Quote Originally Posted by TheOOB View Post
Wow, you didn't read my post before you replied to it. While it is true TWF doesn't increase your damage(though it does increase the chance you'll do some damage at the cost of giving a chance to do reduced damage). There can be many effects carried by an attack that are not damage, which may make a TWF viable.
I don't think you read MY post. TWF doesn't just fail to increase damage, it actually REDUCES the damage of any class that is likely to use it. Hell, my second paragraph even acknowledged that you can use TWFing with rider effects or for minion clearing, I just state that those effects aren't worth wasting a feat on.



You're really not making any sense. First of all, not everyone wants a ton of abilities. One of the advantages of older editions was that if you wanted a complex class with a ton of abilities, you'd play a wizard or cleric, and if you wanted a more simple class you'd play a fighter or rogue. In 4e you didn't have that choice, you'd have stacks of cards no matter what you played as. Also keep in mind that spells are daily, and cover all manner of effects, not just combat abilities. A wizard can reduce their work load by preparing several copies of the same spells, and won't be using all 30+ of their spells as combat spells
It doesn't matter how you spin it. Wizard: 30 spells that can be changed between daily. Right now a 5th level wizard has over a billion permutations of spells available to him. Fighter: 3 abilities that he chooses at level 1 that are then locked into place. That's without even looking at how effective the wizard options are vs the Fighter options. That is the kind of disparity of options we saw in 3rd edition.

And no, you shouldn't say "If you want a simple class, go play a Fighter". You should say "If you want a simple class, use this optional feature to make your class simple". That optional feature may be "Wizard trades out all of his spell slots for some souped up cantrips" or "Fighter gives up his combat superiority options and just gets a flat bonus to hit and damage", but in no case should you have a single class who by default has so few options.




And now I'm going to go on a tangential rant. We were sold Combat Superiority with the idea that it would be the Fighter's complex option, and someone who wants a simple fighter could just ignore those options and pump out extra damage each round. Instead what we've seen is Combat Superiority have half a dozen options that are variations on "deal more damage", a couple options that are "reduce damage", and a bunch of options that are "Do things that in previous editions anybody could do without wasting an ability slot on"

Seriously, Pushing people and knocking people prone shouldn't require wasting an ability slot. It should be something literally anyone can do for free. Glancing Blow shouldn't have ever been written. There is no reason Jab and Snap Shot should have been separate abilities. Cleave should be an active ability as opposed to a reactive one, where you spend dice to attack two enemies near you, because as is trying to use it will frequently result is wasting your dice for the turn.

The only ability out of the ones presented in the playtest packet that actually seemed interesting or added any sort of new option to the Fighter was Shift. And even that's just a sort of souped up 5ft step.

The fact that all of the options are practically non options gets added on top of the fact that you only get 3, and you don't even get to pick and choose just adds insult to injury. A Fighter in 3.5 actually had more options than the Fighter in this playtest, because he at least got his feats on top of the baseline options like trip, disarm, and bullrush. A lot of the options may have been terrible, but so are the options the 5e fighter has now, he just gets even fewer of them. It's literally the worst of both worlds.