Hmmm. Let's say a combat is five rounds, that's 7.5 damage. OK, three combats a day... 22.5 damage. I suppose that's almost respectable, but it's like death by papercuts.
The title says it all, really. Am I missing something, or is getting to re-roll the 1's for sneak attack dice kind of... lame? I'm not a min/max sort of person, but at a level where other paragon paths are getting a huge daily attack, the Master Thief gets... an expected average of 1.5 more damage per round.
Hmmm. Let's say a combat is five rounds, that's 7.5 damage. OK, three combats a day... 22.5 damage. I suppose that's almost respectable, but it's like death by papercuts.
The designers, as far as I can tell, don't really seem to grasp how useless that sort of ability is.
Anyway, I doubt that's much of an imbalance, when looked at across the whole class.
Master Thief is a pretty bad PP IIRC. There are far better ones you could take.
Almost certainly, but is it necessary to do so? Is a thief that takes that paragon path really at a noticeable disadvantage?
That's exactly what I was thinking. It's not stellar overall, but it is not really bad, either. It just... gives you nothing to look forward to.
Not much, certainly. People who don't look at the math will appreciate it more. There's a viceral, instinctual feeling that as long as you're not rolling a 1, you're doing really well. It allows an immediate bounce back from the disappointment of seeing a pile of ones. Mathematically, no, it's not much, but there's another level to it.
I'm kidding, I'm kidding! Mostly!
Master Thief is a pretty bad PP IIRC. There are far better ones you could take.
Almost certainly, but is it necessary to do so? Is a thief that takes that paragon path really at a noticeable disadvantage?
If they like that kind of thing, yes, actually. The lack of a daily versus .5 damage per sneak attack die is a fairly major difference, particularly when you can relatively easily pick up rerolling 1s (ALL 1s) with a 14th level pair of gloves. It's OK, but there are far, far better options.
Master Thief is a pretty bad PP IIRC. There are far better ones you could take.
Almost certainly, but is it necessary to do so? Is a thief that takes that paragon path really at a noticeable disadvantage?
If they like that kind of thing, yes, actually. The lack of a daily versus .5 damage per sneak attack die is a fairly major difference, particularly when you can relatively easily pick up rerolling 1s (ALL 1s) with a 14th level pair of gloves. It's OK, but there are far, far better options.
That's not the same as being at a "noticeable disadvantage." If both builds could get through the same set of encounters but, everyone in the party of the "better" option having three healing surges left each, instead of only two, I'd say there's no noticeable disadvantage to taking one over the other.
But if you did the same and one died and the other lived, it would be. The hypotheticals are fairly meaningless. I'd notice it, others wouldn't.
They're meaningless because we don't know which it is. I simply have a strong suspicion which it is.
And perhaps noticeable is the wrong word. The point is that some differences don't make a difference. If the characters end the day with extra healing surges, it doesn't matter if they have two left or three. If the monsters drop in the same number of rounds, it doesn't matter if they died at 0 HP or -10.
At a table where the PCs are otherwise highly optimised and the DM only ever uses Level+2 encounters or harder (because anything less is basically a speedbump to such a party) and pulls no punches, you will certainly notice the difference.
Most groups are probably somewhere between those extremes.
If your attitude to CharOp is basically "What difference does it make?", then you're probably at a table where you wouldn't notice the difference between a thief with the Master Thief PP and one with the Jack-Of-All-Trades PP.
If your attitude to CharOp is basically "What difference does it make?", then you're probably at a table where you wouldn't notice the difference between a thief with the Master Thief PP and one with the Jack-Of-All-Trades PP.
I guess so. My experience with even moderate optimization, even at Living Forgotten Realms games, is that it's very, very much more than the game requires. And in D&D there's nothing I see to be gained from going beyond "good enough" to "as good as possible."
And in D&D there's nothing I see to be gained from going beyond "good enough" to "as good as possible."
*Nods* Nothing at all wrong with that. It all comes down to what actually qualifies as "good enough" at your particular table.
Problems only arise when different people at the same table have significantly different ideas about how much optimisation (or encounter difficulty) is desirable.
Problems only arise when different people at the same table have significantly different ideas about how much optimisation (or encounter difficulty) is desirable.
Mostly when a DM desires an encounter to go one way, and it goes another, though that can happen even when people are on the same page about optimization.