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<blockquote data-quote="FireLance" data-source="post: 5460093" data-attributes="member: 3424">Personally, I think that most of 4E's problems with magic items stem from an overreaction to how important they were in previous editions. One of the design goals for 4E (IIRC) was to ensure that most of a character's abilities stemmed not from his magic items, but from himself: his class, his race, his feats, and so on. With the introduction of class encounter and daily powers, racial powers and so on, I believe they largely succeeded. However, I suspect that there was an unstated design principle for magic items that, in retrospect, I think was a mistake: magic item daily powers were, on average, about on par with a class encounter power, and magic item encounter powers were, on average, about on par with a class at-will power. The guidelines for wand creation are perhaps the most obvious example of this. Naturally, given this set-up, magic item powers are going to seem anemic comapred to class powers with a similar frequency of use. Personally, I think that adopting a theme model for magic items is not going to be all that unbalancing since a theme at-will power is generally only slightly more powerful than a class at-will power, making it fairly close to the current power level of a magic item with an encounter power, and any further abilities need to be gained at the expense of class powers. Unfortunately, this leads us back to the original problem of magic items defining a character more than his class abilities. However, maybe it will not be so bad if each character has only one or two of such &quot;character-defining&quot; magic items. One other possiblity is to upgrade the power of magic item encounter and daily abilities to be on par with their class equivalents.&nbsp; However, I think that would lead to more balance issues than the theme approach.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="FireLance, post: 5460093, member: 3424"] Personally, I think that most of 4E's problems with magic items stem from an overreaction to how important they were in previous editions. One of the design goals for 4E (IIRC) was to ensure that most of a character's abilities stemmed not from his magic items, but from himself: his class, his race, his feats, and so on. With the introduction of class encounter and daily powers, racial powers and so on, I believe they largely succeeded. However, I suspect that there was an unstated design principle for magic items that, in retrospect, I think was a mistake: magic item daily powers were, on average, about on par with a class encounter power, and magic item encounter powers were, on average, about on par with a class at-will power. The guidelines for wand creation are perhaps the most obvious example of this. Naturally, given this set-up, magic item powers are going to seem anemic comapred to class powers with a similar frequency of use. Personally, I think that adopting a theme model for magic items is not going to be all that unbalancing since a theme at-will power is generally only slightly more powerful than a class at-will power, making it fairly close to the current power level of a magic item with an encounter power, and any further abilities need to be gained at the expense of class powers. Unfortunately, this leads us back to the original problem of magic items defining a character more than his class abilities. However, maybe it will not be so bad if each character has only one or two of such "character-defining" magic items. One other possiblity is to upgrade the power of magic item encounter and daily abilities to be on par with their class equivalents. However, I think that would lead to more balance issues than the theme approach. [/QUOTE]

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