Epic Martial Disciplines - 9 special disciplines of 9 maneuvers each

**Elves** · 2020-11-26, 07:47 PM (ISO 8601)

Looking for help and feedback on this.

Epic Disciplines

You'll notice it's not quite done. Crypt needs 2 more maneuvers. Primeval has 2 to rewrite. Halo and Dread need several each. Ideas or input on these would be great.

Questions:

1) I like the unique rules for epic maneuvers. My concern is that people will frontload their epic maneuvers each encounter, leading to repetitive play. To counter this, should there be a rule that you can only initiate 1 epic maneuver each turn?

2) In contrast to the way normal disciplines work, everyone who takes an initiation feat can eventually learn all the maneuvers from that discipline. That means these disciplines' maneuvers are free to be connected and synergistic. How could this be done better?

General feedback also welcome. I've put my notes in red in the doc.

**noob** · 2020-11-27, 01:50 AM (ISO 8601)

Please note that you are in epic play so you should get really cool out of combat stuff too.
For example final unrest should not dispel previous instances of final unrest because casters have been animating forever high quality undead(including undead that keeps absolutely all the abilities of the target) for like 6+ levels.
By the way why did you give a maneuver that can do "you can not be resurrected by non epic magic"?
You do not want epic maneuvers to resurrect the very dead people?

Soul-Sand Devil Shintai does not exactly compares well to literally any undead drain ability.

**JoshuaZ** · 2020-11-27, 08:23 AM (ISO 8601)

"Undead creatures created with Devouring Crypt maneuvers don’t count against the number of undead you can create or control by other means, such as the create undead spell"

I think that should be "Animate Dead"- you don't have any control from Create Undead.

**Elves** · 2020-11-28, 02:50 AM (ISO 8601)

Originally Posted by noob

Please note that you are in epic play so you should get really cool out of combat stuff too.

suggestions? ideally appended to existing combat mvs for space reasons.

For example final unrest should not dispel previous instances of final unrest because casters have been animating forever high quality undead(including undead that keeps absolutely all the abilities of the target) for like 6+ levels.

Not looking to make this competitive with T1s, instead trying to create a T3-sized idea of what epic combat means, similar to the epic binder vestiges.

Final unrest is restricted because otherwise you could functionally double up on pinnacle maneuvers. For the same reason, considering making it be that you lose all Dev Crypt undead whenever you ready epic maneuvers from another disc.

By the way why did you give a maneuver that can do "you can not be resurrected by non epic magic"?
You do not want epic maneuvers to resurrect the very dead people?

for Consuming Rapture the idea is you're forgoing the ability to reanimate that corpse (although you can use the temp hp to then reanimate something else through transumptive necrosis)

Soul-Sand Devil Shintai does not exactly compares well to literally any undead drain ability.

it's also awkward because you have to stock up to fill the pool before combat or else it becomes way too weak. looks like that one does need rewriting...how would you fix?

**PairO'Dice Lost** · 2020-11-29, 02:54 AM (ISO 8601)

So, the first thing I noticed about these maneuvers is the XP and time cost to learn them. I'm sure you did them that way because epic spells also cost gold, XP, and time to learn, but while the biggest issue with epic spellcasting is that you can drop the research DC to single digits and get a ton of power for free, the second-biggest issue is that if you don't do that then epic spells are basically never worth the cost.

Looking at Blossoming Steel Strike as an example since it's one of the first in the document, learning that maneuver costs 30,000 XP, the same as 6 castings of wish (and while I know wish is among the best 9th-level spells and you're not trying to directly compare to T1 casters, six wishes can do a lot of good for an epic character even if they're just picking up inherent stat bonuses) and over one and a half times the XP needed to get from 21st level to 22nd. It also takes 15 days to research, when downtime is scarce at epic levels since parties are greater teleporting everywhere trying to save the multiverse from destruction all the time.

For all that, the actual benefit that the maneuver gives you is...three rounds of one conditional free attack per enemy at a moderate damage bonus (like a few free mithral tornadoes or raging mongeese), which is the kind of thing you'd expect to see out of a 19th- or 20th-level initiator (time stands still followed by Island in Time followed by Sudden Recover + time stands still, for instance), not a 22nd- or 23rd-level initiator, and while said benefit does stack with those 19th-/20th-level tricks, that doesn't make the whole setup worth it.

Now, looking at the discipline as a whole, to learn all of the Invincible Sword Princess maneuvers would require 365,000 XP and 182 days of downtime. That's just under half a full year of no adventuring and enough XP to otherwise take a character from 21st level to 34th level, and at the end of all that you're getting effects equivalent to wraithstrike (Soft Blade Kiss), limited wish (Lightning Stroke), a small fraction of implosion (Cosmos-Slaying Glory Blade), and so forth. Which, again, are on the more powerful end as spells go and definitely are cool and relevant effects to have if you can pick them up at no extra cost at 21st level, but they're utterly beyond useless at their current cost.

For comparison, vengeful gaze of god lets the caster utterly obliterate any published creature (including the CR 57 Hecatoncheires) or deity within 2 miles of himself in a single shot, yet I guarantee that no one has ever researched or cast that spell in an actual game since the ELH was published, and that spell only costs a mere 150,840 XP and 76 days of downtime to research.

And all of this is on top of having to spend an epic feat just to be able to research these maneuvers in the first place, so instead of spending your 21st-level feat slot on stuff like "my longbow attacks have infinite range" (Distant Shot) or "I can make 5 attacks against everyone in reach" (Epic Whirlwind Attack) or "people I crit basically just die" (Vorpal Strike or Devastating Critical), you're spending it to gain the ability to at some later point be able to spend XP and time to pick up some epic maneuvers...and if you want one maneuver each from two epic disciplines, welp, that's a wait until 24th level at the earliest for you.

So I'd recommend cutting those costs by a factor of 10 at the absolute minimum--at 36,500 XP and 18 days of downtime for 9 maneuvers, you're looking at roughly one wish and 2 days per maneuver, which is much more reasonable albeit still costs almost 1.75 levels' worth of advancement--but would really recommend finding an alternate way to limit epic maneuvers known that doesn't involve those kinds of costs at all. And there's no need to be particularly stingy about it; even just flat-out handing out any two epic maneuvers of a character's choice with an Epic Martial Study feat would take a character until level 33 to pick up a whole discipline, and by that point they could have just taken 13 levels of wizard and gotten access to most of the same effects and much more besides.

---

It's too-early o'clock where I am, so I'll go through all the maneuvers and give some more detailed feedback tomorrow, but after skimming through all the disciplines my general impression is that the feat benefits are on the very weak side and most maneuver effects are the equivalent of 6th- to 7th-level spells at best (or PrC capstones or other effects that a PC can pick up around 11th-15th level), which isn't great when 9th-level maneuvers are already hovering around the 6th- or 7th-level-equivalent mark. There are one or two gems in each discipline that are suitably powerful, flavorful, and mechanically unique, but otherwise everything could use a significant power-up across the board.

