Tydanosaurus wrote:That, and everything scales evenly. Everybody's offense bonuses and defense bonuses go up exactly the same. (Well, in theory, the monsters get kind of screwy IMO.) Your -1 always is a 10% disaster. In 3E, things scale unevenly, so your -1 ends up being less important. It usually only matters on your 3rd iteration, or strong saves, stuff like that. It matters, but not quite as much.
That's flawed thinking.
The only time the -1 becomes less important is if you get pushed off the RNG entirely, but that's something that just shouldn't happen in a well designed RPG, at least not against foes of similar level.
So you're proposing that a bug of 3.5 is actually a feature, which is quite incorrect.
The problem with 4E isn't so much that a -1 penalty to your attack stat is a -1 penalty and hurts you by -1 for the rest of the game. I mean, that's supposed to happen. A -1 penalty is a -1 penalty.
The problem comes in the very concept of an attack stat in the first place. As long as you have attack stats, then pumping that attack stat is going to be the most important thing that you do. The only reason that 3.5 seemed like it was possible not to max out your intelligence as a caster is when you weren't using spells with saves. In simple terms, you were using spells without an attack stat that used a generic DC.
Now, the answer IMO is to just eliminate attack stats altogether. Your ability scores are for skills and defenses only. Your attack should be fixed to some number, like 4 + 1/2 level. And that way you don't hose multiclass characters as much through MAD either.