I will bow to those with greater knowledge. Like I said in my original post, I do not play 4e.
Right. One way that 4e is not like 3e is that it is mostly balanced. Barring a very few anomolies, high level psionics, and hybrids (the latter being explicitely optional) 4e is pretty well balanced. This means that DMs don't need to be so restrictive as everyone has something to contribute.
All the powers looked mechanically the same. The only difference in a fighter and a wizard seemed to be fluff. The mechanics were roll a d20 and add your class prime attribute.
At the risk of digression, a power that does a shockwave of damage in an area and throws people backwards is not the same as one that allows you to advance under cover of your shield. They just both roll to hit and do damage.
I really did not see a need for a cleric in the system, all "cure" powers did is allow a healing surge during combat rather than after.
1: Ding dong the witch is dead. No one needs to play the healbot. In what world is this a bad thing? A fundamental design goal, and a good one, was to allow people to play what they wanted and for there to be nothing essential that someone had to be landed with.
2:
All it does. To put that in terms of numbers, each PC starts off with four healing surges worth of hit points to use in the fight. And the monsters do enough damage to chew through that whenever they focus fire. Two healing words means two more healing surges. So when the rubber meets the road, the person on the front line is quite literally fifty percent tougher. So the party has half as long again to take the monsters out before someone goes down.
All abilities seemed to come from the character rather than items.
1: False. Some abilities come from items.
2: I can't recall many stories where the characters main abilities came from a collection of items (I can recall artifacts - and 4e has them). But not magic item christmas trees defining a character. That 4e reflects the source material is meant to be a
problem?
When I said superhero I meant the way the game felt and played , not the power level. It just seemed more like Champions or Marvel Super Heroes rather than Dungeon and Dragons. The flavor of the game just seemed to be missing as a fantasy genre rather than just heroic.
Honestly, if I wanted a superhero I'd play a 3e druid. As for generic fantasy and sword and sorcery, 4e kicks the arse of classic D&D like entering a centipede into a bug's arse kicking contest. In most fantasy, the protagonists are at the core martial classes and not completely overshadowed by casters. Casting takes a long time and a lot of dribbly candlewax and expensive components, not something that's done in seconds.
Look at Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. The Mouser literally can not be made in classic D&D. He's a fighting rogue who can cast spells - but never uses them in combat. Even 3e multiclassing fails him. While Fafhrd was simply mechanically boring in pre-4e D&D. 4e he's a rogue with the ritual caster feat. Precisely
one protagonist of Lord of the Rings was a caster - and he was the DMPC. Even Jack Vance's heroes are much better represented in 4e (and by non-casters at that) than by older systems with supposedly 'Vancian' casting. Make the dailies your vancian spells and you're done. Vancian wizards are generally competent with a couple of spells, not generally frail and incompetent with dozens of spells.
Leiber. Vance. Tolkien. This is precisely the fantasy that D&D claims to be based on and 4e is
still much better at reproducing it. For that matter, 4e matches
Dark Sun much better than 2e ever did - preserving/defiling is so much a better system now, as is weapon breakage that it's almost incomaprable. (You aren't a Preserver/Defiler these days. You're an arcane caster and can make the choice to defile each time you cast a big spell -
everyone is tempted by defiling). And the Dragonlance saga. Tanis just works as a Warlord, and not having a cleric in an adventuring party no longer makes it a game of Russian Roulette.
When 4e is better at not only reproducing the fiction that D&D is derived from, but in some cases also better at reproducing fiction derived from classic D&D, to claim that the flavour as fantasy genre is missing is ... dubious at best.
What 4e does do that you have correctly identified is run on Holywood Physics. And that's why you say it's like a superhero game. More like an action movie with someone like John McClane keeping going after being shot in the shoulder. And have you seen the amount of punishment Indiana Jones' body takes in Raiders of the Lost Ark?
The system deliberately made characters the same, how can more of the same be ruining the system.
That's because you haven't played the game much. As someone who has played both, two 4e fighters can easily be more different than a 3e fighter from a 3e barbarian.
Oh unless I missed something, it seems to be all about combat now, not exploration or role playing.
You did. Like the roleplaying. Like a useful but non-intrusive skill system (look at 3e Diplomacy for a bad one). Like skill challenges used well. D&D has never been a high concept Indy game.
It seems that a great many people have tried the two together and have found it works just fine. If this is the case I can see where this would be useful as I have players in my group who are more into character generation etc than others.
And that's exactly where it works.
I do have one question though -- what about feats? I would assume that essentials feats only work with essentials character classes. For example (and please excuse me if I get this wrong -- don't have the books at work) I beleive there is an essentials feat called Master of Arms which is basically "every weapon under the sun" expertise.
The expertise feats are upgraded. Which now IMO makes them more paletable despite the power creep - orb expertise increases the distance of pulls, pushes, and slides, whereas wand expertise is slightly more accurate. They add flavour as well as raw numbers. Master of Arms is indeed for people who switch between types of weapons.
