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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5222959" data-attributes="member: 82106">Except it wasn't playtested for years. I recall very recently seeing a post somewhere that outlined the timeline of 4e development. There was precious little time in there for extensive playtesting. There was an initial prototype design in late 2005, followed in 2006 by a more fleshed out version which went through a few months of playtest and fiddling which resulted in a pretty much total rewrite that introduced a lot of basic 4e stuff like at-will/encounter/daily powers etc. Any testing that came before that would have told them very little about details like monster damage output. Given that it takes almost a year to go from a draft version of a book to actual release that means there were at most 6 months of testing that was in parallel with finalization of all the classes etc. I agree with doctorhook, no amount of closed playtesting will ever iron out all the little issues with a system. Its just like with software, you can test it in-house till doomsday, you still won't release a perfect product. Most of the testing is being done by people that are close to the designers. Plenty of things may work reasonably well in the style of play they all fall into for instance. Once you release the product people with very different play styles pick it up and have issues, etc.KS, I pretty much agree. V shaped classes are fine, they just need a full class worth of support for each leg of the V. At that point in some ways they're actually better than 2 A shaped classes. Also I think V shaped classes were partly a response to needing a lot of material packed into a fairly small package for PHB1. In theory they could have split them all in two, but that would have meant releasing a LOT of classes before they were really ready to fill in the class roster that much. It also would have meant diverging even more from previous editions. How would you have done a cleric that was focused on being both a support character and a potent melee combatant? Its not NECESSARY to have such a class, but it was EXPECTED.The few things that really can't be fixed are luckily not super critical. The core of the system is pretty solid. I'd have preferred it if they'd ditched stat boosts for instance and that can't really be fixed, but they did a pretty good job of focusing on putting out a well designed core game that can handle just about anything you'd ever expect D&D to be able to deal with.Now that we have things like MM3 and similar refinements I think the system is pretty much as good as its going to get. Personally I doubt we will EVER see a 5e. I think that was one of the main reasons for 4e, to design a system that fundamentally never needs to be rewritten. I think they pretty much succeeded.</blockquote>

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