I picked up a copy of Heroes of the Feywild at my friendly local game store last Friday, which was apparently the day the book first came out at “premier stores”. I haven’t read through the whole thing yet, but a friend and I were talking about some of the content over the weekend.
The silly example that I tossed out there was building a pixie berserker wearing a Badge of the Berserker, with the goal of charging INTO the space of an enemy and making it really hard for that enemy to escape the berserker’s defender aura. The more we talked about it, the more it sounded like something we had to try!
We were thinking about the character specifically for something like Lair Assault (which neither of us has tried yet), so we were talking about a 5th-level character.
1. Race and ability scores: Pixie. Okay, so a lack of racial bonus to Strength is going to make it tough to build a good barbarian, but so it goes. With the racial bonuses to Charisma and Dexterity (seems more useful for a berserker than Intelligence), the stats will be 18 Strength, 11 Constitution, 16 Dexterity, 8 Intelligence, 10 Wisdom and 12 Charisma. If we were specifically going straight to level 5, we could take Strength down to 17 and then bump it up at level 4, giving us some more points to make the other stats better, but I won’t even worry about that right now. I will assume that the Con score gets to 12 somehow.
2. Class: Berserker version of the barbarian. We get the Defender Aura and Vengeful Guardian powers. We’ll take the Temperate Land heartland (since we’re a pixie), which will give us +2 to damage as long as we wield a weapon in one hand and a shield in the other. We’ll also have +1 speed while charging (which I’ll assume applies to the fly speed, though I’m not 100% certain of that). We get 15+Con hit points at level 1 (26) and 6 more per level (so 50 total at level 5; 51 if we bump up Con). 8 healing surges per day (+1 if we get Con to 12), and a +2 bonus to Fortitude. I won’t worry about skills here.
3. Equipment: Since we’re going for level 5, I’ll keep things pretty simple.
- Badge of the Berserker +1 (obviously)
- Magic Rapier +2
- Whatever magic hide armor +1 you like (level 5 or lower) – Barkskin sounds pixieish to me
- Small shield
- Other cool stuff
4. Feats. I like Light Blade Expertise and Streak of Light (combat advantage when charging).
5. Powers, themes, backgrounds, etc. I’m sure there’s lots of cool, potentially abusive stuff we could do here. That’s not really what I’m interested in, though, so I’ll skip it.
6. The results:
- Crazy Wings the Pixie Berserker (Level 5)
- 51 hit points, 9 surges per day (assuming we bump up Con to 12 at some point)
- AC 22 (10 base, 2 half-level, 4 magic hide armor, 3 dex modifier, 1 small shield, 2 from Poised Defender in defender mode)
- Fortitude 19 (10 base, 2 half-level, 1 neck slot, 4 strength modifier, 2 class bonus)
- Reflex 17 (10 base, 2 half-level, 1 neck slot, 3 dex modifier, 1 shield)
- Will 14 (10 base, 2 half-level, 1 neck slot, 1 charisma modifier) – ugh
- Charging attack bonus: +15 vs AC (2 half-level, 4 strength modifier, 3 proficiency, 2 enhancement, 1 light blade expertise, 2 combat advantage from feat, 1 for charging)
- Charging damage: 1d8+9 (4 strength modifier, 2 enhancement, 2 from Temperate Heartland, 1 from light blade expertise since Streak of Light gives CA)
- Normal melee attack bonus: +12 vs AC (same as charging, minus the charge bonus and the automatic combat advantage)
- Normal melee damage: 1d8+8 (no automatic combat advantage, so no +1 from LBE)
Is this the most powerful character in the world? Probably not. But the idea of charging INTO an opponent’s square and basically locking them down with the defender aura just seems like too much fun NOT to try. You don’t provoke combat advantage for charging with the Badge of the Berserker, you have combat advantage from Streak of Light, and you get extra damage from Light Blade Expertise. CHAAAARGE!
Crazy Wings sounds ridiculous enough to play one of these days. What do you think?
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