When did WotC D&D "Jump the Shark"?

[Aegeri]

The worst thing with essentials was it lost two opportunities:

1) It could have changed the level up chart to incorporate expertise for free. You'd still leave the feats for people who wanted more than 1 expertise feat (for whatever reason). This was a prime opportunity, especially as they changed many other rules completely with the Rules Compendium (see recent discussions about grabbing/flanking ending when you can't take OAs).

2) They should not have changed the magic item system without actually considering if they had enough items to support it. They should have been much more comprehensive in changing old items rarity (there are a fair few items that could be made common, that were just lumped into uncommon). In addition, they could have unnerfed certain items and made them rare, like Veteran's Armor (which was a major problem when you could make billions of them and spam dailies every encounter for a while).

They are indeed at a cross roads though, but as I keep saying if you read through all of this thread there are common elements that come up time and time again. If wizards even fixes half of those, we're in for a pretty solid future. Wizards cannot have jumped the shark yet until we see the result of that feedback. If its acknowledged I don't think anyone could complain: As some big errors in 4E will be fixed. Plus I love the idea of going back and actually buffing a few of the more broken options to usable instead of just publishing more things. There is a great summary of the general consensus here.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think the problem is there are 2 VERY VERY different ways of approaching the concept of utility in a game like 4e.

For instance a Vampire to me has maximum utility when it most thoroughly evokes the concept of being a vampire. If it doesn't do that it is literally worthless because all it is is a name and some random mechanics applied to it. The CONCEPT has to be supported. It MUST feel like a vampire or it is 'broken'. How well it works in a min/maxing optimizer sense as the best mechanical choice for making a character fight well is utterly irrelevant if it doesn't first and foremost do the job of supporting my "my character is a vampire" concept. The HoS vampire appears (not having run the thing I'm not certain, but I suspect from looking at it) to do a pretty decent job of evoking a vampiric character.

Now, I don't disagree that it is good for characters to be as mechanically equal despite thematic choices as possible. In the case of the vampire it is a bit tricky to tell. Yes it will be helpful to have some experience playing the game, but I think any reasonably intelligent player who takes the time and has a decent grasp of 4e healing mechanics and how encounters work will pretty quickly figure out a viable way to play the character. It IS an advanced sort of character, not every shlub is going to play this sort of PC. I'm not trying to be elitist but I don't really feel that it is necessary for every dark niche and cranny of the game to be entirely transparent to rank newbies as long as they have plenty of variety of good options they can figure they'll be happy and the more sophisticated player can play his vampire and it will be fine. Again I wouldn't take that concept TOO far, but within reason it can actually add a bit to the game.

Now, is the HoS vampire ACTUALLY a good solid design? Is there an obvious way to make something better? I don't really like to second guess the designers, especially on something I've only played with in theorycraft effectively. I CAN think of things that might have broadened the concept and the idea of making it a theme is tempting, but it is quite possible these things were explored and dropped by the dev team for perfectly good reasons that aren't apparent to me in my armchair.

I could repeat the above for the shade but I won't. I tend to agree that the shade needs a better racial power implementation than it has, but even good well-written material isn't perfect, and I've never accused WotC of being perfect either. I still think the book is chock full of very good stuff (and fortuitously my campaign took a sharp left turn into shadowy matters lately so it is something I am going to get some good mileage out of in the next couple months too).

In other words from my perspective material needs to be evocative, otherwise I might as well be playing solitaire or Cosmic Encounter. We RPG to ROLE PLAY. The game aspect is significant but 4e luckily is very strong there and I am FAR from convinced that HoS is going to give us any real issues there that come even close to obviating its nice evocative content.

 

[Aegeri]

Is there an obvious way to make something better?

Believe it or not yes. Just take durable. When you can freely spend your extra surges for extra attacks and damage, the vampire makes a lot of sense. Once you get to higher levels you can usually spend 2-3 surges a combat, especially if you have a good defender/controller. While you will lose surges to damage, the regeneration at bloodied and ability to heal by using an allies surge are pretty solid. You also have enough surges that a skill challenge or trap won't bother you.

I'm not kidding that durable makes the vampire from a fragile glass cannon that can fall over from a single bad trap/skill challenge, into a really interesting and fun class to play. It's just that simple as writing "1st Feat: Durable" on your character sheet. By paragon tier you'll end up with 5 surges and with the Vampire Noble (IIRC) you can use blood drain 3x an encounter for 3 extra surges. 4 surges gets you through their very harsh early game and 5 surges + 3 potential extra (or 2 if you go the other PP) has you sitting very pretty. The other thing is the more freely you can spend surges, the more you keep up with actually performing a striker role. A vampire without spending surges is chronically behind on damage - so if you can spend surges more freely you can really keep up pretty effectively. It's somewhat paradoxical actually in this manner: You can't afford to have too low surges in case a trap/skill challenge comes in from nowhere but you need to be able to reliably burn surges to keep up with other strikers damage wise. I actually think it's a very interesting tactical situation and is why while I dislike the core design of the vampire, in play it has more than enough merit for me that I'd love to see a PC play it.

