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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 5518695" data-attributes="member: 996">(BTW, I almost didn't reply, because your post was so reasonable, and I'd mostly be quibbling, clarifying or agreeing... But, I realized, if only reply to the less reasonable posts, what am I encouraging?)  While I'm sure that class balance has been degraded in Essentials, I'm less certain it's badly degraded.  I suspect there may be some aspect of better at low level than high... at least, better at low-Heroic than high-Heroic, because AEDU goes from 1 daily at first to 3 at ninth, while the daily-less Martial characters don't really get much of a boost to their at-will abilities over the same levels (they get a new stance at Paragon, IIRC).  And, while balance may well have been achieved, at a point - like the suggested 3-5 encounters/day (or the overly-precise 17 rounds that my Slayer/Barbarian analysis came up with) - it's necessarily more delicate.  Leading to imbalance if a campaign strays too far in one direction too consistently, or a 'balance of imbalances' if it strays just a little or more evenly in both directions. Very true.  Two points though: 1)  The Warlock, Cleric & Paladin all had some issues early on, because being split-primary cut down their power choices substantially compared to single-primary classes with the same number of powers (the Ranger avoided that problem by the simple expedient of having virtually all powers useable with either stat).   So, it was a different sort of balance problem entirely (and, one that Essentials may have re-introduced, by introducing builds that can't use prior build's attack powers, again, splitting a class's choices).  2) Just because 4e wasn't /perfect/ doesn't mean that it's perfectly OK for Essentials to be /worse/.  Really, it means that Essentials could have at least tried to be no less imperfect, or even aimed higher.True.  While Essential's impact on class balance is real, it's hard to say how extreme a problem it will be.  Likely, just as some campaigns managed to retain a semblance of balance in 3.x, many Essentials tables will never notice the balance issues, even if they run into them.  And, even if they notice them, might attribute them to something else...</blockquote>

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