User:Sigma 7/Broken (4e)
Despite 4e being balanced, there are a few broken combinations. While the degree of broken elements changes from game to game, the most common definitions are as follows:
- Broken: Any use of "infinite", killing an at-leevl solo with a single encounter power, or killing all normal monsters in the encouner with a single power.
- Bent: Killing an at-level solo in a single turn, killing an at-level elite in a single turn without using daily powers, or kills all minions with a minor and no rolls.
- Overpowered: Subjective, but usually creates things that are higher than expected.
Originally found on the community.wizards.com wiki, but evacuated due to the community being closed for no good reason.
Broken
Original: http://community.wizards.com/group/dd-charop/wiki/brokenbroken
Demigod, Divine Miracle
Allows for infinite damage:
- Be in "Follow Up Blow" stance, and spam "Trip Up" until you miss. (need original source)
- Reuse Elven Accuracy until you hit, reuse "Pray for More" and a Vorpal Weapon to roll infinite damage. First found by FlimFlam? This particular instantiation may not work due to Elven Reroll's "use the second roll" language.
- Same as above, except using the Deva's "Memory of a 1000 lifetimes" to hit
- Same as above, except using "Steal Time" to stunlock everything within 20. (nbove)
Suggested House Rule: Allow Divine Miracle to trigger only at the start of the round. Or trigger only once. Or have it make all your encounter powers "recharge 6". That still leaves it rather "bent" by giving a continious stream of stun powers, or spamming hurricane of blades.
Reborn Champion
Potential Infinite DPR. See "Punisher of the Gods" in the "Fixed by Errata" section. But harder to pull off as an action point is better than a standard action. FanityFaerie's build does the recursive crit trick with Reborn Champion instead of PotG.
Suggested House Rule: Change "Legendary Action" to only trigger once per round.
Orbizard
The name comes from an Orb focused wizard, but the trick is actually about stacking save-ends penalties, and can currently be done by a large variety of base classes.
Give someone a save-ends stun, with a -16 penalty to their save. Current example build. Still need original source (Elven Orbizard Demigod)
- Sleep (applied to the second save)
- Face of Death (applied to the second save)
- Legion's Hold or any other straight save-ends spell
- Sequester (Planeshifter's level 11)
Build elements used
- Orb of Imposition Wizard class feature
- Spell Focus feat, or other similar feat
Items used
- Subtle Weapon turned into an implement
- Earthroot Staff
- Orb of Ultimate Imposition
- Orb of Inevitable Consequences, in case your attack to apply the effect missed.
- Phrenic Crown
Suggested House Rule: Either Eliminate stacking of save penalties, or make each penalty only until the end of your next turn.
Warmaster + Horizon Walker
Infinite actions each round for the rest of the party. You spend your action point to take a move action, get it back, repeat until bored. Each AP you spend gives a free action to an ally. Or find a way to attack as a move action (Quicksilver Stance) and have infinite attacks by yourself.
Suggested House Rule: Limit the Horizon Walker's "Wanderer's Action" ability to once/encounter, and add the following to the Warmaster's Tactical Genius ability "but only one per round"
Dual Earth Brute Ping-pong
Infinite damage 1 enc/day. Summon 2 earth brutes (need a way to regain a daily), and place the victim between them so that he bounces back and forth, dying from the 5 damage. (Arcane Admixture?)
Suggested House Rule: Make the Earth Brute use an opportunity action to push, instead of a free.
The infinitely brutal Vorpal Glaive
Infinite damage 1 round/encounter. (Ishi)
Three battle engineers all use Greater Magic Weapon to make the glaive brutal 3 (or the Falchion, or if you have more battle engineers, any other weapon). On a hit, all dice are 4s and are thus rerolled.
Suggested House Rule: Brutal doesn't work on Vorpal-caused rerolls.
Broken (Part 2)
Source: http://community.wizards.com/node/3876131/revisions/4451346/view
Crushing Vortex (Augment 6)
This is a reading issue, straight up. "When a creature within the zone takes damage from an attack, each enemy within the zone takes force damage equal to your Constitution modifier." triggers itself recursively.
Suggested House Rule: "When a creature within the zone takes damage from an attack, you may deal Constitution modifier damage to each enemy within the zone as an opportunity action."
