Player’s Handbook 3 Class Reviews: The Ardent
Player’s Handbook 3 introduces the psionic power source, with several new psionic classes (along with one divine and one primal class). I’ll be reviewing the new classes one at a time over the next week or so. To start things off, we’ve got a good exemplar of the new psionics system — the Ardent.
Ardent is an adjective, which will always make it sound weird to me to hear sentences like, “Check out my Ardent.” Merriam-Webster’s offers a concise definition: “characterized by warmth of feeling typically expressed in eager zealous support or activity.” Makes sense — the Ardent class fills a party’s leader role by channeling emotions with psionic energy.You might make your enemies tremble with fear and despair, or raise your allies’ spirits with feelings of courage and vigor. Sort of like a Bard, but with a weird psionic halo instead of a lute (seriously — all the psionic characters in the book are depicted with the halo things).
The thing that really makes the Ardent stand out is Psionic Augmentation. This is a class ability that adds a new wrinkle to the At-Will/Encounter/Daily triumvirate. Ardents don’t get Encounter powers (well, they get a few Encounter utilities, technically speaking). Instead, they get extra At-Wills. Tons of them, as you advance through the levels. This seems like an interesting trade-off by itself — you have a huge variety of powers you can’t use up, but they’re not as strong as Encounter powers.
To balance this out, Ardents have psionic power points. You get two at 1st level, and you’ll have more than a dozen by the time you hit Epic tier. You can spend power points to augment your At-Wills. Built into each At-Will description are two additional effects that trigger if you spend the appropriate number of power points. The augment abilities sometimes just make the power better, or they might allow you to shape it in a certain way. A good example is the level one At-Will Focusing Strike. Unaugmented, it does 1W +Charisma modifier damage, and lets an ally within five squares make a saving throw. At Augment 1 (meaning, if you spend one power point when you use the power), it also gives a bonus equal to your Wisdom modifier if the save is against a fear or charm effect. At Augment 2, the damage jumps to 2W, and every ally within five squares gets to make a save.
As you move into Paragon Tier, some augment effects cost four power points, and in the Epic Tier some cost six. All power points are regained after a short or extended rest. It gives the Ardent a lot of interesting options for spending points and customizing powers on the fly. When I was grousing about Martial Power 2 and complaining that I wanted the designers to stretch the 4E rules more, this is the kind of thing I had in mind. It’s pretty cool, and I’m looking forward to testing out an Ardent to see how well the system works.
On the battlefield, the Ardent is a very controllish leader. While you can dish out healing and saving throws quite nicely, you can also hit opponents with some unpleasant debuffs, like fear effects, slows, immobilizes and even the occasional domination. Just stay away from the front lines, and don’t expect to be dealing much damage.
What’s interesting is how the Ardent class makes the difference between 4E D&D and a 4E Superhero RPG purely superficial. Make the goblins into hired thugs, the solo dragon into Ultron or Doomsday, change the Kingom of Ghe’lorr into Lower Manhattan, and dress your Ardent up in colorful spandex and suddenly you’re in a comic book universe.
You can order Player’s Handbook 3 from Robot Viking sponsor TrollandToad.com. As usual, it’s quite a bit cheaper than the list price. Tell them Robot Viking sent you!
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March 9th, 2010 7:10 PM
Well, technically you don’t get tons of at-wills, since your average non-human will only ever be allowed to have 3 at-will attack powers at one time. When you hit a level when you’d normally add an at-will (say, level 7) and you already have 3, you are required to lose one of your previous at-wills to take one of the new level, just as other classes do with Daily and Encounter powers at paragon and epic tier. Obviously, Humans get an extra one from the 1st level choices, but they can’t choose their Human at-will from any later levels.
However, there are TONS of at-will options, for sure.
March 10th, 2010 4:04 AM
hmmmm. . . interesting. It seems unlikely that this will affect me, simpy because my 4e campaign is unlikely to ever see this, and outside college my friends are vehemently against 4e, but this is very interesting. unfortunately, I think the decision-making would lead to my 4e campaign taking FAR TOO LONG to finish a tiny encounter. Why does it take 20 minutes to kill 6 minions!?