What did Wizards learn from Essentials?

[Hassassin]

And owlbears are I agree better in the 2e MM. There's a good reason for this. The advantages of the 4e MM are in how monsters think and organise (without hardcoding to say that goblins are tribes). The advantage of the 2e MM are in how monsters physically look and their lifecycles. Owlbears being non-sapient and not very organised get very little benefit out of the 4e format (and neither do any other non-sapient animals).

For me it's the exact opposite. Information on how intelligent humanoids fight, think and organize will vary from campaign world to the next and even in different areas of one world, but the ecology of non-intelligent monsters can be used in any campaign.

Maybe I would like to see a 2e style Monster Manual, and a more 4e style Monsters of X. (Where X is the campaign world, in my case Faerun.) But both should be fluffier overall than 3e or 4e MMs.

 

[Hassassin]

I've used spiders quite a bit in my campaign. 4e MM spider entry tells me, among other things, how drow relate to spiders, and also that Lolth used to be a god of fate. I'll stack that up against the 3E Vermin entry any day! That's likely to be of central importance to my campaign - whereas the height and weight of an owlbear has never yet come up.

That information is of no use in a campaign world without Drow, whereas size, hibernation etc. can potentially be useful in any campaign.

BTW, the size of owlbears gives me ideas about how large their nests can be (minimum size of tunnels if in a cavern), what other creatures their tracks could resemble, and what size of prey they could hunt in the area of my campaign. I can guarantee at least one of these will come up in play.

 

[pemerton]

That information is of no use in a campaign world without Drow, whereas size, hibernation etc. can potentially be useful in any campaign.

Hibernation probably won't come up in a campaign set in the tropics, or in which no adventuring takes place in winter. Given the prevalence of drow as both a PC race and as antagonists, I'm going to call that a wash!

 

[Sadras]

There was one time where weight played a major role in the combat I was DMing...there was this large constrictor snake in a magically enchanted dark room that snuffed out light (this room was from one of the 4E adventures me thinks). Anyways the beast was giving the characters hell and they were losing, but they found out that light actually frenzied the snake - so one of the larger characters had this awesome idea to pull/drag the snake out of the room into the lit passageway. Needless to say the Monster Manual did not provide the weight of a large magical contrictor - so we quickly looked up historical snake weights on google - compared their length to the beast's length and estimated its weight. The weight of the beast was easy enough for the character to pull/drag, plus the serpent was not using a pole or stationery object to hold onto - so it was just the weight of the creature as well as its constricted victim the character had to contend with and not its strength, it just slowed his movement down. Anyways he pulled the beast into the lit passageway, it frenzied, let go of its victim and fled back into the dark room.
Sometimes that extra fluff like weight is nice - just saying.
At the end of the day - when selecting monsters to use, I look through all my Monster Manuals...they all help.

 

[Sadras]

I've used spiders quite a bit in my campaign. 4e MM spider entry tells me, among other things, how drow relate to spiders, and also that Lolth used to be a god of fate. I'll stack that up against the 3E Vermin entry any day! That's likely to be of central importance to my campaign - whereas the height and weight of an owlbear has never yet come up.

Height is important for description - you can have your Frost Giant dwarves of 4E or you can have your towering pillars of strength Frost Giants of 2E. I know, as a DM, who I would go for every time to use...

As for weight...consider the pcs luring the Frost Giants onto a frozen lake, where their weight, movement and attack misses (hitting the ground) could break the ice floor above the lake - creating cracks, tremors and then the ground would give way.

Maybe in the instance of the spider the fluff is better than 3E (I havent checked) but those instances are not common.