doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
Did it? It broadened it, but I never saw any breaking in play.Did it? It clearly broke the resource refresh model,
Well, no, it went in a direction you didn’t prefer.and it undid a lot of the benefits of AEDU, which IMHO are pretty nice. I'd be far overstating the case to say it was bad or even not reasonably solid, but it was going in the wrong direction for 4e.
No, it didn’t.It made the game LESS playable.
Most of the time you are just hitting and moving. That’s it. Even the number of stances is fewer than the list of encounter and daily powers.I don't even think that the e-classes were all that 'easier to play' as they were supposedly intended to be. Slayer, you STILL have to pick a stance every round (or decide not to change what you have now, same thing) vs picking an At-Will in classic 4e, no difference in cognitive burden there at all,
And those additional options weren’t valuable to a lot of players. Also, you still had those options.but IMHO stances are not as straightforward as "hit it with this power" is. Likewise you have to keep track of how many power attacks you have and if you want to use one now or not, which is maybe slightly simpler than picking one of a couple of encounter powers or deciding to use a daily, and then keeping track of those. Its pretty close to a toss-up. There's some simplification in character build, granted, but effectively that comes at the cost of losing a lot of options.
Yes, it is. It’s much simpler. Less to think about while leveling and when deciding on an action, practically no mental overhead at all. Pick target, attack, use your one encounter power as much as possible every encounter. You can build a Ranger to be fairly simple, but that process isn’t simple, and you still have to review powers and choose one every single turn.Certainly Slayer is no simpler than Bow Ranger, or TWF Ranger either really. Nor likewise the other e-classes.
Clearly? I don’t think that’s clear at all.I still would have rather seen the effort going into issuing a rewritten set of core PHB1 classes, which they clearly DID have in mind, since they eventually released some cleanups in Dragon and posted on DDI towards the end. Clearly that book would have been no less successful than Essentials... (some of which we could have gotten as well, MV and the adventures).