..and I'd have to concur. (...not that anyone's shocked, by this point.) The fact is, from a tactical standpoint, the game is actually *more*
interesting than 3.x. In 3.x, you generally wound up with characters who were optimized to do a certain thing, or perhaps had a small number of tactical
options. It's true, you had a huge wealth of strategic options open to you, in terms of what feats you took and what prestige classes you chose, but once
you'd done that, pretty much everyone who wasn't a primary spellcaster would wind up with a relatively small number of Things They Can Do, and a few
situations in which the Things They Can Do would get better. The character sheets were sure interesting, but once you had a given character, you pretty much
knew what you were going to be doing in any given combat. (Yes, exceptions did exist, but it is *certainly* the case that there were a large number of builds
at any given level of optimization that fell prey to this.) The interesting thing about 4th ed (having dug into it a bit more) is that the levels and kinds of
character ability are quite similar, but the optimal tactics are very different. You can take a fighter and pretend to be a two-weapon ranger with him, and
he'll do okay, but if you're playing him optimally, he plays very differently. The three pacts of warlock have *very* similar abilities - you could
actually totally ignore the various pact advantages and still do decently well as a warlock - but when designed and played to work with their strengths, they
wind up very different indeed. The faelock is constantly teleporting and messing with his enemies' minds, the starlock is constantly bringing the debuffs
while he waits for the stars to be right for his most powerful attacks, and the infernalock is just standing and delivering - bringing the damage while he
ignores attempts to damage him. The hexhammer gish (an interesting warlock/fighter multiclass) is another option still, piling even more raw damage-taking
ability on the traditional infernalock while regularly knocking his foes down and dealing out significant amounts of damage even on a miss.
...and that's not even taking into account the questions of when to spend your encounter powers, whether to spend your dailies, and whether/how to spend
your action points and item dailies - and since a number of these go beyond the current encounter into "how much farther do we want to push on today, and
how bad is it likely to be?"....
perhaps the confusion is that the tactical skill curve in 4th starts reasonably far above zero, but doesn't cap quickly. Even a mediocre-to-poor player
can do okay in combat. If you can teach him a few basic tricks, and some basic rules of thumb on how to use his class with reasonable effectiveness, he can
contribute reasonably well, at any level up through 30. Someone who's really good at it can squeak out points of advantage in a dozen different places -
synergies between feats, paragon classes, equipment, and tactics that wind up with their character being noticeably more effective, but even so, they won't
be overpoweringly so - certainly not like the 3.x games. Tricks like choosing exactly which stats to take so you can get certain feats at certain levels can
eke out a few more points of damage here, and another point or two of ac there, but they're not game-defining in the same way. Tuning and optimizing are
possible, enjoyable, and useful, but no longer as overwhelmingly *vital* as they might have been at one point.
--------------------
Bah. "Try the cake. You should try the cake. No really, it's good cake. It is. I promise. You'll like it if you try it." I feel like
an evangelist.
It is good cake, though.
interesting than 3.x. In 3.x, you generally wound up with characters who were optimized to do a certain thing, or perhaps had a small number of tactical
options. It's true, you had a huge wealth of strategic options open to you, in terms of what feats you took and what prestige classes you chose, but once
you'd done that, pretty much everyone who wasn't a primary spellcaster would wind up with a relatively small number of Things They Can Do, and a few
situations in which the Things They Can Do would get better. The character sheets were sure interesting, but once you had a given character, you pretty much
knew what you were going to be doing in any given combat. (Yes, exceptions did exist, but it is *certainly* the case that there were a large number of builds
at any given level of optimization that fell prey to this.) The interesting thing about 4th ed (having dug into it a bit more) is that the levels and kinds of
character ability are quite similar, but the optimal tactics are very different. You can take a fighter and pretend to be a two-weapon ranger with him, and
he'll do okay, but if you're playing him optimally, he plays very differently. The three pacts of warlock have *very* similar abilities - you could
actually totally ignore the various pact advantages and still do decently well as a warlock - but when designed and played to work with their strengths, they
wind up very different indeed. The faelock is constantly teleporting and messing with his enemies' minds, the starlock is constantly bringing the debuffs
while he waits for the stars to be right for his most powerful attacks, and the infernalock is just standing and delivering - bringing the damage while he
ignores attempts to damage him. The hexhammer gish (an interesting warlock/fighter multiclass) is another option still, piling even more raw damage-taking
ability on the traditional infernalock while regularly knocking his foes down and dealing out significant amounts of damage even on a miss.
...and that's not even taking into account the questions of when to spend your encounter powers, whether to spend your dailies, and whether/how to spend
your action points and item dailies - and since a number of these go beyond the current encounter into "how much farther do we want to push on today, and
how bad is it likely to be?"....
perhaps the confusion is that the tactical skill curve in 4th starts reasonably far above zero, but doesn't cap quickly. Even a mediocre-to-poor player
can do okay in combat. If you can teach him a few basic tricks, and some basic rules of thumb on how to use his class with reasonable effectiveness, he can
contribute reasonably well, at any level up through 30. Someone who's really good at it can squeak out points of advantage in a dozen different places -
synergies between feats, paragon classes, equipment, and tactics that wind up with their character being noticeably more effective, but even so, they won't
be overpoweringly so - certainly not like the 3.x games. Tricks like choosing exactly which stats to take so you can get certain feats at certain levels can
eke out a few more points of damage here, and another point or two of ac there, but they're not game-defining in the same way. Tuning and optimizing are
possible, enjoyable, and useful, but no longer as overwhelmingly *vital* as they might have been at one point.
--------------------
Bah. "Try the cake. You should try the cake. No really, it's good cake. It is. I promise. You'll like it if you try it." I feel like
an evangelist.
It is good cake, though.