I have been interested in DnD 4th Edition for awhile now i bought the Players Handbook today. and i was wondering if anyone plays 4th edition or has a friend who plays could tell me that i am a total idiot for trying to play 4th edition or if they have any tips, good advice, hints on DMing with the new Version etc. etc.
thanks
P.S. I am not a noob so don't hinder me with your advice for noob DMs.
Full Version: DnD 4th Edition
Is that your advice or did you just find that?
Nothing in that comic shows what they changed from 3.5 to 4.
that color on the walls of the room is really ugly.
Nothing in that comic shows what they changed from 3.5 to 4.
that color on the walls of the room is really ugly.
I think it's a refrence to the balancing chances to the creature ranking system- Can't remember the name of it, exactly.
What I read I didn't like. Cooldown for spells?
Heeel no.
What I read I didn't like. Cooldown for spells?
Heeel no.
I've actually started to playtest this with my friend last week. We're alternating DMing each weekend, and rolled 5 characters each (covering everything at least once except pally). If I were to list all of his and my thoughts, I'd be here forever typing it up, but here's a few bulleted points, as it were. I'm sure it'll still end up way longer than I planned, heh.
DMing seems simplified, and much easier to just pull stuff out of nowhere. The parcel system makes determining loot very easy, and making an encounter is also very easy to do. I ended up DMing first when we still didn't really know anything about 4.0, and I found it rather fun because there was much less work to do. It's definitely easier to get into than 3.5, from a DM's point of view.
To make an encounter is simple. Challenge Ratings are pretty much replaced with a new, simpler system. If you're DMing for 5 level 1 characters, you just "buy" mobs that add up to 500 XP (maybe a little more, maybe a little less). You can throw in a level 4 or maybe even a level 5 into the encounter and it won't wipe your players, although obviously it'll be harder for them and they may need to use some of their dailies. The new system of "classes" of creatures makes for some interesting encounters. You can have a whole lot of minions, which are basically cannon fodder at 1 HP each, worth about 1/4th of a normal mob at that level. You can have skirmishers, brutes, elites, leaders, and so on... My primary complaint with the Monster Manual in 4.0 is that it feels like they're going to need to make an MM2, and rather soon. MM3.5 had a lot more monsters in it than 4.0 does. You're gonna get tired of Kobolds and Goblins at level 1 after a while, because they are pretty much your only choice. But, at least you can easily throw in level 2s and 3s, as long as you balance things out. We also haven't played around much with advancing and de-advancing monsters, so that may allow for more content. But, overall, 4.0 seems like a new ruleset, and that's all they did. They should have spent some more time creating more content for the new rules.
This same half-finished content is apparent in the Player Handbook as well. PHB2 is hopefully around the corner to fill out some of the missing classes and perhaps races as well. I rather miss half-orcs, but at least the MM has the gnome, still. Druids, Barbarians, and Bards are all missing. In some ways, the Warlord is the new Bard, but not really. There's also some other 3.5 classes from various other books that I hope make a reappearance soon. Sorcerers are also gone, but what I should say is that Wizards are gone, and have been replaced by the Sorcerer of 3.5, because...
Wizards no longer feel like wizards. That they have to rip pages out of their spell book every time they get new powers starting at level 15 is really dumb. Rituals probably make up for the vast lack of spells in 4.0, and I do like the way they can cast magic missile all day long, but generally I find wizards much weaker than in 3.5. Yes, in 3.5 you would end up needing to sleep fairly often in your early levels, but that's better than having one or two kinda decent spells that will probably miss, and then being weaker than any other class for the rest of the encounter or day. Maybe I just suck at rolling, but with 19 int (+4 on my attacks) I'm still missing a lot of the time, and that means I'm missing my encounter spell pretty much always, with no hope for partial effect. I feel it was better being able to have really strong attacks that might be halved by a save than this. I was really looking forward to playing a wizard, my favored 3.5 class, thinking that they were going to be improved in a few important ways, but having actually played it, I think I won't be rolling another wizard for a long time, at least not in the kind of role I enjoy.
On the other hand, Warlocks are very cool. They can dish out some pretty steady damage, and are viable round after round of combat. Warlocks are like the Wizards we knew and loved, in many ways. They are definitely single-target nukers, as opposed to the weaker AoE-type damage that Wizards now do, and in a well-coordinated group, they are highly mobile (at least in the Fey Pact type that I chose).
