July Rules Updates
Thats...a lot of changes, and not simple ones, either. For starters, magic missile now always hits but deals less than half damage than before, dispel magic becomes an encounter spell, and lead the attack only lasts a turn even if you hit. And thats just a few of the changes out of Player's Handbook. All told you're looking at 20 pages of errata, so I'm glad that Character Builder gets updated as well. This means that unlike 3rd Edition I don't have to print out the pages (or check the interwebs) so that I can reference them when making a character.
I'm with you on appreciating the Character Builder updates! But Magic Missile damage isn't less than half of what it was, at least not at first level.
ReplyDeleteIf you have Intelligence of 18 (Int modifier of +4), the new Magic Missile deals 6 damage every time (2+Int modifier) while the old one dealt 2d4+4 (2d4+Int modifier) when it hit, which averages to 9 damage on a hit (a d4 rolls 2.5 on average, so 2d4 is 5 damage on average). Plus, if you only hit a little over half the time with your Magic Missile before, it would deal about 5 damage on average (sometimes nothing - a miss, sometimes an average of 9). So that makes the overall average damage for Magic Missile higher now.
Yes, you lose out on the upside of dealing 12 damage on a crit (plus a bonus for an enchanted implement), but you also lose out on the possibility of dealing no damage at all on a miss. That's a good tradeoff in my book!
Cripes, I should have clarified that the /base/ damage (not counting Int bonus, enhancement, etc) is less than half (2 as opposed to 5). To be fair, though, that is skewed by the fact that now its an auto-hit.
ReplyDeleteI think its a good way of setting a baseline for always-hitting-powers, kind of like how reaping strike always does something.
would this have anything to do with dnd essentials?
ReplyDeleteThe magic missile change is absolutely fucking terrible.
ReplyDeleteIt was an attack vs. Ref. Misses were rare, and being able to do decent damage with a classic spell was nice.
Now you can't even crit with it. An at-will where you can't crit? No thanks. I'll take powers where, at higher levels, I can add extra damage dice from my magic implement 5% of the time.
thats one to see it. Another would be to use the power as a minion and near death enemy sweeper. My players fell victim to a pack of gnolls who where raiding a city because at the end of the encounter, when only the wizard and the gnoll chief stood, the wizard missed its magic missile. 4 points more of damage would have killed the gnoll. I dont think that group would agree with you, charisma. =P
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