Reverb-pedal Action-Point
A two-PC, level 30 combo. Have one PC with Praetor Legate PP and Warmaster ED. A Shaman who knows Nimble Spirit and can summon his spirit as a free action would be a very good candidate, as would a Warlord who has Martial Master and Death from Two Sides. The other PC needs to be a Guildmaster Thief, and should either hit-on-2s, or have really nasty crits.
The Praetor Legate spends an action point to grant the Guildmaster Thief an attack. On hit, the thief gets an Action Point, which he gives back to the Praetor. Rinse, Repeat until everything's dead.
Found by: <a href="http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75882/29257859&post_num=13#522422573">RenZhe</a>
Suggested House Rule: The campaign ends at level 29. Level 30 is just used for the Epilogue.
Forward-Thinking chargespam
The rules for augmentable powers are basically: "replace only the parts listed". So lets take Forward-Thinking Cut. You use the augment 1. That means that you now have a power with a Hit line, a special line (that's irrelevant here) and an Effect line. You do them in order, which means that the effect comes after the hit.
So that's "You start near a monster and use Forward Thinking Cut to attack it. Then you shift one (Long Shift? Staff and teleport tricks?) and charge something. And when you make the melee basic attack, you substitute in Forward-Thinking Cut. It doesn't say "unaugmented", so you use the "Augment 1" option.
Hey, you're next to a monster, you should totally attack it, then shift, then charge something. Repeat.
Found by: TBR
Suggested House Rule: Add an "Attack: none" to the Augment 1 section. The special would then let the base attack work. That's probably what was intended. To make it a great striker power, you would instead add "using this power, unagumented, in place of the charge's"
Golden Rending
Be an Avenger/Ardent Champion//Lord of Fate with a Rending Weapon. Use Golden Mean. Hit on a 10. Take ten on both rolls, crit via Ardent Champion, use the weapon's crit property to repeat. Apply damage until target is dead.
Alternately, a cleric ally with Doom of the Unworthy(D400) should do the same trick as an encounter power.
Found by: <a href="http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75882/27933673">mellored</a>
Suggested House Rule: All granted attacks are free actions unless specified otherwise in the power (affecting Rending Weapon here. Ardent Champion's free MBA on crit feature is already a free action, and thus can't recurse.)
Suggested DM Rule Lawyering: Claim that setting the result to 10 wasn't a roll, and thus didn't trigger Ardent Champion's feature.
Revenge of the Big-W
Ancient Forebears' Rage: Any 1s or 2s are treated as maximum rolls instead.
Vorpal Weapon: Any maximum rolls explode (add max to the damage, and reroll)
Gauntlets of Destruction: Reroll any 1s.
Use a Falchion (2d4) as your base weapon, and you've got a good chance of rolling a silly-high damage roll. Use a Ring of Radiant Storm and Free Soul epic destiny to make it more reliable. Don't crit.
Level 29 only.
Suggested House Rule: Change Ancient Forebears' Rage to "Whenever you roll 1 or 2 on a damage die for a primal attack, you deal extra damage equal to the die's maximum result". That's a minor boost to a normally used level 29 daily power, but avoids the loop.
Final Sucking
Set up the ability to suck with Frenzied Berserker's daily power Final Confrontation (Melee Training: Int should help). Use a lightning weapon, and have the Lightning Arc feat. Pick up a Stalwart Belt.
Now, stand within 10 squares of your target, and attack yourself with Final Confrontation. If you set up your AC and to-hit just right, you only hit yourself on a 20 (which still hits). Since you were just crit, gain 2*Con-mod temp HP to adsorb the pain. Since you crit, use Lightning Arc to turn it into a normal hit, but then do the damage to someone near by. Continue.
Found by [danyc]
This power has to ignore the general rule about number of free action attacks per turn to function at all, thus that restriction does not contain the power.
Suggested Rules Lawyering: Since you turned the Crit into a normal hit, it doesn't trigger the belt: therefore you take your normal damage, such that it is.
Suggested House Rule: Chuck the player out.
Knights of the Roxbury
Take high-level fighters. Get some form of autodamage from a push: Iron Vanguard comes to mind, as does Draconic Arrogance. Use Goad of Blood to allow you to use any At-Will for your MBA. Use Opening Shove to ping the target next to your friend, who takes the granted MBA and subs in Opening Shove to send him back. Repeat, killing the target with autodamage from the pushing.
Found by [ThatWasTotallyNinja]
Suggested House Rule: All granted attacks are free actions unless specified otherwise in the power (affecting Opening Shove here.)