Which brings me to my next point, about movement. Combat now is much more fluid and large. While you can still do encounters where your players fight one or two mobs at a time, and generally nobody's moving except in some initial set-up, 4.0 combat is all about moving around blowing up a bunch of guys at a time. I'm reminded of the Khazad Dum fight in Fellowship of the Ring. The minions rush in, get one-shot by everybody while the brute comes in and starts smacking people around. Skirmishers and lurkers shift around all over the place trying to get combat advantages, and many of the monsters in the MM have special abilities related to shifting around. Your characters are moving around a lot more too. Since there are so many more creatures in an encounter, things get pretty mixed up as everyone's trying to flank everyone else, etc., and many of the classes have powers that cause themselves or allies to shift. Hopefully players in your group will work much closer together to get advantages. Instead of the fighter tanking the giant while the rogue sneaks around to get his sneak attacks, and the wizard and ranger are shooting ranged attacks to burn the enemy down, as was in 3.5, you should have much more involvement and communication between your characters to set things up for each other.
Which brings me to Warlords, who are often shifting their allies about the place. The Warlord I rolled was probably not as good as I should have. I probably should have put more stats into con, and changed some of my powers around a bit, but generally I have to say I'm not impressed. Warlords are good about helping out here and there, improving the party overall, but they seem too easy to smack around, so they aren't good in the front lines. I don't think you're going to be replacing your Cleric any time soon, even though both classes are supposed to fill the same role.
I didn't roll a Cleric, my friend did, but from what I've seen so far it seems to be much improved. Far from being a healbot, the Cleric is now getting in there and doing some damage while healing simultaneously. I don't think it'll be hard getting somebody in your group to play a Cleric anymore.
Going back to a low-point, rogues seem to feel a lot less like rogues now. I'm not playing one myself, but they seem to be less roguey, if that makes any sense.
Rangers, on the other hand, are quite good. I'm enjoying the one I made, a two-weapon ranger. I picked some of my powers poorly though, I think. He should be used more as a hit-and-run type of meleer. Rangers don't have enough healing surges per day to stay in range of anybody at the end of their turn very often. Good news for range-rangers is, shooting into combat doesn't seem to take a penalty anymore, unless we're just missing where it says that. Rangers definitely do a ton of damage when they need to, so I think people will enjoy playing them in 4.0 a lot.
Similarly, Fighters are probably more fun too. You do definitely need to pick what kind of fighter you want to make though. Going half-and-half on the tanking/smacking optimization will make you a bit frustrated at times, but if you pick one or the other, I think you'll find yourself very well equipped for the task.
I think when my usual group starts up again in the fall, I'll roll either a Warlock, Fighter, or Ranger. I might also want to try out a Cleric, but I'll probably playtest it first this summer. Talking with my friend though, we're probably not going to switch over from 3.5 yet all the way. Running two campaigns at the same time, one 3.5, one 4.0, is likely. We're both agreed that Wizards of the Coast should have made a 3.75 instead, because 4.0 is far from having no problems. Partly it's not knowing the game all that well yet, but some of the choices they made were to simplify and balance things at the expense of fun. Wizards and Rogues are just crap, the books are very disorganized, and overall a lot seems to be missing in terms of content. Important class options are missing, the magic item list is very tiny, the MM feels very light, and we're not really even sure what the Dungeon Master's Guide actually offers, since so much of what was in DMG3.5 is now in the PHB or eliminated from 4.0. In some ways it seems like a big money grab, with the Core books being just a teaser, and the real game is coming when they sell a few more books with new classes, additional powers, and more feats.
Oh, one last thing. Prestige classes are gone, but they're replaced with Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies. Obviously at level 1 we haven't really tested them out much, but I do feel a little sad that prestige classes are gone. It does give you some extra leeway though, with retraining too you can pretty much fix any mistakes you made, or even change how you want your character to be at some fundamental levels.
Yeah, that was way longer than I expected it to be, but hopefully it helps people. I'm sure I'll add more in the weeks to come.
Oh, and that comic is somewhat of a reference to the fact that Dragons are considered solo monsters, which means when you "buy" mobs for an encounter, a dragon would take all the XP, thus you really would not face a dragon until you were level 3 at the lowest. So, no more CR 2 wyrmling encounters at level 1. Really though, I think the comic is just about people with certain irrational complaints about 4.0. Which, having read the WotC forums, there are quite a few people whining about things that really aren't a big deal, such as the healing surges and so on, which are actually not bad at all.
