On Cavalier

[Tarkus the dog]

Probably my favorite class recently simply for the fact that you can summon a horse anywhere and ride it and don't feel bad about it either because it's actually strong, especially if you're not a tumble class. However, some issues:

-Cav hammer doesn't stun with spirited charge (on a horse) and neither does the cav sword daze. I have a feeling there's an issue with cav weapons specifically because Heavy Flail and Scimitar works fine ( stuns and dazes ). I'm sure this can be easily fixed.

-I read somewhere that slashing weapons are meant to cause a bleed effect with spirited charge? I'm unsure though.

-Spirited charge deals ridiculous amounts of damage.



This is from spirited charge alone, and 7 weaponmaster + 10 spirited charge just deletes characters ( and on top of that you get dazed ). If you combo it right by flurrying+spirited charging you can deal anywhere between 300 to 625 damage with some good rolls. I understand you are encouraged to let spirited charge "charge up", but since it puts you to 1 APR it delays your attack massively that you're better off just using it mid-flurry.

And it's not a weaponmaster case only, slap 4-10 cavalier on anything that deals damage and watch things just outright get deleted.

-It makes you vulnerable after it goes off? I'm not sure why it works this way, but you're frozen in spot for 2 seconds or so.

-Horses can be faster than haste. It's not a huge difference, but it's large enough that you can easily get away or catch up to somebody. Which is, well, the whole point of being a horserider and that's all well and good but on Arelith -- Going in, dealing 500 damage, running away to heal and do it again -- I don't know how fun that is for the receiving party.

-2 second stun/daze is just unfair. The DC is too difficult to pass and if you're not a STR character you basically will get stunned every time. On the other hand if you have high STR your chances aren't that good either. This is just not cool. AC/Concealment aren't gonna help you against a player who know what they are doing. I don't really know what else to say.

What's more reasonable, then?

1. I'd rather the spirited charge works like divine smite/elemental strike. 1 APR makes the whole thing too awkward to use, you're practically encouraged to do it mid flurry.

2. It should deal less damage. I don't think this one needs explaining. The above is 1h damage too and it's a cookie-cutter WM. If we were to fully utilize tag and run gameplay I'd probably do falchion instead.

3. The stun/daze should have a reasonable DC that all the characters can pass if they are properly built for it. Mind immunity doesn't do much against bludgeoning, it just makes you get knocked down instead which is arguably even worse. It does help against daze at the very least, but this just means that heavy flail/cav hammer ( once it's fixed ) is just a better option.

4. Ride speed should be capped to haste speed. There's no reason for it to go beyond that. Monks were dropped down to 125% for a reason, I'm unsure why there should be a class that can just outright surpass haste speed ( though this might just be a bug ), but at the very least if it was to equal haste you'd make them on an equal footing with everybody else on the server ( vanilla monk speed was removed for a reason ).

5. Let us ride in caves. It's probably a ton of work to implement, but not being able to ride in Underdark feels so lame.

Anyway I wanted to talk about this because I like the class a lot but currently it just feels way too cheesy to play and I'm hoping to see some of these things addressed some time soon.

[Watchful Glare]

Finally someone said it, Cavalier is great.

[Scurvy Cur]

All of these are valid cav concerns, and I appreciate Tarkus taking the time to play one and watch what's going on, because there's a lot that the spreadsheets in the Cav manual just don't capture.

I think a good start would probably be to rework Spirited Charge into some sort of "smite but horse", and give up on making it some sort of "charging my hyperbeam" attack, then rework the damage to make it reasonable as a bonus attack. The smite/elemental strike code looks basically stable and most of the obvious abuses have been ironed out. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like that's the case for Spirited Charge.

I think another move should probably be to decouple spirited charge scaling and weaponmaster; I've shared the opinion elsewhere that, while I sympathize with those who want giant one shot potential on cav, I think WM synergy puts the class in an awkward position. Either the damage is calibrated to be reasonable in the presence of weaponmaster, in which case you never ever want to take cav without WM, because skipping WM makes your charge damage less-than-reasonable, or you make charge good on its own, and you wind up with 600 damage weaponmaster crit flurries.

I also don't think that "percent chance to just vaporize a target" is healthy design. There was a similar problem with the initial smite rework: damage scaling was just too good, and I and several other people looking at the class quickly realized that the optimal way to play a paladin with the initially released smite would have been to engage, throw in one flurry and a smite to fish for a x3 smite crit, and withdraw if this didn't work, because when it did work, you'd put out 550-600 damage in that one flurry. And that's an ability that does only partial damage if you hit the wrong alignment (I could say some other things about alignment damage scaling, but overall smite feels pretty ok now). Cav is in the same space, only you're also on a horse so you can play the kite and fish game for as long as you need to, the damage does not care your alignment, and the potential for burst seems bigger.

