Author Topic: At what character level should White Raven Tactics be available?  (Read 6151 times)

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Unbeliever

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Re: At what character level should White Raven Tactics be available?
« Reply #20 on: January 24, 2011, 03:00:41 PM »
I definitely think you shouldn't be able to WRT yourself, that's just really abusive.  
...
How is it more abusive to WRT yourself as opposed to say, the Conjurer or Druid or Cleric or UberCharger standing right next to you?  Honestly, I'd almost rather the Warblade WRT himself. 

X-Codes

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Re: At what character level should White Raven Tactics be available?
« Reply #21 on: January 24, 2011, 04:29:41 PM »
I definitely think you shouldn't be able to WRT yourself, that's just really abusive.  
...
How is it more abusive to WRT yourself as opposed to say, the Conjurer or Druid or Cleric or UberCharger standing right next to you?  Honestly, I'd almost rather the Warblade WRT himself. 
It becomes abusive if there's some sort of refresh mechanic in place, since then he can just KEEP WRTing himself.

Unbeliever

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Re: At what character level should White Raven Tactics be available?
« Reply #22 on: January 24, 2011, 05:44:55 PM »
I definitely think you shouldn't be able to WRT yourself, that's just really abusive.  
...
How is it more abusive to WRT yourself as opposed to say, the Conjurer or Druid or Cleric or UberCharger standing right next to you?  Honestly, I'd almost rather the Warblade WRT himself. 
It becomes abusive if there's some sort of refresh mechanic in place, since then he can just KEEP WRTing himself.
Hmmm ... let me think this through. 

Option 1:  Warblade
WB moves, then uses a strike maneuver, and then w/ his swift action uses WRT on himself.  He then gets an extra round, which he could use to make a full-attack and then use his extra swift action to regain all his maneuvers. 

That would actually be a bit abusive, I think.  A possible houserule would be to make WRT just give you a move + standard action, leaving you w/ still the 1 swift action regardless. 

Option 2:  Adaptive Style
You use WRT on yourself, and then that full round action to recover all your maneuvers, including WRT.  This one I would be on the fence about.  It's taken one of your great abilities, WRT, and rendered it to just recovering maneuvers.  Compared to what you could do w/ WRT, either on yourself or on others, that might not be so bad.

In general, though, it just looks like the ability to use WRT to refresh is the problem, so if someone agreed not to do so, then WRTing yourself isn't a balance issue.  I know that would be hard to write as a hard and fast rule, but I don't sweat that too much in my actual games.  Further, restricting WRT to other people doesn't really solve that problem if there are 2 initiators w/ access to it in the party (no idea how common that actually is). 

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Re: At what character level should White Raven Tactics be available?
« Reply #23 on: January 24, 2011, 06:26:38 PM »
I definitely think you shouldn't be able to WRT yourself, that's just really abusive.  
...
How is it more abusive to WRT yourself as opposed to say, the Conjurer or Druid or Cleric or UberCharger standing right next to you?  Honestly, I'd almost rather the Warblade WRT himself. 
It becomes abusive if there's some sort of refresh mechanic in place, since then he can just KEEP WRTing himself.
Hmmm ... let me think this through. 

Option 1:  Warblade
WB moves, then uses a strike maneuver, and then w/ his swift action uses WRT on himself.  He then gets an extra round, which he could use to make a full-attack and then use his extra swift action to regain all his maneuvers. 

That would actually be a bit abusive, I think.  A possible houserule would be to make WRT just give you a move + standard action, leaving you w/ still the 1 swift action regardless. 

Option 2:  Adaptive Style
You use WRT on yourself, and then that full round action to recover all your maneuvers, including WRT.  This one I would be on the fence about.  It's taken one of your great abilities, WRT, and rendered it to just recovering maneuvers.  Compared to what you could do w/ WRT, either on yourself or on others, that might not be so bad.

