If you ban Wintertouched / Lasting frost (something I worry my DM might do, or even Wizards-Of-The-Nerf), the melee ranger will just take prime punisher and called shot. Will you ban those too?
(a) The ranger could take both ... they do stack
(b) You can't build an entire party around Prime Punisher and Called Shot, but you can build an entire party around Wintertouched/Lasting Frost. The 'easiest' solution is to just not make frost weapons trivially easy to get, not necessarily ban the feats. If everyone has the combo (and some can even forgo the lasting front feat, they still benefit from the vulnerability one way or the other) it's not just one person getting +5 damage to their attacks, it's everyone. There is a problem when EVERY weapon user's charOp has these feats pop up.
They're from Dragon Magazine, which is still Core. Beware banning one issue of Dragon and not others, or your players will point out favoritism if someone else gets that nifty power from another dragon article. This has happened to a group I was in, and the DM was basically left with either a) ban ALL dragon mag content, which meant 2 other characters would lose feats and powers, or b) risk the player re-speccing their character from one of the other PHB 1 options, which are quite often, just as powerful. Wintertouched / Lasting frost is PHB-1. If they errata that now, three years later, a pox on you Wotc, if it's too cheesy now it was too cheesy then, by far, since there weren't other options such as Called Shot or Headman's Chop back then, to offer some extra DPR options at the cost of building your entire character and playstyle around.
Tons of stuff in PHB1 was too cheesy, and they are STILL errata'ing it. How long before they got to the orbizard?
Again, headman's chop needs you to get someone prone (which ranged people in your party have to deal with, and isn't trivially easy). Doing cold damage with your attacks means owning a frost weapon. Hardly "building your entire character and playstyle around". If you had to actualy take cold attacks, instead of getting a single weapon that makes ALL your attacks cold, I'd buy the argument. As it is, it's 2 feats and a weapon to get (nearly) permanent combat advantage and bonus damage, which extends to any other party members with cold weapons and/or attacks (which is something that the other feats you mentioned don't do). Which also means that someone grabbing frostcheese doesn't have to change their playstyle at all, they can even invest in the other dpr boosting feats to go along with it. Like knocking people prone to get Kulkor and headman's chop, etc.
Called Shot is about as iconic a concept to rangers as anything else I've seen, really, and doesn't incur the cost of the frost weapons, which are darned expensive. (if a player can even buy them to begin with, that is).
E.g. I made this new ranger / sorc hybrid for a 4e game, and came up with better stats, more fun, more playability, cheaper and more optimal in every way, by using Called Shot and taking hybrid talent for prime shot rather than TWF style. Even taking Toughness as an extra feat was no problem, to be on-par in terms of HP. The double weapon I used I just handwave is two weapons in my head. Bonus : All my sorcerer powers, not just cold ones, benefit from the +5 from called shot. On top of that, When I do have CA AND Prime Shot bonuses (via powers or situationals), my max-to hit is 1 greater than the cold-cheesed TWF ranger. It works out even better for me, as I can get a Jagged Double-ax for less than half the price of two frost weapons, at level 11, and benefit from enchanced crit rate ten levels sooner. Also, mechanically, I can do stuff with my offhand like use my Star of Correlon for implement powers on my turn without having to swap weapons.
The main reason I decided to go the Called Shot route is because I have no faith in Wotc, or the idea that frost weapons will be accepted in the new game I'm joining, or if the DM will just keep throwing cold-resist creatures at us, so I sort of said screw this option. There is nothing wrong or cheesy about an entire character based on cold spells, cold breath weapon, cold feats, and cold weapons, since they're part of the system and it opens you up to being foiled quite easily by certain monsters having resistances. Even that can be bypassed, but can you buy the ice gloves to do that? not necessarily.
There's another way to bypass cold resistance with a frost weapon ... turning it off. Unlike someone that ACTUALLY specializes in cold damage, the frost weapon user not only gets to benefit with all powers, instead of having to pick from the smaller group that have cold already, but they also have the ability to stop dealing cold damage if they want to deal more damage. They get the best of both worlds.
