The Gaming Den

Note that 4th Edition has the opposite problem. All things being equal, AC bonuses and hp scale faster than attack bonuses. This gets worse when you throw in magical armor and class abilities, since they're slanted towards giving defensive bonuses and situations in the basic book.

most of the 8 classes can get away with 1 weapon (or implement). Melee rangers, paladins (encounter powers are weapon based, daily powers are often implement based), beatstick clerics (same reason), all get fucked royally in this area. Keeping a second item level appropriate really guts the charact...

I did sit down and work out the difference between a dwarf fighter and human fighter (dwarf going for 16/16/13/10/15/8 and human going for 20/10/13/10/13/. The human is at +2 attack and damage forever, has the same or better (fort) defenses forever except for AC where the dwarf can have +1 AC for b...

You know, I'm just going to keep pimping this build until I get some comments on it so you might as well just humor me. Even if it's a 'no one cares about your retro-retardo shaggy dog build'.

Anyway, like I promised, a Razor Cleric build. I'm not putting everything about this character up here. If it's mandatory, it's not going in. Only choices do. Elven Cleric / Swordmaster Initial Stat Array: STR: 16 DEX: 15 CON: 11 WIS: 18 INT: 8 CHA: 10 Level 16 Stat Array: STR: 20 DEX: 16 CON: 12 WI...

While you may be right about Veteran's armor, Agile armor only matters if you have a dex bonus, and that's probably not happening until 21st level on this cleric.

The razor cleric I may or may not post in a little bit needs a 15 dex score, though, so he might benefit from it.

Josh, your post got cut off.

Anyone, I don't agree with Veteran's Armor so much personally. It takes an action point and a daily item use and I think there are better item dailies out there along with better items to boot. Agile Armor is gold for anyone.

YMMV.

Well, here are a couple of problems I have with the beat cleric build: 1) Clerics don't get abilities that help them protect themselves. If you're up front, this means pulling attention off of a paladin or fighter. 2) Getting all up in the enemy's grill compromises your healing, as in you're using u...

Oh, Jesus, I can't believe I overlooked this. Just use a coup de grace to replenish your damn attack power. In fact, you can use pretty much any attack power. I recommend Crescendo Blade, but then again pretty much any multi-target attack (including Rain of Blows) will work. If your DM is using the ...

Now if you get rid of that and have magic items that auto upgrade, then the model has to be changed to something else. Now I'm not saying that this may not be a good thing, but a lot of people like the constant acquisition of stuff that comes with D&D. So while it's nice to have a lightning bol...

The real difficulty is balancing something like boots of flying to a wand of fireballs. I really think that all magic items should scale, unless they're specifically planned to be obsolete at a certain point in time. Then you should be able to cheaply trade them for something better. For example, l...

If anyone could post reliable ways to get critical hits, expand the critical hit range, or replenish encounter powers I would really appreciate it. I've also been thinking about how this build would stack up with a Spellsword, since they can quick-draw low-level Mage Sword's to pump their encounter ...

Actually, Satan's an incredible pussy when you think about it. How many people did he personally kill in the Bible? Go on, I'm waiting. And Divine Comedy, the definitive vision of hell, what was Satan like? He froze himself in a fucking lake with his own wings. That's Bebop and Rocksteady levels of ...

Here's the general gist of this build. It revolves around the use of the 3rd-level encounter fighter power of Rain of Blows. For a quick refresher at home, if you have a dexterity of 15 and are using a flail, spear, or light blade, you get to make up to four attacks. We're going to try to make our c...

Which paragon tier do you recommend, Frank?

Yeh, the core conceit of "money=power" basically tainted 3e and when taken to it's logical conclusion it ruined 4e. However, it is not a surprise that people working in corporations can't even believe in a world where money does not equal power. I will never understand why money should eq...

Because that's what it looks like to me right now. I think a battle cleric might get some mileage out of polearm gamble and staying close to a fighter. Fighter, not paladin, unless paladin is a Champion of Order or Warpriest and even then. Anyway, while we're on the subjects... fighters and warpries...

In the Character Optimization board's defense, they are actually getting a lot better at min-maxxing. A lot of this, unfortunately, is 4E's slavish devotion to its biggest design factor: The player is not allowed to do anything open-ended. This is the real root of a wizard's power in 3rd Edition. Ye...

...Sorry, I just couldn't keep a straight face after reading that. The 4e DMG's monster creation guidelines are far from perfect, but they're a hell of a lot better than 3e's guidelines. Monster creation guidelines in 3e were an afterthought; they had a guideline for monster AB, but no mention of e...

we're not playing a god damned MMO. yes, things like aggro and threat have some significance across the range but you can't pull hard and fast rules into the game He's fucking you up. But on a fundamental level, a tank self-healing is a bad idea for drawing aggro. The whole problem why a tank has t...

Still, you have to imagine that the Polynesians that made those fucking epic trips on small planks of wood across the entire fucking Pacific had to be either pretty hardcore or shark food. Liar. :( Everyone knows that it was hardworking Christian white people that discovered America even though the...

Shhh.

Don't bring it up until we need to draw an ace in the hole.

The Keating Five stuff is going to be saved if they try to pull ast minute Jeremiah Wright bullshit again.

It won't ever be updated; the guy has been dead for almost 10 years.

I'm a hateful little cuss, so I fully subscribe to the 'executed by Richard Mellon Scaife' theory.

Well, I mean obviously it needs to be updated; that website is almost ten years out of date. For example, Steve Kangas indirectly refers to the Bradley effect heavily skewing polls in this article: http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-poll.html. For those of you not in the know, the Bradley effect is tha...

Their answers to all problems are to cut taxes and social services, and remove restrictions on where and what the wealthy can do with their money. When these plans invariably lead to massive unemployment, catastrophic environmental degradation, falling productivity, and legendary corruption, their ...