That question isn't as relevant as you think it is, as builds that go for crane style will be fairly similar to the ones given as an example. Chances are that if you're a monk and going for styles, you're probably going to be MoMS. Yes, it's a valid question and I encourage you to try it out in PFS, but it's a bit like asking people to test Sap Master in a build with only a couple rogue levels. Yes, that's valid. But that's not how Sap Master is most often used.
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That question isn't as relevant as you think it is, as builds that go for crane style will be fairly similar to the ones given as an example. Chances are that if you're a monk and going for styles, you're probably going to be MoMS. Yes, it's a valid question and I encourage you to try it out in PFS, but it's a bit like asking people to test Sap Master in a build with only a couple rogue levels. Yes, that's valid. But that's not how Sap Master is most often used.
Or it's more relevant than you think.
I don't believe they were trying to pull the "well it's balanced over there, so it's obviously fine" trick at all. I think that they were try to make the point that maybe it was not okay that the MoMS monk could take the Crane Style feats early, as the BAB limit was much more necessary in that case than in the case of other styles.
In other words: Maybe we need to be analyzing whether the feat is okay at its intended (BAB+5 or higher) tier, and if so the blame should instead be cast on archetypes for breaking that pre-requisite.
I think that we'll find it's a super powerful feat either way. I'm not sure if it exceeds the power attack bar, but it's definitely in that league. (To be fair, I'm pretty sure that power attack is only considered "okay" because it makes up for damage-dealing issues otherwise present in the system. This means that if something were to even meet the 'power attack bar' it is likely overpowered.)
That question isn't as relevant as you think it is, as builds that go for crane style will be fairly similar to the ones given as an example. Chances are that if you're a monk and going for styles, you're probably going to be MoMS. Yes, it's a valid question and I encourage you to try it out in PFS, but it's a bit like asking people to test Sap Master in a build with only a couple rogue levels. Yes, that's valid. But that's not how Sap Master is most often used.Or it's more relevant than you think.
I don't believe they were trying to pull the "well it's balanced over there, so it's obviously fine" trick at all. I think that they were try to make the point that maybe it was not okay that the MoMS monk could take the Crane Style feats early, as the BAB limit was much more necessary in that case than in the case of other styles.
In other words: Maybe we need to be analyzing whether the feat is okay at its intended (BAB+5 or higher) tier, and if so the blame should instead be cast on archetypes for breaking that pre-requisite.
I think that we'll find it's a super powerful feat either way. I'm not sure if it exceeds the power attack bar, but it's definitely in that league. (To be fair, I'm pretty sure that power attack is only considered "okay" because it makes up for damage-dealing issues otherwise present in the system. This means that if something were to even meet the 'power attack bar' it is likely overpowered.)
Iak's latest adventures have been at the level of normal Crane Wing. I also have some home game data going up to level 11 (the Crane Wing character is actually only level 9) where Crane Wing is in some cases even more egregious, though I'm leaving it out of the thread because it is a home game rather than a pre-written PFS scenario.
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It's got two (count them) archetypes in a system that doesn't encourage multi-classing, both picked, not for flavour, but for mechanical advantage.
Its tricked out.
So, choosing two options that are designed with the express intent of supporting my goal is all it takes to be "tricked out"?
And you play the "not picked for flavor" card when I'm using these options for exactly the type of character they were written for?
If we're going to assess the power level of these feats/archetypes/etc, we need a decent baseline. And I'm sorry, but putting the baseline in such a place as to leave my build in the "tricked out" or "munchkin" categories is laughable.
Using MoMS to get early access to style feats is what it's for. Just like the ranger's bonus combat feats are intended to get you (for instance) Precise Shot without PBS and grab Improved Precise Shot five levels early. It's not "tricked out" or "munchkin", it's using the class as intended.
Now, we might contest whether those options' intended effect is appropriate (balance-wise), but basing our assessments on a vantage point from which two very straightforward builds are tangentially-relevant outliers will get us nowhere.
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I played a superstitious barbarian 5/master of many styles 2 for a short stint of Slumbering Tsar. No crane riposte, but had style/wing, along with missile shield. The character wore mithral breastplate, had a heavy shield, and had an unarmed strike as a primary attack (though this could have easily been a shield bash). The caracter had a high cha (gained paladin levels after 7 due to some shenanigins) and so had spirit totem wisps to help with damage.
