At-will powers are junk.
Nobody understood these.
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The rogue in particular had difficulty with his at-wills. He wanted to use his Sly Flourish ability, so he rolled a melee basic attack. I explained that he used Dexterity on this roll because it was Dexterity vs. AC. He did that and rolled 1d4 + Strength damage. I explained that he added Dexterity + Charisma damage on this, and we got things sorted out. Next round, we had a similar problem--he was insistent on rolling that 1d4 + Strength basic attack.
This sounds like poor character sheet formatting. He shouldn't even be having to look at his stats! - the character sheet needs at-will options formulated with +to hit, damage expression, and any effects.
It also sounds like poor comprehension of the game design. I think I am fortunate in always having RPed with fairly "game-y" players, who tend to pick up the basic features of a game's design (like at-will powers in 4e) reasonably intuitively.
The striker role should not exist.
In the combat, the strikers did the majority of the work.
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There wasn't much in the way of healing needed in the battle, so I felt somewhat useless.
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every class should be a "striker"; that is, every class should be capable of doing decent damage.
I don't object to the existence of a "damage-focused" class and non-damage focused classes. My own experience of control in play (both ranged control eg wizard, invoker, and melee control such as from a fighter) suggests that it is just as effective as damage-dealing.
My group has never had a dedicated healer - for a long time it was paladin plus leader-multiclass, and now we have a hybrid cleric-ranger who plays mostly as an archer with a bit of encounter healing on the side. I get the impression that the warlord is the most interesting and "active" rather than simply responsive leader.
Maybe your warpriest is a bit sucky in the build if you don't have much to do besides healing? Or maybe your GM didn't send a very strong encounter against you?
Round-by-round tracking sucks.
I think everyone agrees with this. I treat it as a necessary evil - it would be a lot of work to go through and change everything - but (especially in combination with the "E of attacker's NT" misses sometimes being better than the "until save" hits) it should have been done better.
Forced movement is awesome.
No argument there!
Thus, what I want to see from 5e:
(a) Few, if any, at-wills.
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(b) Nobody gets shafted with damage.
On (b), it depends if there is a well-defined control role or not. If not, then agreed that no one should be shafted on damage. But equally if not, then combat can degenerate into mere hit point attrition. I personally don't like this.
On (a), my worry is about ability dependency and also flavour. One thing that I like about 4e is that it makes a PC like a CHA paladin viable - someone who is not strong, but still blessed by the gods and able to win in battle.
Some form of stat-swap, like Essentials does for rogues and rangers, would be another way of going with this.
We playtested a fight with 4 6th level characters vs a young red dragon tonight...it was a great fight...In the opening round, the fighter readied a throwing hammer and the cleric readied her long bow to shoot when the dragon came near. The fighter scored a crit for 13 damage
How is your fighter built? 18 STR and bastard sword +2 would be a crit of 16+2d6. Drop the sword to +1 and we're still looking at 15+1d6. Exchange bastard sword for weapon focus with a longsword, we're still looking at 14+1d6. That's before any Iron Armbands (the fighter in my game doesn't have them, but I know they're pretty popular!).
The only way I can see a crit for 13 is 12 for max damage plus 1 on the d6. 12 for max damage is STR 16 and a +1 longsword with no other feat or item support. I'm not saying that's a terrible build - maybe it's a dwarf focussing on CON or WIS for some reason but nevertheless equipped with a longsword - but it sound like about the lowest damage fighter the system will let you build!
the cleric readied her long bow to shoot when the dragon came near
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the elf hit for 6
I'm guessing that that is a cleric with neglible DEX using a non-magical longbow, for 1d10 raw damage. But I don't understand the readying - the bow has a range of 40, so why was the elf not plinking away for the two or three rounds it took the dragon to close? (This was what the fighter in my game did at around the same level, as a young black dragon flew in.) And then readying a ranged 5 power that would hit for (say) 1d8 (Lance of Faith) + 4 (stat) + 2 (item and/or feat bonus), which would be 6 damage
before the die is rolled.
In other words, I agree that the damage rolls you are talking about are low, but I don't understand the 6th level PC builds that are producing them.