DMing seems simplified, and much easier to just pull stuff out of nowhere. The parcel system makes determining loot very easy, and making an encounter is also very easy to do. I ended up DMing first when we still didn't really know anything about 4.0, and I found it rather fun because there was much less work to do. It's definitely easier to get into than 3.5, from a DM's point of view.
To make an encounter is simple. Challenge Ratings are pretty much replaced with a new, simpler system. If you're DMing for 5 level 1 characters, you just "buy" mobs that add up to 500 XP (maybe a little more, maybe a little less). You can throw in a level 4 or maybe even a level 5 into the encounter and it won't wipe your players, although obviously it'll be harder for them and they may need to use some of their dailies. The new system of "classes" of creatures makes for some interesting encounters. You can have a whole lot of minions, which are basically cannon fodder at 1 HP each, worth about 1/4th of a normal mob at that level. You can have skirmishers, brutes, elites, leaders, and so on... My primary complaint with the Monster Manual in 4.0 is that it feels like they're going to need to make an MM2, and rather soon. MM3.5 had a lot more monsters in it than 4.0 does. You're gonna get tired of Kobolds and Goblins at level 1 after a while, because they are pretty much your only choice. But, at least you can easily throw in level 2s and 3s, as long as you balance things out. We also haven't played around much with advancing and de-advancing monsters, so that may allow for more content. But, overall, 4.0 seems like a new ruleset, and that's all they did. They should have spent some more time creating more content for the new rules.
This same half-finished content is apparent in the Player Handbook as well. PHB2 is hopefully around the corner to fill out some of the missing classes and perhaps races as well. I rather miss half-orcs, but at least the MM has the gnome, still. Druids, Barbarians, and Bards are all missing. In some ways, the Warlord is the new Bard, but not really. There's also some other 3.5 classes from various other books that I hope make a reappearance soon. Sorcerers are also gone, but what I should say is that Wizards are gone, and have been replaced by the Sorcerer of 3.5, because...
Wizards no longer feel like wizards. That they have to rip pages out of their spell book every time they get new powers starting at level 15 is really dumb. Rituals probably make up for the vast lack of spells in 4.0, and I do like the way they can cast magic missile all day long, but generally I find wizards much weaker than in 3.5. Yes, in 3.5 you would end up needing to sleep fairly often in your early levels, but that's better than having one or two kinda decent spells that will probably miss, and then being weaker than any other class for the rest of the encounter or day. Maybe I just suck at rolling, but with 19 int (+4 on my attacks) I'm still missing a lot of the time, and that means I'm missing my encounter spell pretty much always, with no hope for partial effect. I feel it was better being able to have really strong attacks that might be halved by a save than this. I was really looking forward to playing a wizard, my favored 3.5 class, thinking that they were going to be improved in a few important ways, but having actually played it, I think I won't be rolling another wizard for a long time, at least not in the kind of role I enjoy.
On the other hand, Warlocks are very cool. They can dish out some pretty steady damage, and are viable round after round of combat. Warlocks are like the Wizards we knew and loved, in many ways. They are definitely single-target nukers, as opposed to the weaker AoE-type damage that Wizards now do, and in a well-coordinated group, they are highly mobile (at least in the Fey Pact type that I chose).
Which brings me to my next point, about movement. Combat now is much more fluid and large. While you can still do encounters where your players fight one or two mobs at a time, and generally nobody's moving except in some initial set-up, 4.0 combat is all about moving around blowing up a bunch of guys at a time. I'm reminded of the Khazad Dum fight in Fellowship of the Ring. The minions rush in, get one-shot by everybody while the brute comes in and starts smacking people around. Skirmishers and lurkers shift around all over the place trying to get combat advantages, and many of the monsters in the MM have special abilities related to shifting around. Your characters are moving around a lot more too. Since there are so many more creatures in an encounter, things get pretty mixed up as everyone's trying to flank everyone else, etc., and many of the classes have powers that cause themselves or allies to shift. Hopefully players in your group will work much closer together to get advantages. Instead of the fighter tanking the giant while the rogue sneaks around to get his sneak attacks, and the wizard and ranger are shooting ranged attacks to burn the enemy down, as was in 3.5, you should have much more involvement and communication between your characters to set things up for each other.
Which brings me to Warlords, who are often shifting their allies about the place. The Warlord I rolled was probably not as good as I should have. I probably should have put more stats into con, and changed some of my powers around a bit, but generally I have to say I'm not impressed. Warlords are good about helping out here and there, improving the party overall, but they seem too easy to smack around, so they aren't good in the front lines. I don't think you're going to be replacing your Cleric any time soon, even though both classes are supposed to fill the same role.
