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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Brian Gibbons" data-source="post: 3344379" data-attributes="member: 7369">Another way of stating this is that WOTC's design philosophy is moving away from a "balanced on average" style of design.3e tried (with varying degrees of success) to get away from the idea that if a class or race is overpowered at low level and underpowered at high level (or vice versa), that you can consider everything just averaging out over time and call the class or race balanced.  The goal (again, with varying degrees of success) seems to be to make things balanced on a level-by-level by basis.The spellcaster-vs-melee dichotomy, however, has always been balanced on a "well, over the course of the day, the classes are balanced on average" basis, rather than encounter-by-encounter.  The idea that a wizard being able to bring out the big guns and blow away a single encounter at the expense of being sub-par the rest of the game is balanced with a fighter being consistently average all day long unfortunately makes adventure design an integral part of game balance--a campaign where seven fights a day are common will lead to a radically different result than one where a single fight a day is the norm.Personally, I see the Binder (from Tome of Magic) as a harbinger of, if not what spellcasters in 4e will be, at least what some designers are arguing for--spellcasters who can do meaningful things every round and more impressive things on a 1 per X rounds basis.Moving melee types to the same sort of system seems like a good thing to me, though it has to be done consistently rather than an ad hoc add-on.</blockquote>

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