It doesn't matter if your chance of getting your charge to crit is only 10-15%; it didn't matter for smite, and matters less for charge, because you fish as long as you need to.

The extra on-hits are also probably too much. Any sort of damage spike that comes with hard CC is pretty close to "death sentence even if you don't crit a bunch". I sympathize with the desire to make a broad range of cav weapons good, and to make each of them unique, but having reviewed the formulas finally, they're unreasonable. Even strength characters will have at best a 50-50 chance of passing. If you're not strength based, you come close to an auto failure.

All this on a class that gives you 4 bonus feats and fear immunity.

-It makes you vulnerable after it goes off? I'm not sure why it works this way, but you're frozen in spot for 2 seconds or so.

I think this was probably intended to stop continuous hit and run crit fishing, but my suspicion is that it doesn't work out as well as we'd like it to. I doubt 2 seconds is enough in most circumstances to prevent you from escaping and healing up if your dive doesn't work out, and it probably feels clunky af.

[Skarain]

Cavalier does have a number of problems, yes

Of recently, regarding speed, I've been "stuck" with Horse-speed occasionally even when dismounted. Can't really complain of Monk-like speed, but yeah, it is a bit silly. Not been able to replicate it proper yet so no proper bug report.

I do chime in to say that I too like Cavalier. I do, in fact, play one. It's great being able to ride from place to place reliably, and your horse can't be stolen. I am loving the feel of being a horse-rider.

To my understanding, if you trigger Charge mid-flurry, you get only 60% of damage, instead of full if wait 2 seconds.

Bleed I think was removed as the effects were streamlined more, but I could be wrong.

The 2 second root is fine, I think, IF Horse Charge is faster than Haste. It makes sense that you're able to outrun a person on foot, but for balancing purposes the root is fair, as it allows some retaliation. Could even be longer or turned into a longer duration snare, but for now (still leveling, still getting my feats) I do like how the class functions.

Also, someone removed the hilarious dialogue line that you used to get when you tried to Whirlwind on top of your horse, and nearly falling off. I understand why it went, but it was a great joke.

[xf1313]

Agree with most of the problems posted, unsure about 2s stun and ride in caves. Thou if Arelith decide the narrow passage is not enough hell on us...who knows?

This class could use some more ‘general’ synergies, or let it be a base class. Well, for example, stack with fighter/knight/pal/BG/DC? Lore-wise it makes sense. And for deep Cav, it feels like WM and lance being the only great option and that feels bad. Some freedom with weapons, I’d hope.

Other mounts *cough* deers, goat, bear, wolf....

[BurntGnome]

I started 10/10/10 Fighter/WM/Cav and moved to 10/10/10 Fighter/knight/cav

I think spirited charge dropping a ton of damage is what makes going cav worth it. The on foot bonus with spirited doesnt really offset the disadvantages you face for the majority of content since that content happens indoors. The root effect hitting a player with it gives it a suitable counter, because often enough, thats enough time to really delete the cav, if not chunk him down enough to make it manageable. Alot of what people find offensive about the output comes from WM being frankly badly designed. Its a WM issue. I dont like how cheesy it feels, which is why I dropped it.

As for the speed, again, Cav is kinda handicapped anywhere else but outdoors, the speed is about really the only feature outside of damage that gives it purpose. I dont see a point in nerfing the speed, otherwise it defeats the purpose of the horse I think.

Riding indoors, especially as someone who plays gnome, and thus having a perfectly suitable pony sized horse, feels like its overdue. There was a week of time where after one of the patches, you could do just this, and it felt like it was fine, allowing me to actually make use of my build on faction outings, whereas without this, Im stuck doing debuff spam with knight (which is lackluster in itself).

Its a very awkward class to deal with, balancing it, and playing it. I think both it and knight really need reworks, and I think weapon master needs more sanity checks on its ability to completely overpower class combos like it does with cav. But I dont think cav itself needs nerfing in these suggested ways.

If riding indoors was enabled, thus offsetting some of the downsides of cav, I think you could reign in some of the speed and damage, but the class will still kinda feel shallow and uninspired, because the general amount of content it offers is just lacking. Fixing that first then rebalancing around it seems smarter than nerfing what it does shine at and leaving it feeling unfinished. More synergies with other classes would greatly improve how the class feels, opening lines of class combos that could offer abilities such that losing a little damage or a little speed would not gimp the class to the point it doesnt feel worth it.

[Security_Blanket]

Cavalry is lacking in synergy with caster classes, the only incentive is a fancy summon option at the cost of being more prone to dispels. I think Cavalry should get a caster level every 2 or 3 levels.

[Kenji]

These have been valuable feedback and rest assured some changes will be coming to Cavalier Soon™.

The first order of business is to allow riding almost everywhere, but "indoor" areas will likely provide little to no movement bonus depending on the area. This would then, in turn, expand the PrC into UD territory.

