Third Session

I'm making a note here: Huge success.

I did a lot of behind the scenes changes that didn't matter to anyone but me, but I imagine were somewhat noticeable.  I'm also rather pleased with everything overall; aggro, Mana, relative turn length vs. amusement factor, that sort of thing.  I actually FORGOT to implement one feature but that will almost assuredly be implemented in the future.  I also really like Javan's idea of non-combat abilities being gained, probably by-class rather than by-spec, I'll work on that in my spare time over the week.

If anyone had any comments they didn't already give me or thought about later feel free to mention here.

Health Funnel didn't get any use, I just didn't have any need for it what with all the damage I was taking for being liberal with my spells while my imp hung out away from combat throwing felbolt. Now if he was a tanker, then I might have thought about it, after all he'd be making good use of his tanking, but he was a squishie.

Looking back, I'm surprised there aren't more high threat abilities or more specifically interrupts to take the Aggro back in the middle of combat.
I already mentioned the attacks per round. (I had a thought, maybe adding an additional basic attack, but still limiting ability attacks as they are.)

Druid changing forms seems unnecessary as the only benefit seems to be "social interactions"... which rarely occur in combat. Any other time it doesn't make sense to NOT be in "form".
Maybe add a time limit to how long you can be in "form"? If you're changing the action to a Free or Swift action, it would add an interesting dynamic to the system.

One "complaint" I had, and this is just the GM side of my brain nit-picking, and that was not being able to keep track of the HoTs that Third was casting. I know you were doing a bunch of math behind the scenes (admittedly speeding things up) but I would've liked to see the calculations to see how the healing was being figured.

Have to say the trimmed down version was quicker and enjoyable. That said, I'm a greedy bastard and would love to have more abilities and things to be able to do...

Well Rejuvenation was pretty simple; 1d4*SL + half Spellpower for the initial HoT.  Then, Nourish heals for 2d6*SL up front and 0.2 of that is added to the Rejuvenation tick (and refreshes its duration).

I'd echo the thing about forms. I don't know about a time limit, but I would really like to be able to swap in and out of them a bit more freely. I know you mentioned possibly making it free to shift in but a full to shift out. I think that would definitely work so you're not stuck in your form all the time out-of-combat and you can easily shift in to it when combat actually does start.

Druid mana might be something to watch since I could easily see running out of mana if we actually went through the other trash packs. I had to spend mana each fight on HoTs just in case something happened, so even if no one took any damage I was still using mana. Downranking helped a little bit, but on the bosses and in high-damage situations it wasn't really an option.

I probably could have managed it better had I more experience with the damage so I could better estimate what HoT levels I needed to put on people. For the bosses, I just slapped a max-level on everyone because they were a boss and /dance'd while throwing up nourish or cure when someone needed it. Wasn't a lot of reactive stuff it was more like: "hope they don't take enough damage that I need to Nourish/Lifebloom."

There's also no reactive healing or prevention unless you talent in to one of the prevention spells. If there's something that needs to be reduced or interrupted, the druid can't do it by default. Prime example is the AoE one-shot from the first boss. Priests seem to be okay as that goes because of pain suppression and shield (which was used in Mana Tombs), but druids, shaman, and paladin healers don't really have a good way to prevent things like that - they would just die to things like that themselves or be unable to prevent anyone else from being one-shot.

Overall fun though. Didn't really feel like I was struggling and there were several options available to me when I had to choose what to do. If I had to request anything, I'd actually ask for some way to top someone off without having to use a medium cost spell to do so. Several times I wanted to give someone a bit of extra HP but only really had Nourish to do so. Couldn't Lifebloom since that would remove the HoT and heal for many times what they actually needed.

For shifting, I think it shouldn't be a full action per sei. Make it a unique full action, with the "unique" exception in question being capability of movement on the turn they decide to shift out.

And thank you for going all-out with Anzu. You did say you were gonna try and kill us. Props for trying, heh.