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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5329938" data-attributes="member: 82106"><p>Right, basically if you want to support both Essentials AND non-Essentials builds there needs to be a good bit more crunch provided. It gets CONFUSING too. I mean I'd take my group as a fairly typical example of average players. Some of the people that have played in the group obviously had a pretty good detailed grasp of 4e rules, but 2/3 of them DON'T. They certainly understand the rules of the game (mostly) and they understand their character, but they don't have a ton of splatbooks and when they look at all the options in CB their eyes cross.</p><p></p><p>Look for instance at 2e. Yes you had SOME options when you decided to make a character with concept X, but basically there was a pretty clear path to doing it, you took X, and Y, and Z. There weren't a lot of heavily overlapping classes and even when 2 classes overlapped some (like say Barbarian and Fighter) each one was plainly designed for certain archetypes. You MIGHT consider for a bit whether your big tough bruiser with a claymore was going to be a Fighter or Barbarian, but it is nothing like the analysis you're going to want to do in 4e at this point. </p><p></p><p>I just think by rehashing existing concepts the game is becoming a tangled web of options that the average player is just NOT going to want to navigate through. I'm SURE the players in my game are already past that point, and they haven't even seen (maybe even heard of) Essentials. The next time one of them decides to make a character they are not just going to have an already rather extensive set of options from the PHBs, splatbooks, and DDI stuff, but ALSO a whole other somewhat overlapping set of options from Essentials. Ones that work SIMILARLY but not exactly the same and do some things better or worse than what they have now. I am just not really sure what we gained here. </p><p></p><p>What we GOT is that even optimistically if we just don't bother with Essentials then half our DDI content from now on is useless to us, AND people will be wading through tons more stuff in CB that is either confusing them or just getting in their way. </p><p></p><p>At more abstract level what we are also seeing is just the same ground being covered again. If Essentials didn't exist we really wouldn't have needed either of the two articles being discussed here. Yes, a couple of the feats in each one are interesting for non-Essentials characters, but as others have already said you could make a decent staff wielding ranger or tempest fighter already. There was just recently a whole article on fire magic for PHB wizards. It feels like the game is going in circles instead of just giving us really NEW stuff.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 5329938, member: 82106"] Right, basically if you want to support both Essentials AND non-Essentials builds there needs to be a good bit more crunch provided. It gets CONFUSING too. I mean I'd take my group as a fairly typical example of average players. Some of the people that have played in the group obviously had a pretty good detailed grasp of 4e rules, but 2/3 of them DON'T. They certainly understand the rules of the game (mostly) and they understand their character, but they don't have a ton of splatbooks and when they look at all the options in CB their eyes cross. Look for instance at 2e. Yes you had SOME options when you decided to make a character with concept X, but basically there was a pretty clear path to doing it, you took X, and Y, and Z. There weren't a lot of heavily overlapping classes and even when 2 classes overlapped some (like say Barbarian and Fighter) each one was plainly designed for certain archetypes. You MIGHT consider for a bit whether your big tough bruiser with a claymore was going to be a Fighter or Barbarian, but it is nothing like the analysis you're going to want to do in 4e at this point. I just think by rehashing existing concepts the game is becoming a tangled web of options that the average player is just NOT going to want to navigate through. I'm SURE the players in my game are already past that point, and they haven't even seen (maybe even heard of) Essentials. The next time one of them decides to make a character they are not just going to have an already rather extensive set of options from the PHBs, splatbooks, and DDI stuff, but ALSO a whole other somewhat overlapping set of options from Essentials. Ones that work SIMILARLY but not exactly the same and do some things better or worse than what they have now. I am just not really sure what we gained here. What we GOT is that even optimistically if we just don't bother with Essentials then half our DDI content from now on is useless to us, AND people will be wading through tons more stuff in CB that is either confusing them or just getting in their way. At more abstract level what we are also seeing is just the same ground being covered again. If Essentials didn't exist we really wouldn't have needed either of the two articles being discussed here. Yes, a couple of the feats in each one are interesting for non-Essentials characters, but as others have already said you could make a decent staff wielding ranger or tempest fighter already. There was just recently a whole article on fire magic for PHB wizards. It feels like the game is going in circles instead of just giving us really NEW stuff. [/QUOTE]
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