Talk:Parry Everything (3.5e Feat)

Balance
Being effectively potentially immune to most ranged and melee attacks (I'm looking at you, touch attacks) strikes me as heavily wizard-level. --Ghostwheel 21:28, February 24, 2010 (UTC)


 * Even with the changes, I don't see it helping much. Have a pack of playing cards. Every attack kills a card. Not that anyone cares. And many characters (spellcasters, psionics, martial adepts, duskblades, often psywars) use a single attack per round, so the penalty doesn't do much either... --Ghostwheel 21:46, February 24, 2010 (UTC)


 * What if it's Shivering Touch? Irresistable Dance? Etc? Things that don't deal damage--how would that work? --Ghostwheel 21:55, February 24, 2010 (UTC)


 * "Hey look--Irresistable Dance." *parries the attack roll, nothing happens* And then it completely depends on what the DM allows--perhaps diamond disks that take very little/no damage from attacks?
 * Also, attack rolls climb much faster than saves do, so effectively it lets you be immune to virtually any spell that requires a save. Definitely wizard-level. It's like getting Wall of Blades at will, multiple times per round. --Ghostwheel 22:19, February 24, 2010 (UTC)


 * This might work better if you could only parry spells that required an attack roll to hit you (and required you to exceed the roll by 10 or something if it were a touch attack). I just can't see anyone parying a chain lightning or a wail of the banshee. - TarkisFlux 22:29, February 24, 2010 (UTC)


 * The idea was to parry lightning bolts with tables and fireballs with books, but Ghostwheel convinced me that you'd really just be parrying color spray with sheets of Adamantine and Irresistible Dances with diamonds. I've gotten rid of blocking spells so that blocking madmen with axes can remain the primary objective of this feat. --Foxwarrior 22:36, February 24, 2010 (UTC)


 * The thing is, madmen with axes are often the primary opponents in rogue-level games and you can completely and inequivaocably shut them down without too much trouble and with the right equipment (find an item with high Hardness and HP) using this feat. Furthermore, it's an AoO so you can do it multiple times, and doesn't require any of your future actions unlike things such as Wall of Blades. I'm just not seeing this as rogue-level when you can for the most part negate rogue-level enemies with a single feat. That sounds far more like wizard-level territory to me. --Ghostwheel 22:48, February 24, 2010 (UTC)


 * I'm going to disagree with the "completely and inequivocably" part of your statement. You still have to roll at least as well as they do (even better, with these new penalties), and items of suitable hardness and HP are unlikely to be quite that common. Also, I finally put a size minimum on the object. --Foxwarrior 23:05, February 24, 2010 (UTC)


 * Assuming tome combat rules (and similar gear bonuses, to hit stat bonuses, similar conditional modifiers, etc), you can potentially stop about half of the attacks that hit you from 1 guy of equal level and BAB progression. If you're well defended and guy 1 misses with half of his attacks, you can maybe shut down half of 2 guys attacks. The bonus AoOs from Combat Reflexes or it's tome equivalent will maybe double that number of targets, and the extra bonus parries from this skill at high levels are only going to increase that number. To actually shut them down unequivacobly (here meaning going from 50% to around 95%) you'd need to have something like +16 greater on your to-hits than they do. Which might happen for high level full bab guys against substantially lower level / less combat focussed guys, but doesn't seem particularly worrisome to me because I don't care about if a guy who takes this and focusses on hitting things in combat is substantially better at also blocking the strikes of those people who don't focus on hitting things in combat. Shutting down more than 2 dudes is a bit concerning though....


 * So, what I think I'd do is drop the bonus parry ability, make this feat unable to use your Combat Reflexes bonus AoOs (unless tome bonus AoOs are not in play, and then the feat working here is fine), and change the last two abilities to 1) parrying burst / AoE effects with an object big enough to give you partial cover (tower shields, tables, etc.) by rolling against save DC + spell level (which does grow very similarly to to hit bonuses) and 2) parrying touch attacks with like you parry everything else, but requiring you to roll 10 better (which assumes that the attack is substantially harder to parry / that they have effectively 10 more bab because of the attack type). I don't know that it's enough to get it down to rogue, but I'm not sure that any worthwhile scaling feat even can be down there anyway. - TarkisFlux 01:13, February 25, 2010 (UTC)


 * Full round action is an interesting trade off, and it probably works for giving them bonus AoOs. I probably should have said before that I find the cumulative penalties completely unnecessary (even if the "stuff you parry with gets tossed" is rather flavorful). The cumulative penalty does tone it down, but a setting the step size at -6 is going to make the full-round action to get more attacks basically worthless since you could easily get up to -30 on parries at the level you get it alone. Every parry after the first carrying a -4 or -6, non-cumulatively, might work better to keep it from being the super awesome defense that ghost is concerned about (though I am not) without actually falling into uselessness when paired with one of the feat's own abilities. The second drawback makes this basically useful only in cluttered areas, and that's not something I think a point in its favor given all of the areas where this will not be the case (fields, caves, long featureless coridors, etc.); without random crap floating around you're stuck tossing your own gear or whatever useless junk you're carrying around specifically for this purpose (that you still have to be carrying, and you can't draw new stuff off turn...). I'd rather you just kept the "object takes the damage" drawback, and things that deal stat damage or status effects just get ignored because the item can't suffer them. Though I suppose that two drawbacks that effectively drop aspects of the feat into uselessness in specific circumstances might drop it to rogue...


 * In any event, that's my 2cp. Take it or leave it of course :-) - TarkisFlux 02:48, February 25, 2010 (UTC)


 * I think I'm going to go with your previous comment. For some reason I was stuck on the idea of this being a scaling feat; It's a cool mechanic, but it really doesn't make sense for this effect. The ability doesn't really get much weaker at higher levels, so I think I'm going to split it into two or three feats instead.
 * Feel free to make a Wizard-level version that keeps this one's scaling nature. --Foxwarrior 03:54, February 25, 2010 (UTC)