**Elves** · 2020-11-29, 03:52 AM (ISO 8601)

Thanks for looking at the numbers. I had been going with Demented One's original numbers and didn't sanity check. Reduced to 10k/15k/20k/50k to start with, for total disc cost of 180k. Could reduce more; each one being about half a level seems right. The downtime I like, and finding a timeless plane shouldn't be hard in epic if time is an issue.

As for the power level, it's not just that I'm going with T3 -- I also think it would be nice to have epic gameplay be more coherent, as in 4e, rather than being such a crapshow. But the game is what it is so that may be a lost cause. I look forward to you looking at the maneuvers when you have time. Don't feel the need to read them all at once.

Blossoming steel you presumably take if you have Combat Reflexes and/or an AoO build.

----

It's possible to change the framework. Maybe you learn or trade them out normally, but only in a martial adept class your IL is 21st+ in. And then as you say there could be an epic study feat.

Still would want to limit it to 1 epic disc at a time though, which is hard to do if using tradeouts.

**noob** · 2020-11-29, 04:24 AM (ISO 8601)

Originally Posted by PairO'Dice Lost

So, the first thing I noticed about these maneuvers is the XP and time cost to learn them. I'm sure you did them that way because epic spells also cost gold, XP, and time to learn, but while the biggest issue with epic spellcasting is that you can drop the research DC to single digits and get a ton of power for free, the second-biggest issue is that if you don't do that then epic spells are basically never worth the cost.

Looking at Blossoming Steel Strike as an example since it's one of the first in the document, learning that maneuver costs 30,000 XP, the same as 6 castings of wish (and while I know wish is among the best 9th-level spells and you're not trying to directly compare to T1 casters, six wishes can do a lot of good for an epic character even if they're just picking up inherent stat bonuses) and over one and a half times the XP needed to get from 21st level to 22nd. It also takes 15 days to research, when downtime is scarce at epic levels since parties are greater teleporting everywhere trying to save the multiverse from destruction all the time.

For all that, the actual benefit that the maneuver gives you is...three rounds of one conditional free attack per enemy at a moderate damage bonus (like a few free mithral tornadoes or raging mongeese), which is the kind of thing you'd expect to see out of a 19th- or 20th-level initiator (time stands still followed by Island in Time followed by Sudden Recover + time stands still, for instance), not a 22nd- or 23rd-level initiator, and while said benefit does stack with those 19th-/20th-level tricks, that doesn't make the whole setup worth it.

Now, looking at the discipline as a whole, to learn all of the Invincible Sword Princess maneuvers would require 365,000 XP and 182 days of downtime. That's just under half a full year of no adventuring and enough XP to otherwise take a character from 21st level to 34th level, and at the end of all that you're getting effects equivalent to wraithstrike (Soft Blade Kiss), limited wish (Lightning Stroke), a small fraction of implosion (Cosmos-Slaying Glory Blade), and so forth. Which, again, are on the more powerful end as spells go and definitely are cool and relevant effects to have if you can pick them up at no extra cost at 21st level, but they're utterly beyond useless at their current cost.

For comparison, vengeful gaze of god lets the caster utterly obliterate any published creature (including the CR 57 Hecatoncheires) or deity within 2 miles of himself in a single shot, yet I guarantee that no one has ever researched or cast that spell in an actual game since the ELH was published, and that spell only costs a mere 150,840 XP and 76 days of downtime to research.

And all of this is on top of having to spend an epic feat just to be able to research these maneuvers in the first place, so instead of spending your 21st-level feat slot on stuff like "my longbow attacks have infinite range" (Distant Shot) or "I can make 5 attacks against everyone in reach" (Epic Whirlwind Attack) or "people I crit basically just die" (Vorpal Strike or Devastating Critical), you're spending it to gain the ability to at some later point be able to spend XP and time to pick up some epic maneuvers...and if you want one maneuver each from two epic disciplines, welp, that's a wait until 24th level at the earliest for you.

So I'd recommend cutting those costs by a factor of 10 at the absolute minimum--at 36,500 XP and 18 days of downtime for 9 maneuvers, you're looking at roughly one wish and 2 days per maneuver, which is much more reasonable albeit still costs almost 1.75 levels' worth of advancement--but would really recommend finding an alternate way to limit epic maneuvers known that doesn't involve those kinds of costs at all. And there's no need to be particularly stingy about it; even just flat-out handing out any two epic maneuvers of a character's choice with an Epic Martial Study feat would take a character until level 33 to pick up a whole discipline, and by that point they could have just taken 13 levels of wizard and gotten access to most of the same effects and much more besides.

---

It's too-early o'clock where I am, so I'll go through all the maneuvers and give some more detailed feedback tomorrow, but after skimming through all the disciplines my general impression is that the feat benefits are on the very weak side and most maneuver effects are the equivalent of 6th- to 7th-level spells at best (or PrC capstones or other effects that a PC can pick up around 11th-15th level), which isn't great when 9th-level maneuvers are already hovering around the 6th- or 7th-level-equivalent mark. There are one or two gems in each discipline that are suitably powerful, flavorful, and mechanically unique, but otherwise everything could use a significant power-up across the board.

By raw you need to be in high epic levels to have the right to learn vengeful gaze of god: you do not have the right to research a spell dealing you more than twice your hit dice in feedback damage dice and this spell deals 200d6 feedback damage to the caster so you need to be level 100.
So yes it is a really bad epic spell that is out of the reach of most epic campaigns seeing the level needed to be allowed to cast it.
Furthermore literally all the deities have disintegration immunity and so are immune to that specific spell.

As I said before for the epic maneuvers "the casters have been doing better for 6+ levels"

**JoshuaZ** · 2020-11-29, 10:34 AM (ISO 8601)

Originally Posted by noob

As I said before for the epic maneuvers "the casters have been doing better for 6+ levels"

I'm not sure I understand your response here. PairO'Dice Lost's point is that the XP levels should be reduced here making it easier for non-casters to pick up these spells.

**noob** · 2020-11-29, 11:58 AM (ISO 8601)

Originally Posted by JoshuaZ

I'm not sure I understand your response here. PairO'Dice Lost's point is that the XP levels should be reduced here making it easier for non-casters to pick up these spells.

They also described them as being level 6 or 7 spells like ninth level manoeuvrers.
you should try to get stuff as cool as eighth or ninth level spells with epic manoeuvrers if you want them to be a significant improvement over regular manoeuvrers and do not want your characters to fall too far behind casters.
Like give a pinnacle manoeuvrer where you create a reflection of any creature you met before for the glass branch(ice assasin equivalent)
(you make manoeuvrers based on a mirror giant pan dimensional monster and do not use all the potential of the theme: you could also have thrown shapechange but it is still the school to which you gave the most awesome looking stuff)

Or give a true resurrect on hitting ability to some other branch(an improvement over the heal on hitting already available as a regular manoeuvrer: you ought to have higher level effects with epic manoeuvrers)
Or yet give a mind blank equivalent stance(or boost) and/or a gain undead immunities stance.
But no you decided to grant things that that are not even the equivalent of eighth or ninth level spells.

