Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="MrMyth" data-source="post: 5598081" data-attributes="member: 61155">I have the PHB1, Martial Power and Psionic Power.  This means I can use everything from the 'Beastmaster Ranger' build in my game. I cannot, however, use anything from Psionic Power in my game.  What is this if not a compatibility issue? Look, we keep present similar situations to you. Psionic Power, Swordmages, any number of things. You keep insisting it is different with the Essentials content because the Hexblade is a version of a warlock, and so you for some reason feel it should merge perfectly with every other version of a warlock out there.  Despite the fact that they have kindly given it a distinct title (Hexblade) to seperate it from the standard warlock. And have listed, on Heroes of Shadow, what books it is primarily aimed at supporting. Your argument, basically, is that they are not allowed to experiment with new builds for existing classes because... why?  I mean, would you really have been happier if they said, "The Thief is not a Rogue at all. It is a completely different class that happens to be thematically similar and features numerous identical class features."  Would that have really improved things? Caused less confusion? I don't think so. Look... the Beastmaster ranger says, "You can swap these class features in order to get a beast companion." The Hexblade simply does that on a much larger scale - you can swap most of your Warlock features for a different set of them.  Yes, this process - the specifics of playing a Hexblade - is detailed in Heroes of the Fallen Lands, and thus Heroes of Shadow is less useful to someone with just the PHB.  So here is another question for you - what is your opinion of Martial Power 2?  I play a ranger. I pick up Martial Power 2, figuring it will support my ranger. And it does so! I have many new powers and feats!  But... I also have 15 feats that require the Beast Mastery class feature. I... don't seem to have that. Those feats are incompatible with my PHB1 ranger. Along with all these beast powers.  And I also have this Arcane Power, to go along with my PHB1. But a bunch of the content is for Sorcerers, Bards, and Swordmages. I've just got a Wizard and Warlock in my PHB1 - why is all this other content incompatible? You suggest it is ok for these books to support content from a variety of books. You suggest it is ok for Primal Power and Psionic Power to provide no support at all for PHB1. And your reasoning is that no one will get confused, since they will look at Heroes of Shadow and see mention of Warlock stuff, and think it is 100% aimed at the PHB1 Warlock.  Which I think is silly. Again, this is only a hypothetical - do we know of anyone actually being confused in this fashion?  And honestly, if we are talking about a complete newcomer to the game, do we really think the older stuff is any clearer? They pick up the PHB and see the Spiral Tower mage who wields a longsword - maybe they figure he's a swordmage, and are confused by the Swordmage stuff in Arcane Power involving a different book entirely. And aren't Wizards and Sorcerers the same thing? Maybe this sort of things happens, once in a blue moon. Usually, other players, or the store owner, or the internet, will give enough info for even the complete newcomer to make informed purchases. And in the absence of any other information at all, we've got the Essentials material to provide an easy stepping stone to the game. We've got Heroes of Shadow listing what books it is ideal for.  And in the situation where someone walks into a store, sees a PHB1 and Heroes of Shadow on the shelf with no other D&D content, and a game store owner who knows nothing about the game or what products are sold by WotC, and the player purchases both books and ends up only getting use out of half of Heroes of Shadow... I think that situation will be extremely, extremely rare.  And, in the end, no different than if they walked in and saw the PHB1 and Arcane Power sitting there instead.</blockquote>

Verification