After having devoted significant time play testing the new proposed rules I wanted to write about my experiences, not about a specific rule, but about my experience holistically with the rule set. Specifically, I wanted to talk about being a Fighter.
To be clear, I don't mean a Templar or a Scout. I don't mean a Fighter with some ranks of magic. I mean taking Fighting skills.
Please read this with an open mind. It took a long time to write this and an even longer time to playtest through all of these new rules and give them a fair shake. This isn't about any one particular rule, but rather how the rules as a group effect the class that I play. About how this new rule set directly effects a customer's experience. Please... please... please I'm begging you, don't get defensive, instead please help me find fun playing this class. What can we do with these rules to make playing a Fighter an enjoyable experience again? While this thread and its focus is on Fighters, (which is what I have focused my play testing on) most of it applies to Rogues and their situation as well. Finally, I don't address Paragon Paths here. I actually found a lot really enjoyable about playing a Warleader, but each class in Alliance gets really cool Paragon Paths. Unless we plan to scrap them for Scholars, I don't see how having a mandatory path makes Fighters fun. This thread doesn't even address what is a problem under the current rules: Casters get High Magic and Formal Casting to "cap" their build progression with something really cool and flavorful. What do Fighters get? Where is their endgame? What pulls a person to play a *Fighter* rather than a Templar? Is the game all homogenization at the top end?
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My play test experience as a Fighter has been miserable. I went from feeling like a contributing member of battle to a walking pillar without the ability to interact with the fight except when spending 10 critical attacks. This experience has been compounded with each new version of the rules. Each one seems to stack on additional penalties for engaging in melee combat while taking away carrots that were given to the class to make it "playable". Without hyperbole, I am unclear what role Fighters are supposed to play in the new system that is not accomplished almost as well by another class. Even being a hit point sponge (unfun), is no longer accomplished in [0.9]. Monsters can literally walk past many of our Fighters who "Flurry" for 6 (2, 2, 2) in fights without Critical Attacks to get to the targets of value and contribution in the fight.
One of our Rogues actually chuckled, "Now you know whats its like to be a Rogue fighting from the Front".
Some examples:
1. A powerful Scholar was going around the battlefield wrecking havoc. While he is distracted I sneak up behind him and attack him. He has no idea I am there until I am tagging him with weapon blows. Having purchased more Weapon Proficiency abilities than anyone else play testing I swing for the highest base damage in the play test with one-handed weapons: 6 normal. Being the last fight of the day I have used my Critical Strikes so I cannot augment this number.
I deal my 18 points and then "reset" my stance while he turns around chuckles and kills me with some 1st and 3rd level spells (Stone Bolt, Bind (Arms), Bind (Legs).
This is an incredibly frustrating experience that could have been replicated by my 160 build character fighting a brand new player with armor. There isn't really a more ideally situation for me engaging on the caster as a fighter aside from "have more Eviscerates" which was the advice I was given.
2. Another player is moving around the battlefield with a sword and shield. They are normal colored and not red in any way. I approach and use two disarms and an eviscerate. The call returned to me is "no effect, no effect, no effect". Why? Through the Totemic Paragon Path shields can be "claws" now and no where in the rules does it say there needs to be any indication of if they are a "claw shield" or a normal shield that can be disarmed. Due to the new rules my Disarms are "expended" and my Eviscerate is gone until I can meditate it back later. Given players can wait 2 whole seconds before calling any defenses (or that your blow doesn't effect them) there is no way for me to know if the player is just slow to drop their shield, immune to the effect, or just didn't hear me the first time until I have wasted the abilities.
Given the new flurry rule its really a poor tactical decision to follow up the disarm with regular damage because they can pick up their shield while I'm "resetting my stance".
3. During a wave fight several "trash" monsters are attacking. This is when a Fighter is supposed to shine! No one is going to want to use their big things on this engagement! Unfortunately, all the scholars just got out their wands and starting throwing 5 damages at them. Most were dead before they even reached the group and the heartier ones that did reach the group weren't phased by a fully landed set of 18 damage, instead they were finished off by the casters throwing wand charges for almost the same amount.