Between the high AC, crane style/wing, high saves, high HP, evasion, and imp./uncanny dodge, the character was unbelieveably durable. A low touch AC was her only weakness, other than a fairly mediocre level of damage output. Crane wing was a cornerstone of the build, as enemies were typically rolling for 20s to hit, and crane wing deflected the odd attack that got that 20. For this character, crane wing was far and away the most powerful feat published in the pathfinder system.
Ultimately I decided to retire the character due to being boring. Although sociable, the campaign's focus on combat made the one-trick of being nearly invincible get stale quickly. Higher damage would have helped, though the character was an optomized experiment and never meant to actually be balanced.
My analysis is that crane wing is only overpowered in the hands of a character who largely doesn't need it to start with, and is probably contributing little else to combat besides durability and flank bonuses. As always, YMMV.
As a side note, the 2 levels of paladin gained by level 9 truly made the character unstopable, adding her +4 cha bonus to saves and getting lay on hands. Later being immune to disease and fear, and removing rage-induced fatigue with lay on hands completed the journey to rediculousness.
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Absolutely true, though in all honesty the parts of the character that pertain to crane style/wing don't need the multiclass anyway. A fighter/monk would probably do the high AC + crane style/wing thing even better. The multiclass largely gained uncanny dodge, bonus HP, and massive saves. Focusing on the effect of crane style/wing for the character, there was a massive gain to melee durability. As stated, I don't feel that it is terribly unbalanced as the characters that see the most benefit need it least and probably have other weaknesses to be exploited.
I was wondering the same.
I mean, RE has been playing a character several levels below party/quest level, and just dominating thanks to these feats. And he doesn't even look especially min/maxed in that he DOESN'T have a high Dex (so his AC probably isn't as high as it could be). He's also demonstrated that the feats hold up fairly well even after the point that they would normally be available, so the argument that MoMS is the real culprit just doesn't hold water.
I was wondering the same.
I mean, RE has been playing a character several levels below party/quest level, and just dominating thanks to these feats. And he doesn't even look especially min/maxed in that he DOESN'T have a high Dex (so his AC probably isn't as high as it could be). He's also demonstrated that the feats hold up fairly well even after the point that they would normally be available, so the argument that MoMS is the real culprit just doesn't hold water.
As-is, though, yeah. I think the problem here (and one that's shared in threads where people will say you should never ever ever try to bring an optimized in-combat healer in any party composition) is that in many cases with an optimized party, you can get away with a devastating offense to clear away your enemies without using much more tactics than "I pounce-charge, the gunslinger full attacks, and in two rounds everything is now dead". There are many other ways to do things. With good tactics and especially on interesting feature-filled maps where you can find chokepoints, a good defensive character or two (with high CMD so as not to be acrobatics-ed past) can own the battlefield. Now, you do have to get a good deal of PC cooperation to make it work. A good example of bad cooperation was the greatsword fighter who ran right past me and past the chokepoint into the enemies and got himself instantly KOed in my example above.
I played a MoMS 2/Magus 3 in a group of other 5th-level characters for a few games (it was a Pathfinder module, though I couldn't tell you which one since the GM converted into the Forgotten Realms setting). I excelled at protecting myself to be true (much to the GM's consternation), but I missed a LOT. I ended up having to rely on touch attacks to do anything at all, and I ran out of those fast.
Crane Style feats, and even the Master of Many Styles, is perfectly balanced.
I really see this as nothing more than a bunch of GMs frustrated that they can't kill their player's PCs.
Thanks for the info.
I played a MoMS 2/Magus 3 in a group of other 5th-level characters for a few games (it was a Pathfinder module, though I couldn't tell you which one since the GM converted into the Forgotten Realms setting). I excelled at protecting myself to be true (much to the GM's consternation), but I missed a LOT. I ended up having to rely on touch attacks to do anything at all, and I ran out of those fast.
Crane Style feats, and even the Master of Many Styles, is perfectly balanced.
I really see this as nothing more than a bunch of GMs frustrated that they can't kill their player's PCs.
Remember, this is a thread to collect PFS data from players. I'd ask any "GMs frustrated that they can't kill their player's PCs" to find their own thread and leave this one for actual playtest data, except that I'm not seeing any in here right now. Did I miss some posts?