I didn't roll a Cleric, my friend did, but from what I've seen so far it seems to be much improved. Far from being a healbot, the Cleric is now getting in there and doing some damage while healing simultaneously. I don't think it'll be hard getting somebody in your group to play a Cleric anymore.
Going back to a low-point, rogues seem to feel a lot less like rogues now. I'm not playing one myself, but they seem to be less roguey, if that makes any sense.
Rangers, on the other hand, are quite good. I'm enjoying the one I made, a two-weapon ranger. I picked some of my powers poorly though, I think. He should be used more as a hit-and-run type of meleer. Rangers don't have enough healing surges per day to stay in range of anybody at the end of their turn very often. Good news for range-rangers is, shooting into combat doesn't seem to take a penalty anymore, unless we're just missing where it says that. Rangers definitely do a ton of damage when they need to, so I think people will enjoy playing them in 4.0 a lot.
Similarly, Fighters are probably more fun too. You do definitely need to pick what kind of fighter you want to make though. Going half-and-half on the tanking/smacking optimization will make you a bit frustrated at times, but if you pick one or the other, I think you'll find yourself very well equipped for the task.
I think when my usual group starts up again in the fall, I'll roll either a Warlock, Fighter, or Ranger. I might also want to try out a Cleric, but I'll probably playtest it first this summer. Talking with my friend though, we're probably not going to switch over from 3.5 yet all the way. Running two campaigns at the same time, one 3.5, one 4.0, is likely. We're both agreed that Wizards of the Coast should have made a 3.75 instead, because 4.0 is far from having no problems. Partly it's not knowing the game all that well yet, but some of the choices they made were to simplify and balance things at the expense of fun. Wizards and Rogues are just crap, the books are very disorganized, and overall a lot seems to be missing in terms of content. Important class options are missing, the magic item list is very tiny, the MM feels very light, and we're not really even sure what the Dungeon Master's Guide actually offers, since so much of what was in DMG3.5 is now in the PHB or eliminated from 4.0. In some ways it seems like a big money grab, with the Core books being just a teaser, and the real game is coming when they sell a few more books with new classes, additional powers, and more feats.
Oh, one last thing. Prestige classes are gone, but they're replaced with Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies. Obviously at level 1 we haven't really tested them out much, but I do feel a little sad that prestige classes are gone. It does give you some extra leeway though, with retraining too you can pretty much fix any mistakes you made, or even change how you want your character to be at some fundamental levels.
Yeah, that was way longer than I expected it to be, but hopefully it helps people. I'm sure I'll add more in the weeks to come.
Oh, and that comic is somewhat of a reference to the fact that Dragons are considered solo monsters, which means when you "buy" mobs for an encounter, a dragon would take all the XP, thus you really would not face a dragon until you were level 3 at the lowest. So, no more CR 2 wyrmling encounters at level 1. Really though, I think the comic is just about people with certain irrational complaints about 4.0. Which, having read the WotC forums, there are quite a few people whining about things that really aren't a big deal, such as the healing surges and so on, which are actually not bad at all.
wow thanks. I will consider all of that.(you have no idea how nice it is to read that review)
and i am making a new base class (not really a base class) called the Frost warrior i had it functional in 3.5 i am upgrading it to 4 if you want to take a look when I'm done.
and i am making a new base class (not really a base class) called the Frost warrior i had it functional in 3.5 i am upgrading it to 4 if you want to take a look when I'm done.
At www.wizards.com, do a search for Penny Arcade. The guys sat down for a long session of DnD 4.0 with some of the Wizards people, recording the whole thing and with a new episode released each week (they've released six so far). You have to register on the site to be able to download the episodes, but it's all free.
Yeah, I've been listening to the podcasts every Friday. Some of the things mentioned, however, don't seem to be found in any of the rules anywhere. I suspect the Wizards DM pulled some stuff out of his ass, but I could just be missing some things.
Fantastic review, and I agree with a lot of what you've said. I played 3.5 somewhat casually, but really love the new 4.0 system
Yea, the manual is definitely not even close to finished. One thing I really wished they made simpler about the monster manual was adding a more built in way of leveling up or down other creatures. I can't really speak for DMing differences, but it sure does seem to take way less prep to set up a 3.5 game (but that might just be our DM having more experience at doing it in the first place)
First of all, spec wand if you want to be a war wizard, you should easily have +4 +3 (dex) as an encounter power, so you can, obviously, synchronize that wiht your dailies and encounters.
