The Gaming Den

Because 4th Edition errata isn't concerned with actually making options decent, just making them unusable, don't bother with trying to change the effect to something good. Just make it worthless.

Power of Skill will probably be changed to something stupid like providing a skill bonus check after a power is used.
Battle Awareness gets changed to, hmm, fixed damage.
Oath of Enmity will be errata'd to only work with Avenger powers.
Polearm Momentum will probably have an errata of higher stat requirements, longer push requirements, and/or Mark of Storm will get errata'd.
Quicksilver Blade (Swordmage 25, FRPG) will probably be a melee basic attack after hitting with an At-Will power.
All of the Fighter stances will be errata'd as to only get weapon damage bonuses.
All of the sustains minor powers will get errata'd to have fixed damage.
Cunning Weapons, Illusionists' Gloves, Orb of Imposition, Spell Focus, and other such powers will be errata'd to a one-time save penalty.
White Lotus Master Riposte will have a swordmage-only requirement.
Son of Mercy is either losing its WIS bonus or its auto-slowing. Probably auto-slowing.
Form of Winter's Herald will probably lose the difficult terrain zone.
The Barbarian's Armored in Life bonus will probably get nerfed to a named bonus, such as a feat or power bonus.
Polearm Gamble will get errata'd to do fixed damage instead of a power.
Lasting Frost gets neemed down to, oh, 2 vulnerability. And/or a power or feat bonus.
Wintertouched gets changed to providing some bullshit status effect rather than combat advantage. Maybe a speed penalty.
Echoes of Thunder gets clarification that the damage bonus applies once per use of the power.
Dual-Implement Spellcaster gets changed to adding an enhancement bonus.
Enlarge Spell gets changed to an attack penalty.
Recovery Strike/Astral Seal's healing gets changed to temporary hit points. Same thing will happen for all such powers.
Twin Strike gets changed so that you can only target two people with it.
Winged Horde either loses its defense targetted, its rider effect, or the enemies-only clause.
Powers that provide an untyped bonus (like Astral Shield) get changed towards being a power bonus.
Iron Armbands of Power either get changed to providing the bonus once per round or that they get the bonuses halved altogether.
Salves of Power get changed to giving back an encounter power and much be used in the middle of combat.
Rhythm Blades get changed to only work on heavy shields.
Aegis of Shielding gets its damage prevention neemed down to 3/6/9.
Sword Burst targets allies now, too, and/or gets changed to 'targets two foes in burst'.
Arcane Mastery gets errata'd to only replenish encounter powers.
All of the daily-power swap tomes (like Gossamer tomes) get errata'd to only swap out dailies for dailies instead of utilities for dailies.

Unicorn's Touch gets nerfed to either Daily or providing Temp HP.
Pervasive Light gets reworded so as to not double Vulnarable: All effects.
Morninglord's Burning Radiance gets nerfed to only work againt critters with the Undead or Shadow tags.
Pit Fighter's Extra Damage Action gets nerfed to only apply to the next single attack roll and/or Pit Fighter's All Bets Are off gets changed to a single attack dealing 3w +daze.
Vanguard Weapon's Property becomes either an encounter or a +2 item bonus

All healing powers that heal without using a surge will have a 5 point cap, and only give temprrorary hit points instead.

Recovery Strike/Astral Seal's healing gets changed to temporary hit points. Same thing will happen for all such powers.

And two errata cycles after that, Shared Valor armor will get nerfed

They'll never nerf the orbizard. They seem to nerf good options, but never of the game-breaking stuff. (Although it's kinda pathetic that you can break 4e when your character basically has the the same as what a 3.5 wizard had at level 1).

Demigod will lose it's ability score boosts.

CapnTthePirateG wrote:They'll never nerf the orbizard.

Yeah. That's the one nerf that'll never happen for some reason.

RandomCasualty2 wrote:

CapnTthePirateG wrote:They'll never nerf the orbizard.

Yeah. That's the one nerf that'll never happen for some reason.

To be fair, WotC is just trying to make up for having fucked Wizards in 3e. Oh, wait...

My guess is it'll never happen because one of the designers has an Orbizard.

I think it's just that they think making a fix admits the mistake, and they can get away with it not being a mistake.

Of course, that doesn't explain how they can be so stupid to think that screwing with the fundamental RNG of the game wasn't going to fuck it in the ass.

Not that they didn't already do that by adding a feat that adds to attack rolls, and is therefore mandatory.

Weapon/Implement/Focused Expertise will never be nerfed because those feats were hammered into the game to make up for the fact that an average 4E character is losing the attack bonus game over time.

For example, 1st-level to-hit without the feat, with average monster AC of 14 + level:

3 (WP) + 4 (Stat) = +7 vs. AC of 15, hits on an 8 or better.

15th level:

3 (WP) + 7 (Base Level Bonus) + 3 (enh) + 6 (stat) = +19 versus 29, hits on a 10 or better.

25th level w/o Demigod PP:

3 (WP) + 12 (BLB) + 5 (enh) + 7 (stat) = +27 versus 39, hits on a 12 or better.

