Wicked Spheres: OOC Thread 3
It's not that they're the same, it's that they can all be effective. Older edition spellcasters were super OP compared to melée fighters once you got to the higher levels. All the fighters could do was walk up and hit something with their weapon (maybe even twice or thrice depending on level!), meanwhile the casters are busy summoning demons and teleporting to other planes and levelling cities with meteor storms or whatever. I've heard that a Fighter is actually one of the more complicated classes in Fourth Edition...I think it's because they (like other classes in the "Defender" role) spend a lot of their time in combat focusing heavily on positioning, getting enemies where they want them in order for other people to use their own abilities most effectively without having to worry about getting hit.
Fifth Edition seems to have just gone back to melée classes going "I hit it" again, while the casters just seem to have one great big spell list, from which a selection are available based on class and level, but spells aren't unique to classes the way Powers are in Fourth Edition, so you could have three different classes all casting Blight or whatever. I'm not sure how different you can make separate characters of the same class, but I think every edition has the means to make them different, like if you want a party of Wizards or Monks or whatever, I think there are different abilities/styles you can have to make them not all the same? Or do melée characters (in older editions) still suffer from "I hit it with my sword, that other guy hits it with his axe, but we're still basically doing exactly the same thing"?
I've heard that a lot of people who complain about Fourth haven't actually tried it, but I don't know how true that is. Certainly partly true, but that's hardly unique to DnD - plenty of people will say they don't like a film, or a book, or a game, or whatever, just because they've heard it's bad, but they never actually give it a try themselves to see if they like it. I'm not trying to say that's the case for anyone here, just to point that out. But "It's different, so I don't like it" doesn't mean that the differences are "bad" ;).