So here is a general question. Do you think that 4E needed feats to begin with?
'Needs?' Maybe not, if there were more customizable class features, or more to backgrounds/themes, perhaps. But, as-otherwise-is, yeah, it kinda does.
Obviously they used the feat system to compensate for math issues, but if they would have play-tested enough to fix these things from the start, do you think the game benefited by having feats in there?
I think the math issues were overblown, that Epic could have been left to play differently from Heroic, with big stat-mod-based buffs/debuffs and huge critical hits mattering more, and the sense that PCs were almost always at least a little over their heads with the kinds of uber-foes they were fighting.
Feats shouldn't've been abused as taxes to provide patches to disign goofs (real or perceived), when honest errata/updates were so readily available, and they should have been more carefully screened/playtested for balance. Expertise should never have existed. Melee Training, for entirely different reasons, also should probably never have been a general feat - it robbed STR-based characters of a minor but meaningful advantage, non-STR MBA should have been kept to class powers/features with some limitations (for instance, a rogue at-will that required light blades & counted as an MBA might've been fine, especially if it was a little less damage and a cool rider, say). There were make-Dwarves-better-fighters feats meant to make up for the Dwarf not having a +2 STR (was that really so vital?) - then they gave the Dwarf +2 STR. There were HotFK/L heroic-tier feats that obviated Paragon and Epic Tier PH feats. (... damn, again, [MENTION=15684]Imruphel[/MENTION] is sounding less harsh, and more just accurate.)
The idea that Hasbro would create a product 'designed to fail' is of course beyond ridiculous. It might not be too much to say that the person(s) you are referring to, or that [MENTION=15684]Imruphel[/MENTION] is referring to, couldn't succeed, but maybe nobody could have pulled off what they tried.
It certainly seems absurd. But I suppose it's always fair to eschew attributing something to malice, when ineptitude is as or more plausible an explanation.
Otherwise I agree, the whole charade of 5e development repulsed me. I won't have anything to do with it,
There were times it seemed improbably cynical and slanted, but that's much the same kind of perception as Essentials being meant to fail. It looks like it, from a point of view, but it really doesn't make much sense from a practical standpoint.
I did play in one game. My opinion of the rules is similar to yours. Its a VERY much cleaned up 2e that avoids most of the really large pitfalls of 3e. I found the play experience to be snorefull really, just very much like playing 2e all over again, a game I outgrew 20 years ago...
Playing it is hard to get behind, I agree. Running it can really be something, though.
And Essentials could well be knocked for moving in the same direction, though it still has enough of 4e in it that you can play it like 4e core and get pretty much the 4e experience (you have to ignore a few abominations in the RC and of course bring rituals back from core, but that's not a big deal).
The main issue I have with Essentials is the variation on resource recovery that is imposed along with the break from core-style A/E/D/U.
Agreed on each count.
Still, what you really need there is to simply make HS fungible. The Slayer spends his getting hacked up in the front lines, the wizard spends his putting out daily level harm to the bad guys. It works, and HoML definitely shows that, if nothing else.
A plausible solution. Something like that occurred to me when my first character got Bloodcut armor (which re-charges it's daily if you feed it a HS), and again when I finally got around to reading Cure Light Wounds. Surges were very much a daily resource, and daily resources could be neatly balanced against eachother - and even, with HS the obvious candidate, standardized.
It may seems weird, but thinking a little back, it's clear that the changes they made weren't to please 4e fans.
Oh, clearly. They were in response to criticisms - many of them completely invalid, made in compete ignorance and/or with active malice. Mearls had this story of going to a con, and some guy horsing around, saying "I just wanna hit da orc with my ax" and feigning incomprehension at the prospect of using a clearly-spelled-out attack, right on the character sheet, to do so.
I bet that guy never played a fighter before or since, and is now having fun with his 5e wizard or whatever.
I know both 5e and 2e, and I just have to disagree with people who say they are similar. 2e has been a huge fun to me - just by reading - more than 5e could ever be.
I've heard a lot of 2e fans waxing rhapsodic about 5e. For me, I opened the 2e PH, read it mostly through, once, and concluded it wasn't that different. I was running, rather than playing by then, and I updated my variants to 2e, and didn't pay much attention to how it evolved - and really, sooo much of it was setting stuff that I had no interest in anyway.
So I don't have the 'feel' for of love of 2e that it's ardent fans do, AD&D for me will always be 1e.
And, I find 5e very reminiscent of AD&D, in 'feel,' even though a lot of the technical stuff is clearly d20, it's attitude, and they way it just doesn't work without a DM in the drivers seat, feels like AD&D, to me.
Essentials' design itself isn't that bad by itself.
By the standards of D&D outside of 4e, sure. Following only two years after, not so much.
However, in my honest opinion, the paradigm change was so big it should be an official 4.5 edition. Things would be a lot clearer.
It'd've made more sense if Essentials were released, first, say, covering only the Heroic Tier, then 4.0 a few years later.
Heck, if some future game-archaeologist tried to organize RPGs into clades with nothing to date them from but their mechanics, he might well conclude AD&D->5e->3e->PF->13A->Essentials->4e...
