D&D 4E Inquiry: How do 4E fans feel about 4E Essentials?

[Voadam]

I really liked encounter and at will powers and was never really a fan of dailies. 4e's were decent at either being one big shot or an encounter length effect.

When essentials brought out options for classes more focused on at will stances and auras I was all for it.

The monster book math was great and I have gotten a bunch of use out of the monster tokens.

 

[Garthanos]

I really liked encounter and at will powers and was never really a fan of dailies. 4e's were decent at either being one big shot or an encounter length effect.

I liked the ability to pull out all the stops with martial characters, and sometimes this came with action points and sometimes with dailies... and to me essentials seemed to say no you "should not" have that.

 

[Minigiant]

That'd be me. I did and do see it as a desperate attempt to break the back of the good game design to try and win back the people who abandoned the game years earlier.

Especially with the 'We've finally got a boring Fighter' class, Slayer.

Basically sacrificing the Fighter to the throng of disgruntled Wizard players...

The confused mentality of whether it's a half edition, full edition, addon, or standalone with the heavy focus of "classic" archetypes and concepts and little support of new or emerging ones just cause unnecessary rifts.

 

[Garthanos]

The confused mentality of whether it's a half edition, full edition, addon, or standalone with the heavy focus of "classic" archetypes and concepts and little support of new or emerging ones just cause unnecessary rifts.

The classes were basically almost entirely redundant revisits was part of that...

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

When did they turn Magic Missile from a useful ranged basic attack into that auto-hit power that no one needed? That was kinda bad.

And I agree with concerns that the idea of removing Dailies from some classes also meant that suddenly the number of encounters per day suddenly altered the balance between classes. That would actually be a serious problem now for my games, since we don't run that many combats usually. I
I liked that they tried to break out a bit of out the AEDU system while remaining mostly compatible with it, but it could never quite work out that way.

I liked that they tried to make some "simpler" classes with this method, but I didn't really need it.
And if they want to do that, I think they also really should have made a "simple spellcaster". Just because you like mages doesn't mean you want to manage a spellbook.

 

[Minigiant]

The classes were basically almost entirely redundant revisits was part of that...

I mean they could have easily just took all the PHB 1 and PHB 2 classes and Essentialize each of them (giving the Core Four 2 essential classes each). Had they done that right at the get-go and named them all subclasses, it would have clear up a large amount of the issues.

 

[Charlaquin]

I really liked encounter and at will powers and was never really a fan of dailies. 4e's were decent at either being one big shot or an encounter length effect.

When essentials brought out options for classes more focused on at will stances and auras I was all for it.

Yeah, this was a plus for me too. Never much cared for X/day abilities, so the introduction of at-will and encounter powers in 4e was awesome, and then Essentials re-worked the non-casting classes to rely on daily powers even less. I liked that a lot.

 

[Garthanos]

When did they turn Magic Missile from a useful ranged basic attack into that auto-hit power that no one needed? That was kinda bad.

It was an essentials adjustment. I have been methodically undoing essentials tweaks in Character Builder. I haven't undone all the adjustments which made wizards encounter powers more powerful, yet.

And if they want to do that, I think they also really should have made a "simple spellcaster". Just because you like mages doesn't mean you want to manage a spellbook.

Yup but as they did it, well it screamed we are doing a flashback for the fighter players should not have resources or do big things and only caster players get to do the interesting things with higher complexity.

 

[Garthanos]

I mean they could have easily just took all the PHB 1 and PHB 2 classes and Essentialize each of them (giving the Core Four 2 essential classes each). Had they done that right at the get-go and named them all subclasses, it would have clear up a large amount of the issues.

Could have but didnt and It is now blatantly obvious it was lead in for 5e where I cannot have my fighters "Rain of Steel" and my warlords "Lead the Attack" and similar martial badassery ... but the casters get even more.

 

[Voadam]

I liked the ability to pull out all the stops with martial characters, and sometimes this came with action points and sometimes with dailies... and to me essentials seemed to say no you "should not" have that.

Different play style preferences.

The x/day resource management was something that I disliked from both the player and DM side in 3e and Pathfinder. I was excited to see the warlock as a 3.5 non resource management caster option, though a bit disappointed in some aspects of the implementation.

At one point in 4e I was in a game where there were houserule options to turn in your daily for a lower level daily as an encounter, or certain lower level encounters as at wills.

Suited my playstyle tastes perfectly.