Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 6245290" data-attributes="member: 7006">As I've played the 4E game more and more... I've found that my experience has been tainted by my own desire-- the desire to buy more 4E product.  What I mean by that is that the more products I've bought (and even worse... the product I receive as part of subscribing to DDI and gaining the use of in the Character Builder)... the more powers I have gained access to for all of the classes.  The downside of this is that when you only have a certain number of game mechanics available to make powers out of... the more powers you create for a class at a certain level... the more you end up using mechanics that would be better served only for other classes to keep them unique.   As a result, the more homogenized the classes become.When all you had was four powers per level for each class (like from just the original PH)... you could have a much greater demarcation between ones whose mechanics were more martial based versus arcane based or more striker based versus leader based etc.  It was much easier for designers to say "these types of bonuses or abilities are ONLY going to be for Leaders."  Or that "these mechanics will ONLY be for heavy-hitting martial types".  But when you keep designing and adding more and more powers from a finite list of possibly game mechanics... soon those demarcations begin to bend.I mean... according to the CB there are eighteen Level 1 Fighter Encounter powers.  And they include abilities of pushing, pulling, sliding, higher damage, shifting self, shifting allies, dazing, making enemies grant CA, marking, self Temp HP, charge bonuses, reach bonuses, multiple targeting, penalty to target attack rolls, knocking prone, slowing, and grabbing.  Like the only mechanics you can't do are Area attacks and granting other characters HP or Temp HP.Now how can you expect to keep a Fighter differentiated from other classes when he has access to seventeen different mechanics at Level 1 for Encounter powers?  And this doesn't even get into the 17 Daily powers the Fighter also has to choose from.  You can't.  And as a result, I've reached a place of diminishing returns through no one's fault but my own.  I have voluntarily availed myself to these powers, and l voluntarily flip through all of them when creating or leveling characters for myself or my players.  So it's entirely a problem of my own design.But unfortunately, the genie is out of the bottle for me now.  I see all these classes as homogenized as a matter of course, even if I was to go back and start a new campaign where I specifically told players "only allowing powers from the specific PH from which your class came from".  Wouldn't matter.  My visualization of a 4E Fighter versus a 4E Warlord versus a 4E ranger has been tainted irreparably for at least many years of not playing it.  Which is why 5E is going to be good for me.  It's going to bring back the demarcation between what classes can do and how they can do it. And if WotC follows through with their idea of NOT flooding the marketplace with additional splat material... then I suspect I'm going to be a lot better off.And then maybe after five, six years of that game, I'll go back and try out a "PH1 only!" 4E game again and see if my palate has been cleansed.  I'd love it if that was the case.(And in case anyone thinks this is purely a 4E problem... I had the exact same issue with 3E and the proliferation of Prestige Classes.  We got so many of them that they all started running together both thematically and in what they did-- thus destroying for me what they were good for.  And again... this was no one's fault but my own.)</blockquote>

Verification