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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 4982152" data-attributes="member: 82106">More than you seem to think.The point still stands, its not good design to railroad powers into only one possible viable way of working. If you haven't paid attention one of the primary complaints with 4e is the virtual impossibility of making decent non-damage-centric powers and every "lets throw a bit more bonus damage on them" rule just makes the situation worse. Its bad design, pure and simple. No, I would expect that the design of the game will not continue to evolve in such a way that it continues to devalue my choices more and more. At some point these choices were designed to be equivalent choices to powers which primarily do damage. Every time you effectively up the damage of every damage dealing power you devalue the ones that don't. Even powers which do only minor amounts of damage and are primarily focused on status effects and such become relatively devalued as status effects themselves mean less and less when you can pile on enough damage to just kill things outright in a hit or two. There's nothing at all questionable about my logic, it is absolutely and utterly straightforward.This is a straw man argument. I never mentioned fullblades and greatbows. However if you actually take a minute to examine the situation you will see that 3 grades of weapons are a logical and even necessary outgrowth of the game design. Simple weapons pretty much have to exist as "those weapons pretty much anyone can pick up and use with minimal training". Military weapons then simply must exist as the contrasting set of weapons most people aren't exposed to without training and won't normally know how to pick up and use to full effectiveness. Superior weapons naturally then arise as that class of weapons that even your ordinary warrior won't instantly be familiar with. Its simply the natural consequence of the whole design. Its possible they could have done away with the whole notion of these weapon grades and just had every class spell out an exhaustive list of what weapons they could use (not great if you consider new ones are likely to be added).Now, I can think of other alternate possibilities but fullblades and greatbows certainly work. Notice they weren't even included in the core rules and I suspect the original design never contemplated them. Because weapons have a lot of factors attached to them it was possible to easily extend the base weapon system to accomodate a class of weapons that really can be thought of more as trading a feat for even greater weapon skill. Its also kind of inevitable that players will want to have "a really really huge sword" vs just "a great big sword". Again this kind of logic does not apply at all to implements. Nobody asks for "a really really huge wand". Except that the powers spellcasters are using were DESIGNED with that in mind. You're fixated on the size of damage dice and you aren't looking past that. Spellcasters are doing fine. They are quite effective. In fact I would say they were almost a bit on the high side on day 1, especially at higher levels where conditions and other effects still predominate over raw damage. Talk to people who are experienced at playing beyond 15th level and they'll gladly tell you the same thing I've observed, that wizard you don't think much of is suddenly a very bad dude you don't want to mess with. In fact with all the weaplement tricks that have opened up of late its a good thing that melee has gotten a decent boost. Its ironic that a lot of those boosts manage to apply to casters too if they get a bit clever but that's a whole other kettle of fish.I would never argue that the rules for implements aren't a mess, but adding in another implement subsystem is the anti-fix. It will just make the situation even worse or at best not fix it. The problem isn't an issue of balance between melee and casting, its an issue of the rules for implements are simply byzantine and filled with stupid pitfalls that randomly nerf certain builds for no logical reason. No amount of patches to the core rules is going to make that mess go away and applying additional crap on top of existing crap will just make it even less intelligible and logical. WotC should just walk away from the implement mess, chalk it up to experience, and let the whole festering thing lie. At least we can manage to work around its existing misfeatures. Who knows how much worse they'll make it if they mess with it more? There is ZERO track record in 4e so far of it getting any better.</blockquote>

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