The Weapon Expertise feat on its lonesome pretty much eliminates the gap. What they should have fucking done was just to give an additional +1/+2 to hit and damage at level 5, 15, and 25 and given the finger to the fucking feat tax. But I feel the same way about all vertical advancement feats, so who knows. I don't write this game.

Morzas wrote:My guess is it'll never happen because one of the designers has an Orbizard.

If said designer made it past that last round of lay-offs (Rob Heinsoo, Chris Sims, Logan Bonner, Stephen Radney-MacFarland).

Morzas wrote:My guess is it'll never happen because one of the designers has an Orbizard.

This is totally wrong. The reason it has not been nerfed is because NOBODY at WOTC plays an orbizard. They clearly don't think that the language of the ability as written could be interuprted to get the results everybody says it does.

Its 4e so I wouldn't be surpised if every game played in the office itself uses an errated version of the ability anyway and they just don't think that the issue actually exists. Either that or nobody has actually created a strong enough orbizard in their playtest group to ever achieve the effects that lots of people started using from day 1.

However, the idea that is remains because somebody likes how abusive I think is as wrong in this context as when it is used in MMO's to justify why a certain class is stronger or weaker.

The thing is it totally ignores how strong corporate inertia is.

It has not been errated because, regardless of the mountain of evidence, they don't believe the problem, or don't believe the problem is as severe as it is claimed to be.

In general, souran's assessment is why corporations in general do the things they do. However, this is Andy Collins, Mike Merles, and friends. So I don't know if I can believe that in this instance.

Recall that Andy Collins changed the way Power Attack worked, not because 3e Power Attack was overpowered or underpowered, but merely because Andy Collins wanted his own character to be more powerful. That's not a speculation or anything, he literally said that. The "problem" with 3e Power Attack was that his Dwarf with a great axe wasn't doing more damage than the two weapon fighting guy with two short swords. And that's not even an isolated incident. Ed Stark added all those bennies to the 3.5 Druid and 3.5 Shapechange because he liked Druids and wanted them to be more powerful.

Given their track record, it could really go either way. Polymorph stayed broken for years because it was so complicated that they couldn't evaluate whether any of their fixes actually fixed anything. The final solution was simply to make it so incoherent that the player base couldn't figure it out either and have everyone give up on even trying to use or understand the spell (even though after reading all seven or so portions of the spell effect in 4 different books, it was still broken as fuck). Wish got broken in the 3.5 revisions and never fixed because Andy didn't care. Gate never got fixed because even after being told point blank about the free vacation loop he was unable to understand how it could be broken if a 17th level character had to pay 100 XP to do that.

But Shapechange became broken and stayed that way because Ed Stark wanted to be "more powerful" with it. Explicitly. The higher ups have never talked about Orbizards, we can't tell if it stays broken because they don't know or because they like it that way.

-Username17

Oh, yeah, something is definitely going to happen to Hide Armor Expertise and the swarm druid.

People are screaming like raped apes on the boards over these things. I actually agree about the swarm druid thing (reduce damage by your con modifier, stacks with damage resistance); it's just ridiculous in combination with Hide Armor Expertise. I thought that Ed Stark got fired? Oh, well.

Honored Foe is probably also going to get hit with the nerf hammer. +wis temporary hit points every time you get hit by a marked foe, especially if you're a warden, is a wee bit much.

FrankTrollman wrote:In general, souran's assessment is why corporations in general do the things they do. However, this is Andy Collins, Mike Merles, and friends. So I don't know if I can believe that in this instance.

Recall that Andy Collins changed the way Power Attack worked, not because 3e Power Attack was overpowered or underpowered, but merely because Andy Collins wanted his own character to be more powerful.

If they actually said these things then I stand corrected.

I am very used to seeing this same arguement used in MMO's (specifically wow) and there the design team is bound by a demonic force to look only at the numbers that their internal testers are generating within the content.

Therefore, no matter that once its released live there are litterally millions of playtesters foreach and every facet of the game and things that even 100 playtesters couldn't find will be found within hours.

For most Things, not just games, but especially in games, the reason change doesn't occur is because the owners have deluded themselves into believing that the problem doesn't exist or that only people who are deliberatly misreading things will have a problem. Even if what they consider a "missread" becomes the prevailing interpurtation of a thing.

FrankTrollman wrote: Recall that Andy Collins changed the way Power Attack worked, not because 3e Power Attack was overpowered or underpowered, but merely because Andy Collins wanted his own character to be more powerful. That's not a speculation or anything, he literally said that. The "problem" with 3e Power Attack was that his Dwarf with a great axe wasn't doing more damage than the two weapon fighting guy with two short swords. And that's not even an isolated incident. Ed Stark added all those bennies to the 3.5 Druid and 3.5 Shapechange because he liked Druids and wanted them to be more powerful.

Yeah, nothing made me rage more than reading that shit back in the day. Professional game designers just improving bullshit abilities to make their own characters better. They should seriously get fired just for making a statement like that.

