Gonna start with favorite things about an edition I don’t like overall.
3.5. Bard Songs. I want to sing a song, or chant, or yell a battle cry, and all my allies who can hear me benefit.
4e. The Assassin Class. Built from the ground up to be a mystic shadow death dealer. Needed a numbers errata for its powers, but even so it was just so damn fun to play. The Executioner was also quite fun.
Rituals. 5e rituals are fun, but there is still room for spells that can only be cast as a ritual, and don’t mess around with spell slots. Rituals were rad.
Alchemy. The wide range of items, learning formulas the same way rituals were learned, the mechanics of them (for the most part), all of it.
AEDU. I wanted more utility powers and I wish Skill Powers had been in from the jump, and I wish every class just used its main stat for Basic Attacks without needing a feat, but goodness I loved Powers.
Themes/Paragon Paths/Epic Destinies. IMO they are prestige classes brought to the full fruition of their potential. Sat alongside class, rather than replacing it, it’s just good. Great story additions, fun ways to add weird to a character, just one the best things in any edition.
Rules consistency. I had a handle on the rules after a few sessions, and could generally guess at how to rule something, and end up within a stones throw of “correct” most of the time.
Balance that made making stuff up not break the game, and even the “broken” options weren’t actually broken.
Bards, Monks, Shamans, Artificer, Seeker, Avenger, Warlock, were all so juicy!
Nearly all the Essentials class variants, and especially so many of the utility powers they added to the game.
All the races, and how races were built.
Skill challenges.
How skills worked, how nearly every skill (maybe not Streetwise, but all the others I think) had some level of combat usage, as well as being important to out of combat scenes.
The way skill challenges could be run as part of a combat scene.
Martial Practices.
Inherent Bonuses. Magic items not required, but also a character with tons of them, and one with none, could reasonably be in the same party without one outshining the other.
Purpose built options as a basic design paradigm.
Monster/encounter design. Could rave for days on how good it is.
probably more I can’t think of right now!
5e
Bounded Accuracy.
Spell slots and upcasting.
Rogues.
Paladins. Only edition where I wanted to play one.
Most or the classes are fun and satisfying.
Tools, especially with Xanather’s out
Backgrounds. Liked them in 4e, love seeing them reach their potential in 5e. I hope we see more backgrounds like the Ravnica ones eventually.
Quick and easy design, simple to learn.
Other atuff! I’m sleepy!