Good day. I'm running the aforementioned game Matar is playing in, and also ran Niezck's game before it. I wanted to outline before this post that despite everything I'm going to say later, I am quite genuinely impressed with the quality of the work presented in this class. The fact that in my small online campaigning experience I have had not just one person looking to use it, but two, points strongly at what can only be an enticingly written class. If my personal usage statistics are to believed, more enticingly written than everything else ever homebrewed put together, though I suspect such a small sample size isn't enough to come to conclusions like that.
However, I feel there are some pretty serious balance issues not just with the class, but with the theory behind the class.
I'l start with a quote:
DragoonWraith wrote:Counter commentary (not necessarily sufficient to counter your points, but this is my thought-process): It's personal-only (a very big deal later), and the Warlock gains the same at 6th rather than 5th, but it literally is all day, every day, without any refreshing or action usage.
This isn't on the face of it a bad point - Warlocks do indeed have a similar ability to always-fly, and that's fine, isn't it? There's the counterargument to be made that this is coming online at the same level as T1 Wizards, who are always advised to take the Fly spell as it is excellent, and the Swordmage's is better, but at least there's precedent for this ability existing. Well, not quite - that is in fact the Warlock's entire schtick, being the class that is written to be the best at staying 'on' at full power all day. That's a pretty convincing schtick, but we can work with that - we can say that the Swordmage is also meant to be just as good as the Warlock at that. It's actually a little better, gaining its always-on earlier (and no, action use isn't an issue here when the duration is minutes/level - no fights last that long, and you can recover the incantation in midair), but it's only a level better in return for a minor drawback and the Warlock isn't exactly overpowered already. Okay, no major problem. Let's move on.
Let's look at the Scourge incantation next. Here we have a fairly ho-hum attack, attached to a full-strength Turn Undead effect. This works as a cleric of your level, and uses your (entirely SAD) Charisma stat to bolster it further. Well, again, this isn't too bad, is it? It's a Cleric feature, after all, already - they can do this. Now, usually they're not as good at this as Swordmages are - they can't afford to focus as singularly on Charisma, for a start, and they also have a quite seriously restrictive limit on how many times per day they can do this - compared with Swordmages who can manage a rather impressive 7,200 turn undead attempts a day. However, this isn't a huge deal, again, is it? Clerics -can- specialise to be as high-Charisma as Swordmages are if they don't care about ever casting spells - they won't, sure, but they can. They'll never manage to pick up enough turn attempts to seriously be able to claim to do it 'all day', but they can end up with quite a lot. Now, Swordmages are clearly better at this than Clerics are, and clerics are a T1 class, but we can excuse this by saying Turn Undead is only a small sphere of the Cleric's specialisation. And that's fine, too, but we have to chalk down another fact - this is another thing that the Swordmage is the best class in the game at doing. Which is also fine - we now have two full-blown schticks for this class that it is the best in the world at. Let's see if we can find any more.
We can look at Daggerhail next. By all accounts, a rather average-looking power to have by mid-levels, I don't doubt it - but it's a level 1 power. So let's look and see how it stacks up compared to the class that is the best at outputting blasting spells - the Warmage. We could compare it to the Sorcerer or the Wizard instead, but they'd only do worse, so let's not bother - let's skip the T1 classes, and go right to the specialists. It has some area of effect damage spells, and the only one at 1st level in the book the Warmage was drawn from that doesn't have a costly material component is Burning Hands. That's okay, Burning Hands is a staple first level spell after all, we all know it - 1d4 damage, in a cone. That's actually quite a lot worse than 2d3 damage in a 10ft burst - it affects fewer squares, for less damage, requires you to be up close and personal, and it's energy damage, so things will resist it, even at this low level. Now, Warmages also have Warmage Edge, which makes them better at this than Wizards and Sorcerers, but again - they're not going to be able to focus on their Int in the same way that Swordmages can focus on their Charisma, so this number is going to be lower. At 1st level, it doesn't even matter that this is lower, but it is yet another point to the Swordmages. Another really important point is that the Warmage is probably only doing this 3 or 4 times per day and it's his best thing, but hey, that already pales into insignificance in light of the fact that his option is also worse.
So to recap, in terms of Area of Effect damage, the Swordmage has:
- the best damage
- the best range
- the widest and most flexible area
- and the most reusable option.
So it's the best at another thing - AOEs. Okay.
Let's move onto something quicker now. Blinkplate. Obviously not imbalanced, right? It's full-plate, but with a duration - so worse than full-plate. What's the best armour a 1st level Fighter can afford? A breastplate. Which is worse. Blinkplate is also better than, say, Mage Armour, if we're looking for a casting thing to compare it to - much better. So our first level Swordmage can also easily be the best at AC.
I could carry on, but I suspect anyone reading understands my point by now. It's clear that the way the power level for this class' abilities, at least at the very early levels (I certainly haven't playtested it far enough to know how good, bad or indifferent the higher levels are, so I can't comment) was determined by looking at the *best* class in the game for doing a thing, then making something comparable. This is just not a good way to design a class with lots of flexibility, period, because as it is there's just no reason to make a specialist character at level 1 rather than a swordmage who'll do your job better than you. It is my opinion that the class needs a bit more flexibility in terms of what it does in a round of combat (so more readied incantations), in return for those incantations being scaled -right- back to the level of Tome of Battle maneuvers. That proved to be a good system, and while it might seem overdone to make something similar, you cannot have the mechanics both ways - the ability to do a thing without squandering any of your future resources is *better* than the ability to do a thing by squandering power for the day, and if you build your incantations by looking at spells of the same level, they will always be higher on the power curve than T1 classes' options.
I apologise for having to write a post like this, but I felt the people in my games who were coming here to contribute weren't really getting at the heart of my issues with the class. (Having a not-that-good 3 weapon at level 3,for instance? Absolutely fine. Don't change that, it doesn't break a thing, it's just another way to be about as good as other competent TWF-style combatants.) Having googled around a bit, it looks to me like most of the playtesting on this class has been done at much higher levels than 1, 2 and 3, so I hope this information is valuable to you, and can give you some quick tips as to where to start looking in the aforementioned daunting task of rebalancing this class.
Thanks for reading,
-DC
