D&D 4E What Aspects of 4E Made It into 5E?

I didn't get to play anywhere near as much of 4E as I would have liked (chiefly due to how difficult it was to find a gaming group in general until Critical Role helped bring D&D back into the public consciousness), but so far I've been pleasantly surprised to see how much of 4E actually made it into the latest edition. I thought it might be fun to list features of 5E it inherited from its predecessor.

I'll start:
- Healing Surge-like Hit Dice
- Abilities that recharge on a short rest
- Supernatural origins for the Barbarian's powers (especially the primal spirit link)
- Second Wind and Maneuvers for the Fighter
- The Oath of Ancients (similar to the 4E Warden) and Oath of Vengeance (similar to the 4E Avenger) archetypes for the Paladin
- Much of the Warlock's design
- The 4E take on the Eladrin (mostly)
- An increased emphasis on origin stories for monsters (with the 5E hydra's origin being very similar to the 4E hydra's, save for the identity of the entity whose blood is shed)
- The Feywild, Shadowfell, and Elemental Chaos
- Elemental myrmidons (formerly archons in 4E)
- Warlocks as the "priests" of beings that aren't gods (for example, in 3.5 Imix's priests were clerics, but in 4E and 5E are Warlocks)
- The Raven Queen (she's apparently in every Shadowfell now, but only a true goddess in the Dawn War setting)
- Primordials (not counting Imix, Yan-C-Bin, Olhydra, and Ogremoch, the adventure Storm King's Thunder features the primordial Maegera)
- The racial feats of Xanathar's Guide to Everything were racial powers in 4E
- The Sentinel feat gives features that the 4E Fighter had by default
- Spells like Vicious Mockery, Lightning Lure, Witchbolt, etc

I'm sure I'm missing dozens, or even hundreds of examples!
 
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Tony Vargas

Legend
- the spell Healing Word, too (the very first playtest poll had a long list of spells and the question along the lines of "which of these spells do you find iconic to D&D?" - all the 4e spells that made it into 5e were on that list, no 4e spell not on that list made it into 5e, no 4e spell on that list failed to - and nothing from 4e was ever explicitly put in a playtest poll again).
- the wild-magic/chaos sorcerer
- 'roll 2d20 take the highest/lowest' mechanics
- removing mechanical impacts of alignment
- legendary creatures (ie solos)
- simplified monster stat blocks focused on things the monsters might actually do when encountered
- dragonborn PC race
...and, sadly, stealth rules
 
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E

Elderbrain

Guest
4e style Tieflings with Devil-only origins and a uniform appearance (except for that one UA article with the Abyssal Tiefling, but it appears from the projected contents of MTOF that they're dropping that approach and will come up with a new name for Demon-related Planetouched.) Also, Hexblade Warlocks and the Raven Queen tie-in. And Shadar-Kai in MTOF as PCs and NPC stats (Happy, always liked them.)
 

Monsters not as NPCs. Monster traits in the statblock.
-edit-
recharge rolls on monster special abilities.
No racial ability score penalties.
Misty step.
Dragonborn as a full species.
I believe most of the names in warlock spells.
Increased class parity.
Tiers of play.
 
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Gradine

The Elephant in the Room (she/her)
Yeah, the Monsters-not-as-NPCs was a pretty big one.

Also, were Gnomes explicitly related to the Fey in 3.X? Or were they still more Dwarvish back then? Otherwise Fey Gnomes was mostly a 4e-ism.

Wild Magic was a thing from at least 2nd Edition AD&D, if not older.
 


Edited a few more into my 1st post.

Bounded accuracy also very much evolved because of 4e. With the game adding 1/2 level to all checks and new magic pluses every 5 levels. It wasn’t much of a leap to just remove all those assumed pluses and treadmill math, but keeping everything else.
 

MoonSong

Rules-lawyering drama queen but not a munchkin
The most important I think was forgotten: One full night of sleep heals everything.

Wild Magic was a thing from at least 2nd Edition AD&D, if not older.

Yes, but not on a sorcerer.

EDIT: And on the sorcerer, 4e was the edition to take a lot of the fun utility spells and deny them to sorcerers. Yes anybody can take a feat to get rituals, but then lugging around a spellbook defeats the whole point of sorcerers. Just like in 5e...
 
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