Arcanis Character Poll, take 2 (or 3?)

Martial access to Advanced Armour Training and the LMT advancements are the biggest perks. For characters not using medium or heavy armours, Heirloom armour may be meeting the need for Expert archetypes.

For Ss’kethis, I seriously looked at Martial rather than Expert just for the Advanced Armor Training. The huge benefit to AAT is that it can reduce the effective bulk of bulk 1 armor to 0 (exceptional reduces bulk by 1 to a minimum of 1 but there is no minimum for AAT). However, I knew I wanted to be decent at both fighting and casting and I just couldn’t make it work as Martial.

I will disagree that Divine is useless (or even ineffective) as Haakon is an utter terror on the battlefield, at least in the short term. That said, if you want a COMBAT divine, you have to go Illiir, Hurrian, or Nier with the rest losing out rapidly compared to what you can do with others. Hell, I’ve already seen at 2.5 with Haakon that he spends less time smacking things and more time in the background healing and buffing, but there is a niche for that too. What would make Divine far more powerful is more Devout Talents, or at least more broadly useful ones, as that is where I’m finding my own character is lacking.

I also admit that Experts the “multiclass” option for this system, but to be honest I have never seen an Expert who can do any one thing as well as the ‘specialist’ Archetypes.

Edit: Added the Sheems. Don’t know how they got missed either :-/

I know that many people have gone forward to make excellent Expert Divine casters, or Expert Arcane casters. But I can’t help it. I just feel that this is wrong. So when I make an Expert character for my pre-gen pool, I never select Prestidigitation as one of my two Skill Talents.

Its a bad choice to make in creation anyway, as you don’t get Unravel the Thread. The usual method is to take Adaptable at Step 2 to get the three skill ranks by Step 8 and Prestidigitation and Spell Casting together at Step 9.

Of all the Expert casters I’ve built, I’ve never taken Prestidigitation in step 2 – always in step 9. Step 2 is for Adaptable and a racial/foundation edge. On the other hand, most of my expert casters aren’t dedicated casters so I often consciously do not take ASC/DSC in step 9 (so no unravel) – most of the time, it’s not a problem but when you need unravel, you generally really need unravel.

some people have a hard time meeting the requirements of 3 ranks in a lore skill

There’s no good reason that an Expert Archetype can’t have 3 ranks in a Lore skill by Step 9.

My general opinion of Experts is they are one of the most flexible and strong Archetypes in the game. With 3 advancements they can get any 3+Passive Logic skills at 3 ranks per tier. That’s typically 6 or 7. They can opt to specialize in particular skills at the beginning rather than have breadth because it’s easy for them to add skills later at good ranks. They won’t keep up with a hyper specialist caster of any build from a Talent perspective. But unless the caster is planning on taking more than 2 casting related Talents per tier, they can certainly keep pace. Even with adding more than 2 they can do it at an opportunity cost. They have the hardest time keeping up with a Martial Archetype, but if they selected Expert over it, it’s because there is some other area of focus requiring 3 ranks / tier or lots of skill Talents.

The difference is that at a minimum, the Expert’s secondary if not primary focus is always skills. If you want a more martial caster then a Martial archetype with secondary casting is probably best.

Even with that an Expert can with minimal effort keep a combat skill and casting skill maxed, and for one advancement take the best Martial Technique and A/DSC talent every tier with a ton of room left over for further specialization. The mechanical advantage can be seen in the poll Cody posted for characters. While a limited sample set, 40% of primary characters are Experts. The second most common is Arcane. I expect that’s because you can’t start with full casting as a Elder or Eldritch caster as an Expert. You can with Primal, Sarishan Sorcerer-Priest and Psionics now using the Undisciplined Psion from CoH.

Expert is a good foundation for a lot of characters. A bit of tweaking would help the balance between the Archetypes. I like that the system supports so many different ways to get to the same concept. Choices such as Archetype just help put the spin on it.

With a sweep of his hat,

Paul

@ Harliquinn: Which does fit the character that Arcane Spell Casting ability is a rare ability, while Divine and Primal is a learned or imbued ability.

I don’t recall Arcane being ‘rare’, only dangerous. My understanding is that Eldritch was a ‘learned’ ability and ‘Elder’ is an imbued ability, so by that rationale there *should* be a Background to have learned them in your past.

John