With quotes like this, I have to reiterate the monk phenomena in 3rd edition.
When 3e came out, there was a strong belief in the community (myself included) that the monk was obviously overpowered. I mean....look at all those abilities!! Yet with time, we all learned the painful truth that he was in fact a suboptimal class.
A lot of people have looked at 4th edition and concluded that you must have a 17/18 starting stat to be the least bit effective in the system. I think its too early to make such judgments. The game is still pretty new, and my guess is most people are trying out the 17/18 mainstays and have yet to experiment with more rounded builds.
Time will tell of course.
One thing I'm curious to see is how long the current point buy numbers hold out. As many polls have shown over the years, in 3rd edition a large percentage (not necessarily a majority) of groups that used pointbuy used a number higher than 25 point standard. Many used 28-32 points. I am interested to see if groups starting uping the points in 4e's buy as well.
Actually, if you think about it , it is pretty easy to assess the difference between having a +2 and a +3 in your primary (attack) attribute.
Assume (for simplicity) that a typical session in D&D will have 3 combats, lasting ~ 7 rounds each. Hence you will be making ~20 attack rolls. For each attack roll, the probability rolling the number that is a hit with the +3 bonus, but a miss with a +2 is 1/20.
Therefore a bonus of +1 is going to make the difference in 1 of those 20 attack rolls. So if you have a 14 in your primary attribute, you will on average miss once more per session than if you have a 16.
Of course you also deal one point of damage less per attack, but that is easier to equalize with feats and such.
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