AbdulAlhazred
Legend
It's a good build. But plenty of good builds already exist in the game. Deva's make great Swordmages. Elves make great archers. If they haven't ruined the game, I doubt good dwarven fighters will, either.
The point of all of this is WHY was this change made? The most sub-optimal builds are now a bit less common, but when they exist they are relatively even MORE sub-optimal than they were before since the baseline of character performance has just shifted by the average of a +2 in a primary or secondary stat (worst case you can at least shift your bonus to a stat that will probably contribute to your defense). At the top end you now have builds that were top caliber before that are (even if very slightly) better now. How is this anything but power creep?
Seriously, what did this add to the game? I simply utterly fail to see even the slightest benefit to 4e of making this change. At most all it did was reshuffle the deck as far as what are the best builds. Of course people can and will build characters regardless of any optimization considerations, but THEY WERE GOING TO DO THAT ANYWAY, and are no more likely now to end up with their particular concept being optimal or sub-optimal than they were before!!!!!! This whole thing is choice without purpose. It just boggles my mind how anyone could consider it an improvement to the game. If 3 years ago this option had been in the PHB it would be no big deal, it isn't that it is necessarily bad (though the reactions of my players so far have all been "that makes race even more meaningless"). The point is WHY CHANGE IT NOW when the existing system works fine? There simply wasn't a problem in need of a solution, but more like just some random urge to change things for the sake of fiddling.