u/Smashifly

Auriel has some compelling reasons to pick her, namely instant healing, displacement and hard CC, and combos with with many DPS carries.

One issue I've seen with her though is that her healing is fundamentally capped by the cool down of her W ability, which is 4 seconds. Compared to some healers, she doesn't have a ton of tools to keep someone alive other than her ult and displacing enemies. You can drop a full energy bar of healing on someone, but you have no way of applying any more healing (or shielding, or armor) until those 4 seconds pass, no matter how much energy you and your hat are generating.

Some of her talents can help increase the amount of healing done by a single cast, but that still just extends the issue. Even with the talent that increases her max energy on full casts, you just push out how big those heals are, which only helps if you can drop your heal when an Ally's max HP can accept the whole thing. She's often called a burst healer, but she needs time to drop multiple casts of her heal to actually pop someone to full.

I really wish sometimes that she had any way of reducing the cool down of her W. It doesn't need to be a full reset, but it could reward filling the bar so that you don't waste energy generation when you are waiting for cool down.

Here's two versions of a possible talent I would see placed on level 16 or 20:

- When your energy bar becomes full, reduce the cool down of Ray of Heaven by 1.5 seconds

- When your energy bar is full, every 20 energy you generate reduces the cooldown of Ray of Heaven by 0.1 seconds

Thoughts?

I find it disappointing that Spears don't really have a niche in 5e. They're one of the most common and iconic weapons in fantasy and history, but there's not really a reason to use them.

Javelins are lighter and cheaper for thrown strength weapons, and martial weapons have better versatile options. The best weapons for polearm master are glaive or Halberd, and quarterstaffs are technically usable if you really want bludgeoning damage on your polearm or want to use Shillelagh. This leaves spears with no real purpose.

So, what would break if you gave spears finesse? It's a good fit, as spears in real life required a fair amount of precision to be effective. This gives them a unique niche as the only finesse weapon that can be wielded with two hands, and the only polearm.

The most obvious use is to put polearm master on a rogue, but rogues have plenty of ways to get bonus action attacks anyway. It also gives access to the Great Weapon Fighting style, which is marginal and hardly best in slot for fighting styles.

What kind of build would you do for a character fighting with a spear with dex if this was an option?

I've been trying to reduce my social media scrolling and replace the action with learning something instead. I found a great app for learning Geography and I've managed to memorize the locations of all the countries of the world in about a week.

I'm looking for similar apps for other topics, like science and chemistry, history, art, or other subjects. I'm not interested in Duolingo or other language apps right now, but feel free to drop suggestions.

I'm *not* looking things like brain teasers or logic puzzles, I want something that I can retain useful knowledge from. I'd also ideally prefer something that doesn't require audio, so I can play in public without headphones.

Any suggestions?

Let me explain - I've identified a few specific subclasses that are fine on their own, but suffer due to a lack of variety in what spells are compatible with their class features.

Among these are both Tempest Cleric and Storm Sorcerer. They both want thunder and lightning spells, but there's actually a pretty limited number of useful spells for each level that deal that type of damage, and not all of them are available to these classes naturally. Tempest Cleric gets the worse Call Lightning instead of Lightning Bolt, and there's only one or two lightning and thunder spells at each level, many of which are downgrades from similar spells.

The other one is the Necromancer Wizard. They'll mostly be playing with undead minions, but the level 2 feature Grim Harvest is bad entirely because there's not enough damaging necromancy spells, for getting the higher level of healing, and some of the best ones are not available to wizards. You basically get ray of sickness up until 5th level where you get Vampiric Touch, which begins competing with Animate Dead spell slots.

Are there other classes that suffer from these kinds of limitations? How do you like to build an effective character with features that suffer from a lack of available options?

Spoilers ahead!

I'm trying to figure out why Dan decided to try bringing down the building in the fight with the Franchisor and it's hydra enforcer at the end of book 3.

So, this was right after he escaped the ink effect where he had to solo fight the popeye centaur. He comes back out of the ink and sees his team beating on the hydra, which is at 40% health. He does say they weren't looking too good, but 40% is under half, so I was surprised he didn't just blast it with his spells. Instead he has everyone retreat, puts down the slammer of shielding, goes into neural slipstream to pull out all the explosives he has, duct tapes them together, plants them on the pillars, has a little heart to heart conversation with Croc, then slams himself into the pillars while exploding them to bring down the building.

This seems like a really reckless, extremely time consuming plan for the middle of a battle, even with neural slipstream, and didn't actually work! The hydra didn't die and the only reason they survived was because Croc first used the collar artifact ability to save Dan, then Pooh bear stands in the way and talks down the franchisor. I'm not really surprised the hydra didn't die, because they're working off superhuman power levels here. Why would a falling building kill a monster that can shrug off the kind of magically powered damage that Jacob and Temp can put out?

I guess it feels to me like Dan was telling the audience that he was out of options and had to do something reckless to win, like he did against the HOA. But I'm not seeing how that's the case. The main problem they had was that they couldn't do enough damage fast enough. They had knocked out the minions, smashed all the phylacteries, and just had to burn down the boss. Dan conveniently has a spell that's specifically designed to do scaling damage - Hydro fracking blast.