Anyway, let me know if you can get your GM to tell you which module it was and if she made any changes to the opposition while converting it. Looking over your build, it seems like a pretty neat character. Offensively, though, +7 to hit while fighting defensively (+5 to hit with Spell Combat) is indeed pretty low, but then that isn't mostly the Crane feats' doing. It's an organic result of many decisions made in creating the character, such as multiclassing two classes with weak BAB while having your attack stat be a 16 and avoiding weapon focus. You're going to routinely be attacking at a +5 to hit (+7 if flanking, which you probably usually are) as opposed to my guy's +11 to hit (+15 if flanking, which he usually is whenever DPS matters; obviously he doesn't flank when he holds a chokepoint). That's a stark difference, and we both use Crane Style.
Basically what I'm saying is this--you can't say that Crane Style is giving you a bad offense by making a character who would have had a bad offense with or without Crane Style and then blaming it on Crane Style. When we say that we can make characters that contribute offensively and have Crane Style, the burden of proof is on us to do so, but on the flip side, so too is it true that examples of characters who do not contribute offensively do not detract from that proof in any way. As Cheapy was saying with his Sap Master example, there are plenty of ways to make a character with any option, overpowered, underpowered, or in between, who has a weakness in offense. The test is in the proof by construction, and I hardly think an 18 Strength Fighter/Monk with a +2 Strength item to raise it to 20 is out-of-line optimization-wise offensively. Seems pretty standard to me, though I know mileages may vary and I do respect that Funky Badger seems to play a generally lower power game where that would be too much.
Shouldn't this be in the PFS forums then?
It was, but the mods saw fit to move it out a few hours after it was made. However, the purpose of the thread is still to provide playtest data from a standardized play environment: PFS.
I'm going to see about getting my local group to play/run Rise of the Runelords using the new AP/PFS rules. I'm tempted to encourage someone to be a cranestyler for purposes of this data. Would an AP be a good medium for this?
An AP could potentially be a good medium for it--the main problem with home games is that it invites the inevitable counterargument of "well it's a home game, so the GM should just never/rarely attack the group with melee enemies" which an AP run strictly by PFS rules would not. I've seen this argument too often in other threads (for example, "paladins are strong? throw 100% neutral enemies at them then!") to want it to muddy the waters here.
That said, we have a cranestyler cohort we're playtesting in a Kingmaker home game, but I've been intentionally leaving out that data because the GM has made adjustments and also because our group is so ridiculously divination-heavy that we almost-always enter battles at our own advantage. The funniest unintentional playtest was when we were ambushed by a DC 28 confusion (something the GM homebrewed) and my cohort and the PC general (two levels higher Falchion Fighter, very optimized for to-hit and damage) wound up in a cycle of attacking each other. The cohort eviscerated him without taking a single point of damage--it was almost as perfect a playtest as you could ask of the two fighting styles.
Anyway, the main purpose of using PFS is to quell the arguments of "but the GM could just use encounters designed like X". A strict AP can do that as well, potentially, but the Kingmaker data is not following strict, so I've kept it for my own edification (though that said, I'd be happy to give data to others in private or on another thread).
A potential problem with using PFS is the fact that the GM is not supposed to alter tactics as written, while fighting a Crane Styler almost REQUIRES a revision to tactics. Imagine a one on one fight. Put two low level crane stylers against each other. They're going to have to flurry or TWF in order to at least have the potential to get two hits in order to have one leak through. Put a low level crane styler against a low level (lvl 5 or less) two-hander and the two-hander is going to have to switch to two weapon fighting or drop his weapon and attempt to grapple just to stand a chance.
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The funniest unintentional playtest was when we were ambushed by a DC 28 confusion (something the GM homebrewed) and my cohort and the PC general (two levels higher Falchion Fighter, very optimized for to-hit and damage) wound up in a cycle of attacking each other. The cohort eviscerated him without taking a single point of damage--it was almost as perfect a playtest as you could ask of the two fighting styles.
I'm sure someone will come in and explain how the falchion fighter wasn't optimized enough.
A potential problem with using PFS is the fact that the GM is not supposed to alter tactics as written, while fighting a Crane Styler almost REQUIRES a revision to tactics. Imagine a one on one fight. Put two low level crane stylers against each other. They're going to have to flurry or TWF in order to at least have the potential to get two hits in order to have one leak through. Put a low level crane styler against a low level (lvl 5 or less) two-hander and the two-hander is going to have to switch to two weapon fighting just to stand a chance.
