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Message: <blockquote data-quote="spinozajack" data-source="post: 6636986" data-attributes="member: 6794198">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. 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. 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? 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.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.</blockquote>

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