D&D 4E Essentials and 4E Classes: Compatible and Comparable?

[WizarDru]

Hey, gang. I'm not quite up to speed, per se, on the whole 'Essentials' line. I understand the basic ideas behind it, but don't own any Essentials books. I am, however, a DDI Subscriber.

Seeing the classes in the Character Builder, I am considering offering my players access to those classes. AFAIK, Essentials and 4E are fully-compatible, correct? But my main question is...are the interchangeable? That is to say, if I let one person be a Thief from Essentials and another person be a Rogue from 4E, there won't be a disparity in power/balance, will there? I expect them to be different, but not one clearly better than the other.

Thoughts? Experiences?

 

[Incenjucar]

Hey, gang. I'm not quite up to speed, per se, on the whole 'Essentials' line. I understand the basic ideas behind it, but don't own any Essentials books. I am, however, a DDI Subscriber.

Seeing the classes in the Character Builder, I am considering offering my players access to those classes. AFAIK, Essentials and 4E are fully-compatible, correct? But my main question is...are the interchangeable? That is to say, if I let one person be a Thief from Essentials and another person be a Rogue from 4E, there won't be a disparity in power/balance, will there? I expect them to be different, but not one clearly better than the other.

Thoughts? Experiences?

They should be roughly equivalent, power-wise, and close enough that nobody should be getting upset at the table. Essentials classes tend to have a more predictably solid performance but without as many crazy curveballs to throw at things.

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

The Essentials feats are also quite nice (and are 100% compatible with 4e "classic" characters). There are fewer "traps" in Essentials; most of the options in those books are all solidly good, unlike some of the other 4e material which can be hit and miss.

 

[WizarDru]

Cool. that's rather what I was hoping. I planned to give my players access to all the Essentials materials and allow some of them to rebuild their characters if they found some the Essentials classes more appealing. I'm pretty sure my one Defender player, who found the 4E fighter totally lacking, will LURVE the Knight, which appears to be EXACTLY what she wanted (a well-armored 'mace-o-matic').

 

[bert1000]

Cool. that's rather what I was hoping. I planned to give my players access to all the Essentials materials and allow some of them to rebuild their characters if they found some the Essentials classes more appealing. I'm pretty sure my one Defender player, who found the 4E fighter totally lacking, will LURVE the Knight, which appears to be EXACTLY what she wanted (a well-armored 'mace-o-matic').

FYI - one quirk about the new online character builder (not sure if this has been fixed?) is that you must build a "customized" character and not a "quick essentials" character in order to be able to select non-essentials material for your essentials character. Since you are going to be using both material, you'll likely want that player that chooses a knight to be able to pick from all relevant 4e feats (not just essentials) for instance.

 

[OnlineDM]

[MENTION=29013]bert1000[/MENTION] brings up an excellent point. This is one that I struggled with when I first made some Essentials characters for family members and then couldn't add certain magic items to them in the Builder. I rebuilt them as Custom rather than Essentials - problem solved.

 

[Victim]

Essentials classes seem roughly equivalent to other classes.

Essentials feats seem stronger than their closest counterparts in other books (not that there aren't also strong feats in other books...). But for example, the PHB1 feat Human Perseverance is a racial feat that adds +1 to saves. Essentials has a generic feat with no requirements that adds +2 to saves. Its expertise feats come with extra bonuses, etc.

 

[Obryn]

AFAIK, Essentials and 4E are fully-compatible, correct? But my main question is...are the interchangeable? That is to say, if I let one person be a Thief from Essentials and another person be a Rogue from 4E, there won't be a disparity in power/balance, will there? I expect them to be different, but not one clearly better than the other.

Thoughts? Experiences?

I'm running a Dark Sun game with an even mix of Essentials and Core classes, and there have been zero issues. There's no power imbalance that I've seen.

I'd open up the feats from Essentials to everyone, because they're really quite good, fairly generic, and make a good list of easy choices.

-O

 

[666Sinner666]

Essentials classes seem roughly equivalent to other classes.

Essentials feats seem stronger than their closest counterparts in other books (not that there aren't also strong feats in other books...). But for example, the PHB1 feat Human Perseverance is a racial feat that adds +1 to saves. Essentials has a generic feat with no requirements that adds +2 to saves. Its expertise feats come with extra bonuses, etc.

I would not say that Essential feats are stronger just that they actually made feats more appealing to take that before would have been passed over. They also took feats that before may have been paragon or epic tier feats and instead made them available from the start and had them scale from tier to tier.

 

[Victim]

They also took feats that before may have been paragon or epic tier feats and instead made them available from the start and had them scale from tier to tier.

Yeah, that tends to make them a lot more powerful.

Expertise feats seemed to be pretty good without adding extra bonuses to them.