Mechanically we might be looking at changing the spirited charge to utilizing smite script to a fuller extent and its synergy decoupled from WM.

[Good Character]

The first order of business is to allow riding almost everywhere, but "indoor" areas will likely provide little to no movement bonus depending on the area. This would then, in turn, expand the PrC into UD territory.

Woot woot!

Does this mean the script won't force players off in even unsavory places to be riding a horse such as a building in a city?

Running off 4 hours of sleep yields poor reading comprehension.

[AstralUniverse]

The first order of business is to allow riding almost everywhere, but "indoor" areas will likely provide little to no movement bonus depending on the area. This would then, in turn, expand the PrC into UD territory.

Personally I never even looked at Cav seriously as a class because Horse = only outside, and it then means the class's core aspect is limited. From a game-play perspective, imagine you play a wm and only get your crits during night time, or barb and barb rage only outdoors. Too limiting and I always suspected that Cav is intentionally op because of this huge limitation, but I would love to see this limitation gone, even if it means heavy nerfs in trade. Totally worth it. And a very good summery from Tarkus, thank you.

[Scurvy Cur]

The biggest issue right now is that cav is OP when "in niche" in ways that I'm relatively sure were not intended.

From a game-play perspective, imagine you play a wm and only get your crits during night time, or barb and barb rage only outdoors. Too limiting and I always suspected that Cav is intentionally op because of this huge limitation, but I would love to see this limitation gone, even if it means heavy nerfs in trade. Totally worth it. And a very good summery from Tarkus, thank you.

Without going into any specifics here, because I think we should give Kenji time to rework the class before dogpiling him too hard, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that cavalier's OP features in their present incarnation are stronger than WM crits or barb rage. And this feels weird to say, but from my 1 month-ish experience with the class, I believe it to be true.

Much of this is due to the features simply not working as intended, and is why I have suggested the changes I have.

The other thing to consider is that cav is hardly "bad" outside its niche. Foot charge is a good button. Good enough that I would like the class on any sort of AB-maxxing melee build even if I were running it in an environment where I never got to ride anything, since even 4 levels of the class is pretty value.

[AstralUniverse]

Without going into any specifics here, because I think we should give Kenji time to rework the class before dogpiling him too hard, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that cavalier's OP features in their present incarnation are stronger than WM crits or barb rage. And this feels weird to say, but from my 1 month-ish experience with the class, I believe it to be true.

Much of this is due to the features simply not working as intended, and is why I have suggested the changes I have.

The other thing to consider is that cav is hardly "bad" outside its niche. Foot charge is a good button. Good enough that I would like the class on any sort of AB-maxxing melee build even if I were running it in an environment where I never got to ride anything, since even 4 levels of the class is pretty value.

And that's why I'm all in favor for nerfs, along with less limiting riding if it's possible. Eventually (tm).
I mostly try to illustrate that when the core ability of the class is limited, no matter how strong it is, it might just not be so appealing to play. All in all, it's still a full bab class with 4 bonus feats across 10 levels. That's gotta be useful to some builds regardless of riding.

[Dreams]

It would be great if it were simplified. At the moment it takes hours of study to understand why/how anything does anything. Much of the abilities are still bugged, and most of it isn't working off a clear d20 system. Why don't we bring it back to being displayed in terms of dice roll, class level, etc, instead of all of the various tables/modifiers/unique weapon applications?

Also, why is my level 4 Cav as strong, if not stronger than my level 10 Cav?

[AstralUniverse]

Also, why is my level 4 Cav as strong, if not stronger than my level 10 Cav?

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong but since i dont see any damage numbers on the spirited charge, I assume it to be a damage amplifier and that your 4 cav character simply has much higher damage outside of the charge?

[Ork]

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong but since i dont see any damage numbers on the spirited charge, I assume it to be a damage amplifier and that your 4 cav character simply has much higher damage outside of the charge?

3.2v got rid of weapon type damage based on the spreadsheet. Also, based on the 3.2v spreadsheet, if you edit the number of character levels and/or cavalier levels you'll find that your bonus damage goes down with cav levels while base damage goes up and the inverse is true for character levels vs. cav levels.

For instance, say you have a level 20 character and 4 of those levels are cavalier. You get a based damage for say scimitar (16), a non-cav level (16), a cav level (4), and bonus damage equal to non-cav * str mod. As cav level goes up, your based damage with scimitar goes up porportionally. However, your non-cav level goes down at an equal proportion.

All that's to say that as cav level base damage increases, non-cav level bonus damage decreases at an equal scale. Therefore, if I have 1 cav level or 10 cav levels, the total amount of cav levels makes no difference on your total damage. What matters? Total character levels, str mod, and marginally the type of weapon (onehand, twohand, cav onehand & cav twohand).

[MRFTW]

Information

Very informative, thanks!