First Test Session

Well I felt that went pretty well.  Got to see conservative and liberal casters, and I'm pretty pleased with where Mana's at overall.  Had to change Threatgen a bit behind the scenes but that's literally just a me thing.  Several class nitpicks but those are to be expected.  No one really had any issues with rules as a whole too so also awesome.  I'll be doing a post when I'm done updating the class abilities and talents with the changes from this session (not just the specs that were tested) and to add the action type to everything.  Until then, if anyone else has any other feedback you didn't think of please feel free to mention it here.

Edit: Next week we will be playing the following party.

Javan: Marksman Hunter
Third: Enh Shaman
Gwydo: Holy Paladin
Kolson: Prot Warrior
Rory: Assassination Rogue
Sis: Disc Priest

How was it keeping up with all the effects, modifiers, and numbers overall? Seems like there was quite a bit going on there.

Seals (arparparp)
Seals take a long time to swap (10 minutes). Seems like you may just be stuck with one seal for a while unless everyone really wants to wait 10 minutes for you to swap it in the middle of going through packs. Shaman only use full-round actions to swap their enchantments, maybe bring it down to that?

I didn't use it, but now that I know more about what the damage is going to be like, Seal of Light's effect on swing seems very weak. Only a 33% chance on a successful swing to heal for 13 hitpoints is fairly weak given that it is a smaller chance for a small heal. The judgement effect is pretty nice, don't get me wrong, but the on-hit effect is something I look at after the playtest and don't really want to use unless there's absolutely no chance of there being another target to hit with Command.

Normally in the playtest I was either at full health or getting close to dead. I'm not actually sure if Seal of Light would have helped in many of the circumstances because Javan could just heal me to full with a single spell anyway.

It seems to be designed with single-target, high damage encounters in mind. Perhaps if it instead provided some passive damage mitigation while in use in addition or instead of the current effect? That would make me sit down and have to think hard about which one to use instead of just going with Light by default because there's one guy.

Speed of Light
Now that I think about it, I don't think I'd ever choose another talent over Speed of Light. The CC break is just too valuable and you get a boost to get in to combat on top of that. I can't think of an instance where the other ones would have really helped me more than Speed of Light - even when it was just for positioning.

Swift actions
I saw you changed a few of the talents to swift, but unfortunately I don't think that really changes a whole lot. The reason being is that there's actually nothing much else I could use in conjunction with them. They're the only swift actions a protection paladin can get as far as I can tell and most are on the same tier or require some special talent synergy to actually utilize effectively. I don't have any normal abilities I could chain with it, so I would just use a swift action and then waste the other half of my action unless I specifically talent in to either Hand of Purity or Unbreakble Spirit to double-up on that same spell or if I happen to need to use HoP on the same round. Everything else is either a standard (can't use in conjunction) or a free (doesn't matter anyway).

@Snarg: Seals reworked.  Seal of Light reworked.  Speed of Light nerfed (really, I thought hard about a way to buff the other two but just came up short).  Action types changed as per every class.

As of now every spec has been revamped at least a little bit.  If you could please do me a favor and check your character sheets versus the new information.  While obviously the classes we tested last night have the most changes, ALL specs have had at least a tuning pass.

Alright, I'll be sure to make time.

Couple questions about the Assassin. Does being in combo status provide any other bonus aside from making certain skills available to use? Shouldn't Vendetta grant a bonus against the target marked? Without one, there isn't any advantage or incentive to marking any specific target, like say, I dunno, Bob the Boogeyman.

@Rory: Combo status is purely for the use of Combo abilities, nothing more.  It also goes away at end of combat if you're curious.

Vendetta and all assassin abilities are pending testing of course but the ability to enter Combo as a Free action strikes me as incentive enough.  So no, no other specifics to a given target.

Oh, I see. I thought that meant being able to string attack after attack, round after round to build up massive damage.

I messed with the Vendetta description to clear up the ambiguity.

Wait hold on, a first level Assassin only has Mutilate, how are they going to do any combos?

They aren't.  They're level 1.

Updated my Protection Warrior. I held off on my mage in case you make any more tweaks between now and the third playtest.