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Message: <blockquote data-quote="NotAYakk" data-source="post: 6068656" data-attributes="member: 72555">Here are some of the problems I have with 4e:1: Feat power bloat.  The power of each feat scales with tier, and the number of feats a character has scales with the character level.  This means that the power contribution feats have to your character can grow quadratically, crowding out other sources of power growth.A symptom of this happening is that charop tends to revolve around an at-will exploit boosted with items and feats, because the power growth from encounter/daily powers is often not worth the bother, and you can focus better on an at-will.Another side effect is that powers end up 2: The "default" power curve flattens out without charop.  While each level has a +1 accuracy/defence boost, at low levels it also has a massive increase in damage output and HP.  A level 4 monster or character has about twice as many HP as a level 1 monster or character!  Meanwhile, a level 30 character or monster has nearly identical HP and damage to a level 27 character or monster.Fixing this is tricky.4e has an exponential power curve from accuracy/defence, but the power curve from HP/damage is linear.  And accuacy/defence power curves are not-fun: someone who does half as much damage feels like they are contributing, but someone who hits half as often is going to be really bored.One approach would be to ramp up HP/damage exponentially as well as accuracy/defence.  Basically, the rate at which you gain damage each tier (or each half-tier) speeds up.Another approach would be to (mostly) linearize 4e -- either reduce accuracy/defence boosts to nearly zilch, or make them logarithmic.  Then a challenging opponent for a level 20 party of 5 might be a single level 100 monster, or 5 level 20 monsters.3: Static bonuses dominate over damage dice, mostly because power damage dice grow crappily, due to #1 above.  And meanwhile, you can stack static damage bonuses like no tomorrow.4: Multiple taps wins over single big taps because of #3, hard.5: The save system falls apart by paragon/epic if someone pushes against it.6: Striker damage mechanics, for the most part, are not all that impressive.  And their powers tend not to be (due to #1), which makes strikers only as good as their feat support (and some exceptions, like the twin strike at-will and avenger oath mechanics).7: Skills where originally designed to keep pace with attacks/defences, but they don't.  There are a bunch of legacy systems that presume this, and the game would be much tighter if it somehow held.  But because skills are a one-evaluation effect (you roll to succeed, unlike attacks where you roll to succeed then roll to determine effect), you can easily fall into the not-fun part of the exponential power curve of DC vs roll bonus.8: The Skill Challenge system took some interesting design points from indie games, and missed some of the core messages.For a skill check to matter, it must have stakes.  Success should mean something, and failure should mean something.  The source of these stakes should be clear in the in-game universe, not "3 strikes and you are out" without it being tied to in-game fiction.For a set of skill checks to be a group problem, having more people (even people who don't have the highest bonus) help needs to be optimal.  Otherwise it is merely a single character challenge.  So if the only punishment is from failure (ie, no time pressure), then only the most optimal roller should roll -- a single character challenge, not a group challenge.For a skill challenge to be an encounter, there needs to be meaningful decisions for the players and the characters.  Not just a series of rolls.  The decisions that the players make about what their characters do should matter, and not just be a plausible excuse to roll a skill check.For skill challenges to be systematized, you need some kind of ability to measure how hard a challenge is, and how competent players are, other than "eyeball it".9: The core game system isn't designed with speed of play in mind.  Comparing the essentials fighter to the pre-essentials fighter to demonstrate:The weaponmaster fighter has to plan out their turn.  They need to work out which of a bunch of powers they are going to use, and if they are going to use low power at-wills, medium power encounters, or high power dailies.  After they make that decision, they plot out their movement.  Then they roll.  Then they evaluate the power using that roll.  Then based on hit or miss, evaluate the effect of the power.  And meanwhile, they are looking for a use for their "minor action" so as to not waste resources.If the weaponmaster fighter walks up to someone and rolls to hit, they are playing ridiculously suboptimally, because they just made a basic attack.  In comparison, the essentials fighter is always in a stance.  If they do not choose to change stances, they are in the last one they are in.  They move to where they want to engage, then they roll to hit.  Then they see if they hit, and apply the effect of the last stance they activated.  At this point, they choose if they want to use power attack.Now, the essentials fighter does have far fewer choices, but it also makes one choice at a time.  You move, you attack, you choose if you want to use a boost -- one at a time.  This collapses decision paralysis, because doing something doesn't screw you over because you failed to make the proper decision before doing it!  The number of players who want to roll, then decide what power to use, is non-trivial: and the essentials fighter design covers this well.You could rework the non-essentials fighter to have a myriad of boosts (daily and encounter) on at-will stance boosted basic attacks, and you'd have close to the same choice depth as the essentials fighter, but with streamlined play of one thing at a time.In short, 4e needs to more optimized for speed of play: damage per second should be as important as damage per round when designing powers.If and only if a power has a higher damage per round, it can be more complex and take marginally longer to resolve, with few exceptions.  And even controller powers should debuff the opponents defences more than they debuff the opponents offence, because offensive debuffs turn the game into molasses.10: Magic item problems.  At low levels, a magic item is nice but not game breaking.  By level 30, a character without their magic items is crippled just from the lack of +8 to 12 to AC, +6 to all attacks, and +6 to 9 to non-AC defences (or more in some cases!)  A 6 point swing in both your accuracy and defence makes you about 3 times weaker!Meanwhile, at low-heroic, losing your magic items costs you a factor of 1.2x power.Bonuses to accuracy and defence that scale with level are a bad thing.  If all magic items granted a +1 bonus if they where tier-appropriate, and nothing otherwise, to your AC, Fort, Ref and Will and Attack bonus, they would still be very useful things to have.  Their power could instead be back-loaded onto damage, where a scaling amount of damage doesn't result in an exponential impact on character performance.Ie, imagine if Heroic tier magic weapons did 2[W] on a basic attack, 3[W] at paragon, and 4[W] at epic (and almost all weapon attacks where riders on basic attacks).  This could even be steeper -- 1-5 magic weapons are +1 to hit, 1[W] damage, 6-10 is +1/2[W], 11-15 is +1/3[W], 16-20 is +1/4[W], 21-25 is +1/5[W] and 26-30 is +1/6[W].A 6d12 damage weapon does an average of 39 damage from [W] dice, and monsters have upwards of 264 HP at level 30 -- every basic attack dealing 6[W] at level 30 with 4e level monster HP does not break the game!  (This is part of the problem with level 30 daily powers which do 7[W] damage -- 7[W] is a chickenscratch on a level 30 monster).</blockquote>

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