WotC should be sure to only publish material that fits the expectations of your game, then.
I am not the only one who is grinding front line strikers surges into the dust actually - it's just a function of the majorly increased damage since MM3. Six surges is not a lot when you can be taken to bloodied in a single hit now. Especially in the post-nerf to surgeless healing world DnD is now in.
What bothers me is that Klaus posted here to share two races that HE wrote and your immediate response is "that sucks."
This is an incredibly offensive and disingenuous argument to make given that I gave detailed reasons for the problems with the race. Saying "It sucks" is not what I did anywhere: I commented it was extremely underpowered without feats and set a very odd tone for the race by having an actual in built "negative" racial feature with the -1 surge. Especially because as I (and many others I should point out) have noted it doesn't get a single thing back for it.
This has become the stock response here at ENworld to just about every new announcement there is, and it's tiresome.
To be honest with the exception of the Gamma World expansion (expansions?) - let's face it not everyone here even likes or cares for Gamma World - there is not a single thing coming out this year that I really want. I actually don't mind HoS as I've routinely defended the class choices and the decisions to use essential style builds instead of full "traditional" classes. But I'm not going to hold back my opinions when I see something published that is just chronically underpowered. I'd rather see something that has great flavor and is well supported mechanically - something that is a good description of a
lot of 4E races.
You don't need to insert "underpowered" into "flavor" anywhere. There are lots of things that are not only mechanically great but they also have excellent flavor in 4E (like many psionic classes post-Psionic Power, which was plain awesome). This is what I want to see and to be honest, the "crunch" they've presented from HoS thus far has been rather... less than convincing (thinking of the shadow hound as well).
As you said yourself, you haven't seen the feat support.
Even with feats they are just going to be taxes to bring the race up to par with others. That's a huge problem unless the actual books race is substantially different than the preview (which could be possible).
And some people will like the flavor more than the mechanics.
I like things that do both personally. I am not trying to be antagonistic here, but I am really sick of chronially underpowered things being published and subsequently left to die. Seeker. Beastmaster Ranger. Changeling. Albeit the changeling is in a better spot, as it's really the lack of support moreso than anything else.
If the worst race in D&D is the changeling, but people still have fun playing them, then how bad can they really be?
The changeling is bad, but the shade from what I've seen is
substantially underpowered in comparison. Changeling trick is not spectacular, but it's usable and while the changeling lacks feat support there is nothing wrong mechanically with the base race. The changeling does not have an in built penalty to a valuable statistic. It's also poor design for 4th edition, which was supposed to have done away with this racial penalty aspect from previous editions (and so its inclusion is out of whack with the entire system).
How about we wait and see the shade in play before we revoke its license to practice medicine?
I don't need to play it to tell you a race with a pretty poor racial power, an inbuilt actual negative penalty and nothing that truly compensates it will be poor in play. While I leave a qualification for feats, without feat taxes to improve those powers it's going to be a really poor choice.