The Book of Shadow Binder

[TheAverageFan]

Originally Posted by Just_a_Bill

What I love best about ad hominems is how they so quickly get us to a constructive resolution of a conversation, while engendering respect between the participants.

The overall effect may be templated from the Drow, but (as touched on earlier) the specific phrasing that my whole point focuses on is more clearly templated from the Elemental. (An objective examination of the three abilities will probably make this clear.) In fact, if they had actually used CHAIN GRAB's "above or below" approach, then we would never have even had this conversation in the first place.

I am merely (snarkily) adding the Chainfighter to this conversation since it is relevant to the discussion and I was surprised not to see it on your list of other examples of similar powers (as it seems more appropriate as a power factoring in both Height and Base). Indeed it does dodge the issue by having "more than" instead of "higher than", something the Earth Elemental could've had but does not.

The conversation then becomes not so much about the Earth Elemental wording being bad but rather why they didn't go with the better wording from the Drow Chainfighter in this instance. I can only assume it's because the Chainfighter's Grab goes a distance both above its height and below its base whereas the Shadow here cannot exceed its Height ("no higher than its height" sounding better than "no more than its height" perhaps). I can see Ashi-Dhulu's wording being the same since it is an Underground Movement power lifted directly from the Earth Elemental just with Stealth added, but in this instance here we do have an Official Unit with "proper" wording to go off of, one which the power in question is clearly modeled off of to begin with.

I'd be curious if this is just a goof or if a conscious decision was made to go with "Earth Elemental" wording over "Drow Chainfighter" wording.

~TAF