JonathanTheBlack said: Thief and Hunter don't deal excessive damage compared to their counterparts. They just have different options. Elementalist (Fire) does do significant damage but that is ALL they can really do. There is little else they can achieve compared to the options many other classes have. And water elementalists can rearrange a 3x3 square of enemies and allies at will without needing to target the victims of the slide. That's absurdly powerful. Turns an enemy-advantageous arrangement into an ally-advantageous one, at will, with only one successful hit. And I seem to remember having a level 1 berserker with something like 22 or 23 AC a few campaigns back doing striker-level damage, while the warden in the same party was rocking 19 AC and hitting for 1d8's. Thieves and Hunters are okay. I haven't looked into how they can be abused yet, because nobody has ever tried to use one in my campaigns. But the fact that a couple essentials classes are not overpowered compared to vanilla 4E does not mean I can open up the whole series to players without somebody inevitably picking one of the broken classes.