In general, though, it just looks like the ability to use WRT to refresh is the problem, so if someone agreed not to do so, then WRTing yourself isn't a balance issue.  I know that would be hard to write as a hard and fast rule, but I don't sweat that too much in my actual games.  Further, restricting WRT to other people doesn't really solve that problem if there are 2 initiators w/ access to it in the party (no idea how common that actually is). 
Option 3: The Psi-Gish.
Manifest Schism, use your swift action for WRT every round and your full-round action to recover maneuvers with Adaptive Style, then use your partitioned mind to manifest something nasty with your unlimited turns.

Midnight_v

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Re: At what character level should White Raven Tactics be available?
« Reply #24 on: January 24, 2011, 10:47:02 PM »
 I don't believe warblades can refresh and use a strike in the same round. I vaguely rember that. I could be off, but ultimately no, I don't think even if they were able to give it to themself it would be "broke". Obviously if someone finds a way to go truly infinite, then yeah, but the problem is then the refresh mechanic interaction, not the manuever really.
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Akahi

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Re: At what character level should White Raven Tactics be available?
« Reply #25 on: January 24, 2011, 11:22:24 PM »
White Raven Tactics is a boost, so you could do the next:

Round 1: Full attack, WRT yourself.
Round 1.1: Attack to recover maneuvers as a full round action, use swift action to WRT yourself
Round 1.11 through 1.999999999999999: Repeat round 1.1, you are still dealing standard attack damage to the thing you're hitting.

The loop is not infinite unless you have a way to shut down the enemy on it's initiative (yours goes down by one every time you WRT yourself). By lvl 9 we have disrupting blow and dazing strike, those shut the sucker down for the only round he still has to act. By lvl 15 we get Moment of Alacrity for a +20 Initiative, so the combo is now infinite.

veekie

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Re: At what character level should White Raven Tactics be available?
« Reply #26 on: January 24, 2011, 11:39:22 PM »
I don't believe warblades can refresh and use a strike in the same round.
Yep, they can't do that.
If you refresh all you can do is perform a regular attack.
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Endarire

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Re: At what character level should White Raven Tactics be available?
« Reply #27 on: January 25, 2011, 03:06:47 AM »
To refresh his maneuvers, a Warblade must use a Swift action followed by a Standard action to attack.
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LordBlades

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Re: At what character level should White Raven Tactics be available?
« Reply #28 on: January 25, 2011, 04:38:44 AM »
It doesn't really work on Warblade (you can't WRT in the same round you recover it, since recovering eats up your swift action). However, it does work just fine on a Crusader from a point on.

Let's consider a crusader with initiative 20, at a point in combat where he has been granted all his readied maneuvers(including WRT).
He acts on init 20, uses WRT to grant himself a turn on init 19, and full attacks.
He acts on init 19, WRT is available again since it's his only expended maneuver, he uses it to grant himself a turn on init 18, and full attacks.
Rinse and repeat until your init count drops down to 1.

From here it's even more debateable: how far in the negatives can you go with your initiative count? If it's not limited, you can get an infinte number of rounds with this trick.
If it's not, just use last round to refocus. Since refocus by RAW only specifies you go first in the next round, not an actual initiative result, I think you can cosider it as high as you wish, giving you an arbitrarly high number of rounds before anthing else gets to act.

The_Mad_Linguist

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Re: At what character level should White Raven Tactics be available?
« Reply #29 on: January 25, 2011, 04:44:03 AM »
If it's not, just use last round to refocus. Since refocus by RAW only specifies you go first in the next round, not an actual initiative result, I think you can cosider it as high as you wish, giving you an arbitrarly high number of rounds before anthing else gets to act.
I can't find the reference for that; could you give me a pagenumber/srd link?
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X-Codes

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Re: At what character level should White Raven Tactics be available?
« Reply #30 on: January 25, 2011, 04:53:50 AM »
Let's consider a crusader with initiative 20, at a point in combat where he has been granted all his readied maneuvers(including WRT).
He acts on init 20, uses WRT to grant himself a turn on init 19, and full attacks.
He acts on init 19, WRT is available again since it's his only expended maneuver, he uses it to grant himself a turn on init 18, and full attacks.
Rinse and repeat until your init count drops down to 1.
This is very much NOT how the Crusader recovery mechanic works.  The status of whether a maneuver has been granted or has been expended are independent of one another.

