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[AbdulAlhazred]

Originally Posted by Felon

Bad design is putting such discrepencies in place to begin with. Bad follow-up design is deciding not to address a major discrepency for fear that it might result in some minor discrepency. Right now, the damage of an implement-user is devalued in its relation to weapon damage, and that's much more prominent than the argumentative devaluement of a smattering of hedge powers.

No, bad practice is simply throwing in bigger plusses all over the case into a system in a misguided attempt to "fix" things. Its just a horribly bad idea. Power creep is the worst and most common issue with evolving systems. Whatever the good or bad of the original design was, more powerful implements is a terrible way to fix it at the most basic level.

I would've snipped this quote down a bit, but I want to present it in its full glory for what it comes across as: two huge paragraphs of pure conjecture about what's "inevitable" what's "unnecessary", and trying to pass off this "mandatory" stratification as taking precedence over game balance.

I think you're missing the point, which is that the designers of the game don't have a blank slate to work from when it comes to weapons. Yes, it was essentially inevitable that weapons would form a progression of bigger badder weapons and that factor is dictated by the expectations of the people who BUY the game, lol. It isn't dictated by some game-theoretic factor. Since you're soooo obviously smarter about how this should be done than the rest of us, hey, lets see your design for a better game. I'll buy. lol. My argument stands perfectly and its entirely appropriate in this context.

OK, I'm game. let's look past damage. What else do you want to look at? You've already had it explained to you that it's fallacious to suggest that weapon-users can't inflict status conditions, or attack multiple targets, or NADs. So, are you just in denial? What assets put them on the "high side on day 1"?

The class I've been playing since day 1 is the warlock. Its damage output is quantifiably awful compared to virtually any weapon-using class, not even other strikers. The counter-argument I hear is that the warlock has all these great status effect powers that the weapon-using classes lack. In reality, that's a canard that's easily exposed once the rogue runs up and bonks the BBEG over the head and knocks it unconsious, typically sentencing it to death. Then he'll throw a blinding barrage, and the ranger will toss out wolverine's strike, and the claim that weapon-users don't get AOE comes crumbling apart.

I never said weapon users CANNOT inflict status conditions. Where are you getting that from? If you think they have anywhere near the same facility at doing so as casters do then we're reading from different books because I've run a LOT of 4e and there is simply no contest there. Casters are dishing out status effects with practically every attack.

I'm sorry for your warlock man, but you know what? You need to pay attention to doing damage output if that's what you want to do. The starlock in the game I'm running now is consistently the highest overall damage generator. Certainly competitive with the great weapon fighter and the rogue. He has phenomenally high accuracy and just plain keeps hitting practically every round. Again, its a fixation with the big hunk of damage these melee characters dish out when they hit big, but what are they doing the rest of the time? Decent damage, but its also just damage and the rare status effect where the starlock is dropping a status effect on practically every attack.

The combat encounter I ran last night is a perfect example. The STR cleric did some pretty decent damage, and the rogue did quite a bit of damage to a soldier (canoloth) but it was the starlock that finished the job. Then he went on to knock out a runespiral demon single handed, PLUS he wiped out 2 of the 4 minions that were present and finished off a phantom soldier. Meanwhile the lowly horribly disadvantaged by the weapon users wizard disabled 3 other phantom soldiers with a zone and then hurled the BBEG into a pit with Spectral Ram (a very tough BBEG that had not been touched at all yet). Once the guy went in the pit the fight went from "we're very likely going to lose" to more or less cleanup. The psion, another of your poor disadvantaged non-weapon-using classes likewise did great damage, hitting constantly.

Now, I could pick examples of fights that were the other way around too, but oddly they are mostly examples where the casters made bad choices (wizard picks Stinking Cloud and party runs into a whole bunch of undead, lol). Weapon users have a bunch of nice features, like doing all untyped damage and simply being able to go around the battle and stop up terrain with their armored bodies. Overall I'm not finding this imbalance that needs to be rectified.

On top of that if you want to lay blame for any imbalance, don't lay it at the feet of either implements or weapons per se. Lay it at the feet of 2 items, Bloodclaw Weapon and Iron Armbands of Power. I have no sympathy for groups that give away piles of only the top items for weapon users and then complain that something is broken (unless they're complaining about those very items, but isn't that ironic...).