Online Character Builder is LIVE!

[Sunseeker]

Finished creating my character, lots of freezing and a couple more crashes(or at least what I assumed to be crashes because it greyed out for a long time). Overall, not bad for a first day, could be better, but certainly could be MUCH worse.

 

[Raunalyn]

Overall, not bad. I'm running IE9, and it seems to run pretty smoothly with a few minor crashes that I'm easily able to refresh (hit F5) and restore my character. Minor annoyances with the character sheet, and that is the lack of math on defenses.

Another minor annoyance is the skills. Either it's a bug, or the "Trained" tag next to each skill means that the player is supposed to circle it. Anyone have an opinion on that?

So far, made an essentials thief for Dark Sun and added an Athasian Minstrel theme for giggles.

 

[Raunalyn]

Oh, and imported an old CB character with no problem, other than the portrait. Not sure if the online CB will allow for custom portraits, but that isn't a complaint, just a curiousity.

 

[mudbunny]

Importing custom portraits is something that they are looking at.

 

[Dragonblade]

Overall I like the builder. It has potential, but here are the dislikes I would like WotC to address:

It doesn't like me hopping around to different steps. Boo! Making a PC is an organic process for me and I like to hop around and do things out of order. Crashed when I tried to save after skipping a few steps and doing things out of order.

No way to set my bastard sword to use 2-handed. It only gave me the option for one-handed.

No way to implement house rules that give me bonus ability points, feats, trained skills, and powers. This is really critical for me. All three of my 4e games employ these types of house rules. For example, one game I play in lets us start with higher stats and a couple of bonus feats and an extra trained skill and an extra square of movement. Another game allows the human bonus at-will to apply to the at-will stances that the Essentials fighters get.

No math breakdown. If I have +8 to something, I want to see exactly where all those bonuses are coming from. The bonus breakdown on the old CB helped me notice times when I took two feats with the same feat bonus in error.

Minimized feat categories don't stay minimized when picking another feat.

Need to be able to increase the size of the screens so I can see more options at one time.

 

[UnknownAtThisTime]

I very much wanted to report flawless use of the Character Builder. Unfortunately, it crashed while selecting my character race .... that was quick.

"Fortunately" upon restart it recovered the in-progress character file, but 17 seconds of use and then a crash is not promising. I hope they have spun this as a "soft opening". Fortunately, I am a patient person.

EDIT: Giving up for the day. Another crash filling in name, allignment & height etc. A crash every 30 seconds is not a good start.

 

[Mentat55]

(Running Firefox 3.6 on Windows 7 64-bit) I generated a Dark Sun character, level 1 half-elf ardent|battlemind hybrid, with equipment. Everything seems to have worked, I had no crash issues, I saved the character, and printed up a character sheet.

The noticeable load times are a bit annoying. The interface is slicker, though only repeated use will tell me if it is better.

 

[BobTheNob]

2 error so far

1 when selecting a skill for training
1 when selecting a stat as racial bonus.

Do like the interface...its clean. Slow but

 

[Mirtek]

Any way to add a dragonshard augment to a weapon?

 

[hexgrid]

No free trial?!?!?

Seems a bad marketing move...

Subjecting potential subscribers to what's being reported in this thread would be an even worse marketing move. Maybe they're waiting until the initial bugs get worked out.