The HotFL martial builds (knight, slayer, and thief) have a common schtick for their utility powers: most require training in a specific skill. For instance, the level 2 Knight’s utilities Battle Leader, Glowering Threat, Minor Resurgence, and Push Forward require Diplomacy, Intimidate, Endurance, and Athletics respectively.

I like this idea: it makes my skill choices feel a little less meaningless. Honestly, my dwarven fighter’s Endurance check does not come up that much. I chose it to match my character concept. It’s nice that it might get me an extra utility choice.

Some of the utility choices are executed better than others. Among the level 6 thief utilities, Hidden Blade has a Thievery prerequisite and Slip Aside requires Stealth. All rogues get Thievery and Stealth for free, so this isn’t much of a prerequisite.

Here’s a game: Guess the skill prerequisites for the level 6 Knight utilities, just based on their names. (To see the answers, highlight the section or hit Ctl+A.)

Knight’s Challenge intimidate
Helping Hands healing
Rapid Advance athletics
Dauntless Endurance endurance, good job!

More Essentials thoughts…

Each class chapter is illustrated with some new iconic heroes.

Take a look at the iconics from the Fighter chapter: Lyriel, the elf knight, Fargrim, the dwarf slayer, and Shara, the human slayer. They all have something in common:
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After some strange experiments among the 4e Player’s Handbook classes, WOTC settled down and mostly published Dual Ability Dependent (DAD) class builds – ones that required a strong primary ability for attack rolls and damage, and a secondary ability that provided bonuses for various class features and powers. Most of the Heroes of the Fallen Lands classes follow this pattern.

The thief is an odd exception:

Ability Scores
Determine your ability scores (page 38), ensuring that Dexterity is your highest score. […] Strength and Charisma are also important to a thief, so consider making one of them your second-highest ability score.

At first glance, the Thief looks like a MAD (multiple ability dependent) build, since it has powers that reward both Strength and Charisma. On closer inspection, the thief is actually pretty SAD (single attribute dependent). There are no class powers that use Strength or Charisma. Strength and Charisma are used in a bare handful of optional at-will tricks and utility powers, none of which dazzle me.
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The Knight and Slayer fighter builds are presented in separate sections of Heroes of the Fallen Lands, and have very little in common. They have different armor proficiencies, different powers and even different roles. Here’s what they share:

Of the at-will stances, Slayer and Knight share Battle Wrath (+2 to damage) and Poised Assault (+1 to attack).

Both Knights and Slayers get the Power Strike encounter power feature.

Of the Level 2 utility powers, Knight and Slayer share Minor Resurgence (gain 5 temporary HP when bloodied) but the other 3 choices differ. (Since all these utilities are labeled “Fighter Utility 2”, can a Knight take one from the Slayer section and vice versa?)
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The HotFL slayer shares two stances, Battle Wrath and Poised Assault, with the knight, but where they depart, the slayer has some very nice power!

• Berserker’s Charge: It’s hard to imagine not wanting this around for charges (+2 speed and +2 attack). Seems like a pretty solid pick.
  

  Of course, one of the main times you charge is when you’re stunned, in which case you won’t have the minor action to activate this stance. Still. CHARRRGE!

• Duelists Assault: Maybe it’s just me being super greedy, but I can’t pass up damage bonuses like this. It starts at +4 and climbs by 2 each tier. The catch? The target must have no creatures adjacent but you. My feeling is that this is a must have stance for the slayer and is worth seeking out opportunities to take advantage of it!
• Mobile Blade: This lets you move up to your Dex bonus when you hit an enemy with a basic attack. This would be a lot more impressive if it were a shift, but as a move, it likely subjects you to several OAs, which makes it not worth the trouble in my book.
• Unfettered Fury: A -2 to attack for a +4 to damage that increases by two each tier doesn’t seem worth it compared to Duelists Assault and Battle Wrath. I would almost always choose one or both of the other before choosing this one (unless the DM assured me I’d be attacking bulbous, extremely low-AC flesh sacks of hit points for the rest of my adventuring career).
  

  Agreed. This stance screams out “mathematically unsound decision”. But you didn’t hire the Slayer for his math skills.

More Essentials thoughts…

PHB fighters choose either a +1 bonus to one- or two-handed weapons, which is BAD. A fighter with a +1 to two-handed weapons will forever disdain one-handed weapons. I’d like fighters to be the most versatile weapon-using class.

Essentials Knights have a +1 to all weapons, which is GOOD.

Essentials also have a class feature called “Weapon Specialization”:

Level 7: Weapon Specialization
You gain one of the following benefits of your choice.

Bladed Step: After you use power strike with a heavy blade, you can immediately shift 1 square adjacent to an enemy. You then gain combat advantage against that enemy until the end of your next turn.

Staggering Hammer: When you use power strike with a hammer and the target is adjacent to you, the target is also immobilized until the end of your next turn or until you are no longer adjacent to it. You also gain combat advantage against the target until the next turn.

I like the fact that a hammer-using knight feels different from one with a sword. Making the fighter’s choice of weapon meaningful is GOOD. But making that choice permanent is BAD.

The simple fix is to give both of these abilities to any knight. The meaningful choice will be made, not at level 7, but whenever the knight draws a weapon.

