At Will

After finishing up the PHB2, I got a lot of people requesting for me to go back to the basics.  So here we are at PHB1!

You’ll notice that I’m starting with the fighter and not the cleric.  With Divine Power looming, there’s no use touching a class that will doubtless have hundreds of new options in a week or two.  Divine classes will get their own special in play after Divine Power comes out.

Fighters.  Masters of weapon fighting, they’ve always been the red-headed stepchild of D&D –good in the early levels, good as fodder in the later levels.

WotC made up for decades of fighter abuse in 4th edition.  Fighters are worth playing at all levels of the game. You can highlight several features of the class that make fighters better, but the fundamental reason fighters win “most improved”?

It’s because there is one game, and every class plays it.

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Another arcane striker?  Really?  You’d think that the warlock was enough…but the Sorcerer is a whole different beast, with more AOEs and a penchant for static bonuses that focuses on the absurd (see Zebith below).  Plus, the flavor on the Sorcerer is at once flexible, yet well-themed.  If you like some particular source of damage, be it fire, frost, necrotic, or lightning, the Sorcerer is the class for you!

So grab yourself some static bonuses,drop lightning on some unsuspecting minion, and check out these builds.

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Let me talk to you about my ancestors for a sec…ok, forget about that.  We’re talking about Shamans here.  Leaders with aggressive, striking tendencies (but also able to go very defensive)  the shaman is the one class I didn’t get excited about at first.  But then I realized something –the shaman is the 4e skillbot.  If you get a shaman jack of all trades and combine it with their predilection for talking to people who aren’t there , i.e. spirits, you can have a substantial bonus to any skill in the game.  With the Spirit Speaker feat, you can give that ability to a friend! That’s on top of channeling powers out by proxy and have a ton of agressive, get the party in the bad guys faces powers.
I’ve spent a bit of time with the shamans and I’m liking them much more.  Here’s what we’ve got:

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I’ve met and chatted with a lot of great people since I’ve opened up 4etopia.  One of the people I’ve chatted at length with is Aaron Broder, aka gifted munchkin on the forums, aka the author of the blog Allgeektout.  It’s a relatively new blog, but there is a grip of really good content there.

Including something from yours truly

I’ll post an excerpt here, but really you should check out Allgeektout’s Dungeoncraft series in general.  Being a hardcore DM, I always get into what people are cooking up for their individual campaign worlds.

Herai’s father worked in the mines.  Peaceful and diligent, he never missed a day, rising early with a quick prayer to the gods, arriving home late covered in in black from the mines.  Gustalf raised his boy to be just like him.  Herai was to carry on in the the dirty and noble profession of mining, and that was that.  Gustalf heard no nonsense of schooling, and certainly no heretical talk of the arcane.  A devout, hard-working miner.  That’s what the Ironblack men where raised to be.

On my end, I just love making characters and character backgrounds, as you may have noticed with The New Breed series or my previous posts on villains.  I was all too happy to make a character fitting into the world of Allein.

Yes, I do smell the air, thank you.  It’s not refreshing.  It smells like the refuse of homeland ground between a fomorian’s teeth and spit out.

I don’t think I’ll be going anywhere near that, actually.

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Fine.  I’ll go.  But I assure you I will not enjoy it.

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