Quote Originally Posted by Luccan View Post
Not sure I agree with the "it is not enough for me to succeed; others must fail" mentality being applied to a cooperative game. The biggest flaw of 3.X was Ivory Tower game design, which ended up bloating the game with a fair amount of crap. Imagine how much better it could've been if they weren't actively trying to make the game worse for some people. I'm in favor of more spells (and maneuvers and feats and so on) for providing a greater number of options, but they absolutely should not put stuff in the game to potentially make certain players play worse. And if not for those players' sake then for the sake of their groups.
That 3.x flaw was an after the fact rationalization - rather than admit they were incompetent at balance, they said it was on purpose.