Throughout the play test incoming damage against the PCs was largely irrelevant, while takeout effects were the main source of PCs being eliminated from the fight for any amount of time. The other fighters, especially ones that built for "hearty" and "armor" felt largely pointless and unable to engage with the fight in a meaningful way. Watching the guy with 60 points of armor have it all removed by a 1st level spell (stone bolt) to pop his Spellshield and a 3rd level spell (Shatter) was incredibly disheartening for him. He had spent 25 build to wear a hard to get (and expensive) tag only to have it negated in an instant with a single 3rd level spell.
4. A group of 3 Fighters went to approach a caster to kill him. Knowing we were going to try to kill a caster we made sure that we all had spellshields. On the approach one was stone bolted and Slept, another was Disarmed and Confined. Thankfully the third person got there and was able to land a full flurry on the caster! The set delivered was "12 normal (x10 critical attacks spent), 30 normal (slay), Eviscerate". The response? Weapon Guard (Magic Armor), got it, dodge. Due to some sideburns, the fighter then had to "reset his stance" and get blown up by point blank takeout effects. This same scenario would have played out with a Wylderkin or High Ogre (Resolute) as well, or even a racial skill store item.
5. I watched the following happen to fighters over the course of the play test: Damage Reduced to 1 (after having spent 83 Build to have 4 Weapon Proficiency) by a 3rd level spell, armor reduced from 60 to 0 by a third level spell, all limbs removed by a single spell, confined, slept, killed and turned into greater undead, deathed, paralyzed, blown up by an elemental pool before they could engage, gased down, had their weapons shattered (by both spell and melee), and downed by elementals throwing packets.
Aside from Eviscerates, I didn't see any Fighter kill anything (aside from some skeletons, zombies, mud golems, and shardlings).
Do these abilities I describe above effect all characters? Sure, most of them do. But my point is Fighters are NOT significantly harder to remove from combat than scholars or rogues in the majority of situations. Most of the time, the ability of Rogues to dodge and scholars to spell shield themselves provides *greater* livability than Fighters. If Fighters are going to move from an active role of being able to actually kill things in combat to a role where they are "tanking" then they need huge numbers of defenses to take outs to be added or they just can't do their jobs. Tanking in a LARP works roughly as well as it does in a PvP situation in an MMORPG as well because bad guys with any intelligence can just avoid the guy that doesn't present a threat and go for the slightly lower and significantly more effective targets in the back.
Without significant magical backup, fighters can't function in this version of the rules. The same cannot be said for scholars (especially if they pick up the shield skill).
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List of problems for Fighters with the new version:
1. Making Shatter (a 3rd level spell) do the same thing as a 7th level spell (Destroy) is incredibly problematic for people that rely on weapons and armor to actually have an impact on fights. It also hurts melee combatants much worse than casters because it cannot be used to negate spell casting. This spell does more damage than Dragon's Breath to fighters that chose to stack armor.
2. Big Shields. Big Shields make fighting in melee an exercise in futility especially when combined with abilities that make shields unable to be disarmed like the Totemic Paragon Path or Construct's Natural Weaponry. At the same time, these shields make Fighters that choose to use them an even easier target for casters who now can literally hit the "broad side of a barn" and effect someone with their spells.
3. Flurry Rule. The Flurry rule, especially when combined with nerfs to overall damage make fighting casters impossible without using one of a fighter's extremely limited per day skills (and to be clear that's only Slay and Eviscerate because Disarm and Shatter have no effect against most casters). It is impossible to "press the advantage" against a mage and make casting difficult for them because you have to reset your stance before they are dead. Mages are allowed to take significant amounts of armor and now can even purchase Hearty for almost the same cost as Fighters. Meanwhile Fighters have almost no answer to spells outside of Stalwart Shield and even that is only against a single spell.
