4D&D: meet the Battlemind
Dungeons and Dragons receives a large chunk of my time and attention these days. We're about to see a bunch of new material with the release of PH3 in mid-March, and preview excerpts are drifting out as we speak. I usually spend *ahem* adequate time pondering these new releases, and I thought I might share some of those thoughts.
The preview of the Battlemind, a psionic defender from PH3, is available to DDI subscribers (and to the world in ~1 month). I have barely seen it in play (as one of the pregen characters in the Dark Sun preview at DDXP last month), but I didn't really get a good sense of it from that experience for various reasons. In general, I think it has enough variety an flavor that it'll be a reasonable choice -- especially since it's a CON-based defender -- but I do have a few worries.
Number one, the two build options seem to vary only in the class feature power you choose -- you either get some DR at the start of the fight, or you get to adjust your position before the fight starts. This makes some sense, as all the powers are at-will augmentables (a core conceit of the psionic classes, more or less) or dailies, and they often avoid build-riders on dailies. Each feature depends on a secondary stat (WIS or CHA), but in both cases the secondary stat is added to a respectable static number, and both secondaries affect the same defense (Will). There are a few secondary-stat effects in the augmentable at-will powers, but (from the preview excerpt) these again appear to be additions to respectable numbers -- nice, but not necessary. This means that there's not a strong reason to push either secondary very much, and in fact with the (incomplete) information we have now, the class seems quite playable as a single-stat defender.
Number two, a starting Battlemind has a single mark that requires a minor action to use, a reliance on heavy armor&shield for defenses, and must be adjacent to the marked target (of which they get basically one, modulo tricks) to enforce their mark. Sound familiar? It should if you ever looked at the pre-Divine Power paladin -- and the battlemind needs an Immediate to use their punishment feature. This isn't exactly broken, and the battlemind gets some interesting and solid tricks to distinguish it from the other defenders, but it recreates the basic issues that left the paladin so weak that a latter book basically showered them with no-cost improvements (a move oddly similar to the history of the paladin in WoW, actually). I really hope we don't see Psionic Power (already in the schedule and so probably done/mostly done by now) add massive multi-marking to the battlemind the way it was added to the paladin, in part because those two books will be much closer in time, in part because the changes required will be bigger (and hurt the distinctiveness), and in large part just because I'd like to say that ``we've learned from that mistake already''.
Here again I'll say that I have not really seen the battlemind in action, and that my sources are specifically incomplete. The class could easily turn out to be well balanced in play (the paladin before had a huge swing between `decent' and `weak', depending on group, campaign, DM, etc). A high-Con, mostly-Con defender (that is especially awesome on the human, by the way) will surely win some hearts and minds. I can't shake the `paladin redux' concerns from looking at what we've got for now, though.
Oh, and if Wizards/Dragon magazine would like some thoughts on how to address the perceived issues, let me know and I'll send in a proposal. :-)
The preview of the Battlemind, a psionic defender from PH3, is available to DDI subscribers (and to the world in ~1 month). I have barely seen it in play (as one of the pregen characters in the Dark Sun preview at DDXP last month), but I didn't really get a good sense of it from that experience for various reasons. In general, I think it has enough variety an flavor that it'll be a reasonable choice -- especially since it's a CON-based defender -- but I do have a few worries.
Number one, the two build options seem to vary only in the class feature power you choose -- you either get some DR at the start of the fight, or you get to adjust your position before the fight starts. This makes some sense, as all the powers are at-will augmentables (a core conceit of the psionic classes, more or less) or dailies, and they often avoid build-riders on dailies. Each feature depends on a secondary stat (WIS or CHA), but in both cases the secondary stat is added to a respectable static number, and both secondaries affect the same defense (Will). There are a few secondary-stat effects in the augmentable at-will powers, but (from the preview excerpt) these again appear to be additions to respectable numbers -- nice, but not necessary. This means that there's not a strong reason to push either secondary very much, and in fact with the (incomplete) information we have now, the class seems quite playable as a single-stat defender.
Number two, a starting Battlemind has a single mark that requires a minor action to use, a reliance on heavy armor&shield for defenses, and must be adjacent to the marked target (of which they get basically one, modulo tricks) to enforce their mark. Sound familiar? It should if you ever looked at the pre-Divine Power paladin -- and the battlemind needs an Immediate to use their punishment feature. This isn't exactly broken, and the battlemind gets some interesting and solid tricks to distinguish it from the other defenders, but it recreates the basic issues that left the paladin so weak that a latter book basically showered them with no-cost improvements (a move oddly similar to the history of the paladin in WoW, actually). I really hope we don't see Psionic Power (already in the schedule and so probably done/mostly done by now) add massive multi-marking to the battlemind the way it was added to the paladin, in part because those two books will be much closer in time, in part because the changes required will be bigger (and hurt the distinctiveness), and in large part just because I'd like to say that ``we've learned from that mistake already''.
Here again I'll say that I have not really seen the battlemind in action, and that my sources are specifically incomplete. The class could easily turn out to be well balanced in play (the paladin before had a huge swing between `decent' and `weak', depending on group, campaign, DM, etc). A high-Con, mostly-Con defender (that is especially awesome on the human, by the way) will surely win some hearts and minds. I can't shake the `paladin redux' concerns from looking at what we've got for now, though.
Oh, and if Wizards/Dragon magazine would like some thoughts on how to address the perceived issues, let me know and I'll send in a proposal. :-)