The Gaming Den

Having some time to look at Divine Power, the Messenger of Peace build is looking pretty powerful. Not just the Paragon Path, but all the new "nondamaging" powers they add to support it. Who knew, the way to win at Padded Sumo was to just give up on damage.?

Since there is still no Wis/Cha race, go Human and enjoy the stackable bonusing of Peacemaker's Action+Action Surge. Two attacks at +7, the first of which you use to lower defenses for the second.

While we're talking stacking, the rules on penalties let you zap an enemy into temporary irrelevance without much trying. You don't quite go as far off the RNG as the Righteous Brand Cleric, but the defense penalties let everyone on your team join in the game of dogpile.

Peacemaker's Pronouncement is combo-riffic. Sadly it doesn't work with the Pacify you get a level earlier, so you have to work to get the infinite stunlock, but still very worthwhile. This makes me want to dig through Lago's razor builds looking for all the lower-level ways to recharge encounter powers again.

And your level 20 daily is probably the best single power use to end an encounter outright.

The level 20 daily doesn't quite work like that. Note that they're only affected by it until the end of the encounter.

Unless an encounter is defined in a wonky way in the 4E rules, using the power like that will end the encounter....and then they can attack again. You're back to square one.

Break wrote:Unless an encounter is defined in a wonky way in the 4E rules, using the power like that will end the encounter....and then they can attack again. You're back to square one.

Kind of. An encounter is essentially "until the end of combat or 5 minutes, whichever happens first...or last, whichever is more convenient." Not so much wonky as vague, I suppose, but I've seen several other powers mentioned that make no sense unless you broaden encounter to mean "5-minute period of time."

Break wrote:The level 20 daily doesn't quite work like that. Note that they're only affected by it until the end of the encounter.

Unless an encounter is defined in a wonky way in the 4E rules, using the power like that will end the encounter....and then they can attack again. You're back to square one.

Not really, because you just have to attack one of them. It breaks the effect on that one, but his companions still can't do anything, making it basically the single best divide and conquer power ever. Basically you run around and murder each monster one by one while its allies sit by totally unable to do anything.

That power would pretty much be powerful in 3E, let alone 4E, where it's basically the most powerful thing they've printed so far. Even on a miss it totally screws em over, since a -5 is virtually off the RNG.

Oooh, silly me, I just realized that Astral Seal gives real healing, and not just temp HP.Now everybody else in the party full heals every short rest without expending any surges. This will probably run up against the 4e DMG "no bag of rats" clause, but if your DM tries that, you should weasel around it with sneaky power combos, CGD and attacking objects.

Even without blatant cheese, it's still pretty good as "two attacks for one character to heal 2+Wis+Cha+BS" is going to average out to probably better healing than errata'd battlerager vigor "one attack to Gain Con+BS temp HP" - but because the cleric is doing the healing and can spread it around among the group, rather than the fighter self-healing, expect nobody to even notice - even though that makes it more versatile. To max it out go with Healer's Implement (DP), Mace of Healing (AV) and Gloves of the Healer (AV) stack here - adding up to like 15 points/round healed at 8th level, and 19+1d6 at 14th. And at lower levels you can use your daily Beacon of Hope (PHB) to increase this by another 5.


Also Dismissal is punk-rock by 4e standards. Even on a miss, the target still goes away for a round. Symbol of Power (PHB) and Phrenic Crown (AV) are the way to go here.