All I can say is that I disagree.
Fair 'nuff.
fact
but others ... meh. Didn't feel distinct to me.
Opinion
In other words stop telling everybody what their opinion is.
Not telling you what your opinion is, just what the facts were.
Technically - and this is really just a technicality - every 4e class power was even unique -
because the name of the class was part of the power, yes, really, thus 'technicality.'
Eventually a few shared the same name (MP1, the Rogue & Warlord each got an exploit called Anticipate Attack - but they were
completely different), some names got used for both a power and a feat, or both a feat and an item... danger of feat proliferation, I guess.
As of Essentials, that changed slightly as Healing Word was re-cycled whole cloth to the Sentinel Druid, /including keeping the Cleric class name as part of the power/ - may have happened with other powers, too, I'm honestly not sure.
Thing is, that's nothing new to D&D. Spellcasters have always shared some of their spells. In 1e, a shared spell was noted as such, "except as noted above and described below, this spell is the same as the
n level
other caster spell of the same name," was not unfamiliar. In 3e, myriad spells had several classes listed with them maybe even a different levels or components for some of those classes. In 5e, each caster's list contains more shared spells than spells unique to it (the high point, the wizard, has 33 spells it doesn't share, the low point, the sorcerer, /none/.) Nor was it only spells. 1e Thieves shared some of their 'Special' Abilities with Monks and Assassins, 2e, with Bards, IIRC, 3e, in addition to most of them becoming just skills, with Barbarian (Uncanny Dodge), 5e, with Bard (Expertise). 4e went back to the 1e format of listing spells (and prayers & extended it to exploits) by class, then level, then alphabetically, instead of having one big list like in 3e, and took it a step further by putting each list right after its class description - no (technically exact) duplications, no references to another list.
Personally, I had always preferred the 1e organization, you could read the class, read the spells for the first few levels, and have an idea what it could do. I suppose it /could/ have taken mechanically-identical powers, and done the 1e thing, there'd have been a few Rogue powers that gave an Attack line of DEX vs AC, and then substituted "except as noted above, this exploit is identical to the level
n fighter exploit of the same name," but it'd've saved almost no space, I guess, so they didn't do it - instead, they got a tad disingenuous (IMHO) and gave them different /names/, as well, and figured no one would notice (ha!). Again, personally, I think consolidating similar powers by source has a certain aesthetic appeal, though, even if it'd mean that each class would have some class powers, then also draw from a separate list of powers by source, which might, in turn, have special lines for each class.... OK, maybe not that appealing. :
: … no I still like the idea, just needs the right organization/implementation... (heh, subjective preferences are like that).
