Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I don't mind at all that WotC has sacrificed some sacred cows to make the system more streamlined. I don't mind that you have to roll to hit with magic missile. I don't mind that you have to use miniatures, or a battlegrid. I don't mind that the game is more combat-oriented. I do mind that the game just feels boring. Sure, I can make a Dragonborn fighter and an Eladrin wizard. But they don't do anything spectacularly different. Except that the wizard is, for some magically unknown reason, unable to whack anything with his staff. All of the powers that they've added essentially boil down to XdY + Ability modifier damage, and if you're lucky, a 1-turn status effect. I give great praise to WotC for making the classes blanaced. It's very difficult (if not impossible) to push your character off the RNG completely. The problem is that they made everything too balanced, so that no one does anything particularly flavorful. Not only that, but the character you make is essentially straight-jacketed into one of the two (and sometimes three) predetermined character archetypes that are presented. Taking a power from a different character build is inefficient, because it takes a different attribute to use, which you probably don't have as high. I don't care if my wizard impales people with ice spikes or burns them with fire, because there's functionally no difference. Defenses against particular damage types are so few and far between that you can do the same thing with the same spell, over and over again. The elite and solo monsters that are presented are a joke. They have anywhere from 2x-5x the amount of HP a normal monster should have, and have an extra 10%-25% chance to end any effect on them every turn. Considering that combat against normal enemies takes forever, you spend all of your encounter and daily powers against the enemy, and then sit there and grind away at its massive amount of health with your piddly at-will abilities, which do precisely jack squat in the long run. The rituals are dumb. All of them are assigned a cost. It takes 10% of your level-equivalent character wealth to detect a secret door. The rituals themselves are interesting, but I'd rather save up for the 3,000,000 gp required for a better sword (yeesh) than pay 5,000 gp every time I want to teleport. It seems like the playtesters didn't go past about level 10. Magic items are ridiculously expensive. The higher-level encounters just don't add up with the math the designers used. And you're chokeheld to even fewer options the higher you go. Overall, the system is great for a one-shot weekend thing. But if you want to make a long-running campaign, stick to one of the other editions.