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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celtavian" data-source="post: 4354105" data-attributes="member: 5834">reAfter reading through this thread, I am getting the following.A good number of players, quite possibly the majority, had the following conditions occurring:1. You had a bad priest or no priest: It seems like the melee weren't getting healed and buffed by the neighborhood priest. I don't hear much about priests in the 3.5 campaigns.2. Wizards did what they wanted: Melees were left to their own devices while the wizard flew around the battlefield dropping nukes like it was going out of style. We actually have a player who tries to do this. He ends up having to run the majority of the time and having to be saved by the priest. Sad thing is he almost gives up on the encounter if he can't nuke the enemy down. I get the feeling that a great many wizard players from 3.5 would have been very disappointed playing in our 3.5 campaigns because overnuking or coming right out with a death spell was like signing a warrant for your destruction.3. Encounters were not designed with the wizard in mind: Your DMs weren't taking into account what the wizard could do and designing encounters to make it so that going off and nuking was a death sentence.I'll be honest. You could not play regular modules without boosting hit points and tailoring NPCs to fight against the standard power of wizards. For that reason I don't fault the majority of players for their dislike of the 3.5 wizard. That is a fault of the game designers for tossing out overpowered spells like Avasculate and Solipsis and Prc classes like the Archmage that required a complete rethinking of encounter challenges that might have been fine for a PHB version of the wizard, but were not fine when taking into account a wizard with a Prc and access to other spellbooks.So ultimately I can see why alot of people do like 4th edition. Thinking back on it, it did take alot of work designing encounters and quite a few house rules to make high level DnD challenging.For example, we gave feats to Paladins, Rangers, and Barbarians one every five levels. Fighters and rogues were more often multi-classed with a Prc than a straight class. Almost no one ran a straight class rogue, though Scout was one of the best designed single class rogue-types in 3rd edition and that was the most attractive single-class rogue type to run.This is why I completely understand and like what 4th edition did with melee classes. I give them big props for finally giving melee classes interesting powers. I just wish they had not had to rip the heart out of wizards and priests in 4th edition.I include priests because I enjoyed being a priest that my melee classes loved. I liked being the priest that had that remove paralysis ready when a fighter missed his will save. I liked having restorations prepped so that the poisoned rogue or the unlucky melee that was ambushed by spectres could get his levels back. I liked having death ward so my melee comrades could wade into a battle against an army of wraiths. I liked having the big heals when the melee was going toe to toe against the dragon. I liked playing a priest and creating a spell strategy for keeping my party alive and protected as well as occasionally throwing down against undead.Alot of that is lost now. Priests can heal a few times a day not including healing word. I'm going to miss it in 4th edition.A well-played priest and wizard was a thing of beauty. I don't mean just nuking, but also helping those melees on the battlefield as they threw down with the powerful stuff we were fighting. You could actually pull off fighting a horde of demons if your cleric and wizard supported their best damage source (the melee classes) rather than trying to do all the damage themselves. That made for some epic encounters I will remember that I don't think will happen with per encounter and daily powers.We used to sit on the majority of our spell power until we reached one big encounter that would require we spend just about all of it one big, epic battle that took everything we had to win. Now, most players will blow their encounter powers every, well, encounter. Dailies will be the only decision we have to make when to blow them off. Before you had to think about when to use your magic power. Those that blew it off willy, nilly didn't have it when it was needed much to the detriment of their group.But as I said, this kind of encounter challenge took alot of work at high level. That is almost always a negative factor when it comes to entertainment. People don't play games to feel like their working. So I guess I understand the sentiment towards simplification, power reduction, and power scaling. And regardless of whether I miss the old spell system or not, as long as my DM can still make it fun, I'll play. I like getting together with my buddies and throwing down against some baddies. Heck, I've played simpler game systems and enjoyed them like Boot Hill and Aliens. I'll just look at this as another game system to try out with my buddies.</blockquote>

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