Also some manoeuvrers are incredibly underwhelming like:
Heavenly Bulwark
Invincible Sword Princess (Counter) [Epic]
Initiation Action: Immediate action
Trigger: You would take damage
Range: Personal
Target: You
Duration: End of next turn
XP Cost: 10,000 XP
Training Time: 10 days

The Invincible Sword Princess cannot be wounded, cannot be slain. Blades shatter against her skin, flames wash over her without scorching, and even the wrath of the gods is turned aside.

The damage you would take is prevented, and you gain DR/- equal to your initiator level for one round.

Like getting dr equal to your IL: barely helps and it costs 10.000 xp: at that cost you could get magical items better than having that dr all day long: if you did take that you just wasted your xp for no reason.
It is so bad you can say you wasted your immediate action.
Because trust me: epic monsters and characters have attacks in spades so countering one and still taking the others is not enough.

Also Lightning Stroke is seriously bad: if you were playing at a table where you could not hit reliably opponents then you should have played a full caster and never an initiator: you should also add something that makes hitting worth it or else it is useful only at tables where you got that ability 12 levels too late because you had been unable to harm monsters for 12 levels.
Maybe turn lightning stroke in a boost that apply to all the attacks of the turn.
Or maybe turn it into an automatic critical hit that do not miss.
But right now it is underwhelming because the times where it serves you are times where you should have never played an initiator.

Shining adamant defence shows two major problems: you throw a high save boost but casters had been throwing around higher save boosts and it does not stacks with your save boosting items meaning that buying a +10 cloak of resistance instead is better: you save a lot of xp that way and you benefit from it all day long.(not that saves matters in epic play: monsters throws so many sod per turn the solution is not saves but immunities)

Impenetrable skin is the most useless stance I know: it gives +12 ac in epic plays where ac does not matters anymore for players because either they got trick to raise it to thousands or it is so low monster would still hit automatically if you added +12 ac because they gave extreme numbers to monsters so regular ac optimisation cuts down on other performances and you give up.
Maybe it should give some other effect like negate all attacks with natural weapons as the claws and bites shatters on impact with the skin.
Also "Immediate action action" is a typo in the initiate line: remove one of the two action in it.

Bladeswarm is underwhelming it performs comparably to that improved variant of magic missile called chain missile at level 3(apply a metamagic or two and it will match closely the damage like for example maximise and empower).(if wotc wrote a sixth level magic missile spell it would probably be stronger than this manoeuvrer)
The best you can do is like 30d6+10 times int modifier and that is assuming you use that giant crossbow(which is medium sized and an exotic weapon) which is probably considered cheesing it out.
You should let it at least apply all the effect of the magical modifiers of your weapon.

**Elves** · 2020-11-29, 02:23 PM (ISO 8601)

Originally Posted by noob

Like give a pinnacle manoeuvrer where you create a reflection of any creature you met before for the glass branch(ice assasin equivalent)

That's a cool idea.

Or give a true resurrect on hitting ability to some other branch

I'll throw that into "Halo".

Or maybe turn it into an automatic critical hit that do not miss.

Done.

Shining adamant defence shows two major problems: you throw a high save boost but casters had been throwing around higher save boosts and it does not stacks with your save boosting items meaning that buying a +10 cloak of resistance instead is better: you save a lot of xp that way and you benefit from it all day long.

Fair enough, made it untyped.

Impenetrable skin is the most useless stance I know: it gives +12 ac in epic plays where ac does not matters anymore for players because either they got trick to raise it to thousands or it is so low monster would still hit automatically if you added +12 ac because they gave extreme numbers to monsters so regular ac optimisation cuts down on other performances and you give up.
Maybe it should give some other effect like negate all attacks with natural weapons as the claws and bites shatters on impact with the skin.

That's possible, but the concept is exactly that because AC matters less at epic, it's a time when you can give out hugely inflated AC bonuses. Raised bonus to +15, could go to +20.

Bladeswarm is underwhelming....The best you can do is like 30d6+10 times int modifier and that is assuming you use that giant crossbow

It does 10 * IL * (weapon damage + Int mod) so with 30 Int and a greatsword at 21st level you get 3570 damage, +170 damage for each additional level. Its advantages compared to Cosmos-Slaying Glory Blade are that it's ranged, you can split the damage between multiple targets, and there's no to-hit roll.

**noob** · 2020-11-29, 02:40 PM (ISO 8601)

Originally Posted by Elves

That's a cool idea.

I'll throw that into "Halo".

Done.

Fair enough, made it untyped.

That's possible, but the concept is exactly that because AC matters less at epic, it's a time when you can give out hugely inflated AC bonuses. Raised bonus to +15, could go to +20.

It does 10 * IL * (weapon damage + Int mod) so with 30 Int and a greatsword at 21st level you get 3570 damage, +170 damage for each additional level. Its advantages compared to Cosmos-Slaying Glory Blade are that it's ranged, you can split the damage between multiple targets, and there's no to-hit roll.

I did not see it was 10 times IL blades.
My mistake for misreading.

**Elves** · 2020-11-29, 02:43 PM (ISO 8601)

Replaced problematic "Soul-Sand Devil Shintai" with your ice assassin suggestion in Shattered Glass.

**PairO'Dice Lost** · 2020-11-29, 11:11 PM (ISO 8601)

Originally Posted by Elves

Could reduce more; each one being about half a level seems right.

Eh...the thing about XP costs is that you have to compare them with what you're giving up and delaying, and I don't think much of anything in epic is worth a significant fraction of a level.

When it comes to non-epic levels, people tend to avoid XP expenditures like the plague, because the classes that actually stay level-appropriate through the full level range (i.e. full casters on the magic side and initiators on the martial side) gain a whole tier of cool new stuff every two levels and Thou Shalt Not Lose Caster Levels (Or Too Many Initiator Levels). The only exceptions to that are crafting magic items, because crafting directly-relevant items and effectively doubling your wealth is just that good (and even then, people prefer to use crafting cost reduction feats, an artificer's Craft Reserve and Retain Essence, and similar rather than actually spend XP), and 9th-level spells like wish and gate because after 17th level there's not another tier of spells to look forward to in a non-epic game so you're not delaying anything...and even then, crafting a staff of power only costs 8,440 gp and casting wish only costs 5,000 gp, which is around 1/3 of the way to level 18 and around 1/4 of the way to level 20

In epic levels, the cool things you can get are pretty huge compared to the stuff you get below level 20, while the level gap between getting cool things is wider and the XP needed to level only grows over time. When you say something takes "about half the XP needed to go from level 23 to 24," the calculus there is not just "Am I willing to spend 11,500 XP on this?" but also "Am I willing to push back picking up both Perfect Two-Weapon Fighting and Death of Enemies by 5 or 6 sessions for this?" and the answer to that question is almost always "no."

It's your epic maneuvers, of course, but if I'm an epic-level PC and see an XP cost in the tens of thousands, I'm either going to ignore it as not being worth it no matter how cool it may seem or head straight to thought bottle abuse to deal with the exorbitant cost.

The downtime I like, and finding a timeless plane shouldn't be hard in epic if time is an issue.

