Heroes of Shadow: Assassins, Hexblades, and Necromancers!

[Aegeri]

Personally if I'm disappointed these things are "builds" and not new classes comes down to a simple choice. Do I want more Runepriests and Seekers, classes in full that have been left to die due to a complete lack of any support? Or do I want builds that are majorly massively mechanically different to their original class, yet benefit from piles of already available support?

I believe my choice is easy here.

 

[Bartoneus]

Considering that the Essential assassin is martial/shadow, and the ranger is martial/primal, it's quite possible that some of the new builds (like blackguard) will be hybrid classes as well (divine/shadow) while the new schools, being "inside" the Mage build would likely just be shadow flavored instead of shadow 'powered'. Then again, a pyromancer isn't elemental powered.

Walter / UngeheuerLich / Aegeri - I agree with all three of you! It's a bit like I feel one way (that sub-classes are more elegant and should be done) but I'm also a bit disappointed in not seeing a brand new approach and treatment for new classes that would set things like Shadow and Elemental apart. My disappointment comes from a strong desire to see things that are wholly new to D&D and push the game in different directions much like I believe Psionics did (though Psionics is still a very contentious thing, a lot of people love it and a lot of people don't go near it).

Walter: from the preview that WotC released, Blackguard was listed as solely a Divine Striker, not Divine/Shadow Striker, so that's where a lot of my assumptions come from. I think you're dead on with pointing out that Arcane covers a lot of territory, and that is one of the issues, but in my experience most people are quite comfortable with the distinction between Wizard/Mage and Psion, so I'm interested to see what kind of other distinctions could be made when you consider the same idea with different power sources (like Shadow and Elemental). I'm not saying something brilliant is there, I'm just saying I'm hopeful that there is something very cool that could be done with those power sources and it seems WotC is comfortable relegating them to secondary power sources whereas everything I've seen before with 4E made me think they'd be trying to push things further.

 

[DEFCON 1]

...but with the way things are now I would rather have seen the Assassin as a Rogue build than a whole new class.

This would make a lot of sense if it was planned from the beginning to be this way... but you know what I believe happened?

The Assassin was a repurposed Ninja when the Ki power source got nixed.

I suspect that way back when they were putting Player's Handbook 3 together, they had a partially fleshed out Ki power source. After all... the removal of the Ki source was fairly far along in the design process... and this is evident from so many aspects of the design that remained with the Monk. The Ki Focus, the Full Disciplines etc.

What happened to all the other class stuff they designed for Ki? They wouldn't just throw it out whole-cloth... they probably took what they had and tried to find ways to re-use them. And looking at the non-psionic classes that were in PH3... the choices they went with and the power sources they were assigned to seem awfully arbitrary. The Runepriest has nothing in common with the other Divine classes, especially considering it doesn't use Channel Divinity and doesn't actually get it's powers from the gods. So what if the Runepriest was actually repurposed from another class? The Seeker? I've heard a number of people talk about how the "magical archer" archetype is actually fairly prominent in anime (granted I know nothing about it, so I cannot confirm whether or not this is true), but using the magical force of Ki to make a controller archer seems extremely plausible. And the Assassin? Heck, this was the easiest thing of them all. When the announcement of the Assassin playtest happened practically on top of the announcement that the Ki source was being jettisoned... I immediately thought to myself "Well... that's the Ninja class being given to us right there."

If my beliefs are in any way true, then we really can't blame or hold WotC accountable for the decision to make the Assassin its own class, but rather should look at it as an extra "perk" we got for being DDI subscribers. After all, they could have just thrown out all the hard work they did on the class all together... but they instead decided to give us a little something extra as a reward.

 

[Bold or Stupid]

This would make a lot of sense if it was planned from the beginning to be this way... but you know what I believe happened?

The Assassin was a repurposed Ninja when the Ki power source got nixed.

I suspect that way back when they were putting Player's Handbook 3 together, they had a partially fleshed out Ki power source. After all... the removal of the Ki source was fairly far along in the design process... and this is evident from so many aspects of the design that remained with the Monk. The Ki Focus, the Full Disciplines etc.

I've thought the same thing myself. The Seeker could easily be a Shinto Miko (often associated with archery iirc) hence an easy switch to primal as Shinto is a spirit based religion. The Rune priest is I think originally the old Sohei warrior priest class, the Warhammer prof one of the builds get could be a left over from builds being specific weapon based, and the rune states would work a Stances you can switch between (ala the knight).

 

[Xris Robin]

Heck, just look at the warlock. You have ties to the far realm (star pact and vestige pact), ties to the elemental chaos (hellfire pact), the feywild (fey pact), the shadowfell (dark pact). With arcane being such a catchall ... stuff like shadow and elemental find it a bit harder to carve out a niche. You would basically have "a wizard/sorceror that only uses certain types of powers" ... basically a specialized build that focusses on one type of power.

The vestige pact isn't really tied to anything, the infernal pact is tied to devils... which live in the astral sea in the nine hells, and the dark pact is tied to the underdark, not the shadowfell. Just saying.