AbdulAlhazred
Legend
I played 4Ed, I know how PC building worked. I’m saying that it is possible- and IMHO, probable- that a classless, toolbox version of the mechanics could have resulted in a (different but) more popular game.
I have zero idea of how Mearls plays, or how anyone outside of our group did, for that matter.
The main reasons we experienced slow play were:
1) the near absence of iterative attacks. If your attack roll resulted in a miss, you were basically done for the round.
2) too many short duration and/or small value modifiers. That meant a lot of tracking +1s & +2s from a variety of sources, of various durations. You were almost never attacking with the same attack or damage bonuses as the previous round, which meant doing math every turn.
3) some of our less-experienced players struggled with choosing powers, and often were not settled on a course of action when their turn rolled around. I suspect those players would have done better with Essentials classes, but those were not available until after our campaign concluded.
Well, I don't think people really missed a huge amount in practice. I mean, AD&D lacked anything like multi-attacks either, and to-hits were a lot lower, yet it was never called the reason for slow combats (though IME it was no faster than 4e).
2 and 3 are true. The way I found to combat it was to simply turn the game into a crazy action fest where every round of combat presented some unique opportunity or risk and instead of agonizing over the way to use your at-will for the 4th time you were instead leaping onto the moving train or something and lobbing some shot at someone along the way to maybe push them out of the way or knock them back out the window, or something.
That killed off 3 mostly, though I agree that 2 required getting people to be organized and not worrying about it too much. This is a point where some of 5e's design works, though I think it can be done better in some points.