I mean, it kind of makes sense, but, if you make Reaping Strike an encounter power, there's STILL going to be a need for a generic attack power, and your complaints will STILL apply to whatever you use to replace Reaping Strike as the at will.
No, a basic attack would be the vanilla attack. It would be boring, but it is understandably boring not to mention easier and quicker in real time to resolve.
No you didn't. If you were a wizard, investing in dexterity so that your crossbow would be more accurate when you didn't want to use a spell was a noob mistake. Unless you knew your campaign was never going to get into the middle or high levels, it simply wasn't worth it. If you were getting something else out of it as well (maybe you like ray spells) then it was worthwhile. Otherwise, no.
Ah but what if you wanted to be a wizard that invests in a sword and you wanted to use that as your backup weapon to your spells. No wait wait I know the answer... play a swordmage.
Meh. It doesn't actually accomplish this goal unless you rework every class and adjust the power level. If you remove at will attacks, that trivially affects classes that use their primary ability score for their basic attacks, and greatly effects everyone else. Your elf archer cleric will still suck in an at will free system. He'll still suffer the same stat spread. Meanwhile the Fighter is still pumping strength just like before.
I understand this, this may simply be appropriate. Those that pump strength should be effective in melee. A wizard could pump strength and go into melee, if that was how a player wanted to play their character. If you want to play a single stat character then you are able to if you want to play a character that uses more than one stat say like a fighter who uses a bow you can easily do this. All of their powers would key off of melee stuff but maybe they want to use a bow or a sword for their vanilla attacks. If they have at-wills that make using a bow a poor tactical choice then they will 9 out of 10 times ignore the bow.
This would be doable, but merely removing at wills isn't enough. You'd need to rework the math.
This may very well be true. But I do know that removing them makes more character archetypes available for play.
Everyone worried that, in 4e, role would be destiny. People still worry about it, actually, even though it just shows that they don't know what they're talking about. Role isn't destiny. Role is incredibly mutable.
But power sources? Power sources are destiny.
I don't agree, but this is neither here nor there.
4e solved that by letting everyone do their shtick immediately, and at will. In the process, that kind of killed off dual shtick characters.
Except that your solution for resolving the problem of a cleric with a bow is to wait until 11th level. Yeah, touche'.
Multiclassing brings them back a bit. If you want to create an elven cleric archer, you can just make an elf cleric, and multiclass ranger. Or create an elf ranger, and multiclass cleric. You'll have to split your ability scores, but that's not really a crisis. If you're spending a lot of resources multiclassing a cleric into a ranger, dexterity will give you as much benefit as charisma would have given the straight cleric.
So spend a bunch of character creation resources to gain a couple of encounter/daily powers that will come into play 2-3 rounds out of a 12 round combat? This does not synergize in an acceptable way. Pull out my bow make a couple of attacks and then start shooting lazers. No, sorry doesn't work for me.
I suspect that this doesn't really satisfy you, because you want the look and feel of a weapon being a backup for limited use magic. You want the weapon to be the bread and butter, generic attack, and the magic to be the big splash. Multiclassing doesn't really do that. In response, there isn't much I can say, except that running things your way would deny ME the archetypes I like, so maybe this conflict isn't really resolvable.
You are right, this does make a nice point. What archetype would you be denied? You can literally run every character/weapon combination and not have any problems doing it. Explain to me how you are now limited in you weapon choice/class archetype. You are not, just like the RAW except that you are not taking sub-par choice for making your basic attacks with a non-class standard weapon.
Overall, though, I think that making at wills into encounter abilities in order to force people to spread their stats more and take basic attacks is fundamentally a bad idea. It doesn't undo the repetition problem, it makes it worse by forcing you to repeat your basic attack instead of your two or three at wills.
Again, the repetition problem is not that you do it over and over and that is bad. It is that no matter what your vanilla attack is basic or at-will it becomes dry and boring after doing it ~10 times in a combat. The reality is that most classes use only one at-will power, the one the character is designed around to use best.
It encourages stat spread, but that's not an intrinsic good from where I'm sitting.
Fair enough you prefer primary stats to be 18 or 20.
It denies access to as many archetypes as it encourages.
This is false.
It makes combat less tactical (even if my fighter has used up every encounter and daily power he has, I can still try to maneuver for a cleave or shift people around with footwork lure).
This could be true, some may not see this as automatically a good thing. I for one think that cutting any extra time out of an encounter to reduce grind is a good thing. If by your suggestion reduces grind I am all for it.
And an easier solution for the lost archetypes exists. Use encounter powers to encourage them. The encounter power system and the weapon/multiclass system actually provide a great framework for adding unusual things to classes, like archery to a cleric. It wouldn't be tough to draft a multiclass path just to make this archetype available. It would do a lot less violence to the system to make these corner case character concepts available via feats and optional encounter powers than to rework the math.
This is not a clean or easy solution and it does not do what you thought that 4e was supposed to do: "4e solved that by letting everyone do their shtick immediately, and at will. In the process, that kind of killed off dual shtick characters."
