Persuader9494

Good eye!

Ha ha! You think this is my REAL head?

These are all excellent points.

I think druid suffers a little from being so concentration-dependent, but in a campaign with an appropriate number of encounters that's not really a big deal, you just want to ride one or two concentration spells for most of an encounter. And even in a too-few-combat-encounters situation, druid isn't bad, they just won't be quite as overpowered as everyone else.

Stars has always been a front-runner for me: I don't like that its special form conflicts with Wild Shape utility, but with only a short rest to recharge them it's pretty easy to get back up and running if you need a scout form. And it gives you a lot of flexibility both in and out of combat.

It's interesting because you don't want the level 13 end concept, so the question becomes how the power level compares to normal progression? Obviously the first level is the same since you can't multiclass, but at some point this is going to drop way off. I'm not sure at what point.

I think the biggest problem is that you'll have to be incredibly mediocre in all your abilities: even with +3 ASIs from race, point buy can only get you straight 13s, and while you could theoretically delay some abilities through ASIs, you pay extra in point buy past 13 (versus ASIs which are all equivalent).

You could probably set up an Eldritch Blast character with a bunch of utility cantrips, but making attacks with a +1 bonus is going to be agonizing, unlike your damage since you can't take Agonizing Blast. You'll scale with level but it'll drop off pretty quick, since one level in lock keeps you behind on damage and you'll never get the splashier spells more focused characters will.

As others have said, Sunlight Sensitivity is probably the gamechanger here. If you're getting reliable advantage, that's huge, and if you aren't then you don't really get much from Volo's.

If you're locked to Scout, I think this provides a strong argument for Volo's kobold. The level 17 ability is very powerful, but locks down your build in a couple ways:

• Because you need to attack two different targets to get full Sneak Attack damage, you will almost always want to be building for ranged. This means that the sorcerer cantrip you get from Mordenkainen's kobold is just utility: you won't be able to use Booming Blade well, and Fire Bolt won't be as good as just taking a shot. It also means that Draconic Cry isn't very good, as you'd need to be within 10 feet of your enemies to use it.
• Because it takes up your bonus action, that means you're missing a reliable way to get Sneak Attack. Steady Aim would be fine on other ranged rogues, but it also uses your bonus action. Pack Tactics provides this quite easily off your frontliner, who will generally be within 5 feet of two enemies.

If you're planning a more melee-focused rogue, you probably want a different subclass.

The problem I have with bard (and in general spontaneous casters) is that they can't change out spells except on leveling, and they have very few spells known.

So that's great if you want something like Enhance Ability that's going to be useful in a lot of situations, but it'd be very hard to take a spell like Locate Object, because it's a significant chunk of your spells known and you'd probably use it 3 or 4 times across an entire campaign.

But if you're a prepared caster, if it's looking like a situation where you'd want Locate Object, you can just prepare it that day, use it as needed, and then swap it back out for something more generally useful. That kind of approach is what I'm trying to build on.

Note that while Augury has a costly material component, the component isn't consumed.

I think you covered everything that's relevant. It's a neat item in that it strongly incentivizes you to throw out divination spells as much as you can. Great for information gathering, but not a lot of combat relevance, and I'd expect the wizard to use it for a few days/weeks to get a bunch of information about the current plot and then attune to something else as he gets more magic items and more gold that makes just paying the price for new required divinations more reasonable.

Fortune's Favor doesn't seem wildly impactful to me, compared to some of the other 5th level spells you could be throwing around: you could have one reroll for each party member, or you could have a Transmute Rock or Wall of Stone that completely reshapes the encounter.
I think the one place it is pretty nice is on a Divination Wizard where you're not paying the spell slot cost, you're just paying whatever the difference between a 5th and a 4th level slot would be.

I also think that's the only real benefit of Expert Divination here: it's a tough sell casting Legend Lore at the start of a combat day even without the gold cost, it's better to make that the last spell of the day if you didn't need all your slots, or better yet just doing it on a downtime day. Especially since it'd cost you a preparation slot as well.

Optimizing this is probably just "Divination Wizard, cast Fortune's Favor once a day for every combat day, cast free Divination/Legend Lore every downtime day". If you consider that the effect of the item (trade a 5th level for a 4th and the whole party gets one reroll) that looks pretty good if not amazing.

It might not be worth the spell progression delay, but if you took Hexblade to 3 you could pick up Pact of the Chain for a familiar, which you could have be an imp for great flavor and a little extra survivability with invisibility.

Pact of the Tome also offers a familiar through the Book of Ancient Secrets invocation, but that doesn't feel like it's as worth the delay.

I would give some thought to taking Eloquence over Whispers: while the bonus damage is nice, the big thing is making sure you can reliably get Fear running, and Unsettling Words allows that reliably.

Your payoff here is permanently locking down one target for a whole combat as long as you can consistently land hits, and in that situation the damage rolls won't really matter so much.

They don't get another save, the rest of your party cleans up the others while you just plink away at your target (or just shoot at other targets, honestly, you don't actually need to kill this one fast).

The primary drawback is a lack of reliable advantage,

For reliable advantage, the easiest approach would be Blindness/Deafness, but unfortunately I think that qualifies as the target not having line of sight to you anymore for Fear.

Shield Master won't work either since the target will likely just stand from prone on their turn, before taking the AoO.

The Help action would give you a consistent source of advantage though (for only one attack, but that's all you need), and it's not too hard to get Find Familiar on a bard: using a Magical Secrets on it feels bad, but Ritual Caster or Magic Initiate would work. The normal risk of your owl getting swatted is much less since you can just move him into danger after your target is locked down from Fear.

Hmm, fair point, especially with some of the other weapon types they mentioned where it becomes more obvious that no one could look at a single-bladed axe and go "yep definitely a double axe"

I think it's the same reason so many people want to become streamers, or actors,

Live service is a winner-take-all market, where if you hit it big you get SUPER big, and because the biggest names dominate the landscape you see them more and it's easy to forget that for every Fortnite there are hundreds of The Cycle: Frontier.

But when you're starting out it's easy to convince yourself you're going to be the next Fortnite, so you rush down that road rather than more reliable-but-boring ones like "I'm going to make the next Baba is You".

Feels like an isolated demand for rigor: it's pretty standard to just take a bunch of medieval weapon names and haphazardly slap them on the different models in the game.

I don't know that that's that big a deal: you certainly don't go to a Diablo game for any sort of realism, and the names are based off real-life words that don't really have a match in most fantasy worlds.

"Claymore" is just derived from the Scottish for "great sword". Scotland isn't part of Sanctuary, so we've already lost the thread, the word is essentially meaningless in Diablo's setting.

And if we try to resolve this with something like "the word isn't actually 'claymore', it's some word in the language of Sanctuary humans that translates to 'claymore'", well, that also means it basically just translates to "great sword", and now we've got a great sword named "great sword", which seems to work fine.