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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5687150" data-attributes="member: 82106">Meh, I think the picture you paint is a little bit extreme. Most of the changes you list really had very little impact overall. PHB1 OOTB was pretty heavily tilted towards the players, you needed level+4 encounters at all but low level to challenge decent players and challenging epic PCs was basically impossible if you played even close to RAW.Most of the changes to PCs since then have narrowed the gap between optimized and non-optimized characters, but doesn't do anything in terms of making the PCs overall stronger. The average PC effectiveness has possibly even dropped some since it was dominated by certain builds. There are more options now, a few more ways get more out of specific classes, etc, but there were ALWAYS characters up at the level of the better builds today, they were just fewer and further between.The boost to monster damage is really the most significant change BY FAR. This does improve monsters, but mostly it allows the DM more flexibility in being able to use less overleveled encounters to create interesting challenges. If a specific party is really tweaked the result would be more challenging overall. Things like Themes have a pretty minor effect. You get an extra power, but these powers are rarely BETTER than what you had before, just more interesting. Again, if you're talking about 1-3rd level PCs you'll see a bit more impact, but still not much. I'm not really able to agree about Essentials PCs either (the 'E-martial' ones). They're somewhat front-loaded in terms of benefits they get, but they have limited chances to really make a big impact in a given encounter. By Epic tier the lack of a really robust alpha strike means even a totally optimized E-martial character is JUST about keeping up with reasonably optimized classic characters from what I can see. They'll do OK, but they certainly don't represent some kind of power boost. Their nice accuracies are good, but the problem is they simply don't have the chances for amplifying damage, so they NEED that accuracy just to try to keep up overall.</blockquote>

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