joshx0rfz´s last post: Critical Hits is a Trilogy

The 4e 3rd party market probably won’t pan out either. WotC can produce bigger, prettier products for less money and get them into all the gaming shops. Even if some 3rd party manages to produce something new and original that catches people’s imagination, WotC can have a spoiler product out in a few months.

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The Nature Priest in the book feels a lot like the Wizard in the at-wills, though at higher levels, definitely a lot more zones/conjurations/things that require sustaining that are similar to what you talk about. There’s very little in the way of shape-changing and focuses on the spells you talk about. (Though there is a Wildshaper paragon path.)

I actually predict this book will do very well to grab up the people who ONLY play Druids or ONLY play Bards and so forth. There’s a surprising number of people that have dealbreakers in one specific class or race.

I hope that they differentiate the classes of the same role enough that they don’t feel like 6 one way vs. half dozen the other. In regards to the Druid class, I would hope that they gave it a different feel than the Wizard, particularly since the other controller class mentioned (Spellbinder) also uses wizard spells. What’s the point in having 3 classes of controller when they all feel the same?

I think they could easily make the druid feel different than the wizard, if only by doing something simple like decreasing the damage output of his powers and increasing the non-damaging effects (slow, restrain, daze, stun, etc.). That simple change would also mesh well with the ‘traditional’ druid powers involving weather, swarms, entangling roots / vines, etc.

While material like this is really interesting, I don’t think most gamers who play D&D would buy a product like this. 1) Most gamers who play D&D also play games other than D&D and as such must ration their spending appropriately. 2) At some point in the future much of the material in this book will become superseded by official 4e releases. These 2 factors combined mean that, in all likelihood, only serious D&D players will buy something like this. And even players that are serious D&Ders might not buy this book if they have a friend who purchased this book and will let them borrow it.