Corsair114 wrote: Never had DDI, maybe that would have made it better enough to .
I could be remembering wrong, but assault Swordmages got very little improvements. Almost all support for the class focused on the Shielding version of the class. Which, granted, started out in far worse shape than Assault did, but by the time all the support for the class came out, they were far and away the only true version of the Swordmage to play. Hell, one of the later paragon paths just outright gave them a
better version of Assault's main unique gimmick. After a while, the only time I'd see Assault sword mages used in build threads were in various hybrid builds.
It's actually little impressive how much effort they put into refusing to learn how bloody important basic attacks were (to classes that didn't have
Ranger or
Fighter in their names) and even after the bandaid feat for MBA's,they continued that trend by not understanding just how much better it was for a class who could get a '
counts as a MBA' power with their actual class/power keywords instead of using the generic attack. And still beyond that they never even made a ranged version for non dex archers. The closest you could get required two feats, had stat reqs, a god req, paragon level and still was limited to shortbows and just cha or wis characters.
All right up until Essentials... at which point, Melee basic attacks suddenly became the most important thing in the world. So much so that they had to be protected from the grubby hands of any non essential or non str based types. So the general purpose band aid feat was just flat out deleted and the characters that needed it to function were left flapping in the wind.