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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mneme" data-source="post: 5540641" data-attributes="member: 59248">You should pick up the Essentials player books (eg, Heroes of X) and look through them, but:Essentials introduces a number of new concepts to 4e.Chief among them are the ideas of variant advancement patterns and variant subclasses -- instead of having a fighter (possibly with some features you switch around at start), you've got a fighter, which could be a weaponmster (PH1 fighter; who gets to pick a specialty from GW to Arena to Battlerager) or you could be a Slayer (fighter as striker, single encounter powers that levels as you do, no dailies or at will attacks, at will stances), or you could be a knight (fighter as simple defender; single encounter powers that levels as you do, no dailies or at will attacks, at will stances).  Additionally, there's the concept of variant progressions itself.  Not all classes now gain At wills, Encounters, Dailies, and Utilities at the same rate (or at all) -- though actually all classes -do- gain utilities on the same levels, with a few rare exceptions (I can think of one; the Thief [simple rogue] has their 10th level utility locked).  The classes are still pretty balanced (more or less), but the simpler classes let you make fewer choices over the course of a combat, speeding up the action a bit -- and bring back the idea in earlier editions that some classes are easier to play than others, letting a player who doesn't want to make that many mechanical decisions play on easy mode with a character.Finally, there's an overall move away from putting lots of status markers on the board, particularly targetting markers.   With regular characters, you can easily have a monster get marked/focused by 4 or more characters at once, making for a bit of a tracking headache.  But the Essentials warlock always gets bonus damage; the knight (fighter) and caveliier (paladin) effectively "mark" anyone their next to, and the Executioner (assassin) always does bonus damage when using assassin weapons rather than using shrouds.So the hexblade is a different warlock subclass, with a different progression (eldritch bolt [not blast] + single weapon+implement at will chosen by pact, normal dailies, and a single scaling encounter power chosen again by pact [and weapon+implement based]).  Hexblades get to manifest a special weapon in their off hand which uses their implement's stats, so functionally they can act as both melee and implement users without an extra item cost (and thus not pay double to use their weapon+implement powers).  And they still have a reward mechanic, but it's not tied to cursing; instead they get it whenever they finish something.  They're actually pretty similar to a normal ADEU progression; the big difference is the single scaling encounter power rather than getting a choice of encounter powers (one expects that next month they'll be able to pick a feat that will let them swap a use of the scaling encounter power for a normal warlock encounter power).The way the scaling single encounter power thing works, btw, is that it scales up in damage automatically, and you get an extra use whenever you'd get an extra class encounter power normally.  So you start with one use, and get a 2nd at 3rd level, and a third at 7th (after that, it just scales up; this does mean that at level 13, when an ADEU class would get to swap a single encounter power, the hexblade suddenly has 3 3W encounter powers, but they don't get another encounter upgrade until 23 when they scale to 4W).</blockquote>

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