Talk:Empathy (D20 Modern Skill)

This is my least favorite of the power skills presented. It gets a lot of feats, has the most opportunity to be broken, and is the least defined. How long does he have it? It appears that he keeps the power until he tries to "acquire" another. Combined with the ability to "acquire" and "hold" more than one power at once, the ability to use this power as a ranged touch attack from 60 feet away, and the fact that the only way to gain resistance to this power is to actually have this power, this quickly becomes the guy who wins fights against other evolved beings for you. Combine Ranged Empathy and Power Absorption. You just broke your own rule: a character with multiple power skills. The Ranged Sylar just sits 60 feet away repeatedly making ranged touch attacks until he successfully borrows his target's sole power skill. If he only copies the skill, then it's simply broken since it allows a player to spend Feats to circumvent the "only one power at a time" rule by mimicking whatever power he wants from the other heroes in his party. Need to get up a cliff? Borrow Flight from your pal. Injured? Borrow Regeneration. If he can do more than one at once with Feats, and/or copy their Feats as well, this rapidly becomes the best Power Skill of all. The ability to simply steal powers, however, is even worse - because now he can, like Sylar, have a library of super powers at his disposal, quickly becoming Evil Superman. The only saving grace to Power Absorption is that messing it up can kill you outright, making it a risky proposition unless you're sure you can win or can get rerolls from another source. Incidentally, Sylar's "empathy" power actually requires him to feel empathy for someone in order to copy their superpower, not touch them. Before that he took people's brains out of their head and studied them, which is presented as a Feat that doesn't make much sense since it just turns you into a power-mimicking addict that occasionally wants to scoop someone's brain out and study it. Atypicaloracle 07:41, 28 August 2010 (MDT)