People say this a lot, but there's actually not a single published plane that has the bazillion-to-one-round-time-ratio plane trait that they claim exists and there's no evidence that one can make such a trait up for one's private demiplane. For speeding things up, the best you're going to get is 10:1 with a Planar Shepherd or planar bubble of the Region of Dreams, Dal Quor, or Xoriat. Flowing Time can get you 1 day of subjective time per round of objective time, but it's equally likely to get you 1 round of subjective time per day of objective time and you only find out the actual ratio when you leave; you can use divinations to find appropriate times to hop in and out, but since the flow ratio and duration are random there's no guarantee you can find the right ratio when you're trying to research something. The Far Realm can get you an infinite-to-one time ratio but, well, it's the Far Realm.

The best options, therefore, only reduce the 180-day cost for a full discipline to 18 days, and that essentially makes it mandatory for epic initiators to abuse time traits. And even then that only gets you a single discipline; an initiator who wants to pick up all the maneuvers and is playing in a group that somehow manages to play to level 80 or something is looking at spending 162 days even after time shenanigans.

So as with the XP cost, I'd recommend slashing the time cost significantly, perhaps to a day or two per maneuver; call it a "training montage" if it helps make that seem more reasonable.

As for the power level, it's not just that I'm going with T3 -- I also think it would be nice to have epic gameplay be more coherent, as in 4e, rather than being such a crapshow.

I'm definitely with you on making epic levels much less of a crazytown than they are--there's a reason I haven't run an epic game without heavy houserules and a level 30 cap since shortly after the ELH came out--but there's a big difference between "These epic maneuvers don't measure up to epic spells at the same character levels!" not being a problem because you want to tone epic spellcasting down just as much, which is completely reasonable, and "These epic maneuvers don't measure up to non-epic spells from 10 levels ago!" being an issue because unless your epic maneuver system involves a slew of changes and nerfs to high-level pre-epic content to get you to the desired point it's simply not going to measure up.

Blossoming steel you presumably take if you have Combat Reflexes and/or an AoO build.

I was taking that into consideration when I said one free attack per enemy per round, since without Combat Reflexes it would be just one attack per round. And yes, free attacks are nothing to sneeze at, especially if one has optimized one's AoOs to the point that a bunch of AoOs come out to more damage than a Whirlwind Attack or Mithral Tornado, but that's still a considerable cost for a rather minor effect, especially since most enemies know not to start their turn within reach of an epic warrior lest they be full-attacked to death.

Compare Blossoming Steel to Epic Whirlwind Attack, which adds at least 4 attacks per enemy to a standard action, doesn't care where enemies started their turn since the character can move first, and only costs a feat slot, no XP or time. That's the kind of benchmark to which one has to compare these maneuvers.

Still would want to limit it to 1 epic disc at a time though, which is hard to do if using tradeouts.

I don't think it's all that hard. It already says that you can only ready one epic discipline's worth of maneuvers at a time, so you can simply tack on that you can change the discipline if you re-ready maneuvers with Adaptive Style or similar and you're good to go.

Originally Posted by noob

By raw you need to be in high epic levels to have the right to learn vengeful gaze of god: you do not have the right to research a spell dealing you more than twice your hit dice in feedback damage dice and this spell deals 200d6 feedback damage to the caster so you need to be level 100.
So yes it is a really bad epic spell that is out of the reach of most epic campaigns seeing the level needed to be allowed to cast it.

That was exactly my point: that a spell they're expecting to be researched and cast by level 100+ wizards costs much less than maneuvers elves is expected to be researched and used starting at 21st level. The fact that the more expensive maneuver is much weaker than the much cheaper spell was just proverbial icing.

Furthermore literally all the deities have disintegration immunity and so are immune to that specific spell.

Fun bit of trivia: disintegrate, vengeful gaze of god, and similar effects only disintegrate a creature if they're reduced to 0 or lower hit points, so immunity to disintegration only protects them from the "if you hit 0 you're dead and can't be raised" part, it does nothing to prevent them from being killed through plain ol' HP damage.

(Deities are still immune to VGoG thanks to their full transmutation immunity, so you're right for a different reason, but (A) the Hecatoncheires is still boned and (B) an equivalently-damaging Evocation spell would cost the same XP and could nuke all the gods just fine.)

-----

So, time for a full breakdown of the feats and maneuvers. These are going to be short and sweet in order to get through them all, so in addition to any notes I'll highlight names in red if I think a maneuver is noticeably underpowered and needs a lot of help, blue if I think the effect is sufficiently powerful, unique, or useful to be worth taking most of the time, gold if an effect actually ends up overpowered for an epic initiator, and left in black if it's average or mildly underpowered and a tossup as to whether it would be work taking.

When it comes to the discipline feats, since there could be quite a span of time between taking the feats and actually learning any of the associated maneuvers, I'm going to be rating the base benefits of the feats by themselves.

All of my ratings assume low-epic (21st to 27th or thereabouts), since they're available starting at 21st and I'm assuming a comparison to Epic Spellcasting in that an initiator is going to want to pick these up first thing and start researching maneuvers immediately; many of them might get a lot more powerful as they scale into the 40s and higher, but that level range is basically irrelevant for balance purposes. They also only consider the actual maneuver effects by themselves, not the effects in comparison to the cost needed to get them; with significant XP and time costs, or even much of a cost beyond one epic feat per one or two maneuvers, a lot of them would shift from black to red, blue to black, or gold to blue.

Spoiler: Invincible Sword Princess

Show

Unconquered Sword: The +2 dodge bonus from fighting defensively is irrelevant at epic levels, and the difference between Str and Dex for a Str-primary martial character is likely to be no more than 12 or so points, so this is basically "spend an AoO for +14ish to AC against a single attack." Compare to the Factotum's Improved Cunning Defense, which is just "+12ish to AC at all times for no action cost," or Wall of Blades or Baffling Defense, which are only once per round but replace [initiator's AC] with [attack or skill bonus at least 3-5 points higher than initiator's AC] + 1d20.

Heavenly Bulwark: The fact this prevents a single attack regardless of damage is huge, and while the DR is basically meaningless to any epic enemies with Power Attack it does shut down swarms, minions, cohorts, and similar so it's still useful a good portion of the time.

Blossoming Steel: As already noted, compares very unfavorably to Epic Whirlwind Attack, even on an AoO build.

Dancing with Victory: Noticeable penalties are rare in epic (though I suppose you could abuse feats like Shock Trooper or Karmic Strike with it), and "apply normal AC to touch AC" is a low-level feat benefit (e.g. Deflective Armor and Shield Ward).

God-Smiting Outrage: The power level is reasonable (basically equivalent to, and stackable with, Power Attacking except without the attack penalty), but flat damage is boring and doesn't add any new capabilities; in fact, were it not for the ease of picking up extra attacks in epic, this would end up on par with or weaker than Strike of Perfect Clarity (+100 damage to 1 attack vs. +25 damage to 3 or 4 attacks).

Soft Blade Kiss: Just UMDing a wand of wraithstrike would nearly always be cheaper and more effective than using this.

Lightning Stroke: Auto-hit effects are very useful for delivering effects like vorpal or the like, so it's good power-wise, but again it doesn't really add any new capabilities.

Shining Adamant Defense: This maneuver's saving grace is applying to multiple saves in a round for a single counter, but the Diamond Mind save-replacers grant much higher bonuses for anyone who focuses on Concentration and come online a lot earlier.

