My god.  4th Ed is a mess.  From the 4th ed thread on SomethingAwful:

My god.  4th Ed is a mess.  From the 4th ed thread on SomethingAwful:

“Magic items are far worse, actually, to the point where it’s hard to break down all the ways in which the 4E magic item system sucks.

1) The “level minus one, level, level +1” rule for your first three items itself causes mental grief, despite sounding simple. Because of the greatly increased importance of your weapon, your armor, and your necktie, you need to balance the enhancement bonus you need against the property you want for each of those slots, and then balance each of those against each other according to your priority (your level +1 item will probably have a better enhancement bonus, and enhancement bonus often affects more than just your defense or straight attack). Essentially, in picking just your first three items, you are subjecting yourself to an involuntary fantasy football draft. You also might end up with an 11 and two 9s, depending. You’ve already frustrated someone who just wants to sit down and play, so at this point it’s officially a clusterfuck already, but we’re not even halfway there.

2) OK, you’ve got your three star picks for your equipment team. Now for the rest of your slots! Your needs will be significantly different on every character and you need to be fairly experienced to even know what your needs are.

-2a: Certain feats will obviate the need to have certain items at all, often revolving around implements. Do you know what the feats are? Do you know which of the 30,000 implement feats does this most efficiently and will not lead to an unexpected headache later?

-2b: 90% of your needs are items that offer no actual gameplay value, they just make the things you already do every single round exponentially better and are horribly redundant. Deal more damage, push more squares, give more surges, skill more better.

-2c: You may enter scenarios where you would get more money value out of getting an item that does the same thing as another, but in a different slot! Be sure you know the equipment system very well to negate some of the time sink associated with this! Hope you have fun when the search function in the builder eventually breaks every fucking time you are working on this.

-2d: Congratulations, you found an item that obsoletes one of your feats! This is a thing that should ever happen, since what you wear should be more important than who you are! Luckily you can go back and re-pick the feat. In this way, you have actually lost progress while progressing forward through character creation.

3) At the end of the draft you can pick up late-round draft steals for pennies on the dollar, like wondrous items, rituals, or “consumables” (steady my heart at the thought of my consumable might!)

4) If you do not have inherent bonuses on, the system absolutely requires you to replace everything roughly every 4-6 levels to remain baseline competent in battle, otherwise you become useless. If inherent bonuses are on, you will still want to seek out replacement items at roughly every new tier, perhaps a little sooner.

5) Every character needs very specific types of weapons, armor, and magical properties because of how the system is designed. The vast majority of items are worthless to a given PC. If as a DM you randomly roll items for the characters at the end of the quest or whatever, these will all be vendor trash unless it’s very general use.

Essentially, 4E equipment is actually worse than 3E equipment, because 3E treadmilling was actually pretty easy (for me, at least) to house rule. To remove most of the trouble, the character just needed one item that gave multiple bonuses that increased over time. This was still inelegant as fuck, but the 4E designers did not even learn this lesson.

NOW, in addition to treadmilling, you have to synergize and cross your eyes to look out for all the best redundancies and double-downs on your build.

6) Pop quiz, how many magical items did Gandalf, the archetypal high-magic/high-level wizard character, have?

-A cool sword

-A cool ring

-A cool staff

-Technically a cool horse

Frodo is lagging behind with three, one of which was not very helpful.

These are actually complex sets of gear for Tolkien and many of his contemporary and near-contemporary writers. Most Tolkien characters have 1-2 such items, and many none. None of these items were integral to the characters–they weren’t powerless without them. They didn’t have boss magical shit on every part of their bodies, and it was often unclear if the items really did anything palpable.

There’s some effort by 4E to make the equipment mart system (a completely atrocious notion to start with) less important and necessary–clearly they wanted to focus on just those first three big items–but their effort to simplify the system failed dismally, and they made it all worse than ever.

Feats? Feats are fucking easy. Pay your taxes, pick up your +1s, spend what you have left on the optimizers specific to your strategy. Still terrible, but I can do feats for a level 30 in ten minutes. “