WARNING. There is a lot of math in this post. I apologize for that, but this is a complicated subject that can't be analyzed easily. That's pretty much the point of my entire post. That it isn't as simple as some people are making it sound.
Yes, we're trying to restore the previous order, using a new core mechanic.
You are attempting to recreate the imbalance that 4e worked so hard to fix? Well, then it's no problem at all. Just change things and don't worry about the consequences. But it seems rather strange to take the carefully balanced 4e core and purposefully remove the balance. At that point, it really is easier to run 3.5e with some house rules to make it more like 4e than it is to houserule 4e to be more like 3.5e.
That has always been play-group dependent. It will continue to be so.
It may have been play group dependent, but it was play group dependent in the same way that Fighters using weapons instead of their bare fists was play group dependent. The rules let you do it another way, but heavily encouraged one way. It is certainly possible that a DM said "Sorry, you can't buy wands or scrolls, you can't take reserve feats, I don't want my game to be some sort of fantasy game filled with magic. You have to be normal." But the game encouraged a heavily magical game. It always has.
But if you were already making changes to 3.5e to support this style and you didn't care about the imbalance caused then. I don't see why the solution needs to be more complicated than turning all at-wills into encounter powers and doubling their damage. Anyone with high strength or dex will hit with their attacks. No one else will except for their one encounter power per battle. Magic will become even more special because it won't be able to be used more than once per combat. Everyone will be ordinary until the higher levels.
Once again, this reads: "I want the game to be exactly like 3.5e". If that's the case, I'm still failing to see why 4e is the better option.
As mentioned in my previous post, my groups never skipped level 1. If anything we savoured it. Having to stop and rest frequently is part of how the story works for me. It's that 'scared of the next battle' factor, which is sorely missing at present in my games of 4E.
Fair enough. If you find an entire group like that who honestly doesn't like being more powerful better, then go with it. However, be careful not to project your likes and dislikes on your group. I've seen more than once when someone can just assume their group likes their way of playing more than any other simply because they've never asked them, they've never exposed them to other types of styles, or they just went with the group preference even though they were against it.
No, because it's tedious, slow, and just plain annoying.
Remembering effects is not the issue I was seeking to remove. Repetition is.
While I'll concede that some of those you listed are just damage effects (and therefore of little consequence to speed of combat) others are not.
Thunderwave: Damage + push.
Tide of Iron: I can't find this one, but I'm sure it's not just damage.
Move someone? Yes. Do damage? Yes. Move someone and do damage? No. Not for actions you can repeat every round.
And now you've managed to remove one of the core tenants of 4e. It shows a lack of understanding of the problems 4e was trying to correct. Now, if none of those were problems for your group, fair enough. However, that's just one more part of 4e you need to reverse to get back to 3.5. Implying that it's still easier to start with 3.5e and work forward.
In case it needs explanation, the core of 4e is created around the idea that all the players are working together in the same game, toward the same goal in the same way. In 4e, this is lowering hitpoints. Any round you are not lowering the enemies hitpoints is a round you aren't contributing meaningfully to defeating the enemies. So, in order to do interesting things, you need to be able to do damage AND something else cool. Otherwise you're back to "I make a basic attack. I hit, I do 7, go."
That seems to be what you are trying to create, but one of the major reasons 4e was created in the first place was the remove that.
Using the power 'often enough' is precisely what I'm trying to avoid. Less frequent use = More mystery. More mystery = More interest(ing). More Interest = More fun [for me].
The ultimate fun must be when you never get to use powers ever. Then they are so rare as to be the most interesting.
Keep in mind, if you are attempting to make the players more mundane, you need to remove the assumption that all commoners in 4e die in one hit without even having an AC. It was based on the idea that the PCs were heroes. In order to rebalance this, I'd suggest either giving all commoners the stats of a 1st level monster or reducing all PCs to one hitpoint so they can feel like a normal person.
Changing the calculations every round annoys me, and part of that is based on probability. I prefer bigger effects less often.
Fair enough. You didn't change your calculations every round in 3.5e? Oh, right, you didn't make it over 6th level. That explains it. Not enough spells to change it all the time.
However, I can tell you this was much worse at even medium levels in 3.5e. The average combat for my fighter tended to go like this:
Precombat:
-Get Greater Magic Weapon cast on my 2 weapons. Figure out my new attack and damage modifiers.
-Get Magic Vestment cast on my armor. Figure out new AC.
-Have Heroes Feast cast. Figure out temporary hitpoints, attack modifier, will saves.
Combat:
Round 1:
-Get Haste cast on me. Figure out new attack and AC
-Get Prayer cast on me from a wand. Figure out new attack, damage and saves.
