Same here; in fact I went ahead and wrote enhancement bonuses right out of the game.Not sure item dependency is a great idea. One thing I liked about 4e was the ability to punch the 'inherent bonuses' button and run a low- or even no-magic game. You could even run a campaign w/o casters, at all, and still have things work relatively well.
It's possible you're reading something here I'm not saying - that Fighters should be underpowered or that all they should be able to do is hit things. That's not it at all. But I think that early on in 4e the answer to the question "How do you make non-casters interesting?" was "Give them a zillion powers to pick from!!!" I don't believe that that is the only answer or even the best answer.Lol!
Seriously, though, 3e fighters got two feats to start and another every-other level. They could be used to expand options pretty dramatically by level 6. And, classic D&D fighters were supposed to be constantly getting new magic items - the treasure tables were pretty heavily weighted in favor of stuff they could use.
So there's always been some attempts at keeping the fighter interesting, even if they didn't often work that well - contributing to the game falling out of it's 'sweet spot' before double-digit levels in most eds.
Fine and dandy, as long as we define the class by it's Source, Role, and, most importantly, archetype, not by it's (sometimes abysmal) past performance.
To be fair, it's more like a few powers at each decision point, totaling hundreds only across all levels and after /two/ Martial Powers books.It's possible you're reading something here I'm not saying - that Fighters should be underpowered or that all they should be able to do is hit things. That's not it at all. But I think that early on in 4e the answer to the question "How do you make non-casters interesting?" was "Give them a zillion powers to pick from!!!" I don't believe that that is the only answer or even the best answer.
I've only played 13A 3 times, but each time, while the system was nice, the class I was playing proved disappointing. The cleric was too Vancian, for instance, and the fighter was just - sad. I've gone into it elsewhere, but the poor fighter pre-gen had 7 things chosen for it, and in the course of 3 exciting battles with an excellent DM, none of those 7 things had /any/ impact on the game whatsoever. Might as well not have had 'em. (The third class was Paladin, and the game was short, but it had an ability that actually did something 1/encounter +several/day - it would have gotten old fast.) I'm optimistic about 13TWs, though. FWIW.I honestly don't have TOO much interest in coming up with a 4e 'Heartbreaker' because I already have one and it's called 13th Age. In that game the classes all work very differently, yet all of them are more interesting than "I hit it with my sword" and they also balance fairly well.
Psionics was cute because it did follow AEDU, but re-jiggered in such a way that it looked and felt different. There's a lot could be done with tricks like that.But even within 4e we see that there are different ways you can approach the problem. Psionics showed another great approach to building classes. Essentials had some good ideas as well. I would recommend stealing from all three of these sources and coming up with new ideas too, rather than building every class as "modified AEDU".