PHB Classes: What needs love?

[Thasmodious]

I agree with the good king. I like all the classes, the distinctiveness of their powers and abilities and they seem to play well together. My favorite thing is that both of my favorite classes rock the casbah - fighter and wizard. 3e was the dark ages for the fighter and he barely survived.

Overall, I think the feat list is a bit inadequate. It's not uncommon that higher level characters pretty much run out of good feat choices and just tack on toughness or durable or some other generic but useful feat. This, I'm sure will rapidly change with supplements, settings and online content, but right now, picking are kind of slim.

 

[Kordeth]

People have pointed out that the Archer path doesn't gain anything that makes them particularly suited to archery.

IMHO, that's not a bad thing. One PP that works equally well for any martial ranged-weapon fighter is a good thing. Just cross out archer and write in "axeslinger" and you've got a good PP for dwarven skirmishers, for example, without needing to come up with a "veteran axe-chucker" path.

As Bardolph indicates, the Battlefield Archer paragon power Combined Fire is... a bit feeble. In many parties, ranged/area attacks by companions will be rare.

Umm...the power says "when an ally makes a ranged attack or an area attack." Unless you're in a party entirely composed of fighters, I really don't think it's going to be rare.

 

[Fifth Element]

That is exactly what rituals are. Why is this a bad thing?

It can seem like a bad thing to someone in the 3E "the wizard has a spell to solve that" mindset.

 

[RefinedBean]

I can agree with the idea that the books could have only so much info before they become bloated and expensive.

That being said, I'll echo what some others have been saying. More feats. Scads of feats. HEAPS 'o feats. Now that their importance is a bit deflated and I can retrain them, I don't feel nervous and exhausted after reading SPLAT after SPLAT to find the perfect one.

Also, I miss some of the more "exotic" mundane equipment that was found in the 3E PHB. No alchemist fire? No acid? Some of these items, although pricey, were enormously fun to use. This holds true for the fantastic amount of Wondrous Items the DMG had, also. Sure, they had some weird ones in there. But the options they presented were fun to work with.

Oh, and as for character classes, they seem fine to me; maybe a little love for both sides of the Ranger coin, but I can't back that up with reasonable arguments.

 

[GoodKingJayIII]

Well, yes. I'd like to see more options for pretty much everything. But there's only so much they can cram into the core books, and at least they're pumping out a fairly steady stream of new options via Dragon. And of course there are plenty of 4E splatbooks in the pipeline.

I never said they didn't include enough feats. I said I want more. There's a difference, you know.

 

[Zurai]

IMHO, that's not a bad thing. One PP that works equally well for any martial ranged-weapon fighter is a good thing. Just cross out archer and write in "axeslinger" and you've got a good PP for dwarven skirmishers, for example, without needing to come up with a "veteran axe-chucker" path.

They don't mean Battlefield Archer paragon path, they mean the Archery Ranger subpath in the Ranger class itself. Aside from the paragon path entry requirement, you're far better off taking the TWF benefits.

 

[The Sword 88]

I think the CHA based paladin needs some feat lovin' sinc emost o fthe feats I would want to take have high DEX and STR requirements. I also think the STE paladin needs 2 lvl 9 abilities and that paladins in general could use better utility powers.

I think more wizard spells is something a lot of people moving from 3.x really want to see since we are used to having so many spells to choose from.

In regards to the character creation stuff they have enough info on th eroleplaying aspects as is and the larg equantity of combat related stuff is good, but I would like to see some more options with skills, I feel like I just pick a couple to get a flat bonus at lvl1 and it never really changes after that whereas in 3.x I could alloctae my points wherever I wanted each lvl so that way I felt like I had a lot more room for customization, not optimization, customization. I think it would be cool to see something happen with skills at each tier. I'm not sure what though..

 

[renau1g]

I think more wizard spells is something a lot of people moving from 3.x really want to see since we are used to having so many spells to choose from.

I think that goes for all options. I just built a 17th level cleric, and couldn't find any good feats for my paragon levels as I didn't have a high-enough Dex or Con, which most of them required...

 

[Blacksmithking]

I'd like to see more paths for each class, such as a melee path for clerics that isn't based on Str. Right now all my clerics are high-Wis high-Str gishes.

All of the problems I have with 4.0e right now can be remedied by a few splats.

 

[Jhaelen]

I definitely DON'T want to see more wizard spells UNLESS all other classes get an equal amount of new powers. The equality of classes is one of the best changes that 4E brought to D&D.

I also think that rituals are perfectly fine as they are. They're serving exactly the purpose they've been designed for.