Round 2:
-Have Enlarge Person cast on me. Based on my new strength, figure out new attack, damage, and AC
-Have Righteous Wrath of the Faithful Cast on me. Figure out new attack and damage while remembering that it only give me a free extra attack when using a melee weapon, that it's extra attack doesn't stack with haste and that the bonus to hit and damage doesn't stack with Prayer. But I still get the save bonus from Prayer.
Round 3:
-Have Fires of Purity cast on me. Which adds extra fire damage on all my attacks. Add that into the total damage I'm doing.
Round 4:
No changes.
Round 5:
-Get hit by a targeted Dispel Magic that gets rid of Righteous Wrath of the Faithful. Recalculate attack and damage.
Round 6:
-Prayer runs out. Recalculate attack, damage, and saves.
Take Righteous Brand and Bless as the examples from 4E and 3E respectively.
One gives a +2 to hit (assuming 14 str)...
This is a dangerous assumption. I've never seen anyone take Righteous Brand without having an 18 strength. So, +4. But, let's move on.
for a round, if your one ally can attack that given target during the next round. Which is a benefit of 1 in 10... that is, one in ten times you use righteous brand, it will convert a miss to a hit. So on average, you have to activate the effect 10 times to get any benefit out of it.
If you are giving a bonus of +4, it's 1 in 5. Still, if it has no effect, you haven't lost the damage you did with the attack. It's an attack with a bonus.
The other - gives a +1 to hit for the rest of the combat, or even multiple combats if they're close together. So once out of 20 rounds it will convert a miss to a hit... but you only activate it once to achieve that. In fact from 7th level, you can expect it to work twice (assuming a stupendously long combat) from one activation. That is, two converted hits from 40 rounds. But that's not all. It affects your whole party.
That's correct. In a group of 6 people, it gives an extra hit every 3 rounds or so. Assuming the average hit does 10 damage, your action just did 30 damage in a 9 round combat. And that's why it's unbelievably powerful in 4e balance terms. It allows you to get a huge bonus for just one action. 4e is balanced around an action economy. One action gets you X benefit. That's why there's all the repeating of actions. If you want the benefit again, you need to spend more actions.
Compare that to a Righteous Brand that adds +4 to hit. It adds 20% more damage to one attack(essentially), meaning that it does its own damage(let's say 10) and 2 more damage on someone else's attack for a total of 12 damage for one standard action.
Not only that, but Bless is swingy. If nobody misses by 1 it has no effect. If Righteous Brand hits, but its bonus is useless, you still did 10 damage with the hit.
The other thing to consider is that Bless automatically succeeds. Which is a no no in 4e philosophy. You don't have to make an attack roll to give the bonus unless it's a daily. Whereas Righteous Brand essentially reads: "You have a 60% chance to activate this power" simply by having an attack roll. Because of this, you need to factor that chance into the resulting damage. Which means it normally does 6 damage(60% of 10 damage), with the possibility of 8. Compare that to the 30 damage Bless did and you see how much more powerful it is.
Now that I've shown the different mechanics and their results, imagine if bless wasn't more powerful.
Imagine if the choice was between bless and righteous brand, but they both worked out to one converted hit every ten rounds. But where the only difference was that bless was activated once, and righteous brand was activated every round.
So, you are basically saying, assuming an average 10 round combat, that we Bless should be about 14 times more powerful than RB due to the number of actions it takes. That's assuming they both had an initial hit in order to do damage. If you mean that RB still gets a 60% chance to do 10 damage PLUS giving someone else a hit once every 10 rounds while Bless only gives the hit chance, then I'll use RB every round rather than Bless, which would suck.
It's nearly impossible to balance these two effects. Bless has too much of a swing effect. On a good round where all 6 party members get a hit because of the Bless bonus, it does 60 points of damage in one round. Which is more than some of the highest level dailies. In a bad round it does nothing.
The thing with RB is that you know they can use it every round. So, it's going to hit 60% of all rounds for the whole combat(if that's all they use). If it has no effect, they have another chance next round. No big deal.
That's on of the reasons that nearly everything in 4e requires an attack roll and why there is at-wills. It is easy to measure the average damage of a fighter against a wizard if you know their approximate chance to hit and average damage of both using at-wills. If you know their average damage, you can also figure out the hitpoints the enemy needs in order to survive the number of rounds you want them to. And you can predict this no matter what the makeup of a party is.
On the other hand, if one class is doing attacks that always work(like 3e magic missile), or something that has extremely swingy effect, then the calculation goes out the window. One combat might end in 2 rounds due to the party being entirely wizards and able to auto hit with their magic missiles every round. While another combat might take 20 rounds because the party is entirely clerics with spells that don't actually do damage, they only enhance each other. That was one of the problems from 3e that was fixed in 4e.
