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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5517821" data-attributes="member: 82106">I disagree with your analysis.Power Strike is an ALWAYS HIT damage bonus. Now, assume that a fighter has a 2W encounter power at level 1. This power will hit roughly 50% of the time, though maybe the chance is really more like 65%. So Power Strike is worth almost TWO fighter encounter powers (presumably the encounter power also has an ancillary effect, so it somewhat balances out). The Slayer is doing an extra 2-3 points of damage every round vs the fighter. The fighter has a 3W daily, roughly a 7 point damage add over an at-will once a day. Now, the fighter isn't a striker per-se, so we can consider this reasonably balanced (actual play confirms this).The result is that on the whole the slayer is doing a bit more damage, maybe even a bit more than a PHB1 rogue and equivalent to a bow ranger (who also has few other options besides just attacking BTW). The fighter or other PHB1 character OTOH has a bit more control of when and where to drop his big damage and gets some kind of special effect when he does that. As other people have pointed out, because 4e has a built-in system of bonus progression which controls your core to-hit and defense bonuses it is actually fairly hard to have things go totally out of whack. Beyond that there is a rather definite damage increase progression as well, again mostly built into the various powers and such. Given that attack bonus and damage are the MAIN indicators of combat balance for most characters 4e REALLY IS largely self-regulating. No plausible class design is going to be very far out from being balanced. You're going to have to make some value judgments about effects vs damage, how much advantage are area attacks, etc. Still, these are things the 4e devs clearly figured out. I don't see frequency of use balancing as being a harder tweak than those.As for 1e, I still maintain it offers not even the slightest lessons on balancing classes (nor do 2e or 3.x either for that matter). 34 years of sending cars careening down the road with nobody behind the wheel will not teach you jack all about how to drive. It may teach you a lot about the consequences of crashing, but you'll still have to get behind the wheel and learn how to run the car. So the only lesson we can draw from previous editions is that they were indeed totally unbalanced and that we're sick of that. We can hypothesize what made them unbalanced and what might fix them, but 4e clearly has actually done it and equally clearly the 4e devs understand the how and why of that.Now, you may find Essentials martial classes produce slightly different results in your game than other classes. I don't know. I seriously doubt it is going to be very noticeable or amount to anything more than the existing slight variations between AEDU classes. In THEORY it should be easier to balance classes that all use the same exact mechanics. In practice it may be harder to do that with non-AEDU classes, but you'd have to ask Mike Mearls about that. All we can see is that the result is pretty darn close.Honestly I think the analogy of the chasm between Fighting Man and Magic User and that between Mage and Slayer is like comparing the Grand Canyon to a rivulet made in your driveway by a leaky garden hose. They may arise from the same basic process in theory but they are so quantitatively different that we can't even really make a qualitative comparison. I've DMed since the very start of D&D and in this respect I find the difference too vast to really gage.</blockquote>

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