So, I know some people are of this opinion about PFS and tactics. I assure you that PFS has provisions explicitly telling GMs to switch from the tactics when the players do something to mandate it (but you can't switch from the tactics arbitrarily). The latest version of the Guide is clearer about that than ever, and I assure you completely that all my GMs have played with adjusting tactics as needed, not the unbending way. As a 4-Star PFS GM, I've also run nearly all of the scenarios I played with Iak eventually, so I've gotten to see what the tactics are. The GMs adjusted them to respond to Crane Style when the NPCs had a chance to figure out about Crane Style (and one bad GM metagamed and changed tactics even before the NPCs could have known).
So it's an excellent point to bring up, SG, but you can rest assured that it didn't happen in my data points.
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A potential problem with using PFS is the fact that the GM is not supposed to alter tactics as written, while fighting a Crane Styler almost REQUIRES a revision to tactics. Imagine a one on one fight. Put two low level crane stylers against each other. They're going to have to flurry or TWF in order to at least have the potential to get two hits in order to have one leak through. Put a low level crane styler against a low level (lvl 5 or less) two-hander and the two-hander is going to have to switch to two weapon fighting or drop his weapon and attempt to grapple just to stand a chance.
Isn't that a good indicator that it's broken?
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I'm sure someone will come in and explain how the falchion fighter wasn't optimized enough.
And I'm sure if they do, you'll mentally tally it in support of your existing mindset, while if no one does, you'll simply forget about the whole thing rather than tally it in contrast to your existing mindset.
After all, you're a human, right? ;)
The funniest unintentional playtest was when we were ambushed by a DC 28 confusion (something the GM homebrewed) and my cohort and the PC general (two levels higher Falchion Fighter, very optimized for to-hit and damage) wound up in a cycle of attacking each other. The cohort eviscerated him without taking a single point of damage--it was almost as perfect a playtest as you could ask of the two fighting styles.I'm sure someone will come in and explain how the falchion fighter wasn't optimized enough.
Funnily enough, somehow this fellow playing the falchion fighter seemed to be well-versed with Rogue Eidolon's Guide to Fighters and was extremely strong. He was routinely rocking +25/+17 to hit for ungodly damage and a 15-20/x2 as a level 10 character even before I bard-buffed him (and I didn't buff since they were confused and killing each other). Now granted, she only managed to stay unscratched due to not getting an unlucky round where he rolled high twice, but her victory was all but assured, as he had to hit her twice at her 32ish AC to hit her once, and she got three attacks to his two since he almost always made her use the riposte.
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A potential problem with using PFS is the fact that the GM is not supposed to alter tactics as written, while fighting a Crane Styler almost REQUIRES a revision to tactics. Imagine a one on one fight. Put two low level crane stylers against each other. They're going to have to flurry or TWF in order to at least have the potential to get two hits in order to have one leak through. Put a low level crane styler against a low level (lvl 5 or less) two-hander and the two-hander is going to have to switch to two weapon fighting or drop his weapon and attempt to grapple just to stand a chance.Isn't that a good indicator that it's broken?
Actually, this just gave me an epiphany:
You know what Crane Style is strongest against? Enemies with a single attack each round, or a single "good" attack followed by an iterative.
You know what PFS has a lot of? Humanoid NPCs with 1-2 attacks per round, with the second attack being a -5 iterative.
It occurs to me now that PFS might make Crane Style look stronger than it might otherwise be.
Anyone else have thoughts on that?
Isn't that a good indicator that it's broken?
The dominant melee style is the two-handed weapon. Crane wing is best against that dominant melee style, but weaker against two-weapon fighting. Against a monster with one big attack, it rules. Against a monster with bite/claw/claw/wing buffet/wing buffet/tail-slap, it's boned.
Lots of humanoids matches the descriptions of every game I've played in outside of PFS.
It's got two (count them) archetypes in a system that doesn't encourage multi-classing, both picked, not for flavour, but for mechanical advantage.
Its tricked out.
So, choosing two options that are designed with the express intent of supporting my goal is all it takes to be "tricked out"?
And you play the "not picked for flavor" card when I'm using these options for exactly the type of character they were written for?
If we're going to assess the power level of these feats/archetypes/etc, we need a decent baseline. And I'm sorry, but putting the baseline in such a place as to leave my build in the "tricked out" or "munchkin" categories is laughable.
Using MoMS to get early access to style feats is what it's for. Just like the ranger's bonus combat feats are intended to get you (for instance) Precise Shot without PBS and grab Improved Precise Shot five levels early. It's not "tricked out" or "munchkin", it's using the class as intended.
Now, we might contest whether those options' intended effect is appropriate (balance-wise), but basing our assessments on a vantage point from which two very straightforward builds are tangentially-relevant outliers will get us nowhere.
