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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ajar" data-source="post: 5433819" data-attributes="member: 85901">I was apprehensive about Essentials, but I also thought the Power  splatbooks were coming a bit too quickly early in 4E's life cycle. I  didn't really think that publication frequency for crunch was  sustainable. I stopped buying splatbooks after the first (Arcane Power for me) and instead focused my buying on books that contained significant (to me) content that I couldn't get on DDI: DMG2, MM2/3 (monster lore), AV2 (vehicle and alchemy rules), Eberron PG (more alchemy), and both Dark Sun books. Prerelease and shortly thereafter, I had a few problems with Essentials:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">It added more support for the "standard" classes when what 4E  really needs is more support for undersupported classes. Tried building a  Runepriest lately? A Battlemind? Since WotC does not have infinite  resources, oversupporting Fighters necessarily implies undersupporting  something else, and that's exactly what happened.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Essentials builds are mostly incompatible with the other class  builds. The Executioner's poisons are cool, but since they de  facto replace daily powers, why not allow other Assassin builds to  take them in place of a daily? Part of the appeal of 4E is the  flexibility of individual classes when they receive sufficient crunch  support; why hamstring that by releasing incompatible builds?</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">On that note, it's impossible to pick up an Essentials class  feature by making a hybrid or multiclass character. So the Essentials  builds aren't just incompatible with other builds of the same class,  they're also incompatible with the rest of the classes.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The purist in me felt like Essentials added cruft to what I  thought was the cleanest and most consistent ruleset D&D had seen.  (Not the least complex, obviously.) The psionic power source was a great  example of how to add interesting crunch while minimizing cruft; I felt  the piecemeal approach of Essentials added too much cruft (namely, lots  and lots of special rules for each build of each class) without adding enough interesting crunch. The sacrifice didn't seem worth it.</li> </ul>I'd hoped that some of these problems would be addressed. Thankfully,  we're seeing a bit more content for undersupported classes via DDI. I  remain hopeful that some Essentials options will be made available to non-Essentials characters, since that should be feasible to implement. Also, when I read through the Essentials builds, some of my complaints turned out to be not quite as pronounced. The Thief, Knight, and Executioner all brought new and interesting things to the table and are builds I'd consider trying out. Probably not for a long campaign, since my characters are often hybrids (and sometimes multiclassed hybrids >_< ), but there's definitely some interesting crunch there that was worth bringing into the game. So on the whole I'm neutral on Essentials now that it's out. I certainly like the idea of an updated set of evergreen books, and I bought the Rules Compendium and Monster Vault. I've been very happy with both, although I wish the MV contained some guidance on what information to reveal with skill checks alongside its expanded monster lore. But we seem to have gotten into a "worst of both worlds" situation now. Content for both regular and Essentialized 4E is being drastically scaled back, but it looks like we also aren't getting more cool stuff in the historical 4E format (like the Dark Sun books). I'm hoping the content calendar will be updated with another couple of releases, although I don't think we need to get all the way back to the fast release schedule we saw in the first couple of years of 4E.</blockquote>

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