New weapon and armor enhancement ideas - what would they be worth?


Homebrew and House Rules


Devastating: (Weapon enhancement)
When added to a weapon or ammo, it increases the critical multiplier by one.

Transcendent: (Armor or shield enhancement)
This armor or shield's AC bonus is added to touch AC.


Arbane the Terrible wrote:

Devastating: (Weapon enhancement)

When added to a weapon or ammo, it increases the critical multiplier by one.

+2.

This is better than Keen. I dread the Keen Devastating scythe. At least this will make it fairly expensive.

Arbane the Terrible wrote:

Transcendent: (Armor or shield enhancement)

This armor or shield's AC bonus is added to touch AC.

+4

I see this as about as effective as Ghost Touch. It makes your armor useful against attacks that otherwise ignore it. However, the number of times characters are attacked by incorporeal attacks is much smaller than the number of times they're attacked by touch attacks, so this is even more useful than Ghost Touch because it will save your butt far more often than Ghost Touch will.

(On the other hand, I'd probably house rule to drop Ghost Touch to +2 and then set Transcendent as +3).

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DEVASTATING
I honestly can't think of any ability in the game that increases a critical modifier unless it's meant for a very specific type of weapon (like the aspect of the falcon spell). For good reason, it's a very powerful ability. I'm not sure if it should even exist. Regardless, I agree with DM_Blake that needs to be at least +2. I'm leaning towards +3.

TRANSCENDENT
This is an exceptionally difficult item to price because its benefit heavily depends on the type of armor you use whereas armor abilities depend on the enhancement bonus. I honestly think it's too powerful unless you give it a very high static price. Even as a +5 ability, it's better than a ring of protection +5 if you wear breastplate AND it's half the price.


The value of Devastating depends entirely on the chance of getting a crit. For a weapon that crits on a 20, it increases the damage by 5%. woot. That's substantially less than the benefit you'd get from another +1 (which increases your chance to hit by at least 5%, except at extremes) and increases damage too. Conversely, on a scimitar with ImpCrit it increases it by 30% which is fairly significant.

It's not as good as Keen which costs +1 and not only increases your damage (by about the same amount) but increases the chance of rider effects from feats like Stunning Critical and whatnot.

+1 is about right for a single value, though if you're worried about the effect of it stacking with Keen or ImpCrit, +2.

Transcendent is indeed impossible to price as a single value. On a +1 buckler, it gives +2 which is less than amazing. On +1 full plate it's +9 which is awesome.


Mudfoot wrote:
Transcendent is indeed impossible to price as a single value. On a +1 buckler, it gives +2 which is less than amazing. On +1 full plate it's +9 which is awesome.

Good point. Maybe it's +1 for light armor, +2 for medium, and +3 for heavy? (And similar for shields.)


Devastating by itself alone is exactly at Keen's leve of power.

BUT !

BUT !

It would stack with Keen or Improved Critical feat for crazy crit weapons. There its power will grow exponentially!

The stacking is what makes it much more powerful then Keen.

Scimitar with IC:Slashing = 15-20/x3
Three times as many crits then a IC:Slashing Battleaxe at the same crit damage.

Devastating is clearly at least a +2 enchantment.


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Arbane the Terrible wrote:
Mudfoot wrote:
Transcendent is indeed impossible to price as a single value. On a +1 buckler, it gives +2 which is less than amazing. On +1 full plate it's +9 which is awesome.
Good point. Maybe it's +1 for light armor, +2 for medium, and +3 for heavy? (And similar for shields.)

I doubt that would break anything; treat all shields as light armour (+1) because they're only +1 or +2 in their raw state.

For Devastating you could do the same sort of thing: +1 on a 20 weapon, +2 on 19-20, +3 on 18-20. That's priced with the assumption that it'll be used with Keen/ImpCrit; otherwise it's too expensive.

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