Second of all, they SEVERLY nerfed wizards since 3.5, but I think it was entirely warranted. Wizards used to be glass cannons, but since there was no such thing as tanking, they had to have magical forms of AC bonuses and the such, so they had both the most offense and defense.
Now, the focus of wizards is not so much face melting (indeed, if you want to roll a war wizard, chose a Warlock instead, likewise, if you want to roll a ... CHA base lock, (whatever they are called), I'd probably suggest rolling a control wizard instead. These are the more native rolls of each class (but, I mean, feel free to go for flavor)).
The AoE and CC abilities control wizards have really shine, and the burst 3 At-Will is pretty sexy. The biggest issue there is it forces you to cast from melee range, which is... a pretty bad idea.
Orb Spec+Sleep is a great CC at low levels, the only thing I think they need to look into is, similar to WoW, making "elite" mobs immune to certain flavors of CC, as it does allow some encounters to be cheezed a little.
Yes, I think the biggest thing they fixed about combat was removal of the full, iterative attacks. Ironically, we house-ruled that back in as a subtle option. (This goes back to your earlier accuracy issue, which is definitely valid).
As a base, melee gets STR[or DEX] (+3 or 4] plus expertise [+2 or 3] while casters only get their single native stat, so all melee attack rolls have an extra 15% chance to hit that spells don't. We devised a rebalancing where, if you sacrifice your minor action and your move action [except your shift], you could take a +2 to casting rolls. This seems to compensate for some of the wizard issues without unbalancing anything, but again, our sample size is not huge enough to decide if this is a valid change.
(Warlords are amazing, but I don't have anything to add to that, except that I'm proud that melee is fun to play now)
You missed one very very important addition: Cross classing is now Amazing(ly overpowered, but the devs have said they wanted as much).
I play a Cleric Cross-classed as a wizard for an extra daily spell, plus I get Thunderwave, which has a secondary effect based on my already stacked WIS. This, mixed with the existing AoE close range Cleric spells make my cleric very interesting to play, as I often have to dance in and out of the thick of combat to be fully effective.
Almost every class can stand to gain something, especially at level 11, from multiclassing, and you never sacrifice caster levels like you used to.
My biggest issue so far is that there seems to be like 2 or three good caster feats, and you get them every even level +level 1 + human, so... It's hard to decide what to do with them, I hope they release an expanded list soon.
---
As an aside, we all think grids are ugly and awkward for diagonal movement (even if they are more accurate for your average "fortress"). So we replaced the square grid with a hex map. The biggest issue here is, now only 6 people can be adjacent to one person instead of 8, and AoE effects are similarly smaller, burst 3 goes from 9 to 7 and burst 5 goes from 25 to 19, but maybe this isn't such a big deal in terms of game balance. I was wondering if you had any thoughts on that)
QUOTE(mrxak @ Jul 6 2008, 04:13 PM) 
This same half-finished content is apparent in the Player Handbook as well. PHB2 is hopefully around the corner to fill out some of the missing classes and perhaps races as well. I rather miss half-orcs, but at least the MM has the gnome, still. Druids, Barbarians, and Bards are all missing. In some ways, the Warlord is the new Bard, but not really. There's also some other 3.5 classes from various other books that I hope make a reappearance soon. Sorcerers are also gone, but what I should say is that Wizards are gone, and have been replaced by the Sorcerer of 3.5, because...
Yea, the manual is definitely not even close to finished. One thing I really wished they made simpler about the monster manual was adding a more built in way of leveling up or down other creatures. I can't really speak for DMing differences, but it sure does seem to take way less prep to set up a 3.5 game (but that might just be our DM having more experience at doing it in the first place)
QUOTE
Wizards no longer feel like wizards. That they have to rip pages out of their spell book every time they get new powers starting at level 15 is really dumb. Rituals probably make up for the vast lack of spells in 4.0, and I do like the way they can cast magic missile all day long, but generally I find wizards much weaker than in 3.5. Yes, in 3.5 you would end up needing to sleep fairly often in your early levels, but that's better than having one or two kinda decent spells that will probably miss, and then being weaker than any other class for the rest of the encounter or day. Maybe I just suck at rolling, but with 19 int (+4 on my attacks) I'm still missing a lot of the time, and that means I'm missing my encounter spell pretty much always, with no hope for partial effect. I feel it was better being able to have really strong attacks that might be halved by a save than this. I was really looking forward to playing a wizard, my favored 3.5 class, thinking that they were going to be improved in a few important ways, but having actually played it, I think I won't be rolling another wizard for a long time, at least not in the kind of role I enjoy.
