Junts
04-08-2009, 02:40 AM
The 'need a rare drop or a shroud min2 to break the shroud raid boss's dr' problem is a real issue: The raid is pretty old content now, but new players will need to go through it and get into it, and it will be very hard for them to acquire weapons to do so. I presume some of the new loot in m9 will permit this, but its likely to be high-value for some time, and most of the additions are to fairly difficult (dreams of insanity, and the dead shall rise) quests.
My answer is to make the old standby, Retribution, Threnal south bound end reward, silver. It would then break dr, as well as doing fairly acceptable damage (+3d6 in fact). However, retribution is only +1, so it would actually do somewhat less damage than a +5 holy silver weapon, and most importantly, using only a +1 weapon against arraetrikos when not extremely well equipped will make even his armor class a challenge: people using this at lv 14 will not be hitting him on a 2, and that will impact their dps significantly (adding a +5 holy silver of pg weapon would be a big mistake, obviously, but a +1 has these factors working to help balance it). This becomes especially true if we start running shroud on hard/elite regularly due to lack of challenge at 20, which is pretty likely, as his ac there is definitely adequate to handle a +1 weapon in the hands of a new character.
Threnal south is a time-consuming series to run for end reward, and the item is not always present: it would require some effort to attain, and would be a viable method to address the issue.
This does not help everyone (specifically, its not finessable) but I am ok with that, as people accepting restrictive weapon builds (finesse, monks, etc) need to eventually encounter the reality that they chose restrictive, harder to acquire weaponry.
My answer is to make the old standby, Retribution, Threnal south bound end reward, silver. It would then break dr, as well as doing fairly acceptable damage (+3d6 in fact). However, retribution is only +1, so it would actually do somewhat less damage than a +5 holy silver weapon, and most importantly, using only a +1 weapon against arraetrikos when not extremely well equipped will make even his armor class a challenge: people using this at lv 14 will not be hitting him on a 2, and that will impact their dps significantly (adding a +5 holy silver of pg weapon would be a big mistake, obviously, but a +1 has these factors working to help balance it). This becomes especially true if we start running shroud on hard/elite regularly due to lack of challenge at 20, which is pretty likely, as his ac there is definitely adequate to handle a +1 weapon in the hands of a new character.
Threnal south is a time-consuming series to run for end reward, and the item is not always present: it would require some effort to attain, and would be a viable method to address the issue.
This does not help everyone (specifically, its not finessable) but I am ok with that, as people accepting restrictive weapon builds (finesse, monks, etc) need to eventually encounter the reality that they chose restrictive, harder to acquire weaponry.