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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kaomera" data-source="post: 5527931" data-attributes="member: 38357">IMO WotC has two problems - one, they've oversaturated the market, leaving themselves with too many classes, races, etc. to actually support, and two, they really would have been served by not releasing their core products before they had years or errata and feedback under their belts. Paizo got this right with Pathfinder, and even beyond that they had a clear idea of what they wanted to do and they did it, while WotC fell into the trap of trying to launch a million ships with a new setting every year, constant stream of power books etc... WotC needed to exploit the advantages they had, and instead we got the DDI.AFAICT WotC have said quite plainly that they do intend to support epic tier, the issue is just whether and how much they can follow through on that intention.From what I saw when the DMG2 was released? Crunch.You already had a book that limited it's customer base, leaving out those who only play and never DM, and a lot of people seemed to flip through the advice section at the front, go "meh, I already know all this", and put it back on the shelf. It sold worse than the DMG1, which sold worse than the PHB1 or nearly any player book. I see the return of magic items to the DM book (and probably the impetus behind the whole rarity scheme) as an attempt to get players buying these books again (which is hilarious as the compendium totally undermines that effort anyway).I agree wholeheartedly, but I saw a number of people here and elsewhere pan the idea that WotC dare suggest they where not 100% perfect DMs already, an that they needed to be "told how to DM".Not entirely; IMO pulling development on the OMB "screwed it up", because a lot of little, niggling issues went from "ok, I can deal with this until it gets fixed" to "fffffffffffffffffffff". Even before that update I was having to export monsters into OpenOffice to do a final run-through of editing, adding back in things that where dropped, etc. because trying to do it in the MB just dropped more stuff. The last update did introduce a slew of new problems, though, and that was just "icing" on the "cake".Personally, I'd put the "point of failure" a bit further back, with the release of the PHB3. Again, I think that it's kind of an issue that when PHB3 was released a number of classes in there seemed like WotC might have been able to fix them with future products (there was never any hope for the races, unfortunately). The idea of subclasses really seems like a (somewhat stopgap, I'll admit) attempt to address the issue of "support". WotC can't really afford to "support" all of the classes it's churned out in these last few years, but if they can make new concepts support old ones then they have lessened the issue, at least.IMO seeker and runepriest (and even going back to things like the artificer and swordmage)would have worked better overall as sub-classes. The runepriest in particular* could have been designed with more generic effects surrounding the runestates, then they could plop a list errata-ing keywords onto select cleric powers, and hey wuddyaknow? The class launches with "support" built right in.(* In particular only because it's the only one of those four concepts I'm really that interested in seeing "salvaged".)The thing is - go back to the PHB1. Look at the cleric section. That is the cleric. If that's not good enough to play without "support" forthcoming, then the class is dead in the water (ok, it may have had some traction if it was the only divine leader in existence at the time of it's launch...). That's my issue with the runepriest, etc. If they aren't good enough to play without "support", then they aren't worth throwing good money after bad.So, yeah, I think that unless they manage to pop out a class that the entire player base just goes nuts over, I think that "fire and forget" is the way they're going to go. And, personally, I'm more than fine with that if the classes are good in the first place. I do not want to see any more classes that rely on "support" to make them worth playing. And, furthermore, I don't think we're going to see a new class that creates enough excitement within the playerbase to make it really worth WotC churning out more "support" at this point; personally I have dozens more characters I want to give a go in 4e than I will ever get to, even if I gave up on DMing right now, just in the HoWS* books...(*Heroes of Whatever Something, thanx domino for that one...)</blockquote>

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