Community

Classes:
Good- Allowed for thematic advancement  
good: allowed a decent enough feel of viability

bad- Forced players to go a certain way, players often feel compelled to hybrid for originality in feel which is generally severely limited and makes them subpar
Bad- Each class is designated as "Striker, defender, leader or controller" making for redundant classes and sometimes a lack of choice for how you want to play (Recommended change is simply to allow a secondary effect to each power for the role a player picks on his class)
Bad- The incompatability of many classes with their own different paths, A beast master ranger was unable to use ranged attacks, it would be better to simply allow the player to pick from a list of class benefits upon creation.

Races:
Good-Wide variety, most of which are extremely viable

bad- Favoritism, as a player who likes monster races, I felt saddened by the fact that wizards was trying to compell me to be an elf, or one of the hamanish races all the time.

 General:
Good- I liked themes, They allowed for more versatility later in the edition
Good-  simplified skill check system allowing for characters to not has as many ridiculous rolls (Improvement suggestion would be to allow the characters to pick 2 skills that stack based on their primary and be treated as trained for these skills upon creation)

Bad- The feats were usually redundant and typically became outdated. rather than adding new feats that destroyed old ones it should be noted that
Bad: Unfair reactions/opportunity attacks for many ranged classes, OA's should simply allow a player to make an attack, within reason, if it is triggered the idea of "Melee basic/ranged basic for any class seems redundant for any class that has a melee attack at all or a ranged attack at all in their at-wills,
Bad- Prof and damage bonuses on weapons based on type should be swapped out, a one-handed sword should not do that much more damage than another one-handed sword, because that takes from roleplay, it is suggested to have a "grey-gold" standard on weapons and only separate them by their effects and groups.
 

Jan 18, 2012 -- 1:44AM, PVX300B wrote:

I absolutely adore the simplified geometry used in 4e.  Square fireballs?  No extra movement for diagonals.  Bursts and blasts rather than cones and radius...es?  Radii?  Whatever.  I love it.  It's such a simple thing and I am happy that it will almost certainly be in the next iteration of D&D.

I like aspects of the Essentials design philosophy.  Like most of you, I want to see classes balanced but of variable complexity.  A player in my group really likes his Slayer because it's simple.  Simple isn't wrong, and there's definitely a place for both simple and complicated in the game as a whole.  The technical-minded player with the Weaponmaster is playing a different game than the smashy type with the Slayer but both can have fun and enjoy themselves and be optimized.  I'd love to see more of that carried over into the next game.

I want treasure divorced from the system math. 

I want the system math checked over and over and patched if it turns out wrong.  Feat taxes are wrong and unconstitutional.

If they build a game where each ability score is used for attacks and damage then they should include basic attacks for those ability scores.  A battlemind not having a melee basic attack is not acceptable, just because he happens to attack with Constitution instead of Strength.

I want to see them be more mindful of how a class is actually played when they are designing content for those classes.  The monk's unarmed strike is a particularly frustrating example.  Even if you're a stonefist monk with a respectable Strength score, you are still using a weapon attack with an implement-based class.  There's no reason for that.  They missed it when they designed the class but they just didn't fix it.  And when they did eventually produce content for the monk, they missed the mark there, too.  Letting you use Dexterity in place of Strength for the attack you weren't going to make anyways?  For the price of a feat?  Come on.  When they design classes for 5e, I'd like to see them be patched if they need to be.  You're not going to catch every mistake during playtesting but you can sure as hell fix them afterwards.

Do away with printed books; I'll buy e-books just as easily.   Also, if you're going to keep providing us with DDI, please give us some actual content.  This ridiculous Cormyr fluff and preview crap that we get week after week is nonsense.  Stop hoarding the three bits of crunch until the last week of the month.  It's annoying and insulting.

I agree with pretty much everything you said, but I'll give my particular clarifications:

1) I loved the race, class, skill, and power systems.  It could use some tweaking, but 4E hit all the right buttons for me because of this.

2) Feats are great, but they needed to be more organized.  They were literally all over the place in terms of power and usefullness, and attempts to search for particular feats and abilities were aweful.

 3) Math fix.  The math fix feats were aweful.  I'm not sure how nobody noticed those number issues before 4E's release.

4) Complexity.  I loathe Essentials classes because they have so little room for character design.  I'm not saying they are bad I'm just saying I found them uninteresting.  So uninteresting that I basically took a break from DnD for a whole year while all the content they released was Essentials material.
If you are going to release content like Essentials, release content with a different focus as well, so all audiences can keep their interest up.


5) Fluff vs Crunch.  For me, 4E really started to get the right balance with Primal Power, and the addition of Theames.  Unfortunatley, it can be really hard to make choices based on fluff, when you need to make a workable character.
I feel like there should be "build slots" for fluff, with minimal crunch, and "build slots" for crunch and less fluff.

For example, there are a number of feats that are just useless because they are mechanically very useless.  But I really liked some of them!  When I was a DM, I let my players pick a few extra feats as they went, with the restriction "it can't impact your combat skills, or apply a static bonus to a skill check you are trained in"

Know what happened?  People picked up Mounted Combat,  Ritual Caster, dabbled in a new skill.  Someone took Nature training so he'd be better at training his pet wolf, and I worked with another to handwave some custom RP bonuses.

It gave the players some freedom to take the feats they wanted to take, but were unwilling to give up those attack/damage bonuses for. 

I realize the DM is free to do this already, but by building it into the framework of the game you help remind people what the game is for, and help provide a more consistent delivery system. 

Jan 26, 2012 -- 1:02PM, hyperion7788 wrote:

Classes:
Bad- The incompatability of many classes with their own different paths, A beast master ranger was unable to use ranged attacks,

Incorrect or misstated. Of the two best uses of a beastmaster's beast, one is almost exclusively to the benefit of ranged attacks and the other is more useful for the bow-ranger than for the melee-ranger.

Neither of those best uses involve taking powers with the Beast keyword though. And very little stuff with that keyword was ranged. Frankly, Beastmaster is a mediocre-at-best striker in a class that otherwise leads in the role; many of us think that conceptually it might make a better controller.

Bad- The feats were usually redundant and typically became outdated. rather than adding new feats that destroyed old ones it should be noted that

There's something lacking in that sen

Isn't it pretty much the definition of an edition change that the new mechanics are incompatible with the previous mechanics?

A few opinions of mine:

Streamlined: the new streamlined feel of 4E was great. I loved it. But a lot of times (especially in video games *cough* Dragon Age II *cough*) simplifying the system omits some of the 'fluff' that I partcularly love. I cant even remember all the times I was reading through one of my 4E supplement books and thought about how little flavor it had. The art is there, the organization is there, but the content wasnt. Most of the content was for combat, which was no doubt 4E's best quality. But, hey, its nothing they screwed up, they just left some stuff out.

Class Distinction: I like for my character to feel unique and have a specific and integral part on the battlefield (and off). Some of the classes they released, especially in later supplements like PHB2 and PHB3 seemed like only slight variations to the core classes. This was probably great for some people who didnt quite like the core class and instead preferred the variation of it, but it felt like WotC was simply reusing content.

Lack of Content for Epic Tier: I realize that 4E has much more content for higher levels of play than 3.5, but it felt like all the content was for your character. It was hard for me as a DM to find a variety of monsters to throw at my party sometimes. One thing I PARTICULARLY want is information about the gods and how to kill them. Almost everyone in my group wanted to kill the gods and I scoured the internet and bookstores and found only a few resources that had actual stats for the deities. It was a very incomplete list at best, and I kept wondering why WotC hadnt released a book dedicated to information and actual data of the deities.