Embrace the dork-side, Jiggy. Go on.
For reference - I don't think I've played or played with a PFS character that has 2 archetypes. Any archetype at all is pretty rare, in my experience. Call it, say, 50 games played; average at 5 players per game. That's 250. Obviously there's been a load of overlap, so lets round down to a reasonable 100 PFS characters encountered over my career. And not one of them had 2 archetypes.
We could even halve that down to 50 to account for gaming in the pre-APG days and your character would still be past 2 standard-deviations in terms of archetypes.
So, umm.. an outlier. By definition.
Has anyone played a Crane Wing single class normal monk?
It's also possible your experience has been an outlier. I coordinate for Boston's largest PFS gamestore event and am familiar with most of the characters there and run a home group as well. I've also GMed and played at several cons including Gencon and Paizocon. I have 112 tables of GMing PFS and slightly fewer than that of playing it. I can tell you for certain that the vast majority of the characters I saw that were of classes that have had archetypes since the APG (by which I mean, not clerics or wizards with subdomains and subschools only in APG and no archetypes) have had an archetype. And most clerics and wizards have a subschool or a subdomain. I've seen plenty of two-archetype characters too--the only thing keeping it from being more common is that multiclassing itself is not so common.
Neither of our anecdotal evidence sets really counters the other, even though mine has more data points, it just is what it is.
This discussion is useful because it is important to make sure we gather data effectively and usefully, so I'm fine with us continuing in the thread, but maybe if we go long like this again we should use spoilers to avoid clutter? Even if not, thanks for chiming in with your viewpoint--it's as I said before. Everyone's game has very different levels of what is optimized.
Also, I've seen it on a single-classed Aldori Swordlord Fighter, and it ruled heavily. Not a single-classed Monk though, but the Monk has its own issues that have a million threads already and bring in a confounding factor.
For reference - I don't think I've played or played with a PFS character that has 2 archetypes. Any archetype at all is pretty rare, in my experience.
I have only a few PFS characters, so ..
Monk - Maneuver Master, Weapons Adept
Bard - Lotus Geisha
Bard - Arcane Duelist
So, of my 3 characters, 1 has two archetypes, and 2 have one. And one of those expects to add a level of fighter with the lore warden archetype at a future time. But I'm only one data point and probably a few standard deviations from the mean.
A potential problem with using PFS is the fact that the GM is not supposed to alter tactics as written, while fighting a Crane Styler almost REQUIRES a revision to tactics. Imagine a one on one fight. Put two low level crane stylers against each other. They're going to have to flurry or TWF in order to at least have the potential to get two hits in order to have one leak through. Put a low level crane styler against a low level (lvl 5 or less) two-hander and the two-hander is going to have to switch to two weapon fighting or drop his weapon and attempt to grapple just to stand a chance.Isn't that a good indicator that it's broken?Actually, this just gave me an epiphany:
You know what Crane Style is strongest against? Enemies with a single attack each round, or a single "good" attack followed by an iterative.
You know what PFS has a lot of? Humanoid NPCs with 1-2 attacks per round, with the second attack being a -5 iterative.
It occurs to me now that PFS might make Crane Style look stronger than it might otherwise be.
Anyone else have thoughts on that?
I've also tested Crane Style against large numbers of monsters with multiple attacks each in PFS. It is tempting to think of the crane chain as only Crane Wing, but in those cases I mentioned, the combination of +4 AC for only -1 to hit and the deflection allowed my character to solo these hordes of enemies by combining an AC that was hard for them to hit already with a deflection when the monsters actually rolled high enough. Without Crane, no matter what your AC is (even if you have 50 or something) you aren't going to win at level 2 against 8 ghouls surrounding you because they will just eventually hit you with 20s and paralyze or kill you.
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Isn't that a good indicator that it's broken?The dominant melee style is the two-handed weapon. Crane wing is best against that dominant melee style, but weaker against two-weapon fighting. Against a monster with one big attack, it rules. Against a monster with bite/claw/claw/wing buffet/wing buffet/tail-slap, it's boned.
Not as boned as you think. In addition to negating one of those attack, the crane styler is up a few points of AC.
Look at this way. If you have two identical PCs both looking to improve their defense. They both fight defensively each round.
One takes Crane Style/Crane Wing. The other takes Weapon Focus/Ironskin (or some other AC boosting feat).
The Crane Styler has +1 to hit and can negate an attack each round. That's a huge advantage.
