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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MrMyth" data-source="post: 5518772" data-attributes="member: 61155">Hey, no worries! Honestly, being able to engage in discussions where both sides can reasonably disagree while still acknowledging and understanding the other side's point of view is, I think, an example of ENWorld at it's finest.  It's true - though, myself, I've always found healing surges to be more of the dividing line than daily powers. A group might press on without dailies, but will be very cautious about doing so when out of surges. And that hasn't really changed.  (Except, of course, we've got the upcoming Vampire class which does mess with that! Though it sounds like it has a decent mechanic for keeping its healing limitations on par with the rest of the party.) Even so, I'm sure that it will indeed impact some groups, even so. The thing is, I think so many other factors do so as well that the impact felt by this will be slight. I've played in games where we'll go weeks between encounters. In others, we'll delve through 7-8 encounters in a row. I've had both experiences in the same campaign! I think there are already much more significant factors at work, and they vary from group to group, adventure to adventure, campaign to campaign.   Yeah, my point wasn't that it was the same disparity of balance, but that numerous types of imbalance can already exist in the system. The split-stat classes. Weapon damage vs caster damage, especially for strikers early in the edition. Or the difference between direct striker mechanics like Quarry and Curse vs the harder to quantify benefits of the Barbarian. Unless we keep each class absolutely identical to the last, fluctuations in ability will exist.  Now, all that said? Your point - that just because perfection can't be reached, is no reason not to try - is a good one. Other imbalances shouldn't excuse letting worse ones crop up in Essentials.  But my thought is that any issues from Essentials ones is not actually worse than similar issues that have cropped up before. Pretty much every new release, we've heard that one new class is going to be so much better than all the rest, or so much worse. And rarely is that the case - they aren't all equal, but they are all on par and capable of playing the same game, in the way that the imbalances of the past couldn't always achieve.  Honestly, it is possible you are correct - an Essentials character vs a non-Essentials character might work fine side by side for one encounter, but reveal underlying flaws over the course of a campaign. I don't think it is likely to happen... but I also don't think we will know for sure until much more time has gone by with such classes in action alongside each other.  For myself, I do like to see WotC experiment, even as I can understand concern over what those experiments will do to the game. And, honestly, my main concerns with Essentials is more over the ever-greater focus on Expertise and other super-powered feats, and what that does to the game - so it isn't as though I think the WotC design team can do no wrong.  But in this case, I haven't seen any signs that they failed in their goal - to create new builds whose resource allowance is different than the rest, while remaining fundamentally balanced with the earlier options. But I could be wrong - time will tell, far more than any math or theory we can lay out on the table right now.</blockquote>

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