Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 urubos Aug 04, 2011 15:34:23	Has there been any news about the ability to add dragonshards to magic weapons yet?
#2 kenjoon Aug 04, 2011 17:20:08	Has there been any news about the ability to add dragonshards to magic weapons yet? My expectation on information like this is the earliest you'll hear about it is in the patch notes on update day.
#3 CorrinAvatan Aug 04, 2011 17:55:34	Yet another reason I hate the new CB.   "Hey, guys, let's use an online version of the program, except remove half the functionality that's in the old, offline version!
#4 salla Aug 04, 2011 19:46:49	Yet another reason I hate the new CB.   "Hey, guys, let's use an online version of the program, except remove half the functionality that's in the old, offline version!  "Hey, guys, let's keep using the online version when it lets douchebag pirates rip us off and is costing us money, it's a perfect business model."
#5 nshoe Aug 05, 2011 0:40:58	"Hey, guys, let's keep using the online version when it lets douchebag pirates rip us off and is costing us money, it's a perfect business model." The really sad thing is that 10 months after the release of the Online CB those "douchebag pirates" have access to a more usable Character Builder than those of us who are paying customers (at least where non-essentials characters are concerned)
#6 kenjoon Aug 06, 2011 13:56:59	"Hey, guys, let's keep using the online version when it lets douchebag pirates rip us off and is costing us money, it's a perfect business model." The really sad thing is that 10 months after the release of the Online CB those "douchebag pirates" have access to a more usable Character Builder than those of us who are paying customers (at least where non-essentials characters are concerned) There are two different sets of "pirates" being talked about.  The "true" pirates who (as you say) "have access to a more usable Character Builder" and then the "pirates" that WotC was worried about.  My personal definition of "pirates that WotC was worried about" are all those who were taking advantage of their previous business model by getting a DDI membership once or twice a year for the updates to CB and for $10-20 getting all printed book material. Their "new" model is you can "rent" all D&D material by being a DDI member OR you can buy all the books (costs a lot more, but you can keep them forever).  The "new" model is sustainable where the old was not.
#7 thecasualoblivion Aug 08, 2011 11:11:56	The previous Character Builder didn't support Dragonshards either
#8 thespaceinvader Aug 08, 2011 12:27:11	Indeed.  You could equip them, but their bonuses were not actually calculated properly IIRC.
#9 Potmos Aug 08, 2011 18:07:01	The previous Character Builder didn't support Dragonshards either Sure it did.  Go to your equipment page, right-click on the weapon, and select the dragonshard you want from the drop-down list beside "Dragonshard Augment:" In the old builder, all of my characters who are using them (a bard and a druid with the shard of the mage and a paladin with the shard of radiance) all show the extra damage for powers that they work with. The real kicker is that if you import a character with an equipped dragonshard into the new builder, it shows the dragonshard in the damage calculations of the powers for that character.  So the system supports it, but there's no way in the interface to properly equip it.
#10 thecasualoblivion Aug 08, 2011 19:23:45	The previous Character Builder didn't support Dragonshards either Sure it did.  Go to your equipment page, right-click on the weapon, and select the dragonshard you want from the drop-down list beside "Dragonshard Augment:" In the old builder, all of my characters who are using them (a bard and a druid with the shard of the mage and a paladin with the shard of radiance) all show the extra damage for powers that they work with. The real kicker is that if you import a character with an equipped dragonshard into the new builder, it shows the dragonshard in the damage calculations of the powers for that character.  So the system supports it, but there's no way in the interface to properly equip it.   How about that. It does and it doesn't. Things like Siberys Shard of the Mage work fine with old CB and the elemental/radiant shards work with powers that inherently deal that type of damage, but the elemental/radiant shards don't work with things like Frost and Radiant weapons that can change damage types.
#11 CorrinAvatan Aug 09, 2011 22:27:33	"Hey, guys, let's keep using the online version when it lets douchebag pirates rip us off and is costing us money, it's a perfect business model." The really sad thing is that 10 months after the release of the Online CB those "douchebag pirates" have access to a more usable Character Builder than those of us who are paying customers (at least where non-essentials characters are concerned) There's no reason that they couldn't have just changed the old CB to require an internet connection to their servers (or, if they wanted to be really nice, require that it was connected to their servers within the past 24-48 hours to allow offline character creation). Believe me, Salla, I know why they did it.  Same reason Netflix raised their rates: they were leaving money on the table, and being screwed by people who bought one month of DDI just to get the CB, and then never updated it for months on end, when that was not their intended business model. I can understand and forgive that.  But I'll tell you that I do NOT find it acceptable that, after having a program that was comprable to using a Ford F-150 (nothing pretty, but it can do what you need it to do), to suddenly going to a Toyota Yaris hatchback (nothing pretty, but it's REALLY small).  Especially after 10 months.  Seriously.  In 10 months, a single guy in the company I work for programmed, from nothing, an in-store touchscreen kiosk for people to pay their bills, calculating and modifying fees for over 2,000 different utility companies.  I respect him as a programmer.  I had a discussion with him about the new CB, and he can't get his head around the idea that it doesn't have the functionality it had before.  In his spare time one week, he even got a prototype working, although it only worked for the classes in the PHB/PHB2/PHB3, and the max level was 10. Now, either Jacob is a master programmer (which I admit could be the case), or there is some serious slacking or something holding up the entire process.  That's what it seems like to me.  I honestly don't understand why it takes 10 months for the CB to be at the point where the old CB was, especially when we have been asking for a lot of the same things for the past 10 months (like the ability to Houserule feats, for example).
#12 kenjoon Aug 10, 2011 8:45:27	I honestly don't understand why it takes 10 months for the CB to be at the point where the old CB was, especially when we have been asking for a lot of the same things for the past 10 months (like the ability to Houserule feats, for example).  While I agree with your assessment on the snails pace of new or improved features, I just want to mention that just because we ask for stuff doesn't mean that it automatically gets added to WotC's "TODO" list.  Requested features are "business opportunities" which get evaluated and prioritized (or thrown out) by some magic voodoo over at the WotC offices.
#13 urubos Aug 26, 2011 9:17:17	It's just unfortunate that we lost so much functionality. Now, almost a year later, while they have fixed most of the major bugs that caused the system to be nearly unusable at launch, they still haven't gotten around to adding back most of these features. We get barely any communication regarding the character builder or really any other tools.