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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aegeri" data-source="post: 5431841" data-attributes="member: 78116">Bear in mind Nemesis, I am merely repeating the arguments that I've read on essentials from here, Penny-Arcade and the official forums (dear god the official forums...).Exactly and to very many people essentials is wizards going back to this design they dislike.I actually fundamentally agree with you - but it's the kind of design these classes represent that some dislike considerably.Except as the argument advances along these lines, you'll find that the fact essentials has "ruined" future material becomes the problem. Take the drama on wizards over Heroes of Shadow having "builds" of the mage with the necromancer/nethermancer as schools of magic instead of genuine new "shadow" classes in the style of those from the PHB. The point here is that essentials to many has been branded as a 4.5 sneaking in to replace the games older AEDU design. This is of course rather ridiculous, but that is the general impression and so it doesn't look favorably on wizards. It's not far enough for many "grognards" to begin with (as it's still 4E, which we both agree on incidentally) and it's an abandonment of what many liked about 4E design for many ... uhhh... "older" 4E fans? (Not sure what to say here).That's really the problem.Given a lot of these people feel essentials is the reason for 4Es current problems, I don't think that's going to happen.This isn't the argument - the argument is that it means no new builds or classes in the old style will appear. That's what they are afraid of and why Heroes of Shadow is such an important book for Wizards to prove otherwise.Actually this isn't entirely true. I am constantly amazed by games where people are insistent on "No essentials" (<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/4e-discussion/299148-ive-managed-avoid-essentials-until-now.html" target="_blank">like this thread</a>) or people running games that are "Essentials only". This is an absolutely terrible position for games to be split between for wizards. It shows a complete and absolute failure on their part to communicate clearly enough that essentials is just more 4E and fits in with everything else in the system. It means we're starting to get into a situation where you need two conversations and sets of assumptions: One for a game where essentials material is available and one where it isn't. Wizards has to prove this and like it or not, the test for this is Heroes of Shadow. Expect this kind of argument to become more vocal and worse if Heroes of Shadow is all essentials style and doesn't have support for earlier classes.Especially given that some earlier classes have nothing. No divnie power 2, no primal power 2 means that the Runepriest and Seeker are left in an immensely poor position. An arcane power 2 could really help out the artificer as well. There was a great thing about the predictability of power books, especially because Psionic Power was terrific. Added some great new fluff and terrific crunch at the same time. It was so good it actually changed my very negative opinions on psionic classes!I disagree in this situation. Many are going to view it as the death of 4E due to the problem I mentioned above: Splitting the fan base and dividing games between "Allows essentials" and "Disallows". That's not an insignificant or unimportant factor by any means.I am actually far from convinced by this, especially because Dark Sun (by all accounts) sold extremely well, was almost universally praised and is widely considered to be 4Es finest book of any sort. There was more than enough life in that format - especially if they pulled back the release schedule to not be so utterly aggressive book wise. But pre-essentials they were doing things a lot of people approved of. They gave epic monsters their gonads back with better maths (better design of monsters full stop actually), there was predictability in the schedule and always something to look forward to, Dark Sun is their finest hour campaign setting wise by far and there was certainty. Since essentials DDI has also gone downhill (Online character builder, monster builder left for dead, DDI has become more fluff heavy with little viable crunch when they do publish some etc) and to many the correlation is just too distinct.The point is that regardless if essentials is/what does potentially cause 4Es downfall ultimately (probably combined with Wizards incompetency with DDI), it's hated widely by a good chunk of the community. They are going to home in on essentials as a cause of it like a diver in the middle of the pacific wearing his lucky bloody steak belt.</blockquote>

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