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<blockquote data-quote="MrMyth" data-source="post: 4874330" data-attributes="member: 61155">I'm going to disagree here. The gap between the two was massively larger in 3rd edition, in my experience. And while you could build an effective generalist in 3e, you could also build a terrible one. The same is true in 4eE - you can build a good generalist, this player simply didn't do so. Weapon Expertise definitely is an issue, sure, but it sounds like he went down a weaker path at every possible opportunity, and I don't see an easy answer to that - forbid characters from ignoring their primary stats? Prevent them for using lower level weapons? And honestly, ending up with 6 or 7 points 'to hit' between optimized and non-optimized is fine - I think the problem is that you ran into a monster that the optimized characters needed a disproportionately high number to hit. In general, say I expect an average character to be hitting enemies on an 11 (around half the time), then an optimized character might generally hitting on an 8, and a non-optimized character would be hitting on a 14 or say. Drifting +3/-3 from the norm seems like a reasonable level of difference between such characters without making any one of them either too good or useless. (As in 3rd, when I'd run into a party that had one character hitting on 2+ what required another character a 20 to hit.) But if you run into something designed to be hard enough that it shifts the curve so that the optimized characters are intended to struggle at hitting... then yeah, the non-optimized character is going to struggle. The problem might be that your DM is running a campaign to challenge not the party, but the optimized characters along. ~shrug~ So it goes.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="MrMyth, post: 4874330, member: 61155"] I'm going to disagree here. The gap between the two was massively larger in 3rd edition, in my experience. And while you could build an effective generalist in 3e, you could also build a terrible one. The same is true in 4eE - you [I]can[/I] build a good generalist, this player simply didn't do so. Weapon Expertise definitely is an issue, sure, but it sounds like he went down a weaker path at every possible opportunity, and I don't see an easy answer to that - forbid characters from ignoring their primary stats? Prevent them for using lower level weapons? And honestly, ending up with 6 or 7 points 'to hit' between optimized and non-optimized is fine - I think the problem is that you ran into a monster that the optimized characters needed a disproportionately high number to hit. In general, say I expect an average character to be hitting enemies on an 11 (around half the time), then an optimized character might generally hitting on an 8, and a non-optimized character would be hitting on a 14 or say. Drifting +3/-3 from the norm seems like a reasonable level of difference between such characters without making any one of them either too good or useless. (As in 3rd, when I'd run into a party that had one character hitting on 2+ what required another character a 20 to hit.) But if you run into something designed to be hard enough that it shifts the curve so that the optimized characters are intended to struggle at hitting... then yeah, the non-optimized character is going to struggle. The problem might be that your DM is running a campaign to challenge not the party, but the optimized characters along. ~shrug~ So it goes. [/QUOTE]

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