Essentials breaking the mold: Good for prerequisites or bad?

Yesterday I was thinking about two feat I was interested in for my Fighter. One has the prerequisite of being from a Primal class and the other has the prerequisite of being a Monk, which meant due to multiclassing retrictions I could only ever get to take one of them (without a houserule).

Then I thought about how some of the new Essential classes have two origins (ex: the eAssassin is Martial and Shadow) and that could assuage conundrums similar to mine. It made me wonder whether this breaking of the mold will turn out to be generally good (give more options to fully realize your character) or generally bad (provide loopholes that can be exploited to make unexpected combos possible).

Likewise, I could see something similar happen because some of the Essential classes are not being tied to their traditional role. For example, there might be a Fighter feat out there that gives a Fighter Defender a nice boost in damage but will give a Fighter Striker an incredible boost in damage.

I imagine the outcome will be both a boon and a bane. It'll open up some character concepts that weren't possible but it will also be exploitable if the player wants to. Has anyone noticed evidence for either side?

(PS: These are the sort of philiosophical quandaries that burden me while brushing my teeth at night.)

As you suspect, it will likely do both, which is probably the goal. People who've been chiming for the ability to make characters with more of a varied theme will likely be able to. 4e characters are unfortunately so rigidly centralized. But people who like to theory-craft and break the game will probably also gain a greater ability to do so.

The end result will probably be WotC releasing more errata and fixing holes in powers that now exist because of this new and more varied creation.

The most common power source based feats are arcane feats like the White Lotus series and divine ones related to gods. You'll notice also that there aren't any dual source divine or arcane classes. I wonder if that's a deliberate decision.


In general, this will change the evaluation of many preexisting options. But that happens every time a crunch book is published, more or less. Or any issue of Dragon or Rules Update document is published, for that matter.

My favorite unexpected effect so far is that Hexblades don't get the warlock's Shadow Walk ability. But they can get it back... by multiclassing into a different class (assassin).

easy to get dual sources by multiclasses. The question is if it breaks down on 3+ power sources...

Considering that almost all* of the feats released under the Essentials umbrella don't use anything except ability scores and class features as prerequisites, I don't think that will end up being a problem. I would love to see them go through and clean up the existing feats, but realistically that's not going to happen any time soon.

* Aside from two feats in the Dragon #391 WRwarf article that (IMO, unnecessarily) use race as a prerequisite.

shidaku said:

As you suspect, it will likely do both, which is probably the goal. People who've been chiming for the ability to make characters with more of a varied theme will likely be able to. 4e characters are unfortunately so rigidly centralized. But people who like to theory-craft and break the game will probably also gain a greater ability to do so.

The end result will probably be WotC releasing more errata and fixing holes in powers that now exist because of this new and more varied creation.

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Huh? Made many 4e characters? Pre-Essentials classes are for the most part extremely flexible and designed to work with a lot of different character concepts. It is the Essentials builds that are far more straightjacketed in general (though this is certainly not true of all of them). An eRanger IS a guy from the woods, definitionally. The PHB1 Ranger OTOH can be almost anything you can imagine, a swashbuckler, an archer from the king's army, etc.

There really isn't THAT much difference though in a mechanical sense. Like with every new splat book and PHB you always had some feat or other that could be used to overpower some new combo. Essentials really is no different in that respect. A few things have turned up that needed adjustment, but notice that if you have the errata that has mostly already happened.

I'd venture to say the Essentials classes really were not designed for MCing at all. It is LEGAL but you can't usually power swap with the martial ones at least, which does really cut back on the options somewhat. e-classes largely don't seem to really be designed for much customizability. You get a few basic choices here and there, but mainly once you decide to be a Slayer you're a guy that swings a big sword, uses stances, and has Power Attack. You can pick from a few weapons and whatnot, which is still pretty good, but you don't really have the option to go learn a few spells on the side or anything like that. With the rarity system in place you also don't really have a choice of picking build-specific items much anymore, though I'm not real unhappy about that...

AbdulAlhazred said:

Huh? Made many 4e characters? Pre-Essentials classes are for the most part extremely flexible and designed to work with a lot of different character concepts. It is the Essentials builds that are far more straightjacketed in general (though this is certainly not true of all of them). An eRanger IS a guy from the woods, definitionally. The PHB1 Ranger OTOH can be almost anything you can imagine, a swashbuckler, an archer from the king's army, etc.

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Eh, I've made a bunch, but I admit I'm not the most creative of character builders. Just kinda feels like there could be more options. *shrug*

shidaku said:

Eh, I've made a bunch, but I admit I'm not the most creative of character builders. Just kinda feels like there could be more options. *shrug*

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Yeah, it is certainly arguable whether 4e or PF/3.5 has more flexibility. I mean you can pretty much combine anything in PF with MCing, though a lot of the options don't really work super well there are a lot of possibilities. 4e OTOH seems more friendly to bending an existing concept to provide mechanics for something different. Both seem to me (as mostly an old AD&D guy) to be pretty darn flexible.

As far as prereqs go I think they're definitely not putting so many in now on feats. It makes them more useful for doing odd new things without needing to make exceptions and cuts back on nearly identical feats that have basically just different flavor. I think Essentials is a bit more polished but they seem to have abandoned keeping the fluff and mechanics pretty much separate when it comes to the actual classes.

I like those 13/15 stat requisites... 13 is easily got in paragon by anyone willing to not take 20 in a prime attribute...

15 is easy to get in epic or paragon without much of an effort.