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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Runestar" data-source="post: 4356598" data-attributes="member: 72317">But the problem is that even in core, it should have quickly become obvious how spellcasters could dominate the game. I don't believe that no playtester thought of having his druid take natural spell, have the wizard specialize in conjuration, or how a cleric with divine power and quickened divine favour easily equalled the fighter in combat (and more). I-win spells like sleep, glitterdust, black tentacles, wall spells, acid fog etc are standard issue, and I don't even have to go out of my way with some ridiculous rules-lawyer'ish interpretation to abuse them, they are already very strong right out of the box. Polymorph's power was matched only by its confusing rules (and to this day, I don't think anyone really knows how it truly works). At higher lvs, forcecage and maze can easily shut down a fight even before it begins (both don't offer saves, and forcecage ignores sr). Let us not even bother discussing 9th lv spells.Don't tell me that all the playtesters opted to run wizards as blasters and clerics as healbots without examining other alternative build archetypes?Conversely, the only "boost" the fighter got was greater weapon focus/spec, which was really a trap to begin with, as all it did was to distract you from the real must-have feats like power attack, improved trip and combat reflexes, and did absolutely nothing to solve the fighter's real shortcomings (in that he already had no problems dealing damage, what he really needed were more options to make him more versatile in and out of combat, something the warblade accomplishes magnificently with his maneuvers which removes his reliance on the full-attack action and expanded skill list). TWFing was generally inferior to 2-HFing unless you had a damage source that triggered off every hit, such as a rogue's sneak attack or ranger's FE damage boost. The barbarian was a 2-lv class. Bard was sub-par unless you had the ELH and could boost his diplomacy check to 150+. Rogue was perhaps the closest you came to a "balanced class", but was hampered by his sneak attack being very selective in what it could target. Paladin was hard to play because of his restrictive code.While 3.5 did solve quite a few problems plaguing 3.0 (most notably sky-high DCs and haste), it did appear to open the floodgate for newer problems to rear their ugly heads as well. Seems like for each issue they resolve, 2 new ones pop up to take its place. I think that after a while, they gave up trying to fix it altogether. Hence 4e.<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=";)" /></blockquote>

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