Well it seems we have successfully shown that the obvious is obvious.

Quote from: TJS;1051056Well it seems we have successfully shown that the obvious is obvious.

But do they have rubbery skin and regenerate? :rolleyes:

I'd say 4e's legacy is the cautionary lesson: if you sell a different game with the same name as your earlier game the market may not respond in the manner you'd like...

I think 4e was a solidly designed game, but it definitely wasn't what I'm looking for from "Dungeons & Dragons." (And apparently I wasn't alone.) I think 5e also seems pretty well-designed, and is closer to the older editions, but still isn't my preferred approach when I want to play D&D. (I seem to be in more of a minority on that one, though.)

4E inspired some really nice board games, even the Drizzit one.

I never played a Minotaur Sorcerer touched by Hades and driven mad by his own red magical cloak until 4E.

The 1 how hoards rocked! Felt like you were piling the enemy bodies high!

Shadowfell and Feywild are probably the only two other planes I need.

And Damn it all , folks.... I do love some of those very beautiful battle maps they made and still look for any chance to use them.

Quote from: Diffan;1051043- Hit Die / Self-healing as presented in 5th Edition is a shortened version of 4E's Healing Surge mechanic. Just because 3e had one feat (Second Wind, funnily enough) or just because you could "rest" means non-magical healing doesn't equate to having a limited pool to draw from when there isn't a healer in the party. Pre 4E you either spent gold on potions, an NPC heal-bot, or someone rolled up a magic user to heal mid/post combat. 4E ended that cycle.

Magic-Users can cast healing spells? I think you mean clerics.

Quote from: jeff37923;1051073Magic-Users can cast healing spells? I think you mean clerics.

Clerics don't cast spells and use magic?

Quote from: Diffan;1051074Clerics don't cast spells and use magic?

Healing spells are pretty much their primary spell function.
They get spells from level 1 (well apart from 80s basic DnD, where they got spells at level 2).

Are 4e Clerics different perhaps?  I dunno, I never saw Clerics as PCs in 4e when I played it for a bit.

Quote from: Dimitrios;1050880Make sure you understand how your customers are actually using your product before you attempt an ambitious redesign.

I recall a number of statements from WotC at the time that 4e was really just making it easier for players to focus on what everyone had always wanted to focus on in the first place. Maybe this was just marketing, but I got the sense that the designers really had drunk the "15 minutes of fun packed into 4 hours" koolaid and were convinced that for all these years players had been spending much of the game simply enduring boredom while they waited for the big boss fight to arrive.

Turned out that their knowledge of what "everyone" considered to be the fun parts of the game wasn't as accurate as they thought.

Yeah I remember one account of an internal playtest in some kind of elemental temple and it just seemed bizarre, like not D&D game I had ever played. They went into one room and fought a bunch of guys, then went into another room right next to it and fought a bunch of guys, then went into a third room and fought a bunch of guys. And they were talking about how fun it was which left me scratching my head.

I don't have anything against combat heavy games. Played plenty of campaigns with no real plot besides "those guys have money, let's take it!" with five or so fights per session but the account of how they were playing there was no maneuvering or trying to ambush or general ratfuckery at all, it was like giving someone with a sweet tooth a bowl of white sugar and a spoon.

Quote from: danskmacabre;1051076Healing spells are pretty much their primary spell function.
They get spells from level 1 (well apart from 80s basic DnD, where they got spells at level 2).

Are 4e Clerics different perhaps?  I dunno, I never saw Clerics as PCs in 4e when I played it for a bit.

They get something equivalent to healing spells. But they seem to work more like class abilities. There is no actual spells or spell slots. Im looking at the cleric and Healing word is an "encounter" power so useable once her short rest. Cure Light Wounds is a level 2 Daily power so only once per long rest. Same for Cure Serious. 1/day power at level 6 and Spirit of Health at level 22. Same with the Wizard. No spells. Just a bunch of powers you can activate X number of times. For example Magic Missile is an at will power. Dispell Magic is once per short rest. Sleep is once per long rest. So is Fireball which just does 3d6+INT mod damage.

I can see why some would consider it very board gamey due to the presentation and implementation.

Quote from: Omega;1051084They get something equivalent to healing spells. But they seem to work more like class abilities. There is no actual spells or spell slots. Im looking at the cleric and Healing word is an "encounter" power so useable once her short rest.

Healing word is unusual, it's a Leader class ability so Clerics can use it twice per encounter. Warlords Bards etc get similar.

