My first time starting a thread...be gentle.
I am currently active in the Survivor: D&D Edition thread on the forum and have observed that while there are plenty of participants in said thread who like 4E I have yet to see a single upvote for 4E Essentials. I never played either version of 4E, have only a cursory knowledge of 4E and know nothing about Essentials.
So, 4E devotees, what were the changes made in Essentials that you dislike?
If there are any fans of Essentials actually out there, what were the changes that you DID like?
NOTE: I am genuinely curious about this topic and have ZERO interest in starting any kind of intra edition flame war, so please lets try to keep things civil.
Essentials had a number of great design decisions.
1. They did creative stuff with class advancement structure.
2. They did creative stuff with making simpler 4e classes.
3. They did creative stuff cleaning up some of the 4e math.
4. They made another attempt at the 4e christmas tree magic item problem left over from 3e.
5. They did creative stuff with the role and power source system (berserker).
All of that creativity was good.
The problem is, they where obviously short on budget. The stuff wasn't well tested, and it wasn't well balanced. The initial stuff wasn't completely bad, but after that things went down hill extremely quickly.
4e already suffered from epic-tier combat slog, and most of the essentials classes after the first few where abysmally worse than even "random" 4e baseline classes by epic tier.
The Thief, for example, was a good example of Essentials. If you run the numbers, you get a character whose damage output is competitive with the baseline Rogue. Now, sadly, the baseline Rogue still doesn't do enough damage to make epic-tier 4e combat not become a slog, so you end up having to still do optimization on both; and the baseline 4e classes are slightly more able of being optimized than the Essentials versions are.
Then there are the classes which just don't work. The Vampire is only a viable striker by epic tier if you basically ignore the fact they are a vampire and do charge-optimization on it (the "commoner" optimization strategy; the same works in making a Wizard into a melee-weapon striker!) It is like nobody even ran a single epic-tier combat with the class before they published it.
Another subset is stuff that is "PHB class, but worse". The Warlock Binder is just a worse Warlock. The Berzerker has promise, but needed a pile more support to work past heroic tier.
---
In Heroic tier, they are fine. 4e in early Heroic tier works with characters who don't have any class features at all, so it doesn't say much.
Any essentials class with the ability to access pre-essentials material efficiently (feats, paragon paths, even powers) ends up being much more viable than the others.
Now, it isn't hard to tweak essentials classes to suck less if you can do the 4e game math. So there is that.
---
While some of the above is "compared to baseline 4e", the problem is that the baseline 4e encounter building implicitly assumes a damage output rate of PCs, and essentials just don't keep up. You end up with long combats with a long tail at the end.
So even a pure essentials game ends up falling apart by paragon/epic, with combats getting slower and more boring.
On the other hand, they did work to not add "good damage per round, poor damage per second" options in it, which pre-essentials 4e ended up being crufted with.
---
So you can't mix it, you can't do it alone.
As a DM, you end up having to modify 4e to make it continue to play in a punchy manner.
---
As a simple suggestion:
1. Double the damage dice of every power, then subtract 1.
2. Attack rolls don't use your attribute. They are just Level+2. Damage continues to use your attribute bonus.
3. Magic items add +1 to attack rolls, no more. Expertise adds +1 to attack rolls, no more.
4. Multiple attacks on the same target on the same turn combine for damage stacking. So each named damage bonus is applied at most once. (Dice stack). This includes multi-tap attack powers, bonus action powers, etc. If two enhancement bonuses apply to damage, apply highest. If two feat bonuses apply, apply highest. If two unnamed bonuses from the same named game element (like a feat), apply highest. Etc.
5. Twin Strike now deals [W]+Stat damage. (If you target the same creature twice, it does [Main]+[Offhand]+Stat, or [W]+[W]+Stat, as stat bonus doesn't stack.
6. Non-AC Defences are equal to the highest of the two attributes VALUE, plus the bonus from the lower, plus 1/2 of your level. In addition, you get a +3 bonus at level 11 and level 21. Item and Enhancement bonuses are capped at +1 each. Feat bonuses don't scale (keep heroic tier levels). Nix the untyped +4 defence feats. Enhancement bonuses from neck items instead give a bonus to saving throws (!). 2x all ongoing damage effects at paragon, and 4x at epic, from monsters. (This scales by +15 (level), +6 (tier), +8 (primary/secondary)+2(tetiary)+3 (off-stat boost), for +21 and +9/+9/+3, +1 from neck; +31/+31/+25 over 29 levels.)
7. Heavy armor provides AC equal to 10+its bonus+your level. Enchanted heavy armor provides resist all equal to its enhancement bonus and 1 point of AC.
8. Light armor (including cloth) provides AC equal to 12+its bonus+your level. While not incapacitated, once per turn you can Dodge, replacing your AC with your Reflex defence against an attack. Classes that can add an alternative stat to their light armor AC can instead use the corresponding non-AC defence as a Dodge Defence. Magical light armor gives an enhancement bonus to the Dodge Defence, and lets you use the replacement a number of extra times equal to its enhancement bonus per day.
9. Masterwork armor (with +AC) is removed, and replaced with superior armor (featless); up to 1 feature per tier.
Level 30 swordmage with 16 dex and 28 intelligence in leather has an AC of 12+3+2+30=47 AC. They have a Reflex defence of 28+15+1+1+6+3 (54), and 1/round plus 6/day can use 60 to dodge an attack.
Level 30 paladin in plate and shield has an AC of 10+8+30+2+1 = 51 AC, and has 6 resist all.
10. Only one non-weapon item may add damage dice to a hit (or a combo) (this is aimed at charge optimization stacking). Same for multiple critical hits in a combo (use one set of critical damage dice, not all of them).
---
This actually helps shore up a bunch of essentials classes, as they rely on buckets-of-dice-that-just-aren't-buckets-enough to do damage.
Characters tend to have 1 or 2 low non-AC defences. The strong ones are often higher than AC, but the weak one is often much lower.
Finally, there is a bunch of work to make your primary attack and defence stat less dominant.
