going to assume that there's three human wizards, one human battle captain, and one of the wizards took Divine Oracle as a paragon class. And the wizards just did what I recommended.

All the wizards have Orb Mastery and Spell focus. No shit, right? Anyway, they use Orb of Fickle Fate. In fact, they have several of them, over any other equipment if need be. By level 16, said wizards will be able to dump Save Ends spells with one of the opponents getting a minus thirteen to end the save. This pretty much means that any solo or elite encounter is a cakewalk.

So combat looks like this:

Between Improved Initiative, Initiative-boosting items, and Combat Commander your party will be seeing a +15 to initiative. Your party delays until the Battle Captain goes first. He uses his Inspiring Word ability to give power bonuses of +7 to attack (+14 for anyone getting an inspiring word, +24 if they use an attack booster) to those who need it and burns through an action point doing something.

Since the monster is perpetually sleep/stunlocked they're pretty much fucked. The other wizards and warlord are on cleanup duty.


And the lopsidedness of these fights only get worse in the epic tier, where a wizard can force up to a -18 penalty to saves. No one is getting out of that, not even Jesus.

Seemed the iconic 4E party actually had 5 members ...

Now here's the kicker;

Would this situation be any worse if ANYONE had access to, say, 4e Sleep and the appropriate countermeasures/defenses (if there are any)

For the sake of 4e classless, I'm painfully curious.
My guess is that the issue would be lessened since Sleep and similar juggles would be recognized as abusable and therefore nerfed.

As for juggles in general one could do the Brawl fix and make repeated attacks increasingly less effective if used in consequetively (-1 or -2 attack rolls each further round), forcing characters to at least do a 1-2 punch.
The game also needs more generic and near-universal counters based on the concept of the usual roll vs. static value.

Yeah, orb wizard is horribly broken. It's the polymorph of 4E.

The key point on the orb wizard is the orb mastery, not the Sleep spell. Remember that in addition to being able to be used to hose saves it can also be used to increase a fixed duration by an entire turn. Which means that you can make a 1 turn stunlock into a 2 turn stunlock as an encounter power.

So whatever else it is that Wizards do, Wizards have a 1 turn stunlock that always hits that they can use as a free action. In 4e mechanics, that's frickin insane. Phrased like that, it would be insane in 3e as well.

-Username17

The key point on the orb wizard is the orb mastery, not the Sleep spell. Remember that in addition to being able to be used to hose saves it can also be used to increase a fixed duration by an entire turn. Which means that you can make a 1 turn stunlock into a 2 turn stunlock as an encounter power.

Alas, the free extend-a-suck only works on at-will wizard powers. So it is indeed teh suck.

However, not all is lost!

Page 238, Orb of Inevitable Continuance. This works with any power but the only drawback is that it costs a magic item daily.

I'm not sure whether this or the Orb of Fickle Fate is your better friend but the fact remains that wizards are better than you even though Andy still jerks off all over the fighter.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:even though Andy still jerks off all over the fighter.

That's not a mental image I need. Nor anyone else, I imagine.

lol, speaking of 4th Edition Wizards, check out this thread here:

http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?t=1111871




Obviously people don't really 'get' stunlocking at all.

Yeah, the designers fucked up with the orb's first ability. The best fix I've found so far is to nerf the save penalty so that it only affects a single save roll.

TS

Notice how once again, the game falls apart due to a "save" mechanic (3e was "worse" in that at later levels saves didn't even matter... but whatever broken is broken).

The "saving throw" was kept in 4e because it is a Sacred Cow, and it's as bad as it ever was. In 4e it's the one part of the basics that doesn't fit and doesn't work intuitively. It doesn't scale to level, bonuses and penalties to it are scattered haphazardly in the books, and many game-winning effect hinge on it.

I'm not saying that 4e has no other flaws... it's just that this one was utterly obvious from day 1.

I did notice how the saving throw mechanic just doesn't fit. It's sort of like Turn Undead in 3E - it... just doesn't really fit with the rules as they are, and seems like they bolted it on because "we've always had it before, damn it!"

So it doesn't fit smoothly, and as a result, it sucks unless you find a way to abuse it (saving throws: Orbizards, turning: Divine Metamagic).

