I did feel that WotC had taken DnD and turning it on its head.
Cue hilarious misrepresentation of 4e.
1 time I played, I said, alright, my basic attack ... and the guy across the table leapt down my throat saying why in the world would you basic attack?
He leapt down your throat? Sounds like a problem with your fellow gamer rather than the system.
you have a dozen at wills and like 5 encounters!!
You have
two at-wills (three if you were playing a human paladin). You will have,
at most, four encounter attack powers plus a potential racial power depending on your race. If you're under level 11, you have fewer.
I was going What? if I wanted to let lose a fire ball I would go get a mage and cast fireball.
Except none of your powers were fireball, sooooo...
Game play then stopped as the guy proceeded to explain how, long story short, everyone casts fireball in different forms now, and that using a basic attack is pointless when you can cast fireball instead.
Okay, so either you're wildly misrepresenting what your gaming group explained to you, or your gaming group is comically terrible at explaining basic concepts.
This makes sense on a SPELL CASTING PERSON, but the paladin I was playing I didn't think of as a caster.
Ignoring the fact that in 3.5/PF paladins
are spell casters, your 4e paladin wasn't casting spells. Powers =/= spells.
The "at will" was something like blade storm (been a while so digging out suppressed memories, sorry on exact details).
Assuming you were playing with a paladin using only PHB1 options, it was either Enfeebling Strike, Bolstering Strike, Valiant Strike or Holy Strike. Blade Storm is an epic-tier fighter daily power.
Then the caster in the group unleashed his 1 daily, and was like, wow, the pally did triple my damage with his at will...... And kinda sat there disappointed that he was outclassed and couldn't keep anywhere near the same dps.
A paladin is a defender and, assuming you were talking about a wizard or some other controller, should not be doing significantly more damage than a controller.
It sounds like you had either a terrible play experience because of a poor group, or you have an amazingly distorted memory of your only 4e play session that you're now sharing with others, who will take your grossly inaccurate account of what the game is like and say "Man, that doesn't sound fun!"
So either you're blaming the system for your group's problems, or you're misrepresenting the system (purposefully or not) as having problems it doesn't actually have. Either way, it's irresponsible.
