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I don't think your comparison was on those terms. Your comparison, as I read it, was between animating generic zombies in 3.x and this particular ritual's animation of a zombie in 4e. My understanding of your objection was that all undead minions ought to be combat-capable because 3.x created...

Ghost Sound and Prestidigitation. Problem solved.

A beastmaster ranger that doesn't take beastmaster powers has a pretty useless pet. It can't make any attacks without action expenditure- even OAs require that you burn your immediate interrupt to trigger it, so pets can't have more than one OA per round. It's basic attack has a lousy attack...

Well, you could play a swordmage. You're a guy who hits people with swords and casts spells to help you do that better. If you want more classical wizard powers, then you just multiclass into wizard- since both swordmages and wizards share Int as their prime requisite, your powers are every bit...

I've never seen a really conclusive discussion about the "real spirit of <prior edition of choice>". Especially particularly antique editions. People like to imagine that their impression of prior editions is induced chiefly by the printed material. I have to believe that's almost never the...

Lord of the Rings? I don't remember Gandalf doing much more than throwing lighted pinecones at goblins and self-rezzing. Grima Wormtongue is clearly bewitching Theoden's head, but neither he nor his boss threw any overt magic around. LotR is notorious for how _little_ D&D style magic ever...

The reason you see things like this is because a character that inevitably wins simply because the author says he can is incredibly dull. Magic is untethered from any non-arbitrary causality, and arbitrary causality can take tension only so far. So a literary wizard who fails to demonstrate...

What non-game-based fiction has a wizard who both controls people's minds and throws fireballs? I'd venture to say that the wizard who can do every sort of magic is an artifact of D&D and related gaming systems, and not anything that authors naturally gravitate towards writing. The reason for...

I'm using Dominate in the 3.x sense, and that's simply outside the wizard's baliwick. Confusion is just one of those little-taste-of-it spells that wizards get, just as I expect other wizard types will get splashes of elemental damage shtick.

I think you are being far too charitable towards human nature in presuming that the default state for reading games is a coolly disinterested observation of the material with a full understanding of all the ramifications of what is said. You don't have to be "bad at reading" to not fully...

I have to take exception to this. If I drop a Scorching Burst with my 1st level wizard and catch two monsters in the radius, I'm doing potentially 2d6+8 damage, which compares very respectably with a dual bastard-sword ranger Twin Striking. Put three monsters inside the burst, and my damage...

Yes, but you only ever apply the lowest resistance to multityped damage. It's one reason that WotSTs and swordmages profit by using an energy-type weapon.

For a rough equivalence, you can just flip the save. If 3.5 says "DC <High> Reflex Save", then 4e says, "+<High> attack versus Reflex". The only even nominally tricky bit is deciding whether the 3.5 attack is supposed to hit more or less often than its regular attacks in 3.5 would. Usually, I'd...

Close- the Weapon of Myrdoon's Shard lets you make a melee _basic_ attack with reach +1 greater than normal. That alone makes it a lot less preferable than the level 5 lightning weapon, which works just fine with powers.

I can't say that I've ever gotten much sense of accomplishment over the BBEG having bad luck with his saving throws. Single-target SoDs aren't just possible bosskillers, they're _ideal_ bosskillers. The fewer you have, the less likely you are to fire one at a mook, and the more likely your...

As opposed to earlier editions, which just left the DM to learn by trial and error what to change for oddball parties. I have a hard time reading 'superior support for novice 4e DMs' to be a flaw in a brand-new edition. It was the DM's problem in the sense that he actually cared whether or not...

You've been soaking in it for thirty years. For decades, somebody's been in front keeping the monsters off the squishies. Somebody's been the glass cannon who trades cosmic nuke power for being a wimp in a nightgown. Somebody's been the healer who's not much for hurting people. Some roles have...

A fighter can use a bow just fine, so simply being proficient at bow usage doesn't appear to be the issue here. The evident issue is access to a ranger's suite of bow-related abilities, since the degree of bowy awesomeness possessed by a character will always be measured against possessors of...