Scion of Renewal and the Apocalypse
Martial Power includes a feat Avenging Spirit that gives you an action point when an ally drops. That's not usually a breakable thing, because you can still only spend one action point an encounter.
But a Warmaster can spend any number of action points an encounter, as the level 30 capstone. So let's do some additional optimization here.
Scion of Renewal (D385) and Everflame Guardian both get an Action Point feature to surgelessly heal an ally when you spend an Action Point. Ok, now we're healing the ally that dropped. Warmaster already gave an ally a free action when you spent an action point. So now, when an ally drops, on your turn you spend an AP, heal the ally, give a free action to another ally, and have a free action for yourself.
That's kinda nifty, but not broken. How do we break it? Well, use your standard to attack (and drop) your ally, of course. Autodamate, like from Magic Missile ought to do the trick. Or in Dark Sun, you can use Defiling Action to get autodamage on as many allies as will fit around you, while infinitely attacking.
Found by [mellored]
Suggested Rules Lawyering: Clear case of Bag of Rats outside of Dark Sun.
Spam of Kings
The Sword of Kings feature of Legendary Sovereign assumes that all weapon encounter attack powers have attack rolls. Power Strike (or some of the attack power Subs from the Iron Warrior theme) would beg to differ. You never attack: therefore you can't miss. So infinitely use one power on a hit.
(Note: the Slayer can only use Power Strike once per turn, so you need to get the power in some non-limited way to pull this off with Power Strike. Powerful Strike feat looks like it will work. (Epic) Iron Wolf's Bound also looks like it should work)
Found by [ThatWasTotallyNinja and Reg06]
Suggested House Rule: Choose one standard action encounter attack power you know that has the weapon keyword and a primary attack line.
Suggested Rules Lawyering: Mutter something about not knowing if the power was expended until after the resolution of the power, which is too late to use again on the same trigger.
Super-critical recursive criticals
If you can cause one critical hit to create 21 attacks, odds are that one of those 21 attacks will be a critical. If that critical spawns another 21 attacks, then the odds are pretty good that your setup will "go critical" and never end. That's ... not going to happen. But if you increase your crit range, the target number of rolls drops.
Getting rerolls will have a similar effect, although not quite as potent. If each critical spawns a single attack with 21 rerolls, you'll probably get a few cycles in... but eventually you'll get unlucky and the cycle will die out.
Here's a table with some examples that would usually go supercritical. I only have currently legal examples of the 16/2/4 line.
| Range | Attacks | # Rolls per Attack |
|---|---|---|
| 20 | 21 | 1 |
| 20 | 2 | 14 |
| 19 | 6 | 2 |
| 19 | 3 | 4 |
| 17 | 3 | 2 |
| 16 | 2 | 4 |
For the generic case, you need the result of "n*(1-(1-c)^r)" to exceed 1, where n is the number of attacks, c is the chance of a crit per die, and r is the number of rerolls.
I had declared this whole class fixed when they added in the "1 free attack/turn" restriction, but since they never got around to declaring "Rending Weapon"'s attack a free action, it keeps popping back up.
- [ThatWasTotallyNinja came up with a combo] involving Rending Weapons and Opportunist's Rend for the spawned attacks, Swordmaster to recharge Opportunits's Rend, Psychic Surge from the Wilder Theme for crit range, MC Oath of Enmity for more rolls, and a Tiefling Bard to get it all in one PC.
Suggested House Rule: All granted attacks are free actions unless specified otherwise in the power (affecting Rending Weapon here.)
Suggested Rules Lawyering: Oath of Enmitys "this doesn't stack clause" applies.
Suggested Rules Lawyering: Don't allow someone to re-charge a power before it's finished.
Beastmaster Lich
Be a beastmaster ranger with the Beastlord epic destiny. Eat your animal companion. Since you aren't dead, it can't die. Since it isn't dead, you can't die.
Pair 'Porters
Two evermeet warlocks start next to each other. One teleports away (to the other side of his friend), and teleports his buddy next to him. His buddy then goes "oh, wait. I was just teleported. That means I teleported. That means I can move my buddy next to me. Hey buddy, teleport to the other side of me." Repeat.
Gives infinite movement, and invisibility to all creatures you want to be invisible to, including each other. Add Prince of Hell at level 30 for autodamage when leaving, to add in infinite damage.
