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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6637123" data-attributes="member: 82106"><p>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.</p><p></p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>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. </p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 6637123, member: 82106"] 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. [/QUOTE]
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