The Witch Doctor Player Class

Every village must make its own arrangements with the spirit world, and they depend upon wise men and women to speak to those spirits and the primal forces they command. These people are witch doctors, and they use the powers of the spirit world to strike down their enemies with fire, lightning, spirit, and earth.

These are powerful forces, and each witch doctor chooses how to use them. Some demand service or payment for their intercession with the spirits. Others wander like nomads and deal with the creatures that threaten the places they visit. Some, eternally loyal to their duty, are patient protectors of sacred places. These powers are raw and primal — unrefined and crude, some say — but you understand their power. It is up to you how you will use it.

This is the Witch Doctor player class, the most ambitious undertaking yet from the minds at One Bad Egg. Learn more about it at our store page!

The rogue is the best class in 4e. I feel pretty comfortable saying this, though I realize some qualifiers are in order. It’s not the deadliest class (ranger) or the twinkiest class (swordmage), the most versatile class (wizard), the most nuanced class (fighter) or even the all around MVP (I go Warlord for this, but that’s softer). Instead, it is the class that is, as presented, most in tune with the rules of the game.

See, first and foremost 4e is a game about movement and engaging the board. Every class has some movement capabilities and has reasons to engage the board, but rogues have a very synergistic setup with their backstabs. This ability gives a strong incentive to move and a clear lens through which to view the board that provides an array of meaningful choices as the rogue looks for opportunities to seize combat advantage. That combination is important since some classes may excel at one point or another – rangers and some warlocks are more mobile, fighters have a clearer lens and so on – but for those other classes it takes time and experience to find the sweet spot for play. Running around the edges of a fight or standing toe to toe with the big bad can be cool, but they don’t necessarily offer the same clear set of meaningful choices a rogue gets every turn.

Still, if that was all then it would really just be a difference of learning curve – other classes get rewarding too and the rogue is just the fastest route. But the rogue has another advantage – his advancement is just that much cooler than everyone else.

Now, I’m not asserting his powers are cooler. Everyone has cool powers, so I consider those to be a wash. Where the rogue gets more interesting is in the domain of feat selection. I have made a lot of characters, and there’s a pattern you start seeing with feats that is perhaps most obvious when your wizard hits 2nd or 4th level and loudly declares “These feats all suck.” And the thing is, he’s kind of right, at least for a wizard. There aren’t a lot of feats that help him do the things he does better or more interestingly (and even the ones he might want, the keyword ones, tend to have crappy reqs) so he’s stuck taking generic feats for a lack of anything more interesting (at least until he changes tiers – higher level feats are a wizards saving grace). In contrast, I have never made a rogue and not wanted more feats. So many feats interact well with how a rogue is played that you can never get enough of them.

This is a really big deal, and it exists as a sort of spectrum from the rogue at the top to the wizard at the bottom, and if there’s one reason the game needs more feats, it is to get to the point where the wizards and clerics and others of the world have more options than the same handful of feats, then nothing until they change tiers.

Lastly, and this is a point I’ve touched upon before, rogues probably have the best model for how to handle the interplay between stats and character effectiveness, allowing for one clear primary stat, and branching off from there based on substats. Building a rogue that mechanically satisfies your vision is just easier than doing so with, say, a Paladin.

Anyway, all this is important because it means when I’m faced with a general question about how something should be done, I tend to look at the rogue first as an example. That is not to say I want other classes to have powers and effects like the rogue, but rather that I want rules to introduce options that make things as clearly engaging for other classes as they are for the rogue. My hope is that eventually there will be enough support that other classes have equally clear paths to engagement (and some come close already – Martial Power was a nice bump for the martial classes in general) but doing so is going to take some work. There are a few roadblocks built into the core rules that need to be knocked down or worked around, but I think that’s doable.

Working on 4e stuff is an ongoing process of discovery. The game has a lot of moving parts, many of which are not immediately evident. For purposes of play, this is a fantastic thing, and it contributes a lot to the sense that the game “just works.” Unfortunately, it also means that if you sit down and start writing your own material, there are a lot of potential pitfalls. Worse, if you’ve got a lot of third edition in your brain, there are a lot of assumptions that are going make trouble for you.

Here are a few tidbits that I’ve come across (or stumbled over) as I’ve been working on the Witch Doctor. It’s far from comprehensive, but it’s a good start.

• It is critically important to remember that “Effect” in a power always goes off. A lot of daily powers which do not have a “Miss” entry still have an effect, so it’s not wasted on a miss. In short, if you want something to happen whether you hit or miss, make it an effect.
  
• Stance and Reliable are intensely powerful and useful keywords, and they create a number of rules for a power so it’s important to get comfortable with them.
  
• It is easy to confuse attack types and keywords because they’re used similarly, but so long as you remember that melee, ranged, close, area and personal are attack types, then you’re probably ok.
  
• Some bonuses stack. Specifically, feat, racial and untyped bonuses stack. The feat ones are the ones that really matter because there are a few existing feats (like Improved Initiative and Quick Draw or Dwarven Weapon Training and Weapon Focus) that already do this. Obviously, too many stacked bonuses can be a problem, so these are the categories you need to look for.
  Nope. That was me reading certain sidebars wrong.
  
• As a curious addendum, I originally missed that the bonus you get from magic items is not an item bonus but rather an enhancement bonus. Yes, obvious once you realize it, but it left my totally scratching my head the first time I saw a magical suit of armor that had an item bonus among its properties. It’s all laid out explicitly in a sidebar in chapter 9, but I think I just glazed over it.
  
• Anytime you see an effect with ongoing damage, remember that it will almost always fire off at least once, and adjust your impression of its damage appropriately. This is why cloud of daggers uses a relatively low die value.
  
• There is no such thing as a to hit bonus. That is now a bonus to an attack. This is a small thing, but man, the to hit bonus is a hard habit to break.
  
• ‘Wall’ just describes a shape, it does not suggest duration. Notably, a solid wall is an explicit type of wall.
  
• I still have no idea why there’s no ‘Bolt’ or ‘Ray’ area type. You can fake it by saying a wall which can’t change direction, but that’s kind of a pain.
  
• Races that have stat pairs within the same defense category (Strength & Constitution, Dexterity & Intelligence or Charisma & Wisdom) can often seem very potent (Warforged and Eladrin being great examples) but the hit they take to their defenses can be a real problem.
  
• Some feats are just better than others. Dwarven Weapon Training is just better than weapon focus, and that’s ok. This is partly because it’s a more specialized sort of feat, but more because it supports the fiction. Dwarves should be using axes and hammers, so the rules reinforce that by making it a better choice.
  

There’s more, of course, but a lot of it is even more fiddly – matters of layout, style and much more, but I’ll be here all night if we start getting into that. We’re already on version 4 of our internal style guide, and it’s GROWING.