Make Self-Concealment Great Again!

[Sun Wukong]

The reason why I am against going over 50% concealment, is because '50%' concealment is full concealment. In otherwords, if your character is in a pitchblack room with no source of light for example, in order to hit something you are against the full-concealment which is that 50%. If your character gets blinded, you have to face that 50% concealment to hit. Etc. Etc. Etc.

Now, from a role-playing perspective. Self-Concealment feats would make a lot of sense for Shadowdancers. The concealment from Self-Concealment should not stack with concealment from the Shadow Evade, however, you would still be getting your "10/-" Damage Reduction and +4 Dodge AC, which means that we are not making a prestige class ability redundant.

And as for the matter of Cloaks and Epic feats, I would actually prefer to have Epic Feats over cloak switching. I know that you just have to go look at the in game consignment store and you can purchase 1-4 Cloaks of Displacement per week for anything between 2k and 15k a piece. But with Self-Concealment feats our roguish character could save that money and purchase a Cloak of Shimmering from the merchant found in the basement of Blushing Mermaid. This cloak grants Spell Resistance of 32, which can be both very useful and not that useful. And some could easily argue that a cloak with bonuses to Hide and Move Silently would be a far superior choice anyhow.

There's actually a very similar conversation to this one going on in QC right now. Something must have triggered everyone to start thinking about self-concealment? Either that or it's just coincidental timing.

I think it might have been Chad's comment in one of the more monolithic topics. Just gave it a moment of thought and had to agree that there is not really a way to make use of Self-Concealment feats.

You can get 40% within 30 levels which is still not bad.

You don't need to have +50% to still be reasonably effective.

Also, the above build would be a -really- annoying Xbow sniper rogue. Could actually be fun to play.

About that build of yours, it has a lot of sneak attack but no way to damage anything with Critical-Hit Immunity.

Therefore, I could just as well roll a Bard 27/Shadowdancer 3, go for any +2 Dexterity race and get similar end dexterity score. Actually, I could leave mine at 30 and make use of Cat's Grace to reach dexterity of 34. Then use one inspiration to get +5 or +6 magic damage per bolt, or another to get +8 to all my skills, and via my spellbook I would have access to 50% concealment among some other things. (And speaking of the sneak attack damage output, well, a bard can always get Song of Requiem and upgrade it to a Hymn.)

Now this is not say that your build could not be fun to play, it is just that there is another build that kind of does all the same things and is better at all of them.

And as Metaquad said, without self-concealment your build could be able to deal sneak attacks against critical hit immunity and even have more sneak attack dice to throw around by taking those Improved Sneak Attack epic feats.

But I'll keep that build in mind, so don't go around deleting it.