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Jan 4, 2012 -- 9:21AM, mvincent wrote:

Dec 31, 2011 -- 1:13AM, ThatWasTotallyNinja wrote:

Forgetting about RAW for a minute, what does everyone perfer for the result of a Vorpal critical hit?

I prefer #1 because it seems more intuitive (i.e. it probably won't occur to players to reroll dice that aren't there). Plus it's quicker/simpler.

I acknowledge that your points are totally reasonable.

Ditto. Debating RAW seems pretty silly at this point. Anyone interested in discussing preferences and balance?

Sure. Actually, after thinking about it for a little bit, I don't quite agree with your points as much anymore.

When it comes to being intuitive...yes, right now, as the rules are written, it's very unintuitive to reroll those dice. However, doing so also isn't RAW at all. If an errata was issued, let's say changing Vorpal to have the line "These rerolls are not automatically maximized by any maximum damage effect, such as on a critical hit." then it would suddenly become pretty obvious that you do get the rerolls, they just aren't maximized. So...being unintuitive shouldn't play into it, because that changes when the rules change.

In terms of being quicker, I don't know. Yes, it makes your turn take a little longer, because you have more rolling to do. But, all those rolls are being directly used to deal damage, which means the encounter is going to be a little shorter, because you dealt more damage. Which one is a bigger effect? I would expect the damage boost to overpower the extra rolling time, and have a net speedup.

Also, although balance isn't a huge concern at this level, effectively doing close to x3 damage on a crit rather than the more standard x2 (approx.) still seems better (when combined with vorpal's other features) than comparable lvl 30 weapon enhancements. I haven't seen DPR numbers yet for an optimized lvl 30 character, but it seems like the method would equate to about an additional 4 average dmg per hit, on top of vorpal's normal average added damage of about 5 dmg per hit (i.e. about +0.84 dmg per d4).

I agree that Vorpal under this interpretation would be slightly better than other enhancements...but I think that is how it should be. Keep in mind that other level 30 weapons aren't really an exact comparison, because Vorpal is exclusive to that level. If you could get the weapon at level 5, but now it has a bigger enhancement bonus, that shouldn't be as strong as a weapon that you first see at level 30. Plus, it's Rare, so if your DM thinks it's overpowered then you don't get to have one. Which again, should make it stronger.

Under the current standard interpretation of the rules, a Vorpal weapon is almost always less effective than Bloodiron, Rending, or Carnage. But it's rarer and can't be obtained until level 30 (also making it much more expensive). It should be stronger.

Of course, it shouldn't be too much stronger so that it's unreasonable - and with this interpretation, it isn't. Let's say that you can make 3 rolled weapon attacks per turn, with 19-20 crits, a brutal 1 Vorpal falchion, +40 as your static mods, and +12 to your crit damage (so you're pretty highly optimized). 1[W] = 9 damage. A regular hit = 58 damage. A crit = 141.2 damage without middle ground, 159.2 damage with it.

That's a 10% chance per attack to do 18 additional damage. So dpr increases by 5.4. Notice how optimized this character is though: assuming hits on a 10, dpr was already 120.66. Dpr increases by 4.5% under the middle ground interpretation. You'd be just as well off by giving an extra +1 to hit.

If you can also somehow add sneak attack to all your crits (...with a falchion...), then the difference on a crit with middle ground increases to 43 per crit, so a dpr increase of 12.9. This has an effect on dpr that's similar to a +2 to hit, which is pretty significant...except making 3 attacks per round with sneak attack and a falchion is a pretty unreasonable combination of effects.

Is it useful? Yes. Does it come even close to throwing off the game's balance? No. Not at all. If you have some particular reason to like other weapons (like if there's a Morninglord in your party), those things are still going to be better than Vorpal.