I disagree about there being any semblance of balance. If there were, every class feature choice, power choice, feat choice would have the same color grading in the char op forum.
But for this purpose what does it matter if every option is equally good or not? There are TONS of options. There's no way you can tell me that for any given level you can't find a wizard spell that does basically what you want, and is a reasonable power. Not only that but the char op guides only tell you what certain people think, usually because they only build certain very narrow builds. Depending on what choices you make, totally different powers become more or less important. There are no hard and fast choices. There may be a few powers that are 'clunkers', they're never really very good choices, but most of them do work and if you want certain thematics they work fine, or they are great complements to other assortments of powers/feats/whatever.
Instead, what you have is thousands of options and only a handful of sky blue or gold ones. Once you sift through the top tier choices, and ignore the cruft or trap choices, there really isn't much variety at all.
Yeah, this is just nonsense. I've made 100's of 4e characters, and DMed for players running MANY other ones. We never explored even a tiny percentage of all the possibilities and there were huge numbers of viable ones. To call a power 'sky blue' or 'gold' outside of any context is meaningless, and just because one power might give you .075 more DPR just doesn't matter to most people.
Damage is / was kind in 4th ed, and many other editions too. But especially when combat tended to turn into a slow grind, if you didn't max out your accuracy and damage, things took forever to die. The best strategy to avoid grind is simply moar damage, and once you realize that dead is the best status condition to impose, you can pick your abilities accordingly. Once I learned this, I retrained out most of the defensive abilities in the characters I played, and ended up winning fights faster with less HP lost too, even though I had lower defenses, killing monsters one round sooner is a pre-emptive defense and there you go. This is something quite common to all D&D though, including 5th edition. But to even pretend like all character build choices you can pick were balanced is way off the mark. Go read any class guide in the 4e forums, you'll see. Most of the options in the character builder are terrible or at least substantially weaker than the top tier picks. And usually there is one at every level and in every class that is way ahead of the others. In practice you do end up seeing a lot of the same builds, feats, powers used repeatedly. Why choose inferior options?
I see, you are a pure theorycrafter. In sphereworld all this might be true in some sense. If you play in real campaigns that have a real plot and diverse situations that the PCs must navigate then things are totally different. All you ever did apparently was fight some endless series of essentially identical 'steel cage death match' fights with no other goals but killing, and no other outcomes but total annihilation to the last hit point. Its the paucity of diverse situations in the play you have encountered that is the issue here, not the system.
Those options are not all created equal, meaning the game itself wasn't balanced in the sense you are claiming. Not even close. And balance between classes was better than earlier D&D editions, but that was achieved with a uniform power and class structure which many people found homogenized the classes too much. In 5th ed, each class plays quite differently, they have different relative amounts of at-will / encounter / daily resources to spend, which means the pacing and nova strategies are sometimes quite different. It's never the case, in any 4e combat, where you do not use your encounter powers at the top of the round. If you wait too long, you might not get to use them. Dailies are the same. If you expect 3 combats per day, then you use roughly one daily a combat. Not so in 5e, there are many variations of when to use your spell slots, in or out of combat. Name me one instance of someone using a daily outside of combat. Even daily utility powers were designed for combat due to their short duration and limited applicability.
5e is a perfectly good game for what it is, but it can't hold a candle to 4e in terms of real heroic action-adventure play. They are totally different games. Personally I think 5e is a lot more restricted in terms of what its mechanics can handle than 4e is, but that's just me. 4e was easy to run, 5e not so much. I may be biased, but AEDU WORKED, 5e's 'hodgepodge' doesn't work nearly as well.
For my own preferences, I loved wizards and clerics getting at-wills and am very happy they kept those in 5th edition in the form of cantrips. There were unlimited cantrips in 3e and PF too if I remember correctly, but they weren't combat-worthy and rarely useful anyway thanks to the huge number of daily spells. I do like that 5th edition took 4th ed's lead somewhat on reducing the number of daily spell slots in total, and found a happy middle ground. 3-5 dailies in 4e was way too low, and earlier D&D had way too many, beyond low levels at least.
I think 4e's number of powers, what was presented in the original PHB1 rules, was great. It was later bloated all out of need, but that's another story. 5e wizards OTOH have WAY too much leeway. I'm playing one, and at 5th level I've been dominating play since almost level 1. Up to level 5 the fighters sometimes got a chance to shine, but I don't even need them anymore, I'd be better off with all wizards for companions to be perfectly frank (well, and a healy cleric). The straight up battlemaster, he's got really nothing much to offer at this point. Yeah, he does nice damage, but his AC is barely better than my wizard, who can always toss up a shield if he needs to, and has 9 spell slots worth of hurt he can dish out, plus Fire Bolt, which at 2d10 ain't bad. The fighter in some sense may still 'outclass' me in raw damage dealing, but my spells are far beyond anything he can do, AND I can cast a bunch of them as rituals, meaning I often don't even use up a slot if its not a combat situation! Said fighter is strong, but if he's not using a weapon he's nothing special.
Yes, 5e has mechanical diversity, so it also has mechanical irrelevance of entire classes. Its not nearly as bad as 3.x or 2e, but they gave up a huge amount of good stuff just to pretend that fighters don't use powers. The funny thing is, they still do basically. There's all sorts of "1 use per day" and whatnot abilities on all these classes. It was all a lot of cost for pretty much nothing in my book.
I think 4e has problems, as I've said, and I think 5e has done a couple of fairly nice things, as I've also said in the past, but IMHO a better game would combine those couple of things with 4e's mechanics and build better content around them, and it would be a REALLY much better game. IMHO.