Alternately, in non-rarity games you can use the Offerings of Celestian item set (4 items) and keep your PP free.
Found by [Mellored]
Suggested House Rule: Change the trigger to "When you teleport yourself 10 squares or less"
War Wizard's Travel Company
Create a zone of autodamage without the 1/turn limit (Stardock also suggests Blazing Starfall), and use a close arcane attack of your choice through a staff. Via War Wizard's Staff, slide the target a completely undefined route through the damage-zone multiple times until it dies, finishing with the corpse ending up in a square adjacent to you.
Found by [Mellored]
Suggested House Rule: "you can slide one adjacent creature directly to a different square adjacent to you". And also rule all autodamage sources 1/turn.
Bent
Source: http://community.wizards.com/node/3866646/revisions/4375501/view
Adding Damage Dice to static damage powers
You have the Reapers Touch feat and a 20 Int, and charge using Magic Missle as your MBA though a +2 implement, while wearing a heroic tier Horned Helm. How much autodamage did you do?
Well, that's a good question. Magic Missile does 5(Int)+2(implement). It's not a rolled number, so the usual enhancement bonus of the wand doesn't apply, nor would Dual Weapon Expertise nor Implement Expertise or a Shard of the Mage. But the Horned Helm adds +1d6 damage.
If that +1d6 makes it a rolled damage expression (<a href="http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75882/28273717">Discussed here</a>), then all those could apply.
This has larger issues for a whole host of other game elements. Consider Brutal Barrage via a Lightning weapon by someone using Promise of the Storm. Consider the magification of zone abuse, many of which do static damage specifically to lower the multiplicative potential.
Suggested House Rule: Powers have a damage roll, or don't, as an inate property of the power. Therefore no extra damage will change that element of the power.
Suggsted Rules Lawyering: RC222 states "Whenever a power requires a damage roll, it specifies which dice to roll and how many of them.". That statement assumes the dichotomy between powers with rolls, and ones with no rolls. Since there is no direct contradicting rules text, the house rule above is the real rule.
Seal of Binding + Divine Regeneration + Royal Command of Asmodeus
Solo is permamently dominated, and immune to attacks, so basically immune to his allies as he kills them.
The March 2010 update upped the damage to 15, but that's still easily manageable by the high level characters that will be throwing around Seal of Bindging. The May 2011 Class Compendium update changed Seal of Binding to protect the target, which mostly broke the Seal of Binding+Regeneration combo. The immunity is to attacks, so autodamage from a non attack (slashing?) will still eventually kill the solo. And in the mean time, due to Royal Command of Asmodeus, the solo will kill his allies and wait for you to autodamage him to death.
Suggested House Rule: Add a clause to Seal of Binding that the user can not benefit healing while maintaining the seal.
Suggested Workaround: Prefer Monster Vault solos with "get out of stun/dominate free" powers/traits.
Intimidate + Flensing Weapon
Hit the target once with your weapon, use the daily, and then use your optimized Intimidate skill check to force it to surrender. (Need original source)
Suggested house Rule: Adjust the intimidate DCs in combat.
True Permastealth
Take a ranged thief, go Master Thief, and take Treetop Sniper. Snipe in basically perfect safety from 40 squares off for forever. At level 30, snipe in perfect safety from range "Sight" via Cosmic Soul.
There are other approaches to Permasteath that still have the PC appear briefly during the attack sequence. Master Thief's Shadow Striker doesn't.
Suggested House Rule: Treat as all the other approaches: the target knows what direction the attack came from, and should be able to see any regions of concealment.
Suggested Workaround: Now you know why dungeons are cramped. Prefer AoE blasters who can carpet bomb the room. Blindsight, Tremor Sense, and the like are also helpful, especially if you ban the consumables that target those senses.
Spammable Psionics
Balancing Psionic augmentable powers (especially low level ones) is harder than balancing regular powers, because Psionic powers are missing one key limiting factor: the "once/encounter" use. No matter how good Rain of Blows was, it wasn't broken because it could only be used once an encounter. Mind Thrust and Dishearten don't have that protection.
Both the powers listed provide large bonuses/penalties via their augment 2, and both powers can be used many times in the same encounter by a high level psion.
Suggested House Rule: Use the Hybrid rules to determine a psionic class's power points rather than just going strictly by level. That will force the player to swap one power out for a higher level power just to gain the PP he needs.