Quote from: Omega;1051084They get something equivalent to healing spells. But they seem to work more like class abilities. There is no actual spells or spell slots. Im looking at the cleric and Healing word is an "encounter" power so useable once her short rest. Cure Light Wounds is a level 2 Daily power so only once per long rest. Same for Cure Serious. 1/day power at level 6 and Spirit of Health at level 22. Same with the Wizard. No spells. Just a bunch of powers you can activate X number of times. For example Magic Missile is an at will power. Dispell Magic is once per short rest. Sleep is once per long rest. So is Fireball which just does 3d6+INT mod damage.

I can see why some would consider it very board gamey due to the presentation and implementation.

Quote from: S'mon;1051087Healing word is unusual, it's a Leader class ability so Clerics can use it twice per encounter. Warlords Bards etc get similar.

All Leaders get the ability to let another character spend a healing surge twice an encounter.  Other powers they have tend to add extra healing along with other effects.

Clerics are still the best healers however - they have more oomph to their healing than other Leader classes and have some abilities to heal that don't require characters to spend healing surges.

However, the fact that magical healing and non-magical healing are on the whole quite similar was a sticking point for many.   (I always thought that was a failure of imagination on the part of 4E's designers - the idea that not only were they going to have combat roles but all classes within that role should work in a fundamentally similar way. - as the line progressed they did eventually start to get away from that.)

Quote from: Diffan;1051074Clerics don't cast spells and use magic?

It probably would have been easier to just admit you made a mistake instead of trying to imply "magic user" = "cleric" when talking about D&D.

Quote from: danskmacabre;1051076Are 4e Clerics different perhaps? I dunno, I never saw Clerics as PCs in 4e when I played it for a bit.

And here you get to one of the fundamental loves of 4E by many people... the ability to drop a class that literally does not appear anywhere outside of D&D derived literature (and was originally built as a one-off to deal with a problem vampire PC) that has a ton of implied baggage it drops onto later editions (specifically when they overtly went to polytheistic assumptions that are about as anti-medieval in feel as one could get) that large segments of the audience might be uncomfortable with (I know MANY conservative Christians who won't touch D&D because they feel it endorses pagan religions) and then segmented a whole section of mechanics deemed necessary for gameplay (i.e. magical healing and restoration) into said problematic class.

In 4E any of the leader role classes could fill that role and, by far, the Warlord embodied that concept; no supernatural baggage and a clear archetype in the fantasy stories that often drew people to D&D for the first time. But you could also use the Bard or Artificer for arcane healing if you wanted the magic flair without the paganism and in all the 4E that I ran and played in, those were by far the three most common leader classes that got played and I NEVER saw an actual cleric get played.

Even if the Warlord didn't make it into 5e (too much baggage from years of hit points = meat points in previous editions) the solid break from divine magic as the only thing that can fill the healing role in D&D remained thanks to 4E. The Bard in particular (which with the right colleges and spell selections can ALMOST pass itself off as a non-magical... or at least really really subtle magic guy), but also builds of the Sorcerer and Warlock can now do healing and, even if the life cleric is the still the best healer, its not THAT much ahead of a bard built to be a party buffer. Even the celestial-pact warlock (which ironically given the class name has a lot fewer theological problems for the devout Christians I've met since you're basically making a pact for aid with an angel not a pagan god) does a pretty solid job keeping up with even the life cleric if they can use the magic initiate feat to pick up healing word from the bard list (see below) and can get at least one short rest per day (at two short rests it actually outperforms a life cleric's daily healing output).

Speaking of which, another legacy of 4e that made it into 5e would be the healing word spell. In 4e it was a class feature common to leaders (some had different names and slightly different riders)... a minor action they could do 2-3 times an encounter at range to keep an ally in the fight without having to give up their own standard action to do so. The idea that the healer should be able to fulfill that role without having to give up the ability to take other actions made the classes a LOT more palatable to a lot more players who didn't much enjoy the concept of playing the 'heal-bot' (i.e. when the act of healing each turn WAS your action).

Quote from: Brad;1051089It probably would have been easier to just admit you made a mistake instead of trying to imply "magic user" = "cleric" when talking about D&D.

Right because magic user is specific to what version of D&D in the past 3 decades? Especially when the vast majority of the discussion has been about 4e.

Edit: also
Bard
Healer
Paladin
Crusader
Druid
Ranger
Shaman

All classes that can heal. So since they ALL use magic and spells, the general term magic user is more than appropriate.

Well back in 3.5ed our default healer was a bard with a CLW wand. 3.5ed's crafting mechanics had a whole lot of problems but they did make clerics nonessential.

But for healing I find that 4 and 5ed work better if a "short rest" is a night's sleep and a "long rest" is extended bed rest in a safe place.