Essentials Multiclass/Interop Rules in April

[Zaran]

How do you know they'll be able to get all the Wizard's benefits? In fact the Wizard in CC might be updated and get some of the mage features anyway - probably magic missile for free (who knows at this stage). In any event, if you think 1 feat will give you everything a mage does then that is hideously overpowered. It is just very unlikely to happen.

I'm all for things like that. I just hope that there is no disparity between the two concepts of going from essentials to core or core to essentials. The feat costs should be simular. That's all I'm saying.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Ideally, there shouldn't even be much of a feat cost, Features and powers should simply be swappable. For the Mage, that's very nearly reality. A little clarity on cantrips & Magic Missle, and we'd mostly be there. Ritual caster is a big sticking point, though. The general design philosophy in 4e was that characters shouldn't trade combat- for non-combat powers, but that seems to be what the Mage did. It dropped Ritual Caster, and it didn't receive much of anything non-combat, while it did get an extra at-will attack power...

They handled tht better with the Warpriest, it gets a few abilities automatically that are basically simplified rituals, but doesn't get ritual caster. Swapping those would seem natural. The only other question is whether/how it's Channel Divinities might be swapped.

The Martial classes are a nightmare of gratuitious, designed-in, incompatibility with their parent classes. I can't imagine an adequate or fair way to tease out the compensations they presumably have for lack of dailies, and enable any sort of balanced swapping; be it with parent class or via multiclassing.