I always thought, for the longes time that Frostcheese was, well, cheesy, but actually, Called Shot is better for a ranger IMO, and frost does have it's place if you have a good theme going on for your character. That removes the "cheese" part for me.
(a) They aren't mutually exclusive. It's possible to get both.
(b) It doesn't address the fact that a frost cheese party or even a couple of characters, greatly boosts the effect. Everyone dealing cold damage gets the +5 damage from a single characters feat (or multiple people take the feats so even if one misses, someone else will hit before the cold vulnerability drops off).
(c) The frost feats for a spell caster (or even somone like a swordmage or blackguard) that has actual cold powers is one thing. But "owning a weapon" isn't much of a theme.
(d) One class getting a pair of feats that gives a dpr boost that is comparable to a feat available to every class that doesn't seem equivalent.
And unless the DM bans that Prime Punisher/Called Shot, it works by changing the way you fight and making you exposed and off on your own to fight enemies solo, which is risky for a ranger to do. So, there is some balance there, and doesn't depend on items whatsoever so the side benefit for the DM is no item wish-lists are needed to make the build function properly.
It does actually encourage a style of play (unlike frost cheese), it's more reliable for a player, and it doesn't require on a DM allowing it work. Those are all good things. However, it is still not as powerful as frost cheese. You can grab a couple extra feats and get the combat advantage/even bigger boost to prime shot benefit and get a better to hit bonus, but you still don't have the ability to extend the bonus damage to your allies. And you actually have to "pay" for your specialization in a more specific way. Instead of giving up other options for your weapons, you have to put yourself at risk.
It works at range, with multiclass powers, whatever. That's a huge plus. If anything, frost cheese should have been fire cheese focusing on pure damage, and lasting frost would have dazed instead of extra damage instead.
All the energy based stuff was a bit whacky out of the gate. The fact that they made it better for weapon users with an elemental weapon than for spell casters who would have to limit their options to be able to benefit seemed like a pretty big oversight. Especially because, outside of say the wizard of the spiral tower, there wasn't an implement option for changing the damage type of powers consistently.
So stuff that would, at first glance, look like a feat for magic/implement users ... was instead a feat taken by fighters and rangers and rogues. And weapon users, between superior weapons, and other support, are already far ahead of implement users in terms of support.
Firetouched would have prevented regen or bypassed fire resistance or something useful. Wintertouched is a little of redundant for rangers who don't exploit Called Shot and fight off on their own, IMO. Just wait to have CA normally before you nova. If anything, I would worry about those ranger who take BOTH those extra +5 options. That, would be too crazy indeed for me if I were DMing. But think about it this way. Monsters HP go up 5x as fast as player's DPR by epic, do you really want to ban that? All you need to do is not drop frost weapons for now : problem solved. No banning necessary. Or have them be so rare they only find one or two per tier, max, and have to re-enchant their favorite weapons one at a time, so as to ramp up damage more gradually.
Rogues, on the other hand....love them some Wintertouched.
True, it's probably easier/easiest for the DM to control the frostcheese problem by controlling access to items. If WotC would actually get the whole item rarity thing fixed, it would be much easier for DMs to do that. [Also, after the whole flaming weapon update in the DM's kit, there may be some more stuff coming down the pike].
As for Monster HP going up 5 times as fast as player's DPR ... well, that would mean that if the fights normally take 5 rounds, they are scaling at the same rate, since the DPE would go up at the same rate as the monster HP. If the fight's take longer, that's actually better for the PCs, if shorter, better for the monsters. In either case it would "pull" things towards 5 rounds of combat. Although at epic, unless you're an essential character, you have 4 encounters (or the power point equivalent) and 4 dailies, so your at-will DPR is either only being used for part of the fight, or is being supplmented with minor action attacks, immediate actions, etc.
