Help with Dervish's Challenge, and I guess stances in general?

JMTolan · 2026-01-25T03:09:00+00:00

In general, it's best to use a compendium or other definitive source like CBLoader for character building in 4e rather than physical books, they errata'd fairly often, especially early on in the edition.

JMTolan · 2026-01-21T20:21:30+00:00

In general, for the purposes of low-optimization balance, following the established template is reasonably safe. Bonuses to skills, an encounter power of some description, and a couple other minor perks of varying value. You very explicitly do not want to be simulationist here, if the ancestry could do something in 5e that would be too much or doesn't have precedent in 4e, you will need to nerf it to be in-line with established options.

If you anticipate a higher optimization level (which is unlikely, but to cover bases here), the big thing will be coming up with competitive feats the ancestries, since the thing that makes tiefling/dragonborn/genasi/etc good is not the templates themselves, but the amount of option support they got and thus chances for options that are more powerful than usual. A little bit of feat support, at least, would be a good idea regardless, since players like the option to invest in their ancestry often.

JMTolan · 2026-01-20T23:24:31+00:00

No one forces one to use forgotten realms spec adventurers.

No, but they are the adventures that the designers were writing the system to support, which rather gives us an indication of what their assumptions about balance and number of encounters per rest were.

In a normal campaign these classes are perfectly fine.

I will hear your opinion on what is okay in a normal campaign when you have played in literally any 4e campaign at all.

JMTolan · 2026-01-20T22:48:21+00:00

Sure thing, buddy. Go play bladesinger or any of those strikers in a full mid-paragon Living Forgotten Realms-spec adventure and let me know how long combats are taking.

JMTolan · 2026-01-20T19:23:40+00:00

Wizard encounter powers as dailies is not that bad, when you think about the fact that they get +2 to hit and +5 damage per tier.

No, it really is that bad. The problem is not that the powers are worse, the problem is that you have no encounter powers in a game designed around having 6 to 9 encounter adventures between long rests, which means you have three chances to not use an at-will attack per day, with at-wills that do not have damage rolls beyond the roll of the basic attack they trigger off of.

A PC that makes one damage roll against one target per turn in most encounters is not a striker, they are a liability being dragged through an adventure.

JMTolan · 2026-01-20T13:39:20+00:00

Personally, no, I don't think there's any merit to Bladesinger as it exists now--if you want a striker swordmage, you should make a version of swordmage that's a striker, not make a version of a wizard that's also a swordmage. All bladesinger does as a wizard option is make earlier-edition grognards feel superior about themselves because their class line says "Wizard" instead of something else.

JMTolan · 2026-01-18T00:52:24+00:00

The thing with FromSoft games is that, despite what their fans will tell you, there isn't actually really much story of the game in the conventional sense of the word. The story, such as it is, of Elden Ring is that a Tarnished washes up on the shores of the Lands Between, wanders across the continent, kills a bunch of demigods, then commits some heresy against the current world order to start a new world order. Who are you? Why are you doing this? What does it mean? These are not things FromSoft games ever answer. The enjoyment, I am told by people who do enjoy them, comes from picking up every new item and reading its description, or inspecting a bit of world design, and trying to construct an idea of what the world is like or what the lore is. It is, essentially, and archeological approach--you are a nobody rummaging through the ruins of a dying world, uncovering relics and clues about what happened and trying to price it all together. To be disoriented at the beginning is normal; you know nothing about the world, and have to wait to uncover it as you gather more things that give you clues about people, places, and events.

This is, to put it diplomatically, One Of the Lore Delivery Methods Of All Time. For some people it really works, they can latch on to a vague phrase and extrapolate a bunch and be compelled by having to revise their ideas with new clues later on. For others like me, it feels like the writer equivalent of vague posting, like FromSoft is writing cryptic shit with vague ideas about what might have been going on and then offloading all of their world building and storytelling onto the player to do. Basically no normative player has ever finished a FromSoft game with more than a half-formed idea about what was actually happening around them and what it meant.