Space Drop
Fly up some insane distance, but use Eyes of the Warlock to get Line of Sight/Effect to your target. Then either hit it with a Transposing weapon using True-Eye Shot, or Hit it with Dark Transport. Hope it can't fly.
Update: The Feburary 2010 errata allows creatures teleported into the air to make a saving throw to avoid the effect, but a single save to avoid dying is still bent.
Suggested house Rule: All Epic BBEGs can fly, can't they?
Source: Outshined
Unkillable Revenant
Stacking bonuses to death saving throws, along with Revenant feats and the Raven Consort Epic destiny makes you near impossible to kill. You do not drop when you're below 0, are insubstantial, and you can get a high enough bonus to always heal with a free surge. Meaning you have to take 51-125% of you're total HP in a round in order to die. Add in a Belt of the Sonnlinor and you have resist 30 and insubstantial, so you have to take a silly amount of damage in a single round to die. Non-revenant can achieve 20 on death saves, can use soulforged armor to not drop, and can use Eternal Seeker (taking Cycle of Life at 30) to make it surgeless, but they don't get insubstantial.
This "trick" can be used by anyone to a lesser extent.
Overpowered
Source: http://community.wizards.com/node/3876106/revisions/4450566/view
Stupid PMC tricks
Use PMC to trade an unused at will for a class feature. The "you can trade at-wills" clause doesn't specify either "1st level" or "attack".
Cool tricks include picking up the Scout's Dual Weapon Attack feature, or a monk's striker class feature.
Discovered by erachima in the form of Mia
Suggested House Rule: "At 11th level, you can choose to replace one of your 1st level at-will attack powers with a 1st level at-will attack power from your second class."
Ethereal Sidestep + Evermeet Warlock = Infinite Invisibility
Ethereal Sidestep + Evermeet Warlock. Works best with a melee character multiclassed or hybrid-ed with Warlock. Every round you teleport one square (or more if you have items), and become invisible to all the monsters that were adjacent to you. As an at-will ability.
Large Multiattack
This is a LARGE section. Some of these elements may be overpowered separately, in particular, large to-hit bonuses. The combination together certainly is.
Make lots and lots of attacks in one round, hit many times, do tons of damage each attack, and kill things. For a traditional "static" large multiattack to be problematic, you need all three elements to combine:
- Bonuses to hit, so that all the attacks hit
- Bonuses to damage, to multiply across all the attacks
- Lots of attacks.
Builds:
Multi-attack powers
The basic approach is to have many attacks in a round, so multi-attack powers are the bread-and-butter of this combination. Here are many of the problamatic multi-attack powers, and some of the other approaches people have found to get the same effect:
- Hurricane of Blades (Errata improved)
- Storm of Blows (Errata improved)
- Rain of Blows (Errata improved)
- Cascade of Blades (Errata Improved)
- Brutal Barrage. Improved with Brilliant Recovery
- PC attack granting powers. Need to boost PC damage/hit bonuses instead of yours.
- Hail of Steel. Warlord
- Valorous Charge. Cleric
- Mindlink Strike. Ardent, spammable.
- Boar's Toss. Shaman.
- Rune of Astral Phalanx. Runepriest
- Forced Opportunity. Psion
- A Party of High-crit melee fighters and Relentless Assault (Warlord 25)
- A party of Warlords with Commander's Strike.
- A bag of Mage Daggers, another encounter power on this list, and a lot of arcane powers to power the mage dagger. (need source)
- Avenger Relentless Slayer paragon path: Slayer's Asscendancy: Avenger gets to make minor-action melee basic attacks once a round against oath targets.
Of course, if you can get multiple attacks at will, you can probably build something that will exceed your DMs expectations of power levels.
- Twin Strike, and Hellish Rebuke if you can easily constantly damage yourself.
- Dual Weapon Strike from the scout, or anyone who grabs it via PMC cheese
Action Recycling
- And in a spike turn, it's nice to have extra actions you can use to fuel more multi-attack powers.
Known sources of extra actions
- Action Points, AP recycling (PotG,Violet Solitaire)
- Minor action attacks, from your class or from a Weapon of Speed. Or both.
- Free Attacks. Trip Up is your posterchild here, but Iron Warrior has some.
- Spawned attacks from Crits. See below. Think Rending or Harmony Blade here. If you attack enough, your odds of getting a crit rise substantially
- Ring of Free Time, for more minor actions from your 3rd combat on.
