Playtesting: Doing it thoroughly-ish?

[Coidzor]

So, a friend of mine wants some help playtesting some creatures and items he's been working on, and gave us the open-ended request to make up some characters to test the items and have them tested on them and the creatures and so on and so forth.

Any recommendations for what sorts of characters would test out the creatures on as many levels as possible?

All I can think of offhand is seeing how the creatures deal with chargers/melee brutes, lock-down fighting types, twf rogue-types, battlefield control casters, and summoners/minion-mancers.

[Tvtyrant]

Also Cindys and barrage archers. Both of them crop up in builds and are legit forms of combat.

[ExemplarofAvg]

Cindys
Please excuse my lack of knowledge, but what is a Cindy? I have a feeling it does not refer to a girl who lives on your street.

[Tvtyrant]

Please excuse my lack of knowledge, but what is a Cindy? I have a feeling it does not refer to a girl who lives on your street.

The proto/Practical optimization version of the Mailman. Basically metamagic reduction and metamagic stacking with SR:No damage spells (orbs) for high amounts of direct damage, oftentimes combined with a quickened True Strike to always hit.

[Coidzor]

Please excuse my lack of knowledge, but what is a Cindy? I have a feeling it does not refer to a girl who lives on your street.

This is a Cindy. (http://www.thetangledweb.net/forums/profiler/view_char.php?cid=5890)

[subject42]

I would also add enchanters and illusionists, since they tend to be either awesome, or useless.

Testing on builds that focus on extreme debuffing might not be a bad idea, either.

[Lateral]

Cindys probably aren't the best things to do against it, since it's basically a guaranteed kill anyway. Use mid-op, versatile options- see how they stack up against a bunch of standard and specialized parties. For instance, you could have one party be a warblade, a factotum, a sorcerer, and a bard, to see how it fights against the basic party roles. You could then test it against a tripper crusader, a swordsage, a dragonfire adept, and a dread necromancer, and use them to see how it resists different types of debuffs and battlefield control options.

If the DM plays mostly lower-op games, then lower the optimizations of the party a bit- shift from, say, a warblade/factotum/sorcerer/bard to barbarian/rogue/warmage/healbot cleric, or even fighter/rogue/monk/healer.

[Coidzor]

Cindys probably aren't the best things to do against it, since it's basically a guaranteed kill anyway. Use mid-op, versatile options- see how they stack up against a bunch of standard and specialized parties. For instance, you could have one party be a warblade, a factotum, a sorcerer, and a bard, to see how it fights against the basic party roles. You could then test it against a tripper crusader, a swordsage, a dragonfire adept, and a dread necromancer, and use them to see how it resists different types of debuffs and battlefield control options.

If the DM plays mostly lower-op games, then lower the optimizations of the party a bit- shift from, say, a warblade/factotum/sorcerer/bard to barbarian/rogue/warmage/healbot cleric, or even fighter/rogue/monk/healer.

Yeah, the last session we used a slightly modified out of box WOTC PC (Lidda from... Bastion of Broken Souls I think), a hastily leveled up from 9 to 20 tripper lockdown psychic warrior(I believe was underwealthed), and a Favored Soul 10/Healer 10 (leveled up from an existing character as well T_T (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=198511)). Those first two are because was some communication problems and some level of rush because we had thought we were just stopping over to hang out for a bit before starting an evening shift at work rather than playtesting. I still have no idea about that last one. :/

Don't really use ToB in the group though, sorta alternate DMs every now and then and one DM has an irrational hatred of it and the other wants to get a hard copy of it since he wants to be able to read through it all since what he's gotten online doesn't really satisfy his understanding of it all.

Closest thing we have had to a Cindy has been a blaster focused Kineticist Psion focusing on lots of fire.