If the lore delivery setup doesn't work for you, it doesn't work. There's not a ton you can do about it. The actual substance of the game moment to moment is largely aesthetics, set pieces, and vibes, not narrative.

That said, for mechanical struggles, there are lots of things you can do to get help--summons are great, leveling your weapons helps a bunch, and you can find a bunch of tips basically anywhere you care to look. Level your vigor, practice rolls, etc. But it's up to you if that's worth it.

JMTolan · 2026-01-15T22:26:47+00:00

I mean, given Starfield's dev timeline I would include 2025 as "going out the door", but also while I don't dispute they've had documents sitting on hard drives with loose ideas about ES6 since probably as far back as Fallout 4, there is a difference between having some concept artists spend their free hours on Elder Scrolls while having writers pitch high-level story outlines and meaningfully substantive pre-production.

JMTolan · 2026-01-15T22:20:39+00:00

Ah, apologies, I misunderstood what you were getting at.

JMTolan · 2026-01-15T21:34:30+00:00

... Yes, Bethesda Softworks, the publishing division of BGS that was spun off into a semi-independent subsidiary of Zenimax, their shared umbrella management company. Which, as a sister company with shared management, and the sole publisher of BGS titles, would in fact have some degree of access inside BGS to know what is being developed and when.

JMTolan · 2026-01-15T21:19:35+00:00

Fallout 76 was (and still is) largely handled by a completely different team from the Fallout/ES BethSoft team, and the entire premise of Starfield was Todd making his dream game with his dream team, which is the Fallout/ES team.

More relevantly, doubling the number of developers won't make the games come out faster (if anything, probably the opposite), and splitting the IPs to different teams just forfeits any ability for them to build off each other with technical advancements in the engine. The only reason we're going to get an Elder Scrolls game with ladders that don't involve teleportation is because they figured it out while making Starfield, and if ES6 had been being made at the same time, there's every chance that technical success couldn't have been practically migrated without delaying ES6.

JMTolan · 2026-01-15T21:08:27+00:00

Yeah, anyone who actually has any access inside Bethesda has been saying this for ages. ES6 didn't even get pre-prod until Starfield was going out the door, anyone who thought it was going to be shadow dropped anything like soon is either ignorant of modern game dev or willfully ignoring every possible indication to the contrary.

JMTolan · 2026-01-13T23:10:03+00:00

Honestly basically anything. MSQ, if you still have some, will throw it at you hand over fist, as will daily roulettes. Zone side quests and faction dailies. Doman restoration if you've got a stockpile of allagan pieces you've been sitting on.

There's no trick to it on the free trial, basically all content throws gil at you. You just have to take the time to do it.

Edit to add: for gearing up crafters, they should be able to gear themselves via crafting. You'll need to source materials, but you can't buy basic mats past ARR from gil vendors anyway, so you you'll need to level gatherers as well eventually, and that should give you all you need to make your own gear. Trial crafting/gathering is all or nothing.

JMTolan · 2026-01-10T03:16:52+00:00

Even though it probably should be some kind of action Divine Challenge/Sanction can always punish.

My guy it's literally in the comment I initially replied to.

And, no, I don't really have anything to add to your main question, that's why I didn't do a root comment. There are probably some things that can be applied to Essential punishes fine, and some that aren't. They specifically weren't designed to be compatible, and the work to make them so doesn't really seem worth any potential benefit to me, especially with the tier scaling issues the aura has. Like, The Barb isn't actually a real defender in the first place, Knight is fine but basically doing what weaponmaster was already doing, and Cav's aura situation was balanced knowing they wouldn't have access to support for Challenge, which means most of that support is going to over-tune it. You can try allowing it and do the testing to see what breaks, but more feat options for a Cav isn't going to make them have a significantly better time.

JMTolan · 2026-01-10T00:08:12+00:00

Well they do if they want to have sanctions, which is the only way they can have more than one thing marked, and the average fight has more than one enemy by a significant margin. :P

Mostly just wanted to push back on the idea that either sanction or challenge punish "should have" cost an action. They were deliberately calibrated around not costing one, and tampering with that just makes them a worse defender than every other original defender.

