I was going to have them lose starting access to their Daily Attack Powers, In this setting their class Daily Attack Powers will take the place of powers normally accessible through magic Items. Adding some grandeur and drama to magical equipment.
I was hoping to give them more uses of their class encounter attack powers as a balancing feature but I can not settle on a good amount.
Should it be say your 1st level encounter power 2/encounter, or 3/ encounter? or would a "you can use any combo of your class encounter attack powers X/encounter" where X number of times increases with each new power learned? would that be a better solution?
This is just a brain storm right now. My hope is to add some umph and awe to magic items and mixing up combat a little more.
How do you plan to determine what powers belong to what magic item group (head, neck, etc), or all of these simply going on weapons?
What are you doing about magic item daily powers that aren't really attacks and are not duplicated by daily attack powers?
How do you plan to rescale the magic item usage chart so that they are using the "proper" number of daily powers between rests?
If they are still getting the appropriate number of daily attack powers, though from magic items instead of their class, why do you need to increase the number of encounter powers they get?
The problem with letting them reuse the same Encounter power over and over is that some of them are really ridiculously good. Stuff like Storm of Blows (that's the 13th level Barbarian Multi-attack, right?) is overpowered once per encounter, nevermind 2+ times.
So if you have a Sword of Lasting Threat as a Fighter, you could use Lasting Threat as a Bigger Daily Item power. But if you lose the sword, you lose the daily power.
Different weapons could have different powers, so your high level character will probably run around with a few backup weapons; you'd need to give your players a lot of magic items (to keep up, they'd need 4 different weapons at roughly the right attack bonus) and you need to track Bigger Daily Item uses and normal ones seperately because any Class Daily power will blow a normal Item Daily power out of the water.
And keep an eye on multiclassing; you should be careful about allowing the Fighter to use the Axe of Silver Phoenix Rage for easy access to Barbarian powers.
If you want to place emphasis on weapons without changing the whole system, you could add a new category of daily item power, which are basically class powers except it's not you determining which one you have, but your weapon.
So if you have a Sword of Lasting Threat as a Fighter, you could use Lasting Threat as a Bigger Daily Item power. But if you lose the sword, you lose the daily power.
Different weapons could have different powers, so your high level character will probably run around with a few backup weapons; you'd need to give your players a lot of magic items (to keep up, they'd need 4 different weapons at roughly the right attack bonus) and you need to track Bigger Daily Item uses and normal ones seperately because any Class Daily power will blow a normal Item Daily power out of the water.
And keep an eye on multiclassing; you should be careful about allowing the Fighter to use the Axe of Silver Phoenix Rage for easy access to Barbarian powers.
Ok, this sounds like what I had buzzing around in my head. If I wanted to have say one weapon/implement that kept up with the PCs, would I just follow what you wrote but keep it to a singluar item? Sorta like old Weapons of Legacy?
Optionally; you could pick their Dailies if you really want the weapon to decide what powers they get.
