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Hey Guys, I've just been looking through some new stuff on WOTC and found the July Updates, which I have only just started reading but already a big change has been made, if your a wizard that is. Magic Missile is now less damage, but auto-hit, in an aim to restore the power to its classical form apparently.

Also, the new Essentials line of products is going to slightly alter the way some classes work. Most notably the wizard class. Apparently, soon all wizard encounter powers will have a miss effect. E.G. if you miss with burning hands you deal half damage (except against minions of course).

I'm still looking through the updates, I may find some more juicy bits.

EDIT: Yes I did, straight after Magic Missile in fact, Dispel Magic is now an encounter power, makes sense to me.
EDIT: Legions Hold has been made less powerful, lol.
EDIT: HA! Increasing the Tempo (which Rhian just used on Karag has also been made less powerful. No two of the four attacks can be against a single target. Dodged that bullet.... poor Tarrasque razz

Word around the block is thus: Classes light on miss effects will be gaining more and there will be a version of "every"(starting withe 'core 8') class sans dailies. Essentially, 4.5e but without actually changing editions.

Yes and no. It's a rather complex topic, to be honest. But, more options is NEVER a bad thing. What they're doing is smarter than scrapping 4e and releasing 4.5e. They plan to let it all co-exist, and from the sounds of it, it shouldn't cause any major imbalance issues. Time will tell though.

I'm upset about the limiting of free actions. I mean, I need to check some things and see if they're free actions, or just actions, so it might not matter for my plans to make a barbarian that gets like 4 basic attacks on a crit. Because barbarian feels like a class I should make all about gambling on rolling that 20. xp

That, and I'm not sure if this will adversely affect warlords. It has probably fixed some abusable things, but I worry it might have just made some things that seemed okay less viable.