NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 8436762" data-attributes="member: 87792">There was a lot I liked about Essentials as a splatbook for baseline 4e but on its own it lacked a lot of what made 4e engaging. And I think that that (and most of the rest of what I'm going to say) is not out of line with most of the other respondents.Anyway. Highlights:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Monster Vault and Monster Vault: Threats to the Nentir Vale are the two best monster books in any edition of D&D. They've as much fluff as any book but you can use them directl at the table in ways you can't any other non-4e monster book.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The slayer and to a lesser extent the scout opened up the game for mechanically not very adept players. (The hunter did at low levels but really scald badly).</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The Elementalist Sorcerer enabled those same players to play a caster. In particular every version of D&D should have a simple pyromancer "I burn it" to go alongside the simple barbarian "I smash it".</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The thief was a small gem of a rogue class</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Enchanters, invokers, and nethermancers are just more inspiring than staff wizards, orb wizards, and wand wizards</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The vampire and especially the multiclass vampire were both fun twists (even if the class didn't scale well at higher levels).</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The berserker with its switching from defender to striker gives nice options.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Themes added an extra layer to characters.</li> </ul>I'm also in the "4e dragonborn were awesome". I don't think the 4e dryad and satyr were "now shut up" so much as "we need stuff with mechanics to fill the pagecount" - a related issue and one of the things 5e does right is that it has little of this.Oh, and lowlights for Essentials:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Wizards have dailies, fighters don't. And other things that separated the mages from the muggles.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Forced movement being either large (enchanter wizards...) or rare. Neither emphasises the teamwork as much.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Balance. It sucked by the standards of baseline 4e.  Many classes didn't scale properly out of heroic tier.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Roughly 75% of the mechanics of Heroes of Shadow. (The Nethermancy* specialisation was good and the multiclass vampire was cool)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The Dungeon Delver's Handbook was literally 50% advertising for other adventures and the most OP book in 4e.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Theme balance was kinda bad and they were too complex for what they were at times.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">"Spite" mechanics. The worst was probably True Portable Hole; the original 4e Portable Hole was a portable hole that you put on something and walked through bugs bunny style, not a bag of holding variant. So Mearls called the other version the True Portable Hole.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The lack of rituals.</li> </ul>* Nethermancy = shadow magic/the parts of the necromancy school not dedicated to raising dead, plus a couple of spells like Black Tentacle. Mostly cursing and debuffing. And a Nethermancy specialist wizard could easily be added to 5e.I'll defend the bladesinger as being much better than it looked on paper - although honestly that's a low bar.</blockquote>

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