Has WotC hit its stride?

[Incenjucar]

MME is an average book; the main problem is that it is a terrible value for anyone who has been paying into the system due to containing large amounts of reprinted and rehashed material. If you never had any of that material before, then it's more useful.

 

[OnlineDM]

Admittedly, I've only flipped through my copy of MME so far, but I've enjoyed the flavor behind the items I've seen. That's what makes it interesting to me; it's not just dry stat blocks. I like stat blocks, of course, but I like that MME helps a DM place an item into a campaign with some story behind it.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

tried to pick it up today... was sold out...
got gardmore abbey instead... lets see what it brings to the table!

 

[keterys]

MME is an average book; the main problem is that it is a terrible value for anyone who has been paying into the system due to containing large amounts of reprinted and rehashed material. If you never had any of that material before, then it's more useful.

It's true there are some reprints. It's also true that the vast majority of the book is new material. It's also true that many of those reprints had new rules.

It takes some pretty strong blinders to call it a terrible value because a couple pages worth of stuff isn't valuable.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

It's true there are some reprints. It's also true that the vast majority of the book is new material. It's also true that many of those reprints had new rules.

It takes some pretty strong blinders to call it a terrible value because a couple pages worth of stuff isn't valuable.

Yeah, I think also if you look at it from WotC's PoV you find that there's only so much they can do. AV1 and IIRC AV2 are both out of print (AV2 you may still be able to get). Without AV1 or a replacement that provides a lot of your basic core vanilla items there's a problem. Warlocks for instance practically cannot function without AV1. If MME was just all obscure additional items then either they'd have to reprint AV1, which is out-of-date, or put out a revised AV1, which makes no real sense and is no better than just reprinting revised versions of a few critical categories of AV1 items.

I think in general you're going to see this kind of thing going forward unless they reboot the whole system again. Older books are going to go out of print, and newer ones are going to have to either be nothing but updates of old ones, which existing owners of the old books get dicked by, or else they carry some needed old material forward into similar books that fill the same niche.

At some point the same thing is going to happen with the core books and the power books, etc. The way they've ended up structuring 4e practically guarantees if it persists that SOME material will resurface, albeit probably in revised form and mixed in with some brand new stuff.

 

[Rechan]

At some point the same thing is going to happen with the core books and the power books, etc. The way they've ended up structuring 4e practically guarantees if it persists that SOME material will resurface, albeit probably in revised form and mixed in with some brand new stuff.

It sure would be nice to get some new power books - we got MP2, but no AP2/DP2/PP2/PP2.

I loves me some new builds.

 

[Vael]

I never expected to see X Power 2. To be honest, I barely saw the point of Martial Power 2. Yes, the Artificer, Runepriest and Seeker would love to see such books, but I doubt there's enough there for new books, and I don't think they'll sell enough to warrant them.

I prefer Wotc's current approach, go for more thematic appeal in new player books.

 

[Nyronus]

I have not read the new books per-se. I have been following the material on DDI and reading preview material and, from the looks of things, the Heroes of the Feywild looks really good, and the Book of Vile Darkness... doesn't look eye-stabbingly terrible. I've not heard much about Gradmore Abbey, and while MME has a lot of really cool stuff in it, up until the start of the month, also had some hilariously broken stuff in it. I've not heard much from Neverwinter story-wise, other than its more or less useless to me right now since its HEROIC-TIER ONLY, and Bladesingers are a jank class that can become a fairly hardcore striker... if they ignore 90% of the abilities they use and instead twink out a few features for extra damage. This gets worse by the fact that they're MEANT to be a controller. The monster books so far look absolutely great, but the less said about Heroes of Shadow the better...

So, all in all its a giant mixed bag, and while the last few months look to be fairly good, the fact of the matter is that we're only just now getting back to the level of quality of this time last year, when we had Dark Sun, the Demonicon, The Plane Above, The Underdark, The Tomb of Horrors, and PHB3 all rocking the scene, all of which were really great books. After that we spent more or less an entire year waiting for a book that either A) didn't suck, B) wasn't redundant, or C) supported more of the game than heroic and (maybe) paragon tier. WotC isn't hitting its stride, its finally managing to catch up to where it was before it dropped the damn ball.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Eh, see for me it seems a bit different. DS was irrelevant to me. Most of Essentials was semi-irrelevant in that I didn't NEED redoes of the existing classes. MV was nice though. The Plane Above was forgettable, I haven't cracked it since I read it through when I bought it. Same for The Underdark. They were not bad books at all, just not WOW books unless you specifically needed that specific stuff. Same with The Plane Below, it was OK but not WOW. Demonomicon was KICK ASS though.

Now looking at this years books we had HoS, which I thought was highly thematic. Gloomwrought had a lot of good stuff and I thought it was more interesting that Plane above, etc. Heroes of the Feywild KICKS ASS, MV: Threats was good, MME is great. I don't care about Neverwinter, but the parts of it that are in DDI are nice and will see some use, so that's cool. Maybe Bladesinger needs the obligatory little errata? I don't know, I'm sure it would be fine in my game where nobody even thinks of trying to be a munchkin.

I don't think WotC 'dropped the ball' IMHO. They've definitely shifted strategy some, but that's fine with me. I think they're concentrating now on what matters and what is cool, not piling more options on top of too many options already. I feel like they've done a lot of good stuff in the last couple years and as time goes on they seem to 'grok' 4e better and better and the REAL quality of the stuff in terms of what I can do with it in my game has grown somewhat.

 

[babinro]

I'd say they are making a comeback. In my opinion they were going strong back in the ____ Power book days. At least people who I played with were always anticipating what was coming out.

Our hype and interest in 4e really died with the release of the essentials design and the poorly balanced psionic classes. These recent releases are stating to get my players interested in new content again, which was something I didn't expect to see again in 4E.