NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 6078308" data-attributes="member: 87792">And thank you.  This is one of the major reasons I keep arguing here - most of the people actually arguing are unlikely to change, but the audience matters.  You've made my day.And your three issues are all genuine issues with 4e, but 2012 era 4e, especially including Essentials, has them less prominently than 2008 era 4e.Time to play out an encounterThis came down for two reasons.The first is that with the Monster Manual 3, WotC raised the damage on almost all monsters by half their level, and monster design improved so almost all monsters in the awesome Monster Vault are leaner, meaner, and nastier than their Monster Manual 1 predecessors.  (Seriously, if you are thinking about trying 4e again pick up Monster Vault (<a href="http://www.wizards.com/dnd/article.aspx?x=dnd/4ex/20101025b" target="_blank">previews</a>) and probably also Monster Vault: Threats to the Nentir Vale (<a href="http://www.wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4ex/20110520" target="_blank">previews</a>) - they are in my opinion the two best monster manuals for any edition of D&D).  This has the effect of reducing the average combat length from five to six rounds to three to four.The second is that most Essentials classes have a lot less analysis paralysis.  When it comes to attacking, a high heroic tier 4e PC to have two at will attacks, three encounter attacks, and three daily attacks even at heroic tier.  That's eight distinct options of how to hit someone - and on top of that you need to decide who to hit.  Most people can only hold seven plus or minus two things in their head at once so you get analysis paralysis with people not knowing what to do.  Most post-Essentials classes break the decision point up so, for example the Knight has two stances to choose between (and if the knight's current stance is good, there's no reason to change it), then decides who to hit with a melee basic attack (modified by stance), and only after hitting decides whether to Power Strike - i.e. use an encounter power.  They still effectively have a full collection of At Wills and Encounter Powers - but the choice is broken up into lots of small, simple choices with only a couple of options rather than one great big choice of everything, and people don't get overwhelmed by choices with a lot of the newer classes.  (There's even a spellcaster (the Elementalist Sorceror) who has no daily attack powers and has boosts as encounter attack powers, so the choice to make when attacking is first whether to single target blast or AoE blast and secondly whether to boost or not).Between the two, I expect to run an ordinary combat in about half an hour.Bonusses and ConditionsThis too has improved.  Class design has got a bit better - but the main reason why it's improved is down to one single role.  The Defender.  A pre-Essentials defender would Mark people.  This meant you had one role that should always have at least one condition applied to a monster.  The Knight, the Cavalier, and the Beserker don't mark people at all.  Instead they have a "Defender Aura" - they own the space around them.  If an enemy is next to the defender, they are in the defender aura and subject to the mark punishment if they shift or attack someone else.  If not, they aren't.  This means the second most common status effect in the game (only Bloodied being more common) can now be seen by anyone at a glance and doesn't actually need tracking.Also mark punishment for our new defenders is an opportunity action rather than an interrupt - you get one per monster rather than one for the defender to cover the turn.  This sounds as if it should slow things down but in practice it speeds them up - it's an automatically triggered effect rather than something for the defender to think about.  Extra damage with no decision time - again speeds things up.Out of turn actionsOther than the Defenders now making opportunity rather than interrupt attacks, the out of turn actions have gone down.  More accurately, they haven't gone up while the options have.  Most new classes were designed with either zero or one of them (for instance the Cavalier (the Defender Aura version of the Paladin) has the Righteous Shield power to take the damage for a nearby ally and then come out swinging - any other out of turn options they have are legacy options that are available because they can use Paladin daily and utility powers.I hope some of that was reassuring <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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