Saturday, July 4, 2009

The Witch (Svalin Games)

The Witch as presented in this PDF is an arcane leader, which can focus on healing or fear. The healing-based witch, or the white witch, is a really good leader at that, +secondary stat to all surges popped and ALL death saves rolled within a decent-sized burst. In fact, make a witch with starting 18 wisdom and your allies will have 25% chance per round to stand up, coming back from dying. That's really good. Maybe too good IMO.

The mystic word, the witch's basic healing, is interesting. You leach of your allies, gaining temporary hit points when they pop a surge triggered by your spell. The at-wills seem balanced and varied, but the real problem with the class comes with the dailies. All the witch's dailies are called curses, and give (apart from the usual damage + condition) another condition, one that can only be removed out of combat and otherwise stick for the rest of the day/month/year. It sounds like a good idea on paper, and it works well for some of the powers, because the penalties do not have much relevance in combat. Problem is when they do have relevance, such as causing the target to grant CA or be vulnerable to all attacks, the curses become extremely powerful. Just too-good-powerful, bordering on broken-powerful.

The rest of the powers is a mixture of decent stuff, with a few gems (love the one where you during initiative make yourself look like a monster, giving pause to your enemies (penalty to initiative rolls) and the usual stuff that annoys me to no end, such as encounter powers with save ends effects. There is a reason (IMO) why this stuff is reserved to daily powers by WotC.

Overall, While I like the idea of the witch, and I think it has some interesting ideas, it still needs too much work for me to use it. Also, I am still at a loss about what "Target: Whoever" means ;)
Rating:* *

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