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I was a huge, huge fan of packet two and the direction they were taking specialities, and now that I see packet three, I'm disappointed.

Specialities and feats have taken a huge step backwards. They've gone from being really flavourful in-universe concepts to minor boosts to your character. In packet two, the idea of making a Rogue with the Magic-User speciality was exciting and created interesting story hooks. In packet three, the Arcane Magic speciality is pretty much useless to a Rogue, and all the exciting ideas that were possible before are gone.

In fact, that's another one of my complaints when it comes to specialities. Gone are evocative names like "Jack-of-all-trades" or "Survivor" or "Acolyte". Instead, we have "Skill Specialist", "Endurance Specialist", and "Divine Magic Specialist." No longer do I feel like I'm further defining my character's role in the world. Now I feel like I'm just making the "better" at something.

And the loss of this "flavour first" focus that the old specialities had makes me worried that now they've opened the gate to feat bloat again. Now you barely need any flavour justification to make a bunch of feats, so they can crank out more of them.

And the thing is, the specialties in packet two weren't even really powerful (with the glaring exception of Guardian and maybe Healer), but they were flexible and flavorful enough that they were interesting despite the fact that there was nary a damage bonus to be had.

Oct 29, 2012 -- 7:18PM, Rhenny wrote:

Oct 29, 2012 -- 7:09PM, Zardnaar wrote:

 They got rid of defneder because it was broken.

Broken and redundant when using protector expertise dice.

 It wasn't redundent though as it stacked with protector. My entire party took it except for the rogue. She would have taken it as well if he could have used shields.