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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(Psi)SeveredHead" data-source="post: 6241302" data-attributes="member: 1165">My favored edition is 4e.My favorite class is warlord. When I ran 4e for real the first time, we had a player who picked a warlord. This person was really experienced with Warhammer 40K board games and it showed. He used tactics amazingly. One of my current games has a lazy warlord too.It's pretty hard to pick a "favorite class" in 4e, actually, but I find I tend to like the "core four" since they're less flavor-restrictive. I like the PH1 wizard, cleric and warlord, and the Essentials knight, slayer, thief and fire sorcerer.Late 4e really ran out of creative steam as the splatbook fiasco continued. There's numerous terrible classes, usually ones that can't fulfill their roles (seeker, bladesinger, a few others), or have weird combos like low-Strength assassins running around with greataxes (talking about the avenger here). But IMO the worst was the vampire, because it wasn't just terrible mechanically, the flavor was offensive. A vampire base class. Seriously! It's like watching a beloved TV show definitely jump the shark.I have experience with 2e, 3e, and Pathfinder too. For 2e and 3e I'll just stick to the core rules.Special Note: The paladin code of conduct was possibly the worst thing I have seen in core D&D before 4e. But it's kind of lame to keep saying "paladin" as worst.For 2e my least favorite class was the thief for numerous reasons. Most players took the name too literally and tried to pick pocket everything in sight, landing them in trouble with the law. Often other PCs would get caught up in this too. Their skills were too weak at low level (and unstoppable at high; this was before skill DCs) and in combat they were a joke. Once per encounter unreliable backstab... lame. (Kender thieves were worse. Kender are even worse than paladins in the RP department, and kender thieves, called handlers, don't even have backstab. So you have someone who can get you into trouble but can't fight.)My favorite was the fighter. Weapon Specialization was actually class-defining back then, and I liked the good saves. (I wasn't a fan of exceptional Strength, or indeed the entire 2e ability score system.)For 3e my least favorite was the bard. You were basically a rogue crossed with a limited sorcerer, and while you had unique abilities, they just involved handing out small bonuses. You were there to sing a combat song, nothing more. (If 3.0, ranger was the worst. Magic that made no sense, a very heavily-enforced combat style, more hit points than a skirmisher needs, not enough skills...) The monk almost made it due to poor mechanics, but the flavor was half-okay.I didn't really have a favorite, but I tended to play wizards and non-magical rangers.For Pathfinder the wizard and cleric became much more enjoyable to play at low-level. I'd say wizard for favorite, because the cleric's spell list is still too broad. I like the spell-like abilities. They scale poorly if at all, but you only need them at low-levels when your spells/day rating really sucks.My least favored Pathfinder class is the gunslinger. The moment you add guns to a game it suddenly becomes far more realistic as gun fans will not tolerate balanced but unrealistic guns the way they will tolerate balanced but unrealistic bows and swords... real-life guns are not balanced, and unbalanced rules aren't fun. Who wants to play a gunslinger with realistic load times?Paizo attempted to use long loading times as a balance technique. (You can target touch AC against fairly close by opponents, but it's "balanced" because you can only shoot once per round. You have to pay a lot for a gun, but you only need to pay for it once. Unless you buy a lot and pre-load them, which is what happened in real life. You have to pay a lot for bullets, but after some levels the cost becomes minimal compared to your adventuring income.)So naturally splatbooks have ways around this: advanced firearms (now your class can go from weak to overpowered because of one weapon; tell me, do fighters become "overpowered" when you add katanas to the game?), double-barreled pistols (reload half as often, see previous example about the katana), alchemical cartridges (reload faster), weapon cords (reload faster yet; those were recently nerfed), all resulting in an optimized gunslinger being far more powerful than any other martial class.The synthesist is also all kinds of broken, but at least the problems are mainly mechanical. Also the character sheet gets so complex no one can keep it straight.</blockquote>

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