When the ELH was coming out, I was definitely looking forward to buy it, as I was kind of considering it quite essential. Then I fortunately had the chance to borrow a copy from a friend to take a look, which gave me the opportunity to reconsider the idea of buying it
More or less I agree with everything said by Moogle:
MoogleEmpMog said:
I don't share quite the usual negative opinion of the ELH, but it has some serious problems.
The feats-in-place-of-class-features mechanic is jarring, strange, and basically functional; it does step on the fighter's toes, though.
The Epic Feats themselves show far too much variance in power. Some are no stronger than normal feats, others are hugely effective.
Mostly, I don't like the way they handle 'epic' spellcasting (I'd rather see that system used to build spells of any level, using the regular spells/level progressions as per 20-level play.
The ELH monsters are definitely worth $7. They came from the same school of WotC monster design as the beasties in the MM2: every creature is an adventure hook unto itself.
Epic is very much a niche market, and offhand I don't know of any third-party products catering to it. So, WotC or homebrew are basically your only options if you ever play past 20.
It's quite a long time since I kept that book for a while, but I remember that I had the same impression on epic feats, they are too different in power... how can one consider an extra +1 from Greater Weapon Focus (or whatever was called) really epic when there are feats which let a caster automatically metamagic for free entire spell levels?
Epic spellcasting is an interesting rule that many people thought it could make for a good spellcasting system since the very beginning of the game, not just at epic levels, when it is hardly balanced with nonepic spellcasting.
I know that since I haven't played at epic level at all, these are just opinions of mine, without backup from real gaming experience, but my feeling is that at epic levels there is so much variance in what can you do and which "cost" is associated with it, that basically "balance" doesn't mean the same thing as before... While this could be fine - there are eventually many groups that play at epic levels, and I suppose they have great fun - I would expect an official 3e product to actually care more about balance, after all if it's ok for me to play with unbalanced things, why shouldn't I just do that since level 1?
It seems to me that when they wrote ELH they went "let's break all the rules of what characters can do", "yes, but let's make them pay it a lot!"... an example of this is epic magic item prices: want an equivalent +11 sword? pay an extra 500k just because "it's epic" (read: "otherwise unavailable"), even if it's a net +1 compared to the best nonepic sword.
Overall however your purchase is not wasted (definitely worth the price you paid
), because many monsters are really cool even if they may not have a feasible CR for nonepic play, and several things can be really used in nonepic games without problems! Also you can still scatter some of the material along the adventures, such as giving an NPC the chance to cast one time only an epic spell.