I really don't have any idea what will be nerfed, WotC has shown no consistency at all here. I mean, in addition to stuff like the orbizard being untouched, even their balance principles are inconsistently enforced. In that lasts errata they nerfed life transference because two clerics can have infinite healing out of that. But they don't touch the swordmage's better form of infinite healing. What the hell?

shau wrote: In that lasts errata they nerfed life transference because two clerics can have infinite healing out of that. But they don't touch the swordmage's better form of infinite healing. What the hell?

Nor do they touch Astral Seal, Recovery Strike or Inspiring Strike - all of which can theoretically be used to provide an alternate path to infinite healing for the same cleric.


I guess the philosophy is that if the rules encourage arguing with the DM and splitting hairs, things are ok, but if they allow something clearly, then that's gotta be nerfed into uselessness.

New wave of errata. Let's see how the predictions went!

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Cunning Weapons, Illusionists' Gloves, Orb of Imposition, Spell Focus, and other such powers will be errata'd to a one-time save penalty.

Cunning and OOI got exactly this nerf.

Lasting Frost gets neemed down to, oh, 2 vulnerability. And/or a power or feat bonus.
Wintertouched gets changed to providing some bullshit status effect rather than combat advantage. Maybe a speed penalty.

Apparently, WOTC doesn't think it's a problem except on AOE powers, so they nerfed it so that it only works on one power. Apparently rangers are fine, but frost sorcerers are out of line?

Echoes of Thunder gets clarification that the damage bonus applies once per use of the power.

This happened, by way of a rule change rather than errata.

Recovery Strike/Astral Seal's healing gets changed to temporary hit points. Same thing will happen for all such powers.

Nope, Astral Seal is fine! The power that got nerfed is Righteous Brand, which is now a fixed +3 bonus.

Salves of Power get changed to giving back an encounter power and much be used in the middle of combat.

Yup.

Weapon/Implement/Focused Expertise will never be nerfed because those feats were hammered into the game to make up for the fact that an average 4E character is losing the attack bonus game over time.

They did get nerfed, sort of. They're feat bonuses now, so they don't stack with any of the racial +1 to hit feats except Hellfire Blood (which was errataed to be typeless.)

And I forgot one.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Winged Horde either loses its defense targetted, its rider effect, or the enemies-only clause.

It got nerfed, but none of these ways. You just don't add int to damage any more.

Wow... A gang of Wizards and Sorcerers (and a single swarm druid) must have raped a developer's dog recently or something, they took massive nerfs across the board. Orbizards, Murder pinball, gnome illusionists, blaster wizards, radiant/frost/thunder cheese Sorcerers, all of it.

I know encounter long stunlocks were a damn problem, but expending a class feature, and an item daily on a daily power that doesn't even do damage should really give you more than one guaranteed round of incapacitation.

You know.

I'm pretty pissed off at this latest update. In addition to completely killing a couple of previously-viable builds (Razor Cleric, Cold Sorcerer) the only thing left out of the Adventurer's Vault that I want anymore is the Skull Mask, Iron Armbands of Power, and Boots of Eagerness. If those were the only things out of the book that I wanted then I wouldn't have paid money for this shit in the first place. And since the only selling point of 4E books is that they provide the crunch you want, if they make the crunch meaningless then why should I pay any money for it.

I really hope, for their sake, that this latest nerf-fest is just the R&D staff either being completely scared of the errata board or just being downright incompetent. If this is a deliberate strategy on their part--sell lots of books with power creep then nerf the options once the sales run out--then this actually makes me outraged enough to never buy another WotC product ever again. Since I don't trust the team at all, until further notice, I'm cancelling my DDI subscription and getting any 4E information secondhand--that is if I care at all. If there's one thing I won't tolerate from any company it's a bait and switch. I fucking hate being lied to.

(double post)

Lago PARANOIA wrote:I really hope, for their sake, that this latest nerf-fest is just the R&D staff either being completely scared of the errata board or just being downright incompetent. If this is a deliberate strategy on their part--sell lots of books with power creep then nerf the options once the sales run out--then this actually makes me outraged enough to never buy another WotC product ever again. Since I don't trust the team at all, until further notice, I'm cancelling my DDI subscription and getting any 4E information secondhand--that is if I care at all. If there's one thing I won't tolerate from any company it's a bait and switch. I fucking hate being lied to.

I'm impressed it took you that long.

I pretty much stopped caring for the errata after they did what you describe here to Martial Power 1 (Battlerager Fighter). It's the Games Workshop 'Army of the Month' model all over - release overpowered codex, and once sales lag for the concomitant army box, nerf the codex. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The current errata is basically a response to e.g. the low ratio of Divine Power cleric DDI character files compared to PHB 1 cleric builds. They can't issue a Divine Power 2 without a HUGE powercreep OR nerfing the PHB 1 prior to release. Wait for the selling line for DP 2 ... "Comes with a VIABLE STR-Cleric!!!!!".

They're SO taking the piss of their client base in the LFR which basically has no option to get out of this vicious circle.

Windjammer wrote:Wait for the selling line for DP 2 ... "Comes with a VIABLE STR-Cleric!!!!!".

Saw the PHB3 yesterday. It has a new Divine Leader class, the Runepriest, which is a Strength-primary class.

Yeah.