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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kzach" data-source="post: 5695510" data-attributes="member: 56189">This only serves to increase the problem of optimisation.The disparity between a well-made striker and a piss-poor striker is quite large, and it is mostly based on feat choices. Other elements come into play, of course, but none have as big an impact on the overall effectiveness and power of the character as feats do.So why have it in the system? Why create such a problem when the simple fix is not to provide the tools for the problem in the first place? By eliminating all damage and defence increases from feats, you almost entirely eradicate the optimisation issue from the game. Power creep becomes almost a non-issue and class balance becomes almost trivial to maintain across the entire system.What's even better is that you actually increase the diversity of characters by doing this because feats become solely about customising your character to whatever you think is cool and fun rather than keeping up with the Jones's.Now sure, you can already ignore all the feat taxes and damage boosts and defence boost feats and focus purely on customisation choices, but that's where the problem of optimisation kicks in because you then have a huge disparity between optimised and non-optimised characters. Not only that, but the system becomes reliant on balancing around the optimised end of the spectrum (and please, this issue has been laid to rest by WotC admitting feat taxes so it's not even up for debate anymore), so that players who don't optimise suffer.I hear a lot of people say that they play in games where optimisation isn't an issue and feat taxes are irrelevant. And yet I see the same people then go on to complain about how 4e combat is too long and grindy and about all their TPK's using the rules as written. If WotC has the power to balance the system from the very beginning and not create a situation where there is such a disparity that has to be subsequently balanced around, then why not do that and make character customisation about making the character more interesting and versatile rather than just having bigger numbers?</blockquote>

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