It is impossible not to see 4e as a different game with similar names, at least to me.
Same as 3e and 5e. All different games.
I have to agree on some level. There were really at least 4 editions in the TSR era, maybe more if started contrasting versions of Basic. Yet they were all very similar, they felt like the same game, they were generally interoperable. Like, 1e monsters were written for use with 0e, since the MM was out before the PH or DMG.
Each of the 3 full WotC edition has been decidedly different from and not at all useable with, either TSR or other WotC editions.
OT1H, that's a good thing, as there is at least theoretically room for innovation and change, even if it's mostly been unutilized and reversed by 5e. OTOH, that's a bad thing, as anyone who just fell in love with a past edition loses ongoing support for it, even if there are OGL and OSR support for TSR era and 3e, they're still not official IP-holder support, and just can't maintain the kind of vibrant community the current edition has always benefited from.
Sure, right. There's no truth to any of it.
There's truth to it, they're just all the same truth: "ick, balance! kill it with fire!" I mean, when you have a range of differently worded complaints, each of which can only be resolved by restoring class imbalances, they're all about restoring class imbalances.
Every game has flaws, including 4e, at least for some. Let's not pretend that's not true.
Undoubtedly. 4e lacked a martial controller, for instance. It's fighter was unduly lacking in skills, both number, and range of choices. There were an unconscionable number of pointless "chaff" feats published in Dragon. Skill Challenges and DC guidelines were badly off, mathematically, at first. Skill Challenges had a great deal of unexplored potential. Attack spells & non-combat Rituals were separate resources instead of competing for slot resources , but combat-and-non-combat utilities competed with eachother, and rituals competed with combat & non-combat magic items for gp resources. By the same token, while roles were well-defined and implemented in combat, there was no such differentiation/balancing among the classes out of combat. There was never a treatment of or DMing advice for Epic like there was for Paragon. Class balance degraded in later supplements. 'V' classes never worked right, even tho some, like Paladin, were kludged and became quite potent. Scaling was patched by feat taxes instead of corrected more directly, or just taken as an asymmetric aspect of design that slightly contributed to differentiating the higher Tiers. There was decided power creep and lack of needed updates after Mearls took the helm...