Large bonuses to hit
To help a large multiattack spike turn, the attack bonuses have to last for someone's entire turn, so I'm not listing any bonuses that just last one attack.
- War Chanter: +Stat to attack (and damage rolls) if your leader spends an Action Point.
- Flame of Hope: +Stat to attack rolls to allies within 5 when the invoker spends an action point.
- Battle Captain's Inspiring Word (2-4x per encounter, no attack needed)
- Various Leader Encounter/Daily Powers
- Battle Engineer's Greater Magic Weapon
- Warlord's Favor, Thunderous Fury, or Raise the Bar/Lead the Attack (+Wis/Int to attack rolls for a turn.)
- Instant Planning, Quickening Order (+Int to hit, minor daily)
- Rush of Battle (+Stat to hit, Resourceful Warlods only)
- Great Dragon War Cry/Brutal Setup (+Cha/Int to hit, Inspiring/Tactical Warlords only. Must hit but also targets other creatures if you can otherwise weaken/Daze)
- Various Striker/Controller/Defender defensive debuffs
- Armor Splinter
- Chains of Sorrow
- Thorn Spray
- Bane/Denunciation
- Sources of rerolls
- Sage of Ages
- Divine Oracle (for Will attacks)
- Dice of Auspicious Fortune
- Potions of Clarity (Made more expensive March 2010)
- Avenger's Oath of Enmity
- Lifesinger
- Martial Mastery stance (fighter)
Suggested House Rule: No clean suggestions. Applying modifiers to a damage roll only once per turn might work, but is a large change that would need extensive play testing.
Fixed By: The November 2009 Errata nerfed Bloodclaw and Reckless, which took out a large source of static damage. That helped. The May 2010 nerf to Follow-up Blow turned it into a pure DPR power and really killed most expressions of this technique. Kulkor Arms Master was nerfed in March 2012. The July 2010 update only allows one free action attack per turn, which limits the crit-fishing aspects. Various nerfs to the larger multi-attack powers also hurt this overall apporach. It still can be nasty.
Large Damage Bonuses
We're still in the "Large Multiattack" section. Once you've got many attacks, you'll want to apply as much damage to each of them as possible. Some known sources of damage bonuses include:
- Item bonuses: Iron Armbands, Radiant Weapons, Staffs of Ruin, Goblin Totem weapon for halflings.
- Various PPs that don't limit bonus damage to once/turn.
- Extra Damage Action, from Pitfighter or Warpriest.
- Called Shot (D364), Feats (TWF, Weapon Focus)
- Titan's Belt
- Many leader powers
- War Chanter's AP feature adds a stat to damage for a round
- Battle Engineer's utility adds a stat to damage for an encounter, and both Magic Weapon and Greater Magic Weapon will add a stat to damage for a round.
- Rage of the War Bringer from a Thaneborn Barbarian
- Many many others (especially Bravura and Inspiring Warlords)
- Elemental
- Shard (1/3/5), "better weapon focus" feat (-/3/4)
- Cold gets Gloves of Ice(-/2/4) and Lasting Frost (-/5/5)
- Sarifal feywarden (5/10/15)
- Radiant
- Shard, Gifts for the Queen which can also grant damage rerolls
- Morninglord(10)
- Pelor's boon (4-10)
- Radiant One (Notable for applying to any damage source)
Excessive Defenses
Take a party that's kept up with the defensive feat taxes. Further, have each member take the Epic feat for their strong defense to push it up to the "basically non-hittable" region. Now have the bard use Mantle of Unity. Team monster can't hit for a round. Refresh that somehow, and team monster can't hit fur the combat.
Take a party that's kept up with the defensive feat taxes, and used the Epic feat to patch their weak defense so there are no gaping holes. Have the cleric pop Valorous Charge. Now, besides the epic damage output that comes from granting everyone free attacks, you have a party that can't be hit for a round. And once you recharge it (via Divine Mastery) you have a party that can't be hit for the combat.
Examples:
- Warlock's Wrath (Tiefling)
- Imperious Majesty (Tiefling)
- Instant Planning (Warlord u10 daily)
- Dishearten Spam (penalties to hit are equivalent)
- Word of Divine Protection (Runepriest, Rune of Protection
Broom Builds: Polearm Gamble, Polearm Momentum, Heavy Blade Opportunity, Pushing At-Will, and Controlling Weapon
Everyone approaching you ends up prone 2 squares away, unable to attack you. (Source)
The December 2009 errata limited some of this, by making Polearm Gamble not apply when people shift into position next to you.