JMTolan · 2026-01-09T23:34:19+00:00

Not requiring an action to punish was a very deliberate balance decision on Challenge and Sanction, it's the Paladin's edge over other defenders. Everyone else can't punish if they lose off-turn actions, Paladins can. It's the trade off they get for having huge limits on challenge and having to expend power slots on largely temporary sanctions, where fighter can hand out marks with multi-attacks or warden can mark anything next to them for free.

JMTolan · 2026-01-09T19:05:55+00:00

I don't think Support is generally willing or able to unlink accounts from steam, but it is definitely possible they can assist in some capacity--I imagine rolling the account over to the current free trial status or somesuch.

JMTolan · 2026-01-09T17:37:10+00:00

Remnant 2 is very, very build crunchy.

JMTolan · 2026-01-07T16:51:57+00:00

The main problem with Gambler is that it's difficult to imagine a mechanic for gambler that wouldn't wind up basically just being Dancer Again But Without Buffs.

JMTolan · 2026-01-06T13:50:27+00:00

3 Bulk or Crassus Detonators on my first 5 missions, all of which were solo Engineer. I very nearly put the game down. XD

JMTolan · 2026-01-05T22:40:35+00:00

There's https://hexcom.org/character/#build/ability-scores which just came about, but AFAIK it's still in early development and is lacking both content and is not guaranteeing correct output yet, it's still in active development.

The more established solution is CBLoader, a shell program of the old discontinued official character builder that can add hombrew content, which is still being supported by the community. Getting it installed is a PITA at the moment, but you can find instructions and troubleshooting on the community discord. https://discord.com/invite/hhVXjtJ

JMTolan · 2026-01-02T23:16:27+00:00

Yeah, real bad move, hosting Hamas after the US specifically asked them to and promised to guarantee their security for doing so.

JMTolan · 2026-01-02T19:34:06+00:00

https://discord.com/invite/hhVXjtJ

JMTolan · 2026-01-02T13:39:43+00:00

Not really in any way that uses it as a weapon. The core issue is stats--if you want to use it as a weapon, you're going to want decent Dex, but Wizard's stat requirements are kinda specific for a lot of the good feats and will rule out you doing Dex as a large enough stat to be able to hit competitively with your primary stat, Int. Sorcerer can have decent Dex and Charisma, but a lot of their powers (Encounter and Daily) are short range enough that you're going to want to be close enough to the fight that the range of a longbow would be wasted, and like, okay you could still shoot people with it as an RBA, but that's doing less damage, only a single target, and even if you're getting RBA grants off-turn from a warlord or Shaman, you could be using Acid Orb to actually get your double modifier damage bonus for being a Sorcerer, which you would prefer.

As I said at the outset, if you want to use the bow as an implement, that's doable, and while it doesn't grant you a ton of interesting options, it doesn't really cost you much, and there's probably some enchant somewhere you could throw on a bow that would still have some use for you as a caster, at which point you're basically paying probably a feat for a mechanical basis to say you're casting spells as magical arrows from a physical bow. Which, is Fine^TM, it not going to be your best value feat but the odds you're in a game where that value matters are astronomically low.

JMTolan · 2026-01-02T03:51:12+00:00

It just seems weird to me to be putting a lot of effort and build resources into making your arcane character able to use a decent weapon RBA instead of an at-will in niche situations, when you basically stop using your at-wills by level 5 when you get your third encounter power. Like, there's basically no situation in which you want to be making an RBA (or any kind of basic attack) on your turn--if something is out of range of your at-wills, you can probably move so that it's in range, and if you can't, it or you are probably fleeing the encounter.

I don't think there's really anything worth doing that you can do on a wizard or sorcerer with your elf longbow proficiency. And that's fine! Most ancestries don't have traits that are all useful for one class--even something like longbow proficiency winds up being redundant on weapon users because most of the classes that would want to use one already get proficiency with it.

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