Toward the second half of 4e's life, my group did a giant homebrew hack to the game engine with all of our preferred tweaks. We called it "Franken-Fourth." It ended up being our very own 4e-heart breaker. This was probably way too extreme for most 4e fans, but I thought I'd toss this out there in case anyone finds it interesting.
A few things we did:
- Lowered the math scale. It wasn't 5e's bounded accuracy, but nor was it adding +27 to hit at higher levels. This made PCs less reliant on magic items without using some of the weird math fixes.
-Went through many of the encounter/daily powers and tried to smooth them out balance wise, and got rid of a lot of the redundant ones (or combined them). That was a big project, but reduced so much power bloat in the end.
-We created a 'stamina' pool that recharged during Short Rests. You could spend 1 Stamina to activate an Encounter power or what we called "Power Attack" (add +1[W] damage to other ability). A Daily power cost you 2 Stamina and a Healing Surge to activate. Stamina capped out around 4 or 5 I think. The reason for doing this was to give more flexibility to combat. You could now use the same Encounter power twice in a battle, and you didn't need to hoard your Dailies quite as much.
-When you hit Paragon tier, instead of trading out your Encounter/Dailies for new ones, you would pick one of your existing abilities and add a new rider-effect to it (from a pool of effects curated for your Role). Again this was done to cut down on power-bloat.
It of course meant we couldn't use the character builder software anymore, but with the reduced powers, we built some logic into Excel character sheets that worked fine.
