DM Help Pain Mastery [Archive] - Giant in the Playground Forums

Zaq

2021-03-21, 01:05 PM

The trigger is taking the damage, not maintaining HP below your max. So if you can heal then you can keep going. The feat says explicitly how long the bonus lasts (to the end of the encounter) and doesn't say that healing removes it.

That said, I admit that I kind of hate this feat on a design level. Since that's not technically what you asked, I'll spoiler it.

First, while I'm no stranger to fiddly little bonuses (I mean hell, one of my favorite 4e characters was a freakin' runepriest, and they're the monarchs of cobbling together a million little +1s), I feel like that's an obnoxious trigger for recalculating.

Second, it kind of violates Grod's Law (credit to Grod the Giant: "You cannot and should not try to balance bad mechanics by making them annoying to use."). I guess if you don't heal at all, it's only moderately annoying to keep track of a running total of how much damage you've taken, but if you heal, use THP, or otherwise alter your functional HP total in any way other than simply getting closer to 0, it's annoying to have a separate running tally of gross damage sustained alongside your actual HP total. Simply annoying on a table-time level. This part would be fine if we had a machine doing it, but we generally don't. (And I'm certainly not good enough at Roll20 macros to even fake it that way.) Also note that if you're a PC using this or another creature who's expected to keep adventuring/fighting after a single encounter, that means that any encounter in which you take 50 HP or more of damage leaves you exhausted, and exhausted sucks for someone who cares about STR. You then need to either suck up being exhausted (which is awful) or invest in magical means of removing it, so there's even more hidden cost to using this.

Third, and more importantly, there's no good balance point for it. If you're not doing some kind of trick with easy healing, 50 HP is a massive amount of damage. Very few printed characters (read: monsters) can trigger it enough times to be worth the feat space and to be worth the time needed to keep track of the bonuses before they just flat out die. However, if you DO have the ability to just absorb 100, 150, 200 points of damage in a single encounter, I expect a bigger payoff for a feat with a conditional bonus that's outside of my control than just +1 to hit and +1.5 (or less) to damage every 50 HP. A cloud giant, just to grab a semi-random sack-o-meat from MM1, can only reasonably trigger this twice (MAYBE three times, but you'll be hanging by a thread after the third proc) before dying, and that's not a big payoff for a feat with a crappy prereq, especially considering that it might not trigger until a few rounds into combat. A dragon in the upper CR range might get five or six pings before going down (assuming that the dragon fights to the death, which most dragons by fluff are too smart to do, but whatevs), but a freakin' high-CR dragon has better things to spend two feats on than a slowly mounting bonus to STR.

HOWEVER, if you DO have access to massive healing (or a slow-and-steady source of THP, like a lantern archon familiar with at-will aid; after all, the damage doesn't have to be taken 50 HP at a time), this is uncapped. Which means it's fuel for a loop. Depending on your source of healing, it's potentially arbitrarily high. And that's a little scary. Is it especially practical? Not really, but to be honest, loops are rarely trivially easy to execute. That doesn't mean it can't happen. You've got a lantern archon buddy, a dread necro + Tomb Tainted Soul, or another source of slow-and-steady THP/HP, and your STR bonus before crashing into an encounter is limited only by how much time you can spend in advance. (Now, two things here: yes, taking time and effort to prepare ahead of an encounter can and SHOULD result in the character doing the preparation getting an advantage in the coming fight, but usually that's not an arbitrarily high bonus. Second, just getting good at physical attacks by means of really high STR isn't actually likely to split the game in half and it's less disruptive than, say, hardcore minionmancy, but that doesn't mean that this feat is well-designed. The presence of other stupid design choices does not excuse this stupid design choice.)

But the thing is that just having standard access to healing isn't really enough to kick this out of the "too small to matter" purgatory. It's only when it starts layering over and over that it really matters. But once you start doing that, nothing in the feat gives you a reason to stop doing that, and I just plain feel like that's inelegant.

In short, in my opinion there's no happy medium here. It's too small to matter if you play it straight, and it's unnecessarily annoying to use. If you play it dirty, it goes from "too small to matter" to "unreasonably huge" with no reason to actually stop. Therefore, I don't like it. And now you know my opinion.