| VariousPesh |
Hi all, I want to open this by saying I'm loving the Inventor. It's an absolute flavour win and the design is very strong overall, I just wanted to focus in on the Weapon Innovation because I feel like the first two tiers of innovations are fairly underwhelming mechanically, although they are excellent flavour wise.
So firstly, I want to ask what our "Goal" is when making weapon innovations. What I mean by that is what should a weapon-innovation Inventor be good at? Well the flavour goal here is to create something unique, and the mechanical goal is to fight well enough that the class can stand up with the big boys.
So, for flavour purposes I think the idea behind how these innovations are described is brilliant, but it's not exactly unique - remember we want to build a weapon no other class could have. My hypothesis is that our weapon innovations should be at least as interesting as an Advanced weapon from level 1, which might be too tall of an ask, but let's examine some advanced weapons.
The Dwarven Waraxe is a nice simple one, we just take a bastard sword and add the Dwarf and Sweep traits, we'll ignore Dwarf for now: Sweep is available at level 9 with the Aerodynamic Construction modification, meaning we have to wait until 9th level to be able to construct a weapon Fighters could use with the same proficiency since level 1.
As a second example, let's look at the Gnome Flickmace, again ignoring the racial trait let's look at the main appeal: Reach on a one handed weapon. The inventor can't match this until level 17!
OK, I've offered a lot of criticism but not much in the way of a solution, plus I'm ignoring Overdrive which is basically our Rage. Well how about we lean into that? I propose that for every weapon modification, there is a secondary effect which is truly unique, one that activates only while Overdrive is active on the weapon.
So for an example let's look at the first level mod Razor Prongs: Right now this adds an OK trait (Bear in mind the class has no feats to support combat manoeuvres) and versatile. How about adding a secondary effect that really "Overdrives" the prongs? Just as an example (not saying this is balanced) but while a weapon with Razor Prongs is Overdriven, it deals bleed damage? Doesn't have to be much, could just be equal to weapon damage die, but crucially no existing weapon would feel exactly like it.
This post is rather long, but I'm really passionate about the inventor, I think it has the potential with just a few small changes to be the best designed class in the game.