In 4E, the save is more of a duration than anything else. The problem is that they let they had scaling penalties on a roll with a static DC. That just doesn't work.

In 4E, the save is more of a duration than anything else. The problem is that they let they had scaling penalties on a roll with a static DC. That just doesn't work.

If I was going to rewrite the D&D system, I'd make it so that the difference between the enemies' defense stat and your roll determines the effect and/or duration of the condition. Like Mutants and Masterminds.

As RC points out, the Saving Throw has really nothing to do with the Saving Throw from any previous edition. So calling it a "sacred cow" is to piss all over that terminology.

The problem is that 4e adopted a methodology of grind sumo where people trade blows for long periods of time, and they went to a standard set of durations that everything get. Every single effect lasts either 1 turn or has a 50% chance of ending at the end of each turn (which averages 2 turns for the kids at home). That's stupid, because it makes minor inconveniences into meaningless inconveniences (1 turn of a small bonus or penalty is statistically unlikely to even matter) and completely destroys the possibility of balancing different effects.

But perhaps the biggest flaw there is the thing where they left it so that effects could modify that 50% ending chance sight unseen. That is, a solo monster has a 75% chance of ending effects across the board, which makes lesser curses even more meaningless than ever. And of course, crap like Orb Mastery pushes ending chances off the RNG altogether - making any kind of severe effect into an outright game ender.

It's a bad subsystem, but not because it is in any way sacred cow-like. It's because the system is basically an MMO, and for reasons that no one can adequately explain to me they decided that all mezzes, DoTs, curses, and buffs should be put on one of two duration schedules and one of two recharge schedules. That's just retarded. And I mean that in its actual definition of being limited in growth and potential by an outside force.

-Username17

Lago PARANOIA wrote: If I was going to rewrite the D&D system, I'd make it so that the difference between the enemies' defense stat and your roll determines the effect and/or duration of the condition. Like Mutants and Masterminds.

I actually half like the idea of the 4E save, mostly because I was one of those people who always had trouble tracking durations in 3E. Though 4E is a bookkeeping nightmare in its own right. Mainly because status condition durations aren't always linked to the person with that condition. A lot of time they're linked to another character. Like "Target is marked until end of next turn." which means that you have to remember that it's the marker's next turn, not the target's next turn, which is a real pain. All effects should end during the target's turn for simplicity, so you don't have to remember which creature generated the effect. If all effects ended on the turn of the creature that had that effect, then the 4E save would actually work somewhat ok as a base mechanic.

That and 4E has piles and piles of conditional bonuses that are annoying as hell. Minor +1s for being closest to the target and all that crap. I suppose they were trying to introduce a little bit of system mastery to the game, but it's really annoying sometimes because most of the time, those bonuses are so minor that nobody really cares.

What I was throwing around for Fantastic! was giving effects a Duration Number. During the Recovery Phase, you roll a die for each such effect on you, and it ends on the Duration Number.

Arch Villains, rather than getting a bonus to their rolls during the Recovery Phase, simply get an extra Recovery Phase at the beginning of their turns. So they have a real chance of breaking free in time to get a turn (so you can never be assured of stunlocking them forever), but they don't push on the RNG in any way.

-Username17

Well, it might not be a Sacred cow, but it's some kind of divinely-infused bovine meat, because they obviously wanted to keep the phrase "roll a saving throw!" on the table.

But yes, its a duration mechanic now, rather than a standard defense.

Lago PARANOIA wrote: Between Improved Initiative, Initiative-boosting items, and Combat Commander your party will be seeing a +15 to initiative. Your party delays until the Battle Captain goes first. He uses his Inspiring Word ability to give power bonuses of +7 to attack (+14 for anyone getting an inspiring word, +24 if they use an attack booster) to those who need it and burns through an action point doing something.

Since the monster is perpetually sleep/stunlocked they're pretty much fucked. The other wizards and warlord are on cleanup duty.

Just out of curiosity, how do you handle an equal number of Level +1 foes? Like a bunch of Level 12 Wights? Say upgraded Deathlock Wights that can rez each other? There's 5 of them, you can't stunlock all of them all the time.