Suggested House Rule: Allow a short charge/Lunge: All penalties from charging, no benefits from charging, but no minimum distance requirement.
Massive Damage Reduction
Many effects can dramatically reduce the amount of damage PCs take. Here's a list of a few:
Paladin's Hospitaler paragon path: Hospitaler's Blessing: Heal any ally that is hit or missed by a marked enemy with no action required. Mitigates a huge amount of damage from solos or elites and others if a paladin is able to mark more than one enemy. Completely inhibits the threat from monsters that get free-action attacks like beholders or hydras.
Swordmage's Reaper's Challenge: Automatically weakens a target until the end of an encounter if it does not hit the Swordmage. Swordmages can easily stay away from any melee hitting monster and thus keep it weakened indefinitely. Inhibits elites and solos very badly.
Swordmage's Radiant Shield: Makes allies insubstantial for a round but can be used multiple rounds with various encounter recovery effects. Mixed with Reaper's Challenge, a swordmage can keep a single target weakened and a party insubstantial for up to two rounds.
Iron To Glass (Cleric Daily 5): Target takes -4 to damage until end of encounter that worsens on each hit. It has no save. This will render a melee-focused solo impotent.
Moment of Glory (Cleric Daily 1): Gives party resist 5 with sustain minor. Dramatically reduces heroic-tier damage. Monster damage updates since MM3 help but this still stops a lot.
Certain Justice (Paladin Champion of Order paragon 11 power): Target marked by you is weakened and dazed until it is not marked by you. Can completely remove solo effectiveness.
Suggested house rule: Give solos a way to shake off or ignore status effects and penetrate resistances.
Stun Lock
Some number of targets don't get their first 5,6 turns. Missing with Blood Mage's Destructive Salutation, push the effect out another turn with an orb, spamming encounter stun attacks, etc.
Need link to the thread that focused on missing with DS.
Unhittable PC
Stack items, class features, feats, and anything else to push relevant defenses so high at-level monsters can't hit them on a 20.
Class Features:
- Barbarian Agility assumes the barbarian does not get a full stat to AC. Whirling Barbarians can get a full stat to AC, as can any other Barbarian build that doesn't dump Dex.
- Hybrids can Paragon Hybrid and take Hybrid Talent to pick up multiple defensive features, and stack them. Armor of Faith and Swordmage Warding are popular, and then adding feats to expand both features.
Items
- Helm of Able Defense: +2 to all defences until hit (after the 1st round). If you can't be hit ...
- Shadow Band: Concealment is usually effectively +2
- Boots of the Fencing Master: +1 to AC/Ref if you shift. That's in your control
- Displacement Cloak: +2 item to AC&Ref until hit. If you can't be hit, that lasts a while.
- Cloak of Translocation: +2 to AC&Ref if you teleported. There are at-will teleports.
- Golden Ring of Teros': +2 item to AC and Fort.
- Agile Armor: +1-3 item to AC&Ref until bloodied. If you can't be hit ....
- Elven Chain Shirt: +1/2/3 to AC in light armor.
- Battle Cleric's Lore: Virtual fake shield can stack with other virtual fake shields for +2.
Specific Single Powers
I'm not actually convinced that these powers are actually overpowered. But they do get a lot of play for certain builds, and are certainly not weak. Consider this a listing of nerf-bait.
Control Zones
Most of these can be handled by the monsters readying actions to charge/move, so that they get to act between the save at the end of their turn and you reapplying the condition during your turn.
(All known were fixed by the May 2010 update, but I'm sure I missed some)
Defensive buffs
Consecrated Ground(Cleric Daily 5): Any fallen allies automatically gain consciousness as soon as their turn starts. The HP count isn't a lot, but since it starts at zero, it can get very annoying to the DM very quickly.
Debuffs
Iron to Glass. No save. Target either really really sucks or Sucks until death depending on the intial D20 roll. Either way, kills any creature w/o some sort of effect shedding mechanic.
Sources
- http://community.wizards.com/group/dd-charop/wiki/brokenbroken
- http://community.wizards.com/node/3876131/revisions/4451346/view
- http://community.wizards.com/node/3866646/revisions/4375501/view
- http://community.wizards.com/node/3876106/revisions/4450566/view