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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KarinsDad" data-source="post: 5706634" data-attributes="member: 2011">When 4E first came out, the At Will powers were mostly "basic attack" + some small extra benefit. A one square slide, doing a little damage to a different adjacent foe, etc. The powers were similar, but with slightly different extra benefits.There were some discussions on Sure Strike and Careful Attack. Many people thought that they should have other cool attributes added, other than normal damage.My take was to (and WotC eventually errata-ed them to) make them a basic attack with +2 to hit.The purpose of these powers were to increase the accuracy of the attack. So, why were other At Will powers "basic plus benefit" when these were "basic plus benefit minus damage"? It didn't make a lot of sense and as it turned out, nearly nobody ever took these powers until they were errata-ed.Later on as more source books came out and more designers created "new cool stuff", the concept of At Will basic attack plus a small benefit occurred less frequently. But, I think that it was most likely one of the earlier core design goals and it should be brought back because not only is it elegant, but it allows players to have multiple similarly balanced powers that do not take up a ton of space on their character sheets.Having 5 At Wills like these allow a lot of flexibility on the part of the players, but even new players can easily grasp the concepts and not be overwhelmed by 5 totally different powers. Instead, they'd effectively have one power with 5 different minor benefit options. And, players would get less bored using the same 2 repetitive At Will powers over and over again many hundreds of times over the lifetime of a PC if they had ways to get 5 or so At Wills that did slightly different things.</blockquote>

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