I’m all for letting fighters bathe in the glory of having mastery over two or more types of weapons. However, simply allowing both of these specializations won’t quite do the trick. You’ve also got the feat hump, where expertise and weapon focus will make them lean one way or another, so those would need to be houseruled.

Agreed, which is why expertise and weapon focus are BAD.

More Essentials thoughts…

The knight has some pretty interesting at-wills, not the least of which are its totally boss Defender Aura and Battle Guardian power (the replacements for the PHB fighter’s Combat Challenge class feature). Let’s dive right in!

Battle Aura: An aura 1 that gives all unmarked enemies a -2 to attack rolls when it makes an attack that doesn’t include the knight. Not only is it easy to keep track of, it’s unobtrusive: other defenders can mark enemies at their pleasure and the knight will take care of the rest of adjacent enemies. Also, once it’s up it takes no actions to keep going, so it’s totally a fire up and forget ability.

Battle Guardian: Like the second half of Combat Challenge, this power lets you make a free attack if an enemy attacks someone else or shifts away. It’s probably one of the best defender abilities because it’s an opportunity action. It both frees the knight up to use their immediate actions on other powers and lets them take multiple attacks a round if a bunch of enemies decide to ignore them. Much nicer than the fighter and other defenders who are basically spent after their first free attack, letting other enemies run off and attack at their relative leisure. It’s fun to have that kind of firepower, even if it doesn’t come up very often.

Knight Stances: Some fairly interesting/powerful stances, even if brute force will probably end up winning the day. These stances make me excited about playing a warlord again, so I can help the fighter make a lot of extra basic melee attacks!

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Traditionally built classes start with one encounter power at level 1 and reach a maximum of 4 at level 11. Heroes of the Fallen Lands fighters start with one encounter power, “Power Strike”, and pick up multiple uses of that power until they reach 4 at level 13.

Power Strike: Free action.

Trigger: You hit an enemy with a melee basic attack using a weapon.

Effect: The target takes 1[W] extra damage from the triggering attack.

Level 17: 2[W] extra damage.

Level 27: 3[W] extra damage.

Power Strike lets you apply extra damage to a successful basic attack. The total damage from a Power Strike-enhanced basic attack is about equal to the damage from a regular encounter power.

Basically, while regular classes get 4 encounter powers, with varying extra effects, fighters get 4 copies of the same simple encounter power. It doesn’t have any extra effects, but it can’t miss either.

Having 4 power strikes is pretty fun, though they definitely are a bit underpowered compared to some other notable fighter encounter powers. This is mitigated somewhat by the fighter weapon specializations that add some nice effects when power strike is used. The coolest of these are probably the knight and slayer hammer and axe specializations, which immobilize and knock the target prone respectively.

More Essentials thoughts…

HotFL offers more advice than the 4e PHB on race/class combinations, descending (gasp) into CHARACTER OPTIMIZATION ADVICE!

Here’s what the PHB has to say about cleric player races:

Humans and dwarves make ideal clerics. Elves, half-elves, and dragonborn are good clerics too, but they rarely have the same values of piety and reverence found in many human and dwarven cultures. […] The race you play and the deity your character worships have little effect on your cleric’s ability to utilize divine powers.

HotFL, on the other hand, has a full page about dwarf, elf, and human clerics, with comments like “Dwarves are a natural fit as warpriests, since they can gain a bonus to both Wisdom and Constitution.” The book also claims that there’s a long tradition of elf clerics, and “elf warpriests are instrumental in defending their people and the allied races of the mortal world.” If that’s the case, why don’t I see more elves in church?

Because elf warpriests are too busy adventuring and bathing the lands in the blood of undead, goblins, and undead goblins to ever step foot in a church, save perhaps to beg some fellow holy man (or woman!) to resurrect a buddy before hitting level 8 and being able to do it themselves.

Really? Too busy adventuring? Because I notice they find plenty of time to dance about trees.

More Essentials thoughts…

Essentials classes don’t get the Ritual Caster feat, and there are no rituals in Heroes of the Fallen Lands. Arguably the most important rituals, Raise Dead and Enchant Magic Item, are dealt with in other ways.

Enchant Magic Item is dealt with by not letting PCs enchant magic items. Most magic items are now “uncommon” or “rare”, which means they “are not usually created in the current age of the world”, and the book assumes that “common” magic items are created by NPCs.

Raise Dead is replaced with the 8th level Warpriest class feature, Resurrection, which is pretty much identical, except that

• it can only be cast on someone who died in the past 24 hours (as opposed to a month for Raise Dead).

• the death penalty (-1 to all rolls) can be eliminated by 3 milestones or 3 extended rests, which means you can sleep it off; you don’t have to adventure it off.
• Instead of costing thousands of GP, it’s FREEEEEEE!
  

  That definitely takes the sting off of dying, especially in the early levels of a tier. 500 gold isn’t much to a level 10 character, but to a level 1 character it’s a small fortune! Similarly, 5,000 gold is a big hit to a level 11 party. One thing I do like about this is that there’s less incentive for people to make new characters when they die, something that I’ve had some trouble with in my campaign.

  Create Water might not have been a ritual, but it should have been. This is now an encounter power available to the storm domain! Crazy and actually pretty powerful. Imagine if you could walk into any desert and start pumping out a gallon of water every five minutes. You and your party would certainly never go without! Unfortunately, Dark Sun is the only campaign world in which this would be super useful, and there are no clerics in Dark Sun.

More Essentials thoughts…