Revision to Dragon article Class Act Rangers?!

[Kzach]

If it was that bad, how did it get through editing and approved by probably more than one person before being posted online?

My bet would be 'cause they're overworked and stressed out from all the whining they face from the online community.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

My bet would be 'cause they're overworked and stressed out from all the whining they face from the online community.

But Kzach, you can't have so much impact on WotC!

Regarding the problems with the powers - aside from the Immediate Interrupt, which seems more like some kind of copy & paste error, I think the worst offenders where Utility Powers that directly inflicted damage. I think that could count more as a fundamental design error that should have been caught by a developer. We can only guess what happened, but it's possible that exactly the last step was missing and we got something a designer put out with no developer tweaking the powers and checking its sanity. And maybe an editor that could catch copy & paste errors.

 

[MrMyth]

Honestly, if that happened often and I saw it, I don't much remember it. I largely stopped buying stuff from WotC after 3.5 was released, except for Lords of Madness and FCI and FCII. The last editing issue I remember from the 3.5 era was the state of the editing and development in Complete Divine. I think that one got a public apology of sorts as well, but I'd have to go back and look.

It happened, and often. From things like Libris Mortis, which was just filled with constant stat block errors, to various books with references to check "Page xx", it seemed pretty commonplace. Like 90% of NPC stat blocks had at least one error in them. NPC examples of Prestige Classes often didn't mean the requirements, or sometimes even showed an incorrect understanding of how those classes work. This didn't render the books useless by any means, and did often have many of the minor errors fixed up in errata, but I think it is entirely misleading to claim the 3.x era was pristine of such issues, or that it was somehow the fault of the upcoming 4th Edition.

The quality and editing with the online magazines has been pretty good so far. One slip up - consisted of mainly one power that didn't work as intended, and three or four powers with a typo - is not all that much a concern, especially when almost instantaneously fixed and apologized for.

I am fully in agreement with those that believed WotC handled this well, and even that, as Dire Bare says, "it's a testament both to the quality of DDI and a strength of the online format."

 

[Dire Bare]

...actually, to condense it all into one sentance: Despite being the ONLY other fully Psionics book that was ever released in 3.5, pretty much all psionics fans have completely disowned it.

Really, huh? I loved the book personally. And I've seen plenty of folks post here referencing the book positively.

Complete Psionic most definitely has some serious editing issues, and there truly were a lot of boring, redundant feats. But there was also a lot of good stuff in there too. I created more than a few fun characters to play using the classes, races, and feats from that book.

When the book was released, I remember a lot of the typical negative hyperbole being thrown around . . . I also suspect that most of us just ignored it as usual and played the game!