So, how do you reconcile the refresh rates for a Slayer and a Wizard (even the Essentials one)? 'Broadened' means nothing to me, they are simply not compatible.
There is no need to reconcile them. I've done long days, short days, marathon days where the group got more than 2 extra action points over 3+ sessions, and it does not matter. At all. All it does is broaden the player experience, so that players who dislike the play experience of stressing over daily and encounter resources can play in the same game as people who love the resource management mini-game of a tome-wizard with a bunch of magic item daily powers.
Hey, I bought a lot of 4e stuff and brought in plenty of people that weren't already playing it.
Okay? So did I. In fact I purchased every supplement except the elemental chaos one and maybe a couple X Power books, on top of having a DDI sub throughout the run of 4e, and introduced a
lot of people to dnd using 4e.
Seems to me like the opinions and tastes of your supporters might be important, but WotC instead put a guy in charge that didn't believe in the game, and apparently didn't understand it.
You won't find me supporting or defending Mearls. My opinion of him is not the sort of thing I like to say in these forums (although I sometimes slip). However, Essentials was good for 4e. Full stop. It sucks that it didn't help save the edition from getting the axe, because the direction they were going around the time of Heroes of The Feywild was
really good.
You can, obviously, just make statements like that, but without any logic behind it, they're of little value, aren't they?
The point of a statement like that is pretty much that I'm saying exactly what you're saying here, to you. You use a lot of words to say stuff that is unsupported by literally anything, but the extra words don't make it more convincing.
You are picking a stance and then making an attack. How is that a different number of/simpler set of, decisions from making an At-Will attack, which is what I compared it to? Oh, and if you are then going to make a Power Attack, that's ANOTHER decision. "hitting and moving" IS making those decisions. I mean, if you want, we can draw out the decision trees, I'm 100% sure of what the answer is.
If you won't acknowledge the difference between choosing whether to use an at-will, encounter, or daily power, and choosing whether to change stances or not (which isn't an actual decision point unless you have reason that turn to consider changing it, most of the time people just stay in the same stance for most or all of a fight) and then attacking, there is no point in this discussion continuing.
Except they did value them. Once you hit 10th level, Slayer starts to really fall flat. I mean, you can find some deep charops tricks to pump it up on the DPR front, so it will basically be 'playable' in a sense, but it will just do basically one thing over and over, like charging (which is the best option mechanically). The other similar e-classes, the thief for instance, are even more problematic. Thematically the Sentinel is OK, but it too loses dramatically to the Druid at higher levels. I get it, Mearls decided everything past 10th level was worthless. A lot of people didn't agree.
You've misunderstood. A large number of players
did not care about the increased options of every class having a suite of powers with different power levels and refresh rates that fostered different tactical play experiences. Having every class have to have that, no matter what, was a problem for a large number of players.
The fact that some classes weren't the stars of CharOp discussions is so far into the realm of inconsequential trivia that I can't even manage to muster a tiny sliver of interest.
Want to go through the decision trees? You're going to be disappointed.
You can write out convoluted nonsense slanted by your own bias and desire to win an argument all you want.
Anyone who isn't desperately trying to win knows that the Slayer is simpler to build and to play than the PHB Fighter. Trying to claim otherwise is complete absurdity.
Trying to claim that choosing whether to change stance or not before attacking with a basic attack is the same as reviewing several powers with different costs and power levels and different kinds of effects is just...mind-bogglingly strange. There is objectively less to review, less to analyze, while building and playing a Slayer.
I think its pretty clear that the sales numbers for Essentials were not good. It was neither fish nor fowl.
Neither were the sales numbers
for 4e DnD before Essentials. The fact that Essentials didn't manage to save the edition does not, by even the most incredible stretch of logic, mean that a doubling down of what 4e was going would have done so.