Victory Over All: The stacking bonus is going to be miniscule for anyone with enough of a Str focus to use the initial feat benefit, and the active block is actually worse than Wall of Blades or Baffling Defense because they can be applied against spell attacks and touch attacks.

Cosmos-Slaying Glory Blade: The ability to kill someone without a save by dealing even a single point of damage to them, in a way that bypasses any possible protection like death ward or Transmutation immunity, is broken at every single level of the game (except perhaps 1st where a normal greatsword attack is a save-or-die effect) regardless of its usage limits or number of prerequisites--and that's before considering any combo potential with e.g. Bloodstorm Blade, Distant Shot, and a brilliant energy weapon.

The useful part of this maneuver at epic levels is the ability to bypass "actually I don't die" stuff like delay death, Stance of Immortal Fortitude, and similar, so reworking it to be a "no, you really do die" effect plus a moderate extra damage rider instead of an auto-kill would be good.

Spoiler: Celestial Impetus

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Abundant Vector: Qualities like ghost touch and force and weapon material like riverine are available from low to mid level, making this feat very overcosted and bsaically redundant.

Force Veil: Anyone who cares about regularly flat-footing opponents picks up a reliable way to do so long before epic, and the extra damage is negligible. As a feat that a Sneak Attack-focused rogue could pick up at 21st level to free up some actions and resources it would be pretty cool, but on top of an initiator it's meh.

Articulated Transparency: The combination stealth and defense in this one is great (though "immune to most forms of damage" is misleading because after the force and energy damage caveat it basically means "immune to physical damage").

Prison of Duress: Combos with forcecage are awesome for casters because they can plop down AoEs to damage creatures trapped in it and do things to prevent trapped creatures from teleporting out. Initiators can do neither of those things, and they can't even attack trapped creatures because it's a solid cage, so any creature that could be meaningfully affected by this would be worse off (and the initiator better off) if the initiator just grappled them instead.

Reaving Potency: Highly niche. Yes, it can combo with two other maneuvers in the discipline, but two rounds to set up 2d6/IL damage isn't that impressive and the maneuver is basically useless otherwise the character has a feud with an epic Wizard/Abjurant Champion/Argent Savant or something.

Violent Repulsion: Near useless as-is, since there's no guarantee the character will have Craft (Sculpture) ranks when the discipline feat requires Profession (Sculptor). Assuming that was an error, it's not too bad since pushing someone 25+ feet away reactively is nice and there's no clause preventing the initiator's allies from AoOing the target, but it would have to have a much less restrictive trigger condition (and thus give it some utility and ally-protecting potential) to make it blue.

Auspice of Duplication: This is basically fission but with a shorter duration and harsh restrictions on actions taken.

Impenetrable Skin: See notes on above AC-boosting maneuvers.

Impulse Labyrinth: The base effect of shooting forcecages at people is actually really cool, but the bonus damage is fairly small, the cover against enemies within the area is negligible, and the fact that you can't attack someone outside the resilient sphere boundary (when many epic monsters have speeds in excess of 60 or 120 feet and combats often occur at considerable range) or once you've forcecaged them really cuts down on its usefulness.

Bladeswarm: As with Cosmos-Slaying Glory Blade, "kill anything automatically, no save" is overpowered regardless of level or prereqs, the only saving grace of this maneuver being that delay death or similar will help you against this one. Even one weapon copy per initiator level auto-hitting would be stronger than a 13th-level-equivalent intensified chain missile spell, so try reworking it with some limits on how many attacks can be sent against a single target.

Spoiler: Devouring Crypt

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Ravenous Scorn: Constant nonmagical death ward plus a pseudo-healing effect is definitely worth an epic feat slot.

Entropy Nimbus: One negative level per hit is kind of anemic, but the duration plus the healing from Ravenous Scorn plus the ability to punch through immunity make it a reasonable pick.

Consuming Rapture: It's barghest's feast but faster and slightly more effective, basically, plus a bunch of extra temp HP. There are certainly cases when being able to hit them with soul consumption in the same round to prevent a revivify or similar would be handy, but that niche use plus the additional HP doesn't make it significantly better than the 6th-level version, and contingent resurrection effects are common enough in epic that when you would want a faster effect it wouldn't matter anyway.

Strike with the Risen: It's an widened-plus-a-bit-more mass snake's swiftness, but comes online 10 levels later, and can't affect your non-minion allies. Not particularly impressive.

Threat of Doom: It's Doomspeak, minus a saving throw, plus a restrictive trigger condition. Too niche and too many levels late once again.

Transumptive Necrosis: This would be fantastic if it laster longer than an encounter so you could turn a bunch of commoners into a very beefy zombie army (or very lack-of-beef-y skeleton army). As it stands, though, basic skeletons and zombies don't really add anything to epic combat, even with a lot of extra HD, unless you're a necromancer or Requiem bard or something who can buff them up into actual threats.

Embrace of the Last Sin: See above for the limits of temporary animation and plain ol' zombies and skeletons.

Final Unrest: Now this is worthwhile animation, since they keep their stats and you can keep them around for multiple combats even if doing so limits your options a lot.

Spoiler: Dread Crown

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Horrid Blackhallow Fighting Arts: Firstly:

...must know a 9th-level maneuver from...Infinite Torment [or] Ninefold Damnation...

Aw shucks, I'm flattered.

That aside, turning large amounts of damage vile is huge in epic when copious amounts of healing (and contingent healing at that) is common and combat-time consecration is very rare. Definitely a useful pick.

Join Me in Misery: The concept is great, but this has the same pitfall as Iron Heart Surge: any conditions that would really be useful to transfer to an enemy are ones that prevent you from initiating the maneuver in the first place. It could be more useful if it had a clause allowing you to initiate it even if you couldn't normally do so, but even then you first have to have a debilitating condition or three get through all your defenses then manage to transfer it, which is extremely situational.

Strike of Ultimate Corruption: This is basically a longer-duration more-sticky morality undone, coming in 12+ levels later, and nothing in the description prevents the newly-evil and fiendishly-enhanced target from just attacking you immediately. Unless the entire campaign is about slaying celestials and paladins, this is too niche to be useful.

Creation-Swallowing Hellmouth Strike: Assuming the brief description means "create a gate and call a ton of fiendish minions through," that's a great transportatin and utility maneuver, but the exact details would be a make-or-break for the power level.

Spoiler: Exalted Halo

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Gift of Conscience: See the Strike of Ultimate Corruption note.

Path Through the Imperfect World: This is basically One With Shadow, with a very minor boost in that you can also go through walls of force and harmful AoEs. Not enough of an improvement to be worth it.

Strike of Salvation: Free and unlimited true res is very handy.

Spoiler: March of Aeons

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Knight of Paradox: This is Spell Stowaway (time stop) with different prereqs and fewer restrictions, an excellent pick since Spell Stowaway is rarely used for other spells anyway.

Recurring Bloodshed: This is basically Repeat Spell for maneuvers. Useful in theory, but extra standard actions are easy to come by at epic levels, and since you have to initiate it before the maneuver to be repeated, it's wasted if that maneuver happens to roll too low to hit the second time around.

