help rate a racial ability?

[Dimers]

I'm homebrewing a race that should have major access to elemental and nature-oriented abilities. I'm considering a racial trait to freely powerswap for druid and warden powers of the same or lower level. For example, replace your class L10 utility with any warden or druid utility of L2, L6 or L10, and replace your class E3 with a druid/warden E1 or E3. The swaps could be retrained at level-up.

Is this too much? What classes or builds do you think would benefit the most from it?

What if the powerswap also allowed the player to change the power's attack stat from Str to Dex or Con, from Wis to Int or Cha? The race has +2 Dex and a choice of +2 Int or +2 Cha. Their magic should be more "coolheaded control" than "primal might".

[Kurald Galain]

You should probably prohibit summons (because the game slows to a crawl if everybody uses them), as well as the Charm Beast encounter power (which is a tad cheesy). Druid gets a lot of area effects, so probably classes without those would benefit the most.

The stat swap shouldn't particularly make any difference.

[MwaO]

I'm homebrewing a race that should have major access to elemental and nature-oriented abilities. I'm considering a racial trait to freely powerswap for druid and warden powers of the same or lower level. For example, replace your class L10 utility with any warden or druid utility of L2, L6 or L10, and replace your class E3 with a druid/warden E1 or E3. The swaps could be retrained at level-up.

Is this too much? What classes or builds do you think would benefit the most from it?

What if the powerswap also allowed the player to change the power's attack stat from Str to Dex or Con, from Wis to Int or Cha? The race has +2 Dex and a choice of +2 Int or +2 Cha. Their magic should be more "coolheaded control" than "primal might".

That's wow. Get Magic Stones as an at-will? Guardian's Pounce and Charm Beast?

But in particular, Serpent's Cunning and Eagle's Splendor give great all day benefits from U6.

[masteraleph]

MwaO is right. But I do have a couple of thoughts-

1) Limit the amount of swapping that can be done- they can swap ONE power, for instance, not one of each type.

2) Use up other game resources. Instead of loading them up on the race, for example, take a few of the powers you like and make a Dark Sun style theme- a low power Level 1 feature, no other features, and plenty of powers for power swaps. Maybe allow swapping one power via a racial feat- Tieflings get that on Utilities from Secrets of Belial, and while it's part of what makes them very powerful, a race without the other Tiefling support wouldn't be so unreasonable.

[Vhaidara]

I think it would probably be behind the stronger races (things like dragonborn, tiefling, genasi, and revenant) that got extensive support, but would be miles ahead of weaker races. For the cost of your race, you basically triple your power selection pool, and ensure that you have appropriate stats. Warden powers are REALLY good, and druids have some great options as well.

They also have a lot of flexibility between levels, since afaict you're saying that anything they power swapped would be freely retrainable on level up, as the standard power swap feats are. So you could potentially freely retrain half of your powers every level up, in addition to the normal level up retrain.

[Kurald Galain]

It strikes me that the straightforward approach is to make a list of five or six Druid powers of each type, and allow the race to pick from this list rather than from all powers.

[Yakk]

Having full access to an entire pool of options, not all of which suck, is strong.

Basically your powers become the best power of 3 pools of powers instead of from 1.

The power-swap feats, which require your multiclass, cost a feat, and let you swap 1, are reasonably strong feats. Even if you only ever swap 1 power in each category, this is as strong as 3 decent feats.

Throw in attribute-swapping and it could get ridiculous.
About your only defence from this being top-tier is the lack of charop work on it; your players will have to do their own charop. They can still just look up the best powers from wardens and druids and see if they boost their build.

...

You could split it into a pair of Theme's and a racial ability. That might help.

A "Warden" Theme tied to the race, and a "Druid" Theme tied to the race. Plus the racial attack power might be "pick one from Warden or Druid" with stat-swap.

That would mean you couldn't for example, abandon your original class's powers and take all Warden or Druid powers as an Avenger.

[Dimers]

Thanks for the feedback. I hadn't thought of shifting some of the ability to themes, which does sound workable. I might have an at-will swap as a base racial power, then let themes cover the swaps for encounter/daily/utility.


I think it would probably be behind the stronger races (things like dragonborn, tiefling, genasi, and revenant) that got extensive support, but would be miles ahead of weaker races.

That's especially useful. This would be for a game which only uses my homebrewed races -- no dragonborn and tiefling, but no gnome or gnoll, either. The other races I've designed are more powerful than typical PHB races, thanks in part to the feat support I'm implementing. I'm not bothering to write up feats that are less useful than the average of what's been published, and many are stronger. I feel that every build choice should have visible impact.


They also have a lot of flexibility between levels, since afaict you're saying that anything they power swapped would be freely retrainable on level up, as the standard power swap feats are. So you could potentially freely retrain half of your powers every level up, in addition to the normal level up retrain.

Ah. No, I meant that you could choose one of those swaps as your one-per-level retrains, rather than being stuck with the early-game choice forever. I'll clarify that in the final writeup.

[Duff]

Worth considering how powers interact with class features that weren't designed to have that type of power - Fighters letting off big bursts marking everyone, warlocks hitting lots of targets for curse damage, warden powers letting other defenders enforce their mark and then punish them again or letting specialists in a particular element fill the necessary-for-balance gaps in top tier powers from their list etc.

Warden powers are where they get most of their defender "stickiness"
Druids powers have the summons which use the character's stats - much more powerful when the defender uses it (or any non-controller. Druid powers are also designed to make a controller survive being in melee. Some of them may be OP in the claws of a class from a different role.

This is good advice...


I think it would probably be behind the stronger races (things like dragonborn, tiefling, genasi, and revenant) that got extensive support, but would be miles ahead of weaker races. For the cost of your race, you basically triple your power selection pool, and ensure that you have appropriate stats. Warden powers are REALLY good, and druids have some great options as well.

They also have a lot of flexibility between levels, since afaict you're saying that anything they power swapped would be freely retrainable on level up, as the standard power swap feats are. So you could potentially freely retrain half of your powers every level up, in addition to the normal level up retrain.

[Vhaidara]

warlocks hitting lots of targets for curse damage

This specifically isn't a concern, curse is only once per turn. And warlock does have AoE powers, even if there aren't a lot. They're actually some of warlock's best powers.