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Message: <blockquote data-quote="WalterKovacs" data-source="post: 4753825" data-attributes="member: 63763">In the "wizards could be psions" front, they had deliberately avoided giving wizards a lot of powers that woud cross over with psionics (and bards) immediately. They gave them illussions back in Arcane Power, but there are still some old "schools of magic" that wizards don't have. In the previous edition, they had three power sources at the start (with primal being either a variant of divine or a variant of martial, and chi being martial with some sort of magical class features). The differences between divine and arcane were the spell failure. Other than that it was only "designer only" ideas, like that divine focuses on healing while arcane is about damage, and other portioning out. The way spells are cast was handled differently from class to class, so that wasn't really a way of differentiating power sources. Since the wizard could do just about anything, any new caster type was either going to be a sorceror type class (a wizard that prepares/casts differently) or they'll be a specialist that is more restricted than a specialized wizard, but gets bigger benefits (like a warmage or beguiler). New power sources had to come up with a different casting system, since the wizards spell list was so expansive as to make it hard to give it a flavor of it's own that couldn't be copied by a wizard. So, in 4e, they've avoided going the route of each power source having it's own method of casting by giving a chance to have flavor options for each class. They didn't give the wizard everything out of the gate, they held back stuff for other power sources. Shadow can deal with necromacy, psionics can deal with enchantment, etc. They've eliminated one source of differentiating the power sources by streamlining the power system.  However, since, outside of a few exceptions (dilletante, Eternal Wanderer, paragon multiclassing with the half-elf feat from PHB2) you can't just cherry pick powers from whereever you want them. So, the overall theme of the class includes not just it's role, but it's power source as well. You can't look at individual powers out of context to judge the power source since you can't just take a power on it's own out of context (with a few exceptions).</blockquote>

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