[PDK] Class related abilities feedback

[White_935]

Greeting!

I have some feedback regarding the changes made to PDK (really love that it's been altered to a knight class).
I would like to present what would be my suggestion, to see what the rest of you people think about it.

I'm hardly a expert on the class, it was a pick mostly based on my character, rather than what it provides on the table but it has nonetheless allowed for some interesting choices, and so far is incredible enjoyable addition to a regular meele based fighter.

I have been toying with the abilities and generally found most abilities useful and enjoyable, and mostly balanced, however.

Heroic Shield: "The Ward gains 5% + 1% per Knight Level damage immunity to all damage types, as well as 1/+1 DR.
This point, the benefits given by Heroic Shield is mostly meager, beside being a trigger for the other PDK abilities.
Not really giving or granting any particularly way of the knight to oversee and protect his ward.

My suggestion:
I would loved perhaps if instead of defensive measures, the Heroic Shield allowed the Knight to Share the damage of the ward, splitting it 50%/50%, somewhat similar to the 5th edition cleric spell "Warding Bond"

Fear: This spell is quite interesting, and definitely useful, however my experience it relays on one problem, and one oddity.
The spell is casted as a normal spell, with chanting at a location as an AoE spell, This both locks you into a animation when your most likely knee deep in combat, provoking an attack of opportunity from -every- hostile around, it does not help that due to nwn animation glitches you often lose a extra round.

The other part is that it behaves like a spell, for a knight, using his presence or words to intimidate, it seems odd to be casted, even over longer distances.

My suggestion:
I would love if this spell instead behaved as a instant cast on the user, and presented itself as a lasting fear aura around the knight, lasting for its duration of 1 turn, with the effect of people who leave the fear aura, have a lingering duration for 3 rounds (due to the vanguard trait).

[Baron Saturday]

I love PDK.

I disagree about Heroic Shield, however. It's probably one of the best abilities in the game, frankly. Up to 15% DI to ALL damage is nothing to scoff at, and you left out a key part of what it does:

The Knight designates a friendly target as a Ward, automatically applying a -guard to them.

Note that this can be used in addition to -guard, allowing the PDK to protect two targets at the same time. This ability can also be used on NPCs, including summons, which allows for things like the BG/PDK combo. If using the demon or yugoloth stream in concert with the Protector path, this results in a summon who can, for a turn at a time, have 55% physical immunity, 50% elemental immunity, and 30% immunity to everything else. That's crazy good.

Fear, on the other hand... Fear has come up in PDK feedback threads before, with exactly the same comments you've given. Here's the dev response from the last time it was brought up:

The concentration check is a result of the game treating it as a spell. As per the vanilla tooltip:

Specifics: Once per day, the purple dragon knight may cast the fear spell with a caster level equal to his character level.

I do agree that it feels out of place. We'll review the 2da settings to see if it can be treated similarly to the other PDK feats. No promises.

Personally, I do prefer the idea of it being a shout-like AoE centered on you that doesn't have a concentration check or provoke AoOs. Not sure I'd want it to be instant cast, but even just as a standard action it would be much better.

[White_935]

I love PDK.

I disagree about Heroic Shield, however. It's probably one of the best abilities in the game, frankly. Up to 15% DI to ALL damage is nothing to scoff at, and you left out a key part of what it does:

The Knight designates a friendly target as a Ward, automatically applying a -guard to them.

Note that this can be used in addition to -guard, allowing the PDK to protect two targets at the same time. This ability can also be used on NPCs, including summons, which allows for things like the BG/PDK combo. If using the demon or yugoloth stream in concert with the Protector path, this results in a summon who can, for a turn at a time, have 55% physical immunity, 50% elemental immunity, and 30% immunity to everything else. That's crazy good.

Fear, on the other hand... Fear has come up in PDK feedback threads before, with exactly the same comments you've given. Here's the dev response from the last time it was brought up:

The concentration check is a result of the game treating it as a spell. As per the vanilla tooltip:

Specifics: Once per day, the purple dragon knight may cast the fear spell with a caster level equal to his character level.

