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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Plane Sailing" data-source="post: 4719472" data-attributes="member: 114">First - dwarfs make great fighters. Their resistance to being moved, second wind as a minor action, high Con (which works well with hammer and axe powers and feats) and high Wis (great for fighter opportunity attacks) make them great fighters with or without the dwarven weapon training feat.Secondly - I was going to do my own mini-review, but since it is smaller than yours I'll tack it on here.Overall: Disappointing, in that it isn't really a PHB2 as it is a collection of races, classes, a few magic items, a few rituals and not much else.Races:unlike Evilbob, I like the Deva (and I'll continue to pronounce it deeva with no worries). While they are like Dr Manhattan clones in appearance and attitude, at least it gives them a clear 'look', and I quite like the idea of their background. I think I would have preferred Wis + Cha as their key abilities though.Gnomes, shifters, half-orcs are OK, goliaths just don't do anything for me though, they seem sorta like a 'power creep' race with no history. If they wanted a +2 Str & Con race, why not just go with one of the bigger tougher monsters? That would have a whole lot more traction. I would have preferred to see Bugbear, Hobgoblin and Goblin as a thematically linked set of races than, say, goliaths, half-orcs and shifters.Anyway, that's just by preferences.ClassesI didn't expect to like the avenger, but I do - although it pretty much treads on the toes of how I've always imagined paladins to be played. I can't see many paladins ending up around when someone could be an avenger.Barbarian? I hate it. Perhaps if they had called it 'Totem Warrior' or something similar then it would have made a little more sense as the lightning, cold, thunder and fire powers appear around it. I would have greatly preferred a more 'classic' barbarian. You clearly couldn't model Conan on this class!Bard - looks like it might be the best implementation of bard ever.Druid - looks OK, seems to have a lot more flexibility than the arcane controller (wizard) at low level.Invoker - feels like a pointless 'fill in the place on a grid' class. "What shall we call divine + controller, since we haven't got one of those yet". I would have preferred to see its powers divided between the wizard and the cleric.Shaman - haven't got a feel for this one yet.Sorcerer - I like it, it seems (in effectiveness) to be the kind of thing that lots of people wanted the 4e wizard to be. Some possibilities for other 'kinds' of sorcerer too. Does make the baby warlock a bit sad though.Warden - yawn. Seems like another "fill in the grid" class.Character OptionsBackgrounds - I was hoping this would be good and it was feeble. Basically it gives +2 to a skill or an extra language associated with an aspect of a 'background'.I was hoping that this would be at least as good as the "Forgotten Realms" background or the "Scales of war" background; perhaps even something for rolling up a nice detailed background for characters as we used to have fun doing in the 80's. it seems that no design work or crunch went into this at all.Feats - far too many feats are limited by race and/or class, so the number of actual feat options anyone has doesn't increase much at all. At least there are some fun extra things in there, and they are moving away from the huge ability minimums (although not errating old things - why is epic bow criticals available to anyone regardless of ability scores, but all the PHB1 epic critical feats have steep requirements)?Magic Items - blah. Few and flavourless from what I've seen so far.Rituals - missed an opportunity to include lots more rituals. They've done the (IMO stupid) thing of making some rituals tied to only one class (bard). I suppose they did it because they'd killed the perform skill, and so didn't know what skill to tie it to.Overall? C-, possibly a D+Cheers</blockquote>

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