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Yup. Several players tried (all with previous experience with regular 4e classes). Liked quite a few of them, not radically different in power level. I hope 5e can do an "essential" build for every class they release, for those that prefer minimal decision making.

I for one, LOVE the idea behind the Vampire class, as terrible as CharOp thinks it is. (They are right).  

Jun 2, 2012 -- 7:14AM, edwin_su wrote:

I kind of hope this tread will convince players of older edition to give essentials a try.
becouse they seem to hate the oriiginal release of 4th and don't want anything of it in 5th edition.

and personaly i would like to see essentials have a bigger influence on the design of 5th. 

Not me. I think Essentials butchered the martial classes, and this is what I fear in DDN. Especially looking at the rogue and fighter.

I thought Essentials was probably one of the best, most well polished products that WotC has ever put out for D&D.

The classes are well-balanced, the feats are good and it does add a little bit more feel to the different classes.

Most people didn't give Essentials enough of a chance. I disliked the idea when it was first announced, but actualyl reading it and playing some of the classes, I will certainly say that my initial feeling was wrong.

I was one of the people(one of the only people) on the boards during the build up to essentials that advocated a wait and see approach.  Well, I've waited, I've seen, and I can now say that essentials is pretty disappointing.  The core stated idea of making an accessible, understandable entry point was such a complete fail I wouldn't try to call someone out if they called it a lie.  I've had some success with introducing new players by giving them a Slayer, mainly the types of new players who give you a "Deer in the headlights" look if you start mentioning scary mechanics like "dice" or "armor class", but I wouldn't want to be a new player trying to find, buy and then use essentials to enter the hobby.  The more obvious real intention of inserting some old school flavor into 4e to bring back grogs was fine.  I really don't mind the existence of the Slayer or Knight, so long as I get to play what I still think of as 'the proper Fighter'.  

Where essentials really went wrong was in the subtler stuff, the design direction and handling.  4e had been struggling for a long time with a few problems, notably uneven support(which I'll go into at more length when I write that post for Rashan's thread that I've been meaning to), and essentials was where they just said "Screw it" and actively made them worse.  There was a lot of talk about "opening up design space" that didn't really go anywhere. 

The worst of it was balance.  There was a lot of talk about focusing a little less on balance and a little more on flavor, and "whether a class did it's job" and it all sounded very nice if you like flavor and don't like balance(I think there's a grog scout merit badge for that), but in the end it didn't turn out that great for either balance or flavor.  We got a few gems, notably the Hexblade and the Blackguard, which both are really fun, flavorful and decently balanced.  The lack of focus on balance was pretty evident, and I really thought this would mean some more gamebreakers, but mainly it meant that anything coming out was either going to be on par or underpowered.  The flavor, though...well, there was a lot of it.  That's the best I can say.  Again, there were a few, rare gems, but mostly there was just a lot of words.  Not great flavor, not inspiring or useful flavor, flavor that wasn't necessarily even new within the context of 4e, just lots and lots and freakin' lots of words.  Not even well organized or well placed, just words sprawling around and making it hard to find rules(which made a lot of the essentials books crappy table references, save the Rules Compendium).  The worst was in a few, select places where you can clearly see that the designers were sacrificing flavorful stuff for balance while somehow simultaneously sacrificing balance for flavorful stuff, resulting in things like the Vampire class, which manages to be terribly underpowered and not even have the benefit of feeling properly like a Vampire.

I think the idea of bringing old school feel into 4e worked to some degree and isn't necessarily a bad one, if done well, but the design once essentials came out was just such a crapshoot that I can't look at essentials and say I like it, even though there are elements and qualities in it that I do like.