In comparison to other combat careers, the Wardancer seems underpowered or I should say lacking in defense given the mandate on not wearing armor. Backed with a career ability (being able to switch, in some cases, from reckless to conservative at will) that seems lack luster. Thinking about changing the career ability to something like, "Derives essentially magical armour from the tattoos that they wear. +2 to Soak and 1 Black Die to Defense." or some such.

Thoughts?

I admit to not being a master of this system so any help is appreciated!

Thanks in advance

Hy!

A few thoughts

1) An easy fix would be to give them the career ability of the Troll Slayer, and use the current career ability for and advanced version of the Wardancer.

2) If you look in this forums, I think under the thread Valor of Ages, you would find three fan made new careers for wardancers which prety much covers what you are asking for.

3) Have in mind that this is an rpg, terms like balance, underpower, overpower etc. which have sense in board games or computer games, have little or no sense in an rpg (imo).

Cheers,

Yepes

Well the first thing to take into account is that the Wardancers career ability ties directly into the whole Ritual Dance mechanic.

I've been playing one in a play through of the Gathering Storm these past few months and it took a while to get my head around.

Essentially it boils down to this..

The Wardancer does not stand toe to toe with his opponent and trade blows like the Trollslayer or the Mercenary.

They leap in and out of combat, sweeping strikes as they bound past their foes. The manouevre is your friend as a Wardancer.

You do a lot of thinking about which cards to use, what stance to use them in, what side up to leave them facing, all thee things affect the Wardancers core abilities much more than most of the other careers. Plus, as there are only 7 ritual dance cards in total, you can maximise your choices quite early on in your career.

From my own experience i would recommend that you start off with "Leap from stillness" as its capacity to get you into combat, Strike and then disengage is a tactical blessig. If you want to concentrate on defensiveness then the next action should be Woven Mist, an ongoing riutal dance that gives you defense equal to your recharging Reckless ritual dance cards.

That last item illustrates how useful the Wardancer career ability becomes once you start getting a few more cards recharging. It allows you to be felxible in the stance you choose to be in to activate your cards yet still maintaining some control over which side the cards remain face up.

With the correct actions your Wardancer's defense will be impressive. Against a single foe in a recent session I calculated that I would have been able to add over 8 misfortune dice to the opponents strike. (Coordination Trained Dodge(2), Weapon Skill Trained Parry(2), Catlike Reflexes Talent(2), Shadows Coil (Additional defence equal to your depth in reckless stance - 2, plus you can add another 1 if you elect to switch to conservative).

All of those, bar the talent, have arecharge of 2 and in the next round you could use the Wardancer action Tempest Fury, which allows you to take 3 recharge tokens off of your ritual dance cards as well to recharge the shadows coil action quicker.

The fan made careers that Yepesnopes mentioned do contain an item or two to help with the defense issue. Freast Master essentially contains the TrollSlayer defense ability, although in my opinion it is configured incorrectly as the Wardnacer should get more defense over time and not more soak.

In my opinion the carrer (or at least one of its subsequent advances) needs an ability to retard the loss of recharge tokens on its actions rather than more defense. Its existing abilities give more than enough defense. The issue is with keeping them in play.

Excellent answer Princeearwig! I figured that I was missing something in the Ritual Dance cards that would bring the Wardancer up to par! Will review! Thanks again!

Any career with WS as a career skill is more powerful than the other 74 careers

I'd rank them this way however in terms of POWER:

#1 Ironbroken..er' Ironbreaker

[ orders of mangnitude of vast, empty chaos]

[ ]

[ ]

Swordmaster

Trollslayer

[ Bright Wizard ]

Pistolier

All other careers with weapon skill as a career skill

[initiates of anything]

[ ]

[Peasant ..b/c of all of the fortune point gains]

All other careers

[Careers that exchange socketing slots]

jh

What about Initiates/priests of sigmar? They gain weapon skills and have blessings (actually blessings of sigmar are so off the board it's not even funny).