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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ryryguy" data-source="post: 4682460" data-attributes="member: 64945">1. Hard to see how this is a "beneficial effect" in and of itself.  I think your point is that you've made the current at-wills feel more "special" by changing them to encounter powers, but how is that really any different than just adding new encounter powers?2. Seems a slightly roundabout way of stating that you'd prefer to see all or most characters using weapons more often.  This is only a "beneficial effect" if that's your personal taste.  (see below)3. Really hard to see how this is a "beneficial effect" in and of itself.  What, you just like Str and Dex? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />4. I don't find the current at-wills significantly slow down combat or increase "grind".  Indeed compared to endless basic attacks they may reduce grind since their extra little bonuses can help end combat sooner (and at least promise to keep it more interesting).This seems to me to be the heart of the issue and most of the stuff about basic attacks and stats and weapons and archetypes is pretty peripheral.  You prefer a style where some characters' "output" is less uniform, in particular it seems where spellcasting classes have much bigger but infrequent "booms" and are forced to fall back to much less effective weapons use fairly often.That's fine.  It is true that the 4e system does not support that style very well, because 4e consciously tries to give every player character something interesting to do almost all of the time and a way to contribute to party effectiveness roughly equal to everyone else in the party.  The "boom and bust" wizard does not fit well into that scheme.  The one thing that I fundamentally disagree with is that this design direction leads to less space for different character archetypes.  Partially this is a matter of terminology, since I think what you're expressing is a desire for a different style of play mechanics which has nothing to do with what I think of as character archetypes.  "Wizard who has to shoot a crossbow after running out of spells" is not, to me, a character archetype so much as an artifact of a particular system of mechanics.  One that we've all gotten used to over time so it may seem familiar and comfortable, but not really a character archetype if you look at it more closely.Even if you want to insist that the crossbow-wizard is indeed an archetype, I don't see how removing at-wills leads to space for more archetypes.  Even if it reopens the crossbow-wizard "archetype", it closes down the "magic missile all day" wizard archetype... that may be one that you personally dislike, but I think you have to regard it as an archetype that is lost if the crossbow-wizard is an archetype that is gained.</blockquote>

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