LordBlades

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Re: At what character level should White Raven Tactics be available?
« Reply #31 on: January 25, 2011, 05:02:12 AM »
If it's not, just use last round to refocus. Since refocus by RAW only specifies you go first in the next round, not an actual initiative result, I think you can cosider it as high as you wish, giving you an arbitrarly high number of rounds before anthing else gets to act.
I can't find the reference for that; could you give me a pagenumber/srd link?

Embarrasing mistake, read about it a couple of days ago, but only when you made me go back and check it realised I had read the 3.0 PHb  :blush No refocus in 3.5 sadly. This however leaves the question how low can you go with your init.

@ x-codes: yeah, you're right. Turns out my group was playing Cruseder pretty much wrong. So yeah, what I said doesn't work sadly.

skydragonknight

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Re: At what character level should White Raven Tactics be available?
« Reply #32 on: January 25, 2011, 09:56:41 AM »
It's worse action economy wise than Haste - a 3rd level spell. The imbalance is not the actions it creates...but rather that there are spells can have more impact on a battle than even a mostly-melee party getting extra attacks each turn.
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Midnight_v

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Re: At what character level should White Raven Tactics be available?
« Reply #33 on: January 25, 2011, 11:00:59 AM »
It's worse action economy wise than Haste - a 3rd level spell. The imbalance is not the actions it creates...but rather that there are spells can have more impact on a battle than even a mostly-melee party getting extra attacks each turn.
It seems really sad that people fight against melee's doing seriously relavant things. I'm sometimes really flabberghasted by it.
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Re: At what character level should White Raven Tactics be available?
« Reply #34 on: January 25, 2011, 01:52:16 PM »
It's worse action economy wise than Haste - a 3rd level spell. The imbalance is not the actions it creates...but rather that there are spells can have more impact on a battle than even a mostly-melee party getting extra attacks each turn.
It seems really sad that people fight against melee's doing seriously relavant things. I'm sometimes really flabberghasted by it.
But in that case they aren't. They're just giving the casters the option to shut down the encounter faster.

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Re: At what character level should White Raven Tactics be available?
« Reply #35 on: January 25, 2011, 02:24:42 PM »
A Kalastar Warblade can recover WRT with Psychic Renewal, but that still doesn't let him have infinite turns (Swift action for PR, only a handful of uses/day).


Really, WRT on yourself is a Belt of Battle every so often. If you want to curb a spellcaster's ability to abuse it, try this:
  • Restrict the target to Self or one Martial Adept within 10ft.
  • Raise the number of White Raven maneuvers required to learn it by 2.
  • Have the Crown of the White Ravens follow the maneuver prerequisites rules.


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Unbeliever

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Re: At what character level should White Raven Tactics be available?
« Reply #36 on: January 25, 2011, 03:43:31 PM »
A Kalastar Warblade can recover WRT with Psychic Renewal, but that still doesn't let him have infinite turns (Swift action for PR, only a handful of uses/day).


Really, WRT on yourself is a Belt of Battle every so often. If you want to curb a spellcaster's ability to abuse it, try this:
  • Restrict the target to Self or one Martial Adept within 10ft.
  • Raise the number of White Raven maneuvers required to learn it by 2.
  • Have the Crown of the White Ravens follow the maneuver prerequisites rules.

We always use the pre-reqs for the maneuver-granting items.  That does mean that WRT is available for the cost of a feat and 3k, so it's fairly cheap, but not trivial in cost.  And, yeah, there is the Belt of Battle floating around, although we've recently gotten kind of tired of it.