How Much Would This Break the Game?

[ArcturusV]

I know as we level in 4th edition, we're eventually capped out on how many powers we can have. 4 Encounter, 4 Dailies, 7 Utilities, and our 2/3 At-Wills depending on race.

What I wonder is if it would really break the game to have players NOT have to trade in their dailies and encounters for new powers as they level up?

Granted this would be better for some classes than others I understand. Like the Barbarian most of their powers are "Strictly Better" as they level up, and their dailies being Rage Stances you don't necessarily want to void your strictly better stance. But there are other classes that just get a bunch of random one off abilities that aren't really improved on as they advance (Like the Wizard off the top of my head).

So here's the theorycraft. Would the game be massively broken if, as people level up I let them pick new Encounter/Daily/Utility powers as they level up, without EVER having to ditch their previous powers?

As a likely balance factor/drawback, I would likely implement that you could NEVER do power swaps and once you made a choice, it's locked in. No trading up to new powers because of Cap Limitations, and no swapping out Powers with your Level up Retraining.

And if I did this, what sort of balancing would I need to incorporate into encounters to compensate for the increased power of PCs having 4 additional Encounter powers and Daily Powers?

[NecroRebel]

You're kind of expected to go through 4 encounters per day, and each encounter is expected to last ~4-6 rounds. At least, that's how long it typically takes to wear down the defenders' healing surges. So, under normal circumstances, starting at mid levels, you're basically expected to use a daily during every battle of the day, and an encounter power every round of each fight until they're used up at which point you devolve to at-wills for the last round or two. This is pretty much how things actually go, too.

So, if you give more dailies and more encounter powers, you'd end up with players that used daily powers more than once per encounter and rarely actually used up all of their encounter powers. They'd be doing something different every round, basically, because of this.

The obvious solution to rebalance this change would be to A) give more encounters per day, forcing the characters back into the one-daily-per-encounter paradigm, and B) give encounters that take longer to fight, forcing the characters back into the one-at-will-per-encounter paradigm.

There are problems with both of these. For the first, you wouldn't be increasing the available surges, so in the later encounters characters would be likely to start wounded, which would lead to deaths. The Comrade's Succor ritual can help mitigate this by allowing defenders to use the squishies' surges, however. For the second, longer encounters tend to mean harder encounters, but harder encounters means the enemies deal more damage, which can overwhelm a character's hit points, which would lead to deaths. The only real way to mitigate this would be to use monsters with the pre-MM3 guidelines, where they were tougher but not as hard-hitting, and also boring.

In short, you'd either not give your characters chances to use these additional powers, you'd kill them too often, or you'd have a boring game. None of these is particularly desirable.

[Alejandro]

I would love to play a Wizard under those rules, and it would be very, very broken. :)

[Kurald Galain]

What I wonder is if it would really break the game to have players NOT have to trade in their dailies and encounters for new powers as they level up?
Combat lasts an average of four rounds. During this time, if you're level 9 or above, you are expected to use your three best encounter powers and a daily. Since you can expect three or four combats per day, you can use a daily pretty much every combat.

So for encounter powers, it doesn't really matter how much of them you have, just what your best three are. The same more-or-less applies to utility powers: at some point, you'll never have the actions available to use all of them, anyway. However, giving people more options will slow down the game because of choice paralysis! The main reason why characters have limits on encounter powers is not game balance, but to reduce decision time in combat.

The place where it matters are dailies. There are some classes where the dailies aren't particularly impressive (e.g. sorcerer) and some classes that have staggeringly powerful dailies (e.g. wizard). A sorcerer, under this method, will simply still be using his three best encounter powers; but the wizard now uses two dailies per combat. That is a clear shift in balance.