4 surges would still be a pretty big disadvantage, it's just not as crippling and makes the class more forgiving to anyone. It really is this simple it makes me honestly wonder why Wizards never caught something like this in playtesting. But then again I was more worried about this before the thread I linked above: Because if Wizards will ask their community I hope we'll get more openness about new content and what they plan. I personally feel the feedback thread on the official forums about Mike Mear's recent Rule of Three has prompted this. To say the least his answer about the shade was completely ravaged by a majority of the community.

Not all fixes are simple of course returning to the shade. I have no idea how to fix the shade short of rewriting the entire race, but other people have really great ideas already. I might just use one of theirs as I've seen a couple of user efforts that are pretty good (and remove the -1 surge value as well).

But again if Wizards listen to their fans and the community, I have no doubt things like this might be fixed or just not be an issue in future.

 

[Herschel]

When did WotC D&D jump the shark?

In round two after the bridge section collapsed leaving a two square opening between it and the crocodile. It does have a +16 bonus to athletics so it wasn't as if it was going to miss the roll.

 

[Raith5]

4E still works great at my table. But I must say when I saw the Shardmind race in PH3 the vision of Fonzi's bike did flash through my mind.

 

[Mummolus]

I don't think 4E has jumped the shark just yet.

I do, however, think that if in a year we look back and haven't seen any support for classes that aren't "Essentials", then the release of Essentials will very likely be seen as the moment.

The thing to keep in mind with Happy Days is that it wasn't until some time afterward that the shark moment was identified as the start of the downslide, and right now we're too close to Essentials to be able to tell if it's the same sort of thing. It certainly has the potential to be, but it would be premature to say it is already.

 

[S'mon]

D&D hasn't jumped the shark, but the recent steep decline in both quality and quantity started (imho) with the decision to pull support for the original CB and MB without adequate replacements, and after months of misleading statements about a forthcoming "update".

That said:

NO.

DDI is better than it has been since the switchover to the online CB and MB but is still total crap compared to where it was a year and a half ago.

Agreed ('must spread xp, etc') - the Essentials products are very nice, though poorly marketed, new players are still buying the PHB not HotF/K IME. But the online situation is very much not good.

 

[shamsael]

From an historical perspective, when did 3.5E D&D jump the shark?

Tome of Battle: the Book of Nine Swords

 

[shamsael]

Believe it or not yes. Just take durable. When you can freely spend your extra surges for extra attacks and damage, the vampire makes a lot of sense. Once you get to higher levels you can usually spend 2-3 surges a combat, especially if you have a good defender/controller. While you will lose surges to damage, the regeneration at bloodied and ability to heal by using an allies surge are pretty solid. You also have enough surges that a skill challenge or trap won't bother you.

I'm not kidding that durable makes the vampire from a fragile glass cannon that can fall over from a single bad trap/skill challenge, into a really interesting and fun class to play. It's just that simple as writing "1st Feat: Durable" on your character sheet. By paragon tier you'll end up with 5 surges and with the Vampire Noble (IIRC) you can use blood drain 3x an encounter for 3 extra surges. 4 surges gets you through their very harsh early game and 5 surges + 3 potential extra (or 2 if you go the other PP) has you sitting very pretty. The other thing is the more freely you can spend surges, the more you keep up with actually performing a striker role. A vampire without spending surges is chronically behind on damage - so if you can spend surges more freely you can really keep up pretty effectively. It's somewhat paradoxical actually in this manner: You can't afford to have too low surges in case a trap/skill challenge comes in from nowhere but you need to be able to reliably burn surges to keep up with other strikers damage wise. I actually think it's a very interesting tactical situation and is why while I dislike the core design of the vampire, in play it has more than enough merit for me that I'd love to see a PC play it.

4 surges would still be a pretty big disadvantage, it's just not as crippling and makes the class more forgiving to anyone. It really is this simple it makes me honestly wonder why Wizards never caught something like this in playtesting. But then again I was more worried about this before the thread I linked above: Because if Wizards will ask their community I hope we'll get more openness about new content and what they plan. I personally feel the feedback thread on the official forums about Mike Mear's recent Rule of Three has prompted this. To say the least his answer about the shade was completely ravaged by a majority of the community.

Not all fixes are simple of course returning to the shade. I have no idea how to fix the shade short of rewriting the entire race, but other people have really great ideas already. I might just use one of theirs as I've seen a couple of user efforts that are pretty good (and remove the -1 surge value as well).

But again if Wizards listen to their fans and the community, I have no doubt things like this might be fixed or just not be an issue in future.

I think they did see this in playtest. The class description tells you to get durable. I think giving the vampire 2 surges and highly recommending durable was just friendlier than saying the vampire gets 4 surges and no feat at level 1.

 

[Ourph]

I do, however, think that if in a year we look back and haven't seen any support for classes that aren't "Essentials", then the release of Essentials will very likely be seen as the moment.

Heroes of Shadow contains plenty of support for classes from PHBI (Wizard and Cleric spring immediately to mind), so I guess we're safe. Whew! That was a close one.