Hourglass Siphoning Prana: The fact that there's no dispel check required and you can "dispel" (Ex) abilities--and thus utterly hose epic barbarians, factotums, initiators, and similar--makes it defnitely worth taking. In a game where Mordenkainen's disjunction isn't nerfed or houseruled out, however (a very common thing to do in epic games), it would be an overpowered gold for the auto-dispel, so keep that in mind.

Killing Pendulum Stroke: Immunity to ability damage and drain is too common at epic levels, and the rate at which this reduces ability scores far too slow, for this to be useful in combat.

Transience of Strife: This is an un-augmentable temporal acceleration, 10 levels late.

Eternity’s Martyr: The free 21 to 84 damage would make this a pretty good pick, except that basically all epic foes will end the effect after 1 round unless they natural-1 their save.

Divergence Blade: An actual epic spell effect, and not a weak one. Excellent pick.

Excision of History: This is a good pick, but isn't blue because having to meticulously track actions in case they're reverted by this maneuver (like a psion with time regression has to do, but for everyone in the encounter) makes it enough of a pain to possibly avoid taking.

Renewal of Heartbeats: If "positive conditions" includes buff spells, this is red. Otherwise, a full tune-up is nice but losing a round of combat to get it definitely hurts.

Causality-Rending Mandala: Considering that you can stay in a stance as long as you want, this already allows someone to time-travel backwards anywhere from multiple encounters to multiple years--and even if they stick to using it within combats this maneuver adds all of the time regression fiddliness to every round of combat for its duration, so it's almost red at the same time.

Spoiler: Primeval God-Monster

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Flashing Blood-Knuckle Fury: Extra full attacks and act-out-of-turn abilities are common enough that the ability to take a full attack out-of-turn is nice but not amazing.

Clenched-Fist Krodha Soul: This is black instead of blue because the base effect is nothing special and the ongoing effect is useless without having the other maneuver it enhances.

Many-Armed Wrathful Deva Method: I ran a campaign involving a four-armed warforged monk obsessed with adding extra limbs and thus extra unarmed strikes, so I know exactly how useful this is.

Fist Meets Fist: Negating 1 to 2 full attacks per encounter on average, with the potential for serious out-o-turn damage, is nice, but not blue given the dependence on another maneuver for full effect.

Crack the Sky: The lack of ability to aim the creature makes this effectively just +20d6 plus a more escapable mass time hop for all practical purposes, somewhat underwhelming for the level. If you could aim it, the unavoidable 1000 damage plus the ability to continue it through planar travel would make it blue.

World-Breaker Grip: While balanced against an otherwise-un-grapple-able opponent, this is basically an automatic 60d6 damage minimum per round against any grappleable opponent without freedom of movement. Limiting the +10d6 damage to just the first grapple check in a round would make it blue.

Pummel the Horizon: This is basically Distant Shot for melee attacks, which is fantastic, and the fact that it ends on a miss is a good balancing factor without being crippling.

Spoiler: Rainbow's End

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Radiant Prism: Prismatic effects are too rare for this to be blue, especially in games where Mordenkainen's disjunction is common, but the combo potential (and its necessity for some maneuvers) is handy.

Aurora Walk: While the faerie fire bit is nice, flight and teleportation are too common in epic for the prismatic wall portion of this to be really useful. If you added in an "If you totally encircle an opponent..." clause to deal with that, similar to Ring of Fire, it would easily go up to blue.

Actinic Form: Very solid defense, not much to say.

Death Nova: A reasonable upgrade to Death Mark.

Lightspeed Charge: Great utility, and the mini-shadowpounce is nice too.

Prismatic Ward: A near-perfect defense plus a great counterattack.

Prismatic Onslaught: Avalanche of Blades without the "stop if you miss an attack" clause, I like it.

Seven-Ray Blade: Mostly useful for the reach against flyers and the corresponding ambush potential, but punching through damage mitigation is nice too.

Shimmering Echoes: Prismatic greater mirror image, nice.

Rainbow Finale: 45d6 plus four separate save-or-loses all at once in a huge AoE is too much, even before the Emerald Immolation effect. Having each creature be affected by a single random effect instead of all seven would probably bring it down to blue.

Spoiler: Shattered Glass

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Desolate Arbitrator: Punching through outsider immunities is exceptionall useful in epic when most major enemies are outsiders.

Sandstrike Blast: Basically a better Firesnake, not much to say here.

Sand Through Fingers Defense: Non-concealment-based miss chances are nice.

Soul-Sieve Transformation: Kinda Salamander Charge meets Rising Phoenix Stance, not much to say here either.

Transcendent Desert Creature: I assume, based on the clause about deities and Concentration, that "cease to function" for the second effect means "can't be acively used, but existing effects still keep going." If it basically means you have a 30-foot-radius divine-casters-and-outsiders-only antimagic field, this is gold.

Many-Faceted Mirage Technique: A flavorful way to gain extra attacks, not bad.

Knowing the Desolate Heart: A nicely flavorful effect and an excellent counter to basically any kind of opponent; fortunately, the on-save effect is reasonable enough to prevent it from being gold.

Counter-Pronouncement of Enthymematic Law: An incredibly useful effect with great flavor.

Swallowed in Eternity: Free ice assassins are incredibly abusable, given that you have total control of them and so can do things like targeting your party caster to get a whole extra set of spell slots for the next hour. Adding a caveat that you can specify how it attacks the target but you can't do anything else with it would remove that abuse and leave it at blue.

World-Grinding Sandstorm Devastation: The only downside of this maneuver is that it makes Athasian defilers jealous.

**Elves** · 2020-11-30, 04:07 AM (ISO 8601)

Man, that must have taken ages. Tomorrow I'll look at your red and gold listings, so watch this space -- but wanted to let you know I appreciate it.

I agree Rainbow's End is in the best place right now. I thought the flavor text for that one was nice as well. I should point out for those who didn't see the credits that most of these discs are other peoples' work, just heavily modified.

As for cosmos-slaying glory blade, I feel it kind of has to be there for the shock factor. Note that as written, since it deals infinite damage, it actually would be blocked by delay death. Another point in its defense is that it's conditional on you getting in melee range and penetrating miss chance/etc, not an easy task against the bigger enemies like gods and casters.

**PairO'Dice Lost** · 2020-11-30, 01:15 PM (ISO 8601)

Originally Posted by Elves

Man, that must have taken ages. Tomorrow I'll look at your red and gold listings, so watch this space -- but wanted to let you know I appreciate it.

It took an hour or two, but I spent most of the evening reviewing various homebrew so it was no biggie.

As for cosmos-slaying glory blade, I feel it kind of has to be there for the shock factor. Note that as written, since it deals infinite damage, it actually would be blocked by delay death.

The actual verbiage is "your foe is utterly destroyed, reduced to an arbitrary number of negative hit points," which looks like the primary effect is an instakill with the infinite HP damage as a side effect, like disintegrate's "If the damage doesn't kill you, you get disintegrated too." Rereading it, it looks like the first part was probably intended as just flavor text and could use some rewording to make that clear; that makes things a bit better, but is still something that happens without a save and that only two or three effects in the game can protect against.

