NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 8793628" data-attributes="member: 907">I think it's wrong to say 4e was like an MMO, in generic terms. However, it took some inspiration from a specific one: World of Warcraft.It's not like the whole game was a WoW clone, but there were some things that were clearly inspired by WoW:RolesThis is something of a boomerang. Classic D&D had the fighter, magic-user, cleric, and thief as core classes, and a bunch of other classes that were sort of variations on these. In WoW, classes need to fill certain roles in combat: tank, damage-dealing, or healing – which roughly corresponds to fighter, rogue/mage, and priest (although many classes can fill different roles depending on specialization). And then the boomerang came back to D&D, which made classes built around these roles instead of being built around concepts and then just seeing what that meant.Personally, I think this was an improvement. A well-composed party has always had the edge over a more haphazard one, mostly meaning "We need someone to defend the others so they can pull off their shenanigans, and someone to heal us up." This meant that people would gravitate to the classes who filled those roles the best, or just deal with having problems (or have a DM tailoring the challenges to the party). But with defined roles, it's easy to say "We need one of these, one of these, and the rest whatever." It also meant that other classes in the same role were expected to hit the same benchmarks: notably, a bard, an artificer, a warlord, and a shaman were all supposed to be as good at healing as a cleric was, which in turn mean that cleric-less parties were just as workable as parties with a cleric.EncountersThis was something we started seeing in late 3e. In WoW, the game's focus is on boss fights. It's not where most players spend most of their time, but it's where the spotlight is. And generally speaking, each boss fight stands alone. Similarly, late 3e experimented with abilities recharging on a short timer (e.g. many Binder abilities could be used once/five minutes, and Martial Adept classes also recharged with a very short amount of downtime) and in 4e they just made some abilities into one/encounter. They also allowed you to heal fully on a short 5-minute rest, although with a maximum amount of daily healing. The effect was that each encounter was mostly self-contained, and designed to challenge the players on its own (as opposed to 3e, where most encounters were supposed to be cakewalks that mainly eroded your resources so by the time you got to encounter 4, you might actually be in danger.</blockquote>

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