Yes, the crane styler is more vulnerable before she's had a chance to attack but once she's in combat she's a lot more resilient than her competitor for the same investment.
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As for PFS I have nine PFS characters.
barbarian druid (brutal pugalist and bear shaman)
fighter wizard (weapon master)
barbarian inquisitor (no archetypes)
barbarian rogue (invulnerable rager and thug)
sorcerer (crossblooded and wildblooded)
fighter monk (brawler and martial artist)
cavalier (gendarme and honor guard)
barbarian (armored hulk)
oracle (no archetypes)
My tenth character will be started soon and he's likely going to be a wizard (with no archetypes).
Hm... My Crane'd AC at (freshly) 3rd level is 21. What was yours at that point, or do you know?
For the fight in question? I had received a Protection From Evil, which gave me a 24 or 25 AC, I think. Normally 22 or 23 when defensive fighting. Which is very important because ghouls like to flank.
There are countless other threads for discussing Crane Style, but this is the only one that's dedicated to standardized playtest data. I'd ask that we try to keep it that way.
One takes Crane Style/Crane Wing. The other takes Weapon Focus/Ironskin (or some other AC boosting feat).
The Crane Styler has +1 to hit and can negate an attack each round. That's a huge advantage.
Yes, the crane styler is more vulnerable before she's had a chance to attack but once she's in combat she's a lot more resilient than her competitor for the same investment.
Don't forget the "Feat Tax" of IUS for non-monks.
The usual wisdom is that it's better to boost your offense than your defense because killing the other guy first in this game of rocket tag means fewer incoming attacks later. The monk really can't do that beyond a certain point.
If there's anything "broken" here, it's the way you can combine two archetypes to get the entire crane style feat chain at level 2, rather than at level 6 where full BAB classes are getting a second attack.
One takes Crane Style/Crane Wing. The other takes Weapon Focus/Ironskin (or some other AC boosting feat).
The Crane Styler has +1 to hit and can negate an attack each round. That's a huge advantage.
Yes, the crane styler is more vulnerable before she's had a chance to attack but once she's in combat she's a lot more resilient than her competitor for the same investment.
Don't forget the "Feat Tax" of IUS for non-monks.
The usual wisdom is that it's better to boost your offense than your defense because killing the other guy first in this game of rocket tag means fewer incoming attacks later. The monk really can't do that beyond a certain point.
If there's anything "broken" here, it's the way you can combine two archetypes to get the entire crane style feat chain at level 2, rather than at level 6 where full BAB classes are getting a second attack.
Feral, SlimGauge--I love you both. You both have had a lot of good things to say and think about on the topic. But could you please take this particular argument to a new thread? I'm fascinated by it and would be happy to discuss it on the new thread, but I'd like to keep it out of here.
Now I really want to run my roommate through Thistletop with a PFS legal crane styler to see how much of it he can solo...
I'll run the idea by him tonight.
The player of the Bard/Monk "pupil" of Iakhovas apparently nearly soloed Dark Menagerie. I wasn't there, and he didn't describe it in full detail, but I heard it was a cakewalk.
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I worked out some more of the details with my roommate last night but he got home pretty late from work so we didn't have time to get started.
We're going to do a total of eight test cases running each through the bigger encounters in Thistletop.
There's a few things being assumed:
*Each build has ~7k wealth
*20 point buy
*He is healed to full between each encounter
*He has mage armor up at all times
The test cases are:
*'Vanilla' Dex/Wis build
*'Vanilla' Dex/Wis build (without Crane Style)
*Super Optimized Dex/Wis build
*Super Optimized Dex/Wis build (without Crane Style)
*'Vanilla' Str build
*'Vanilla' Str build (without Crane Style)
*Super Optimized Str build
*Super Optimized Str build (without Crane Style)
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Are the non-Cranes still going to be monks?
The non-Cranes will be completely identical to their counterparts minus the two feats.
What will "vanilla" mean in this test?
We're still working this part out but in all likelyhood it will mean single-classed monk. No archetypes. Core races only.
Will any of the PCs be named Frasier, Niles or Martin?
Nope. Sorry.
Edit: The vanilla build will still have an archetype as that's the only way to get Crane Wing before level 5.
He has mage armor up at all times
Is this a good assumption ? I suppose the monk could have spent money/points on a wand and UMD, but if so, it needs to be accounted for in the WBL and the skill points in the build. I've been in quite a few arcane challenged parties.