Let them bleed to death

[MrSinister]

SO......

I have a guy playing a Shadar-Kai Rogue in my game who just got himself a Wounding Spiked Chain and he kinda wants to make ongoing damage his gimmick. He is currently level 4.

Any advice on feats, powers, tricks, etc. to maximixe this gimmick? Is there some kind of feat that replaces sneak attack dice for ongoing damage, or am I just having a brain fart?

What say you playground?

[Yakk]

Charop wise this is tricky because it costs so much to get ongoing damage and it is hard to scale it. Plus the better you get at killing stuff the worse ongoing damage gets. On the other hand this means you can go all out cheese without risking eclipsing other players.

You could get some leverage out of it if you could figure out how to add vulnerability and elemental damage to both attacks and ongoing. Dunno how.

How high is the groups CharOp level?

The first thing I would do is search compendium for the word ongoing for all class feats...

[MrSinister]

Eh, the op level is kinda middle of the road, just going with what looks like fun. Ongoing damage as a gimmick would fit right in with the group.

If ongoing damage is a weak or not really supported tactic, any other ideas you guys have for just a vicious and brutal build, not really mechanically but thematically?

And speaking of ongoing damage, this might come up. If something gets Vulnerable to damage, say from an Invoker's Armor of Wrath with the scouring wrath feat, does that add 2 to the ongoing as well as just plain hits?

[tcrudisi]

While this link is both old and deals with a Ranger, I'm sure many of the options taken will be viable for the Rogue in question. There are probably new options, too, but this is a good starting spot:

http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75882/19647790/Da_Bleeder_-_96_ongoing_damage_without_needing_to-hit?pg=1

[Kurald Galain]

He is currently level 4.

Any advice on feats, powers, tricks, etc. to maximixe this gimmick?

At level 4? No, not particularly.

There is a whetstone that adds ongoing damage, and an Eberron shard that increases OD, and a rogue daily (Bloodbath) that deals a lot of it once per day. The biggest OD support is two feats that are for Tieflings only.

[MrSinister]

The biggest OD support is two feats that are for Tieflings only.

What two feats would those be? (away from books and builder ATM). Tieflings don't exist in the campaign so Tiefling stuff can be refluffed if it makes sense.

[WickerNipple]

Icy Clutch of Stygia is the main one. It's often coupled with Hellfire Master for casty types, but it's hard to see getting and using that being efficient for a Rogue.

The OD Tiefling Warlock/Wizard is a really fun time once it gets going, but there's only so much you can do to a make a Rogue a bleeder. Rogues reallllly wanna be alpha strikers anyway, so going for OD works against their grain.

[Zaq]

Cruel Cut Style (D373), for a Rogue, lets you inflict ongoing damage equal to your WIS mod if you hit with the riposte part of Riposte Strike. Unfortunately, this is generally a trap, since the main attack is DEX-based, the riposte is STR-based, and the ongoing damage is WIS-based, so you're spreading yourself pretty thin. (Cruel Cut Style works better on Fighters or Rangers, or even on some Warlords, since those classes generally can have decent WIS anyway without giving anything up.) If you manage to get the riposte part of Riposte Strike to not be DEX-based, it's slightly better, but that generally requires you to not be a Rogue in the first place (I'm thinking of something like Combat Virtuoso or Adept Dilettante), so that's a moot point there.

If you're willing to change your class, Slashing Kama Style is a Monk feat that lets you do ongoing damage with FoB when you're using a sickle. It's one of your better bets if you want to get ongoing damage at will, but you'd pretty much have to rebuild the character for it, since Monks and Rogues really don't play very similarly. (They're both DEX-based and mobility-heavy, but the resemblance ends there.)

[Vendle]

I particularly like the feat Tainted Wounds which keeps the target from healing any damage you did for a round. It has no prereqs, but it has no other upside either, so it's not an optimal choice but still a fun one IMHO.

[Zaq]

I particularly like the feat Tainted Wounds which keeps the target from healing any damage you did for a round. It has no prereqs, but it has no other upside either, so it's not an optimal choice but still a fun one IMHO.

The problem with it isn't that there's no upgrades. The problem is that, by design, very few monsters in 4e have the ability to heal. This is fully intentional; monsters healing makes everything take much longer, which isn't what 4e is theoretically about. There are a few exceptions, of course, but it's a feat that'll basically never come up. That's why it's bad.

[Yakk]

Yep. In a sense, monsters have a "spent a healing surge or two" feature built-in. A typical monster has 8*(level+3) HP, while a typical PC has 5*(level+3) HP.

That's 50% more HP than a similar-level PC.

If you threw healing surges at monsters, they'd take much longer to kill. If you lowered HP to make up for it, concentrated fire would drop them before they could spend the healing surge. This would both make the healing surge for HP tradeoff make less sense, and punish "spread" fire and reward "concentrated" fire even more than it already is rewarded.

And, in a sense, it would just add mechanical complexity to the DM's side of the table, juggling spending healing surge and tracking them for each monster. One big thing about 4e monster design is to reduce per-monster state.

(As an aside, this reduced state slack on the DM's brain can be consumed by the longer round-count, plus status effect spam from PCs. In 3e, while there was a lot of state, often the state was "you are screwed" -- in 4e, there are a lot of minor state conditions, and as it handles multiple monsters well, you can easily have 8 monsters on the field each with a distinct set of state conditions on them...)