I was talking about dual wielding rules.
A 5E subclass tends to use a page or so. 4E was 10-15 pages.
Designing to level 30 also bad design since only 1% make it to 20. Mostly just wasted space.
...the dual-wielding rules for 4e are also a few sentences. As is the Tempest Training feature.
4e's dual-wielding rules, directly quoted from my copy of the book:
"
Off-hand: An off-hand weapon is light enough that you can hold it and effectively attack with it while holding a weapon in your main hand. You can't attack with both weapons in the same turn, unless you have a power that lets you do so, but you can attack with either weapon."
Note that 5e...isn't meaningfully different here. You don't get to attack with both weapons in the same Attack action. You get to attack with one weapon or the other. Wielding a weapon in your off-hand simply lets you make a bonus-action attack with it--something that has left many people dissatisfied with how 5e implemented dual-wielding, especially if they have other uses for their bonus action.
The text, for those who care, is:
"When you take the Attack action and attack with a light melee weapon that you're holding in one hand, you can use a bonus action to attack with a different light melee weapon that you're holding in the other hand. You don't add your ability modifier to the damage of the bonus attack, unless that modifier is negative. If either weapon has the thrown property, you can throw the weapon, instead of making a melee attack with it."
As for the Tempest Fighter, it is, again, literally just four sentences:
"When you wield two melee weapons, you gain a +1 bonus to attack rolls with weapons that have the off-hand property. You gain Two-Weapon Defense as a bonus feat, even if you don't meet the prerequisites. When wearing light armor or chainmail, you gain a +1 bonus to damage rolls with melee and close weapon attacks when you are wielding two weapons. This bonus increases to +2 with weapons that have the off-hand property."
They don't really do that, though. The spells and abilities of Druids, Clerics and Paladins do far more to differentiate the classes than the power sources. Divine, Arcane and perhaps Mental(if psionics ever comes back) are all you really need. More sources just dilutes what differences the power sources bring.
Well, uh...you may be surprised to know that there were only five "regular" power sources in 4e, so it wasn't too far off your list. Divine, Arcane, Psionic, Primal, and Martial. Others have articulated why having Druids/Rangers/etc. be
actually different from Divine stuff, instead of "well it's Divine magic but
completely different from all the OTHER Divine magic you see," was super helpful to them both mechanically and narratively....which means Martial is really the only one with no justification beyond, well, that it's the category for all the people who don't use some kind of mystic mumbo-jumbo hand-jive, which seems a pretty useful category to me. After all, we
do refer to Fighters and Rogues as "martial" characters, with EKs and ATs as notable exceptions, don't we?
This. We had shadow wizards in 2E. They were still arcane, you could make them shadow I suppose but no real point.
...there were also shadow wizards in 4e. They used "nethermancy," literally shadow-magic. Admittedly, that one took longer (
Heroes of Shadow, April 2011), but it still happened--and it's not like shadow wizards were an at-launch thing for 2e, I'm sure. Are there any other examples you'd like to cite of stuff 4e (allegedly) prevented people from doing? Perhaps I can demonstrate that 4e covered more ground than you think it did.