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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KarinsDad" data-source="post: 4932981" data-attributes="member: 2011">You must be reading between the lines more than what I wrote.Swordmages are Arcane power source, but they are not spell casters. Or spell slingers.My point is mostly with regard to ranged spell casters, classes that throw magic at foes and use magic to solve problems, even outside of combat.Spell casters are the bread and butter "magic users" in DND. For me. They are the ones that break the mundane laws of physics with regard to outside themselves. Sure, a few other classes get a few minor magical effects, but for the most part, the other classes are souped up versions of mundane swinging a sword. Many of their powers affect just themselves, or the group of foes directly surrounding them.Sure, a Swordmage can teleport around a little and throw a short burst around him, and that is magical. But, my concern is that spell casters are no longer "magical". They are more elementalists (i.e. they do damage, who really cares what type?).I'm not just talking Wizards, but Wizards and Clerics and Warlocks and even Invokers.The definition of spell casters in 4E has become: 1) I do a hit point damaging attack at range, and 2) the attack has an effect that slows or dazes or somehow adds a disadvantage to the foe.Sure, there are exceptions, but I really cannot Charm a foe. I cannot create an Illusion to trick him. I cannot Fear him. I might be able to buff the team for an encounter once per day, but that is few and far between.Spells that used to short term incapacitate foes, even in 1E and 2E, now merely inconvenience them. As an example, Stinking Cloud.Entangle is one of the few spells that actually does anything similar to what it used to. Restrained until save and then Slowed. Of course, it also does damage which is lame, but it is one of the better "magic feeling-like" spells. The fact that it jumped from a 1st level spell to a 9th level spell (in previous levels, that would be 5th level) is also lame, but ...I have never seen Slow in 4E do much of anything. The NPC either has a ranged attack, or is already fighting in melee, or is within 4 squares of where he can charge a PC or 2 squares where he can attack normally. The effect is extremely minor. There are almost 20 powers in the PHB that Slow foes and for all intents and purposes, they have nearly zero utility the vast majority of the time. Their only real significant use is to prevent a foe from fleeing. A tricky player might be able to stop a move action with it by taking the disadvantage of Readying an action.With the exception of Daze which does drop an opponent to an action per round and Stun which prevents actions, most of the conditions do very little or if they do more, are rarely encountered.But because of limited durations and the fact that the conditions and other modifiers exist on the vast majority of attack powers, the DM and players are forced to do a lot of bookkeeping that was not done in previous editions to this extent.One is not slowed for 1 round per level or most of the encounter, the target is slowed until a save. Which means that instead of keeping track of the fact that the target is slowed, the game system involves more keeping track of when the condition ends. There is a greater likelihood of someone forgetting to make a save or forgetting that the target was affected until the end of PC #4's turn, etc. There is actually more bookkeeping, just a different type. In our game, we are constantly adding and subtracting tokens from the miniatures to indicate various situations and conditions, nearly on every other creature's turn, some miniature is being affected.This is one reason why longer durations are a good thing. Durations should either be: until the end of the encounter, or until a save is made.The durations of: until the start of the target's turn, until the end of the target's turn, until the start of the attacker's turn, and until the end of the attacker's turn are inferior game mechanics. They force a lot of busy work.The nerfing of durations has actually created more bookkeeping for the game system, not less. A buff that lasted one hour per level had very little bookkeeping involved.</blockquote>

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