First of all, spec wand if you want to be a war wizard, you should easily have +4 +3 (dex) as an encounter power, so you can, obviously, synchronize that wiht your dailies and encounters.
Second of all, they SEVERLY nerfed wizards since 3.5, but I think it was entirely warranted. Wizards used to be glass cannons, but since there was no such thing as tanking, they had to have magical forms of AC bonuses and the such, so they had both the most offense and defense.
Now, the focus of wizards is not so much face melting (indeed, if you want to roll a war wizard, chose a Warlock instead, likewise, if you want to roll a ... CHA base lock, (whatever they are called), I'd probably suggest rolling a control wizard instead. These are the more native rolls of each class (but, I mean, feel free to go for flavor)).
The AoE and CC abilities control wizards have really shine, and the burst 3 At-Will is pretty sexy. The biggest issue there is it forces you to cast from melee range, which is... a pretty bad idea.
Orb Spec+Sleep is a great CC at low levels, the only thing I think they need to look into is, similar to WoW, making "elite" mobs immune to certain flavors of CC, as it does allow some encounters to be cheezed a little.
QUOTE
Which brings me to my next point, about movement. Combat now is much more fluid and large. While you can still do encounters where your players fight one or two mobs at a time, and generally nobody's moving except in some initial set-up, 4.0 combat is all about moving around blowing up a bunch of guys at a time. I'm reminded of the Khazad Dum fight in Fellowship of the Ring. The minions rush in, get one-shot by everybody while the brute comes in and starts smacking people around. Skirmishers and lurkers shift around all over the place trying to get combat advantages, and many of the monsters in the MM have special abilities related to shifting around. Your characters are moving around a lot more too. Since there are so many more creatures in an encounter, things get pretty mixed up as everyone's trying to flank everyone else, etc., and many of the classes have powers that cause themselves or allies to shift. Hopefully players in your group will work much closer together to get advantages. Instead of the fighter tanking the giant while the rogue sneaks around to get his sneak attacks, and the wizard and ranger are shooting ranged attacks to burn the enemy down, as was in 3.5, you should have much more involvement and communication between your characters to set things up for each other.
Yes, I think the biggest thing they fixed about combat was removal of the full, iterative attacks. Ironically, we house-ruled that back in as a subtle option. (This goes back to your earlier accuracy issue, which is definitely valid).
As a base, melee gets STR[or DEX] (+3 or 4] plus expertise [+2 or 3] while casters only get their single native stat, so all melee attack rolls have an extra 15% chance to hit that spells don't. We devised a rebalancing where, if you sacrifice your minor action and your move action [except your shift], you could take a +2 to casting rolls. This seems to compensate for some of the wizard issues without unbalancing anything, but again, our sample size is not huge enough to decide if this is a valid change.
(Warlords are amazing, but I don't have anything to add to that, except that I'm proud that melee is fun to play now)
QUOTE
Oh, one last thing. Prestige classes are gone, but they're replaced with Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies.
You missed one very very important addition: Cross classing is now Amazing(ly overpowered, but the devs have said they wanted as much).
I play a Cleric Cross-classed as a wizard for an extra daily spell, plus I get Thunderwave, which has a secondary effect based on my already stacked WIS. This, mixed with the existing AoE close range Cleric spells make my cleric very interesting to play, as I often have to dance in and out of the thick of combat to be fully effective.
Almost every class can stand to gain something, especially at level 11, from multiclassing, and you never sacrifice caster levels like you used to.
My biggest issue so far is that there seems to be like 2 or three good caster feats, and you get them every even level +level 1 + human, so... It's hard to decide what to do with them, I hope they release an expanded list soon.
---
As an aside, we all think grids are ugly and awkward for diagonal movement (even if they are more accurate for your average "fortress"). So we replaced the square grid with a hex map. The biggest issue here is, now only 6 people can be adjacent to one person instead of 8, and AoE effects are similarly smaller, burst 3 goes from 9 to 7 and burst 5 goes from 25 to 19, but maybe this isn't such a big deal in terms of game balance. I was wondering if you had any thoughts on that)
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