Fear Change

[The Rambling Midget]

While Fear is no longer a save or die effect, it remains a save or be unable to participate anymore effect. Even if you've heavily invested in fear saves , the longer you fight something with a Fear Aura, the greater the statistical chance of rolling a 1 and incurring a set of penalties so crippling that you might as well walk away. This leads to players dumping Will as a save and instead relying on spell based immunities, which contributes to minmaxing instead of balanced builds.

Short Term: Change ALL NPC Fear auras and spells to a Taunt-like contest, which incurs penalties based on the difference between DC and saving throw. Investigate whether similar changes are warranted/necessary for PC based effects, to ensure balance. Make Fear effects slightly more prevalent throughout the module, among suitably terrifying NPCs.

Long Term: If the short term part comes out balanced and fun, change Aura of Courage and Perfect Self to apply a very large Fear save bonus, instead of immunity, and offer scaling fear save bonuses with Clarity, Lesser Mind Blank, and Mind Blank, as well as possibly introducing smaller bonuses on things like Good Hope, if deemed appropriate.

Ultimately, I'd like to see this sort of scheme applied to all debuffs that effectively function as save or die (e.g. Paralysis), to reward balanced characters, but Fear seems like the easiest place to start and test whether it will be viable, especially if immunity options are left in place at the beginning.

[garrbear758]

Denied. PvE was balanced around these effects working as is.