Short and Quick First Glance Review of Martial Power 2
This is, as the title states, a very short preliminary review of Martial Power II, which was just released by Wizards of the Coast, on February 16th, 2010.
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I picked it up today and it looks extremely interesting. Based upon my quick first glance through the tome, I think it is well worth it. I was wondering where they were going to go with the martial classes, and this books holds the answer to my question. It also holds more than I was expecting.
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Along with new builds, powers, feats, paragon paths, and epic destinies for the martial classes (Fighters, Rangers, Rogues, and Warlords), it also has new combat style rules, which provide benefits when you wield specific weapons or use specific weapons to attack. A combat style basically consists of two feats, the lesser one modifies at-will powers and gives a bonus to a specific skill check, while the greater one modifies encounter powers and provides some other benefits. Each greater style feat has the lesser style feat as a prerequisite. These lesser and greater style feats allow you to fine-tune your fighting style, allowing for more and more specialization (or min/maxing). In my mind, this is the type of thing that will bring 4e closer to the 3rd edition material (which may or may not be a good thing, depending on your perspective).
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The other cool new addition that I liked was a whole section on Martial Practices. These are basically a way of giving martial players a group of rituals to perform. Don’t run away at the mention of ritual, I know that some of you out there find them generally useless, but these martial practices are directly related to martial builds, and learning one of them provides a specific benefit. For example, you can learn to forge weapons or armor (including magical ones), fortify your mount (or tame a new one out of a previously wild beasty), and also do cool physical things better, like run long distances or get a short burst of uncanny strength.
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I don’t want to go on too long because this was supposed to be a short first-glance review, so here is my final statement: I thought that Martial Power II was going to be just the same old thing – a splatbook style group of new powers and feats that can be added to an existing PC. I was pleasantly surprised to find that there are rules additions that are worthwhile in this supplemental tome.
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Out of 159 pages, about 40-45 of them contain new and interesting material. At the standard $29.95 (USD) it’s worth the price if you play martial PCs a lot and don’t have a subscription to D&D Insider (with its awesomely powerful character builder).
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Until next time, I wish you good gaming!
~DM Samuel
RPGBN
Great review. I’m still trying to secure a copy of this book to do my own take on it, but I’m wondering if I should post a glance back at Martial Power 1 and assess it in the context of all the material that has been released since then.
Unrelated: I never understood why so many people argue that rituals are useless, considering the number of situations our group has resolved using them.
Arcane Marks help give a spellcaster a means of marking people when they could be impersonated by doppelgangers while Seek Rumor helps arcane characters with poor Streetwise scores.
I remember our level 7 artificer once used a string of rituals to prevent a level 12 werewolf from entering a room. And he didn’t even know it was a level 12 werewolf!