4. Meditation. This is a huge buff to offensive casters (who miss spells all the time), and a huge nerf to Fighters who used to be able to swing with their skills until they hit. The ability to claim that a blow "didn't connect" or "was mostly blocked" even when it clearly did is magnified by that blow not being used again against the same target immediately.
5. Prepare to Die. The removal of this makes combat less fun. While its a "buff" to fighters because they can "surprise Eviscerate" someone with no warning this makes combat less tactical, less teamwork based, and less about using a shield to block a sword and more about what kind of word salad you can throw at someone's shield to see if they die.
6. Slay Nerf. The reduction of Slay damage makes them very expensive to take if you want a comparable effect to the old rules. Meanwhile while Fighter damage has gone down, Celestial Damage has stayed the same and Necromancy damage has increased.
7. Hearty Changes. The one "saving grace" to being a fighter under the old 2.0 system was that you were really tough to kill. With the removal of Hearty as a Fighter skill and the changes to costs, it is just as expensive for an Elven Fighter to buy Hearty as it is an Ogre Earth Scholar. While fighters get more base hit points as a result of gaining build this advantage is pretty much the only upside to being a Fighter in the new system.
8. Critical Attacks. Critical Attacks give Fighters the ability to do an acceptable amount of damage in a single fight for 10 minutes. If you don't purchase enough of them after you have engaged in two fights its time to sit in the tavern for the rest of the event. The problem with critical attacks is that they take one of the two strengths that fighters have (good sustained damage) and make Fighters into bad Scholars. Now instead of being reasonable in every fight throughout the weekend, you are a little better in 2 fighters and totally worthless in the others. Scholars spending the same build will get dozens of spells and dozens of wand charges to be effective and those spells will often end the fight in a single throw rather than having to slog through a huge pile of hit points.
To put things into perspective, Celestial Scholars get bonus wand damage for FREE just for purchasing more spells and abilities (which they were going to do anyway). They get more uses of their wand per day FOR FREE just by spending build. There is no cap to wand damage and at high levels I expect all wands will do more damage than all one-handed weapons. At incredibly high build totals this will be true even with critical strikes added to the mix because the number of crit attacks that can be added caps while wand damage never does.
To be able to swing my longsword for 6 normal it cost me 83 build. It costs a scholar nothing to be able to shoot 6s 83 times from a wand, they just need to have spent 250 in Celestial Scholarly Skills.
9. NO SCALING. This is the biggest problem for fighters under the new system. Once you have purchases a few weapon proficiency skills, what is there left to purchase? Resolute is a reasonable choice now that its costed better, but it doesn't really help against what actually eliminates Fighters from combat: takeouts. Intercept is horribly expensive for the minimal effect that it does. Intercept is a really weak ability unless paired with Paragon shenanigans. But even if you purchase all the bad slays, weak intercepts, and your standard fighter skills of parry, riposte, and eviscerate you don't have enough spent build to keep the train rolling. Eventually you have to purchase more ridiculously expensive weapon proficiency to keep buying Fighter skills.
Additionally, the changes to the way Ritual Magic works massively disadvantage Fighters compared to casters. Most of the scrolls that benefit fighters only benefit them against other fighters:
Defensive Burst (Reduces Melee Damage)
Magic Strike (Allows participation, when Caster's automatically have it)
Raging Blow (Good against weapons and shields not mages)
Warrior's Incantation (Only good if you are a Templar or Scholar with a Weapon Prof)
As far as I can tell Stalwart Shield is the single Ritual that benefits Fighters against Scholars in the new rules. Thankfully, Spell Parry remains, but relying simply on Ritual Magic to make Fighters not immediately fall over from damage is really unfortunate.
Even though Stalwart Shield was added, Cloak and Bane were removed which leaves things about the same. Damage Aura, Expanded Enchantment (Spellshield), Channel and a number of other very powerful options for fighters have simply been removed from the game with no interesting replacements. Most of the new formal magic rituals require a knowledge of magic to even use, the ones that remain only change melee combat against other melee combat.