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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Eldritch_Lord" data-source="post: 5885494" data-attributes="member: 52073">Part of the problem, yes, but again I only claimed going back to 1e memorization and acquisition rules would solve one part of the problem.  Spell nerfs and reinstituting dangerous combat casting solves another part.I wasn't saying the wizard could nuke the fighter, just a roomful of random goblins or nobles or whatever.  That the wizard can easily neuter the fighter is a different, but no less pressing, issue.Fly really isn't the gamechanger people make it out to be.  From an NPC/world perspective, there are already flying threats out there such as, say, one-half of the name of the game.  (No, not flying dungeons, though those would be pretty awesome.)  If you already have to prepare for every flying thing from allips to zombies, flying humanoids that are more easily stopped than other flying critters (e.g. dispelling) aren't any more of a problem.From a PC perspective, fly doesn't really open up new avenues of exploration.  If you're in the wilderness, you can already buy/find/borrow/tame flying mounts, and your reliance on the mount for flight is no more onerous than your reliance on the wizard for flight--and might actually be a benefit, if the mount you choose is intelligent and/or can fight well.  If you're underground or in an otherwise-cramped space where you can't take a mount, flight isn't as much of an advance because you're limited in your flight ceiling and creatures can climb to get to you. Action economy is important, but that's not the concern here.  As you said, you can hire minions already, and there are non-action-economy-breaking minions of other sorts, but undead have their own advantages, such as not breathing or sleeping, being totally loyal, being immune or resistant to different things than living creatures, and so on.  And of course the most important reason to have necromantic minions is that some people want to play the Dread Lord Tim, Lich King Extraordinaire, not the Dread Lord Bob, Mercenary Leader and Human Resources Guy Extraordinaire. It's interesting that Essentials seems to have everything I want, and I freely admit that I don't have much knowledge of it.  It's interesting for a few reasons.  First of all, the reason I'm not that familiar with it is that my 4e group doesn't like it at all and doesn't play with it, and since we don't use DDI I don't just run into the material.  Second, Essentials discards a lot of the formerly-sacrosanct 4e design goals in favor of more 3e-esque design goals.  Third, a lot of online advice surrounding 4e centers around non-Essentials material: the question "How do we handle out-of-combat stuff?" is usually "Rituals are amazing!!!" rather than "Non-combat utilities from Essentials are amazing!!!"So if the way to satisfy my complaints is to note that those complaints are inherent to pre-Essentials 4e, and if the Essentials material "broke the base" a bit among 4e players precisely because it is more 3e-like than standard 4e, turning around and saying that the pre-Essentials 4e way of doing things is great doesn't really jibe with that.  If Essentials is the best way to unite 4e fans and AD&D/3e fans on the topic of martial dailies, utility magic, and so forth, I don't see why people are complaining about Vancian casting and too-versatile wizards and all that.You say that no one cares about the Vancian part, but you've just described a Vancian system.  I like it, actually, and I do the same when I run 4e (make rituals Vancian alongside daily powers, I mean).  Part of the appeal of Vancian casting is not only the daily preparation part but the part where you have the effects at your fingertips (if you thought ahead to prepare them, that is) to allow on-the-spot use and creative combinations.  It is the Vancian part that I appreciate--I don't mind if it takes 10 minutes to cast the Knock ritual, as long as I can hang it at the end and release it later when I need it, because a 10-minute Knock simply isn't useful compared to a rogue or your fist while a 1-round Knock might be.I would point out that, in that particular example, even an unintelligent animal would probably not go after something that looks like a prey creature but smells like nothing.  In the general example, countermeasures to all of those spells exist, and the vast majority of the time the countermeasures are at the same spell level as those abilities (invisibility vs. see invisibility, charm vs. protection from X) or even lower-level (major image vs. detect magic).There's a difference between a DM rewarding creativity, which is desirable, and a DM rolling over and letting the PCs take over kingdoms.  Countermeasures exist for all of these abilities that are not only just as common as those abilities themselves but are also quite logical to use with a bit of thought, and the abilities have limitations that are frequently ignored (lack of senses for illusions, volume affected for creation/shaping spells, features not granted by polymorph spells, etc.).  Granted, you shouldn't require a DM who thinks about the world for 5 minutes to figure out why the world isn't already under the control of invisible, charming 3rd-level casters, but it isn't too much to ask for, and a section in the DMG on fitting abilities into the world and making the world coherent would go a long way to helping with that.Elves being less susceptible to aging was admittedly a feature rather than a bug according to many people, including one of my 1e DMs, to reinforce the whole magical elves thing, but several effects did scale the penalty based on race.  Age may not be a large penalty, but it does have an effect; you can't cast haste for every combat of every day, because then adventuring for a year or so could kill you--aging wasn't there to stop you from using something or make you think long and hard before using it, just to disincentivize using the same abilities over and over again.  Wish has more significant drawbacks than just aging (not the DM-screwery, the resting afterwards), as do polymorph and other things, so aging isn't the only drawback.And dispelling isn't a huge drawback in general, I'm referring specifically to the fact that many 3e spells with an Instantaneous duration (particularly animate dead) had a Permanent duration in 1e.  A dispel magic in 1e can wipe out a half-dozen undead per casting, antimagic field suppresses undead while it's up, and so forth.  Necromancers' hordes of undead are much less powerful in such a situation.  3e wizards can build entire castles out of thin air with wall of stone; 1e wizards shouldn't do that unless they want a determined rival to be able to dispel their castle out of existence.  That difference did in fact limit a lot of the more powerful world-altering strategies in 1e that 3e casters have easy access to.</blockquote>

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