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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Deset Gled" data-source="post: 4046000" data-attributes="member: 7808">I believe I woud file this change under "mistakes not learned from".In 3.5, they wanted Power Attack to be more powerful.  If you follow the math that is consistent with the rest of the game and is most balanced, you would change it so that light weapons add 0.5 damage for each point of penalty spent, one-handed weapons give 1, and two-handed weapons give 1.5.  But, since that would make the math more difficult, WotC decided it was best to damn the math and go with 0-1-2 (respectively) instead.  The result was one of the most controvertial changes of 3.5.  The rounding caused PA to be *the* way for just about every melee build to deal more damage in 3.5.  I was such a lopsided feat that WotC eventually denounced it as a bad idea (while also not learning that any opened ended bonus is a problem - but that's another rant).Here, again, they have decided to sacrifice realism for the sake of quick playability that requires less math, in a way that will be amazingly controvertial, and allows players to munchkinize rounding errors.  IMO, they have gone too far in search of simplicity, to the point that it will actually make things more complicated when people learn that they can play games with diagonals.  Also, like PA, it probably won't be much of an issue at low levels, when all movement is 2D and not many bonuses to speed are available.  But at higher levels the problems will be much larger, as the unbounded rounding error gets greater over longer runs, 3D movement, and larger spell areas/ranges.  It also gives me flash backs to an N64 FPS (I'm pretty sure it was Perfect Dark) that failed to normalize the joystick vectors properly, and made you run faster on a diagonal than straight forward.  The results were very silly.  This is the only mechanical change in 4e so far that I completely disagree with.</blockquote>

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