If I recall correctly, HFB deals more damage the longer it's focused on a target by applying searing erosion, and after a threshold (10 seconds?) it gets a boost to triple damage. It's unclear if it continues to triple or only deals more stacks of searing erosion. This spell is literally perfect for dealing huge damage to a large, slow moving target, but Dan only ever seems to use it for short bursts to pop smaller enemies and sever limbs. It's not like he's limited by how much mana it costs either, due to his infinite mana hack from the wild surge ability.

Why didn't Dan at least try to blow it up with pressurized burning water before pulling his party into a hasty retreat for an unpredictable scheme?

Necromancer wizard here, looking for ways to covertly transport a large number of undead minions without alerting passerby. You can put them all in cloaks, but it's still difficult to explain a crowd of 50 unspeaking cloaked figures. Packing them into a covered cart or some chests or barrels would be much less conspicuous.

So I started doing some math. A human skeleton weighs about 25 lbs according to Google, and if they are outfitted per the MM stat block, they wear armor scraps (AC equivalent to leather armor) with a Shortsword, a shortbow, and they must carry a supply of arrows in a quiver.The total weight is about 41 lbs. You can start giving them better equipment, which almost always increases the weight.

A draft Horse has a weight capacity of 540 lbs, or 5x as much when pulled in a cart, so 2700 lbs. This means you could put 60 skeletons in a cart before you run out of capacity. However, I don't know that it's possible for 60 skeletons to physically fit in a cart without making a very tall stack.

So I'm crowd sourcing some opinions. How many people do you think you could fit in a cart before it becomes impossible to hide them under a tarp? How many skeletons do you think can pack into the same space as one person?

I remember seeing this in some visual form, but I can't remember if it was from a video game, or an anime, or something like a YouTube animation. What I recall is there is some kind of demon army, and they pull out this demon that's treated like a superweapon. It looked like a giant (50+ ft tall) torso, no arms or legs or head, that floated in the air and was held down by chains. It might have also had a giant eye in the chest. I remember it having some crazy strong power, like some kind of force wave that blasted out from it or maybe a beam from the eye.

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My best guess was something like Path of Exile, Diablo, Doom, Warhammer or Divinity Original Sin, but I haven't been able to identify it from googling. Any ideas?

This is the first major faction quest that most players are likely to discover, since it's in Whiterun where you are pointed at the start of the game. The giant encounter in the farm outside of town draws your attention to the group from the first time you approach the city.

So why is the pacing so strange and rushed? You enter the hall, someone tells you to talk to Kodlak, he sends you outside to test your fighting skills, then they send you on a job to rough up a guy twenty paces outside the front door. As soon as you come back, it's all "The time has come to test you. Please go retrieve this extremely important fragment of an artifact that's central to the traditions of our group".

Do you think the pacing would be better if there was another couple of filler quests in between the intro and the Dustman's Cairn quest?

I've got an idea for a character that I'm hoping to someday play, and I'm looking for some help to flesh out the best picks. I'm using 2014 rules, with MotM Kobold and point buy.

The concept is a kobold who discovers they have psychic powers and is kicked out of their clan out of fear. They use their powers to pick up odd jobs and fell in with various criminal groups.

My question is this: how would you best optimize this build given both Kobold and Soulknife, as both are important for flavor?

Kobold meshes well with Rogue in general, since the Draconic Cry gives advantage for unconditional sneak attacks a couple times per rest, and you can take the Draconic Sorcery kobold legacy to get Booming Blade, which is great on Rogues. However, Soulknife doesn't support these features with the Mind Blades - they are a thrown weapon, encouraging a ranged style that doesn't work as well with the small radius of the Draconic Cry. The mind blades are also a simple weapon with no explicit value, so they are *not* compatible with Booming Blade, which requires a material component that is a weapon with a value of at least 1 sp.

How would you play this build, and what would you take as ASI's? I'm considering the Telekinetic feat, which is flavorful for this character concept, but the bonus action shove is less useful on rogues already have useful bonus actions, including disengaging for positioning and the mind blade bonus action attack.

Would this build work better as another rogue subclass, and if so which one? What other suggestions do you have for other build options?

I'm theorycrafting a max AC build for fun (most likely not for actual play, so please don't bring up weaknesses to saving throws) and the problem of crits keep plaguing me. I have a theoretical build that sits on enough AC that even Tiamat couldn't normally hit you with a +19. But crits auto hit, so even the lowliest goblin might deal damage to the unbreakable wall 5% of the time.

I've already considered Adamantine Armor and the Grave Cleric level 6 feature, both of which say they turn the crit into a normal hit. I read this to mean that the attack still *hits* but does regular damage instead of double dice.

What ways exist to prevent a crit from hitting at all? Is this limited to effects that force a reroll or replace the dice roll, like Divination wizard's portent, or silvery barbs? Any feature, magic item or other effect is on the table from any officially published source.