At minimum I'd add a saving throw against the effect as is standard for these sorts of things, and then adding one more "out" against it (the [Death] descriptor, a "doesn't work against non-solid beings" clause like implosion, or similar) would be good.

Another point in its defense is that it's conditional on you getting in melee range and penetrating miss chance/etc, not an easy task against the bigger enemies like gods and casters.

It can be difficult for a martial type to routinely engage in melee against those kinds of opponents, yes, but if someone just needs to land a single attack and deal a single point of damage there's a lot of ways to make that happen and a party is definitely going to work together to help the initiator land that on the BBEG. Just to start with, a limited wish from the party wizard can let him auto-hit and the initiator should have some means of flight or teleportation, so it's basically a case of "If the target doesn't have immediate-action movement or has already used its immediate action, it dies as soon as it starts its turn within movement range of the initiator."

It's definitely tempting to give martial types a kill-basically-anything ability that ignores all kinds of defenses, but that sort of ability is such an all-or-nothing effect that (A) it gets stronger as the character levels because it's ignoring more and more defenses over time, not a good thing in a theoretically-unbounded epic environment, and (B) if there's this ability out there that slays everything in one hit and is only defended against by a handful of abilities, then eventually everyone needs to have one of those abilities to survive...and since the thing those abilities protect against is "all hit point damage" then any other damage dealers in the same party as an initiator with this maneuver are now totally useless.

**Elves** · 2020-12-01, 04:09 PM (ISO 8601)

Originally Posted by PairO'Dice Lost

Eh...the thing about XP costs is that you have to compare them with what you're giving up and delaying, and I don't think much of anything in epic is worth a significant fraction of a level.

Changed costs to 5k/10k/15k/60k for total disc cost of 150k and a real cost of 90k since the pinnacle is supposed to be a big choice not everyone will take: "I'll be behind in levels forever but this will be awesome every time I use it".

With these costs, 1st maneuver is basically a freebie if you take the feat. your first 3 mvs only cost 1 level which seems about right and is where many will stop. Lowest I would go is 6k/8k/12k/48k.

I don't think it's all that hard. It already says that you can only ready one epic discipline's worth of maneuvers at a time, so you can simply tack on that you can change the discipline if you re-ready maneuvers with Adaptive Style or similar and you're good to go.

Doing them as normal maneuvers with epic-level effects would require rebalancing them to work with recovery mechanics, as otherwise it's too awkward. It might be smoother, but would cannibalize your normal initiation even more since you're readying epic mvs in place of normal mvs. For now I'm just going to run with The Demented One's framework b/c my priority is to finish and move on.

Re: maneuver feedback

In regards to Causality Rending Mandala and Pummel the Horizon, I don't know if you caught this, but right now I have pinnacle stances still abiding by the 1/day restriction of other pinnacle maneuvers. Mandala's negative levels make this unnecessary, but do you think "Pummel" is too strong if unlimited use?

Spoiler: Invincible Sword Princess

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Blossoming Steel: As already noted, compares very unfavorably to Epic Whirlwind Attack, even on an AoO build.

But provides out of turn atks that can stack with that feat, so I don't agree.

Dancing with Victory: Noticeable penalties are rare in epic (though I suppose you could abuse feats like Shock Trooper or Karmic Strike with it), and "apply normal AC to touch AC" is a low-level feat benefit (e.g. Deflective Armor and Shield Ward).

Reduced duration to 3 rounds, added: "and gain a cumulative +1 dodge bonus to AC each time in a round you’re attacked by a foe".

Soft Blade Kiss: Just UMDing a wand of wraithstrike would nearly always be cheaper and more effective than using this.

It's the weakest mv in the disc but does last 2 turns instead of 1, and is meant as a bland/vanilla solution (in keeping with "Princess" being the bland/vanilla epic disc)

Victory Over All: The stacking bonus is going to be miniscule for anyone with enough of a Str focus to use the initial feat benefit, and the active block is actually worse than Wall of Blades or Baffling Defense because they can be applied against spell attacks and touch attacks.

But usable without limit and frees up a readied mv. Removed touch atk limitation.

Cosmos-Slaying Glory Blade: The useful part of this maneuver at epic levels is the ability to bypass "actually I don't die" stuff like delay death, Stance of Immortal Fortitude, and similar, so reworking it to be a "no, you really do die" effect plus a moderate extra damage rider instead of an auto-kill would be good.

If nerfing this maneuver, that would be a more balanced identity for it. Maybe +1000 damage and ignore "gotcha"s. But infinite damage is one of those "big statements".

Spoiler: Celestial Impetus

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Abundant Vector: Qualities like ghost touch and force and weapon material like riverine are available from low to mid level, making this feat very overcosted and bsaically redundant.

Prison of Duress: Combos with forcecage are awesome for casters because they can plop down AoEs to damage creatures trapped in it and do things to prevent trapped creatures from teleporting out. Initiators can do neither of those things, and they can't even attack trapped creatures because it's a solid cage, so any creature that could be meaningfully affected by this would be worse off (and the initiator better off) if the initiator just grappled them instead.

Added to the "Abundant Vector" feat: "You may attack freely through force barriers, such as forcecages, walls of force, and resilient spheres."
Could instead add that ability to the first maneuver, force veil, and lengthen its duration.

Force Veil: Anyone who cares about regularly flat-footing opponents picks up a reliable way to do so long before epic, and the extra damage is negligible. As a feat that a Sneak Attack-focused rogue could pick up at 21st level to free up some actions and resources it would be pretty cool, but on top of an initiator it's meh.

Yeah this maneuver needs to be rewritten. Any ideas for alternate effect?

Reaving Potency: Highly niche. Yes, it can combo with two other maneuvers in the discipline, but two rounds to set up 2d6/IL damage isn't that impressive and the maneuver is basically useless otherwise the character has a feud with an epic Wizard/Abjurant Champion/Argent Savant or something.

the point of this maneuver is that it's a niche effect, but the synergy with other celestial impetus mvs means you'll always have something to use it for. Upped damage to 1d6/CL of each dispelled effect.

Violent Repulsion: Near useless as-is, since there's no guarantee the character will have Craft (Sculpture) ranks when the discipline feat requires Profession (Sculptor). Assuming that was an error, it's not too bad since pushing someone 25+ feet away reactively is nice and there's no clause preventing the initiator's allies from AoOing the target, but it would have to have a much less restrictive trigger condition (and thus give it some utility and ally-protecting potential) to make it blue.

removed trigger condition

Auspice of Duplication: This is basically fission but with a shorter duration and harsh restrictions on actions taken.

had that one marked to rewrite anyway; will make it more closely duplicate fission.

Impenetrable Skin: See notes on above AC-boosting maneuvers.

As I said to noob, the point here is exactly because AC is less relevant at epic, you can give out a large bonus to basically be "don't target my AC". Upped to +20.

Impulse Labyrinth: The base effect of shooting forcecages at people is actually really cool, but the bonus damage is fairly small, the cover against enemies within the area is negligible, and the fact that you can't attack someone outside the resilient sphere boundary (when many epic monsters have speeds in excess of 60 or 120 feet and combats often occur at considerable range) or once you've forcecaged them really cuts down on its usefulness.