I do agree that it feels out of place. We'll review the 2da settings to see if it can be treated similarly to the other PDK feats. No promises.

Personally, I do prefer the idea of it being a shout-like AoE centered on you that doesn't have a concentration check or provoke AoOs. Not sure I'd want it to be instant cast, but even just as a standard action it would be much better.

I suppose your right on the Heroic Shield, it just feels underwhelming now in early levels.. but i suppose it'll be felt once people add immunities from other sources combined etc.

[Hinty]

Fear does not provoke concentration checks thankfully, Just a myriad of AoOs, but my main problem with Fear and also Inspire Courage is that they both cause Expertise to drop, whereas Rallying Cry and Oath of Wrath do not. Dropping Expertise is particularly lethal with fear since, as stated before, you will likely be using it while surrounded by enemies that are likely already hitting you through Expertise, causing a swarm of AoOs against a now lower AC, and I have found that sometimes Expertise can take a good round or two to reactivate. The end result is that using Fear can be much more of a liability than benefit.

[Baron Saturday]

Fear does not provoke concentration checks thankfully, Just a myriad of AoOs, but my main problem with Fear and also Inspire Courage is that they both cause Expertise to drop, whereas Rallying Cry and Oath of Wrath do not. Dropping Expertise is particularly lethal with fear since, as stated before, you will likely be using it while surrounded by enemies that are likely already hitting you through Expertise, causing a swarm of AoOs against a now lower AC, and I have found that sometimes Expertise can take a good round or two to reactivate. The end result is that using Fear can be much more of a liability than benefit.

I was just poking around on the PDK wiki page and noticed that Fear had been updated to not cause concentration checks anymore. So that's something! But yeah, I admit, even with my epic PDK, I've never used Fear. It just doesn't seem like a good enough ability for how much has to be invested into it.

[Hinty]

So, after posting all that about fear/inspire courage disabling expertise, today I noticed that neither one disabled it at all.....

So I think something else I was doing was disabling it coincidently around the same time, although I can not for the life of me think what that might have been.


The AoOs are still exceptionally painful however.

[TimeAdept]

Fear's a total waste unless you're Vanguard and invest all the skill points into it, otherwise it's not even worth slotting. It's the only ability that requires a full round cast action but also requires your enemies to fail a save but also requires a 33 skill point investment to be decent, for a bonus effect that only lasts 3 rounds if all the previous is successful. Definitely the lowest tier of the unique class features IMO.

Protector's massive AoE purge will save your entire party's life so much it's insane, and the extra DR on your ward is great too, and the +4 saves is just sort of icing on the top at that point.

I've warmed up a lot to Valiant, the non-Valiant Rally Cry is pretty tame/lame, but being able to slam out a Valiant Rally Cry + Oath as no action means your entire party just got 3 AB, 6 damage, and your ward got an extra 2, and you did all this while spending 0 actions whatsoever. That's amazing. Throw this on a Bard for even more party ridiculousness (Song + curse + Rallying Oath) or a CoT for more personal ridiculousness (Wrath + Rallying Oath on a 4/10/16 is an instant +8 AB/+8 dmg to yourself and +3/+3 (+2) to everyone else), bonus points if you're a madman and you do Paladin 4 10 PDK 16 CoT and just say "ah heck" and go two handed and decided you hate your life so why not crossclass Tumble and lose UMD.

PDK in general is a fantastic class right now and I love what they've done with it. A change to Fear is, I think, really the only thing I'd want to do with it.

[White_935]

Perhaps a good change to the fear could be.

Activate (toggle) to activate a permanent fear aura, but for Vanguard increase the benefits to -4 ac -4 ab ?
Thus is could be activated early.

That would make it into a rather good ability, despite it being difficult to get the DC Up for instance.