This mv is a mess. Might make it a more literal battlefield control -- either actually create force cubes that provide cover and you can direct to "swallow" foes, or draw a literal labyrinth of walls of force -- but not sure how to flavor that as a martial maneuver rather than a spell.

Bladeswarm: As with Cosmos-Slaying Glory Blade, "kill anything automatically, no save" is overpowered regardless of level or prereqs, the only saving grace of this maneuver being that delay death or similar will help you against this one. Even one weapon copy per initiator level auto-hitting would be stronger than a 13th-level-equivalent intensified chain missile spell, so try reworking it with some limits on how many attacks can be sent against a single target.

Damage most likely does have to be reduced. Halved # of weapons for now, but unfortunately makes it harder to calculate. (While removing int to damage makes your weapon too determinative). Don't want to target cap as rainbow finale is supposed to be the epic aoe, cosmos glory blade the single target, this one a flexible mix with the benefit of range.

Spoiler: Devouring Crypt

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Consuming Rapture: and contingent resurrection effects are common enough in epic that when you would want a faster effect it wouldn't matter anyway.

As I understand it, an immediate action can interrupt and prevent a contingency. & the temp hp gain additional utility with "transumptive".

Strike with the Risen: It's an widened-plus-a-bit-more mass snake's swiftness, but comes online 10 levels later, and can't affect your non-minion allies. Not particularly impressive.

Increased range and added bonus damage. Does mass s.s. include you? Not sure if "burst" includes you in area...I suspect RAI was it doesn't, but who knows.

Threat of Doom: It's Doomspeak, minus a saving throw, plus a restrictive trigger condition. Too niche and too many levels late once again.

I wanted to make this non triggered, automatically take penalty for 1 round any time they take an offensive action against you. But hard to fluff as a martial maneuver. Will think.

Transumptive Necrosis: This would be fantastic if it laster longer than an encounter so you could turn a bunch of commoners into a very beefy zombie army (or very lack-of-beef-y skeleton army). As it stands, though, basic skeletons and zombies don't really add anything to epic combat, even with a lot of extra HD, unless you're a necromancer or Requiem bard or something who can buff them up into actual threats.

I see 2 solutions: allow creating more advanced undead, or letting you empower the undead, perhaps by sacrificing additional temp hp or with another Crypt maneuver.

Probably will go with the first. Any undead that are simple to play but you think would still be relevant?

Embrace of the Last Sin: See above for the limits of temporary animation and plain ol' zombies and skeletons.

The undead created by this stance are permanent. Of course, to animate more, you have to leave and re-enter, so you can't accumulate. It's elegant IMO.

Spoiler: Dread Crown

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Aw shucks, I'm flattered.

They're cool disciplines, Stygian Nightmare is what we're taking as the NE disc (Hades and Gehenna).

Join Me in Misery: The concept is great, but this has the same pitfall as Iron Heart Surge: any conditions that would really be useful to transfer to an enemy are ones that prevent you from initiating the maneuver in the first place. It could be more useful if it had a clause allowing you to initiate it even if you couldn't normally do so, but even then you first have to have a debilitating condition or three get through all your defenses then manage to transfer it, which is extremely situational.

It's another mv that would work better as a spell since the melee attack application is also limiting. Added the exception clause. Could do 'or effects that ended for you this round/that you saved against' but that encourages gaming it.

Strike of Ultimate Corruption: This is basically a longer-duration more-sticky morality undone, coming in 12+ levels later, and nothing in the description prevents the newly-evil and fiendishly-enhanced target from just attacking you immediately.

added: "and regards you as its dear ally in the cause of evil, while detesting any good-aligned former comrades."

Spoiler: March of Aeons

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Recurring Bloodshed: This is basically Repeat Spell for maneuvers. Useful in theory, but extra standard actions are easy to come by at epic levels, and since you have to initiate it before the maneuver to be repeated, it's wasted if that maneuver happens to roll too low to hit the second time around.

Removed the "same values as last time" clause.

Killing Pendulum Stroke: Immunity to ability damage and drain is too common at epic levels, and the rate at which this reduces ability scores far too slow, for this to be useful in combat.

Clarified it's aging not ability damage, and doubled the damage.

Transience of Strife: This is an un-augmentable temporal acceleration, 10 levels late.

Nonetheless it's a stronger effect than is found in any nonepic mv save WRT. It could work as a 9th-level maneuver, but slides by as a weak epic IMO. Don't want to let you attack during it because it can be stacked with WRT. Could change to 2 rounds.

Eternity’s Martyr: The free 21 to 84 damage would make this a pretty good pick, except that basically all epic foes will end the effect after 1 round unless they natural-1 their save.

Changed to Wisdom check as in default spell.

Renewal of Heartbeats: If "positive conditions" includes buff spells, this is red.

was meant to, but removed as you're right the lost round is already a cost.

Causality-Rending Mandala: Considering that you can stay in a stance as long as you want, this already allows someone to time-travel backwards anywhere from multiple encounters to multiple years--and even if they stick to using it within combats this maneuver adds all of the time regression fiddliness to every round of combat for its duration, so it's almost red at the same time.

Added that you can't travel back if the negative levels would kill you. Sad to see the story potential go but prevents "Dream of Metal" type madness.

Spoiler: Primeval God-Monster

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Flashing Blood-Knuckle Fury: Extra full attacks and act-out-of-turn abilities are common enough that the ability to take a full attack out-of-turn is nice but not amazing.

Eh. I think it's a solid ability and is meant to be an offensive contrast to "Princess's" defensive 1st mv.

Crack the Sky: The lack of ability to aim the creature makes this effectively just +20d6 plus a more escapable mass time hop for all practical purposes, somewhat underwhelming for the level. If you could aim it, the unavoidable 1000 damage plus the ability to continue it through planar travel would make it blue.

made aimable.

Pummel the Horizon: This is basically Distant Shot for melee attacks, which is fantastic, and the fact that it ends on a miss is a good balancing factor without being crippling.

do you think it's too strong if not limited to entering it 1/day?

Spoiler: Rainbow's End

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Aurora Walk: While the faerie fire bit is nice, flight and teleportation are too common in epic for the prismatic wall portion of this to be really useful. If you added in an "If you totally encircle an opponent..." clause to deal with that, similar to Ring of Fire, it would easily go up to blue.

out of time but I'll add something with that in mind

Rainbow Finale: 45d6 plus four separate save-or-loses all at once in a huge AoE is too much, even before the Emerald Immolation effect. Having each creature be affected by a single random effect instead of all seven would probably bring it down to blue.

what if just a 1-mile-radius prismatic spray?

Spoiler: Shattered Glass

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Knowing the Desolate Heart: Free ice assassins are incredibly abusable, given that you have total control of them and so can do things like targeting your party caster to get a whole extra set of spell slots for the next hour. Adding a caveat that you can specify how it attacks the target but you can't do anything else with it would remove that abuse and leave it at blue.

changed.

to save you time: here are the ones I'd especially welcome your further thoughts on:

Spoiler