Hybrids

Hybrids are complicated, especially if you don't have the Character Builder. They're a lot closer to Multiclassing than 4e's actual Multiclass system. You take two classes, take half of the hit points from each class, add them together, add your Aunt's telephone number and divide by the square root of zero. You lose most of the minor class features from each class, but you can gain one of them back later by taking a Hybrid Talent Feat. You get a few skills from each class, but some classes get extra skills. You take three points from your IQ and add it to your pants size. You get one At-Will from each class, and you can cherry-pick your Encounter and Daily powers from either class. If one of the classes uses Power Points, you can choose an option that makes them more like normal powers. You get all the weapon proficiencies but only the lesser of the armor proficiencies. If your paternal grandmother was a Half-Orc, you also get a fruit basket and a three-legged newt named Nadine. Or something like that.

Hybrids are great for jack-of-all-trades characters, but it's hard to come up with an optimized combination that works really well. I foresee them being used far more in roleplay-heavy campaigns than in combat-centric games. You can come up with some great combinations if you really work at it, but you'll still be giving up something somewhere. The difficulty is that the two classes need to have several points of synergy; specifically Primary Stat, Armor, and Weapon.

Of course, a Fighter/Wizard sounds awesome. You can rush into battle, slashing everyone around you, and launch fireballs at those farther away. But Wizard spells are based on INT, and you put all your points into STR and CON so you could survive the melee. You need to use your wand to cast that fireball, but your hands are full with your sword and shield. And Hybrids only start with the lesser armor of the two classes, so you're going to get cut to ribbons rushing into battle in your Wizard robe. Sure, you can take a Hybrid Talent Feat to regain the Fighter's normal Armor Proficiencies, but that's a feat that could have gone toward something else.

On the other hand, some classes work together pretty well, but upon closer inspection seem sort of pointless. I started putting together a CHA-based Warlock/Sorcerer, and it was looking pretty good... the stats, armor, and weapons all worked pretty well together. Until I realized that neither class was really adding anything to the other. The two classes are too similar - either way you're firing blasts of arcane energy from a distance. Unless there's a particular roleplay reason your character has studied the two fields, you'll probably be stronger as a full-blood Sorcerer or Warlock.

Now I'm not particularly good at optimizing characters, so I'm not going to run down a list of the best Hybrid combos. (The WOTC forums are probably full of cheesy builds by now anyway, so try there.) Instead I'm just going to mention a few observations, and notes about combos I'd like to try. If you want a quick reference to help you decide what might work, I put this together: Classes and Builds. It's a list of all the different 4e classes, the suggested primary stats, and the races that match the primary stats. It might help to have all the information in one place.

Class Features
Hybrids lose most of the features you automatically get with that class, unless you take extra feats to get them back. So the best Hybrids are ones where you didn't use the class features much anyway. For example, Rogues keep Sneak Attack, which is of course their best feature. But they lose First Strike, which is painful. First Strike allows Rogues to use their Sneak Attack in the opening round of battle, and a crafty Rogue can change the entire dynamic of the encounter if they use the right power on the right enemy. My buddy Rick once took out the boss in the opening round, which left the DM cursing. So most Hybrid Rogues will want to take the First Strike Hybrid Talent Feat.

Meanwhile, my Archer Ranger Voranna hardly ever uses most of her lesser class features. Of course she uses Hunter's Quarry all the time, but Hybrid Rangers keep that. The features she would have lost are Prime Shot and Defensive Mobility. Prime Shot gives you an attack bonus if you're the closest ally to your target. That's fine for melee rangers, but Voranna tries to keep as many allies as possible between her and the enemies. Defensive Mobility gives her a bonus to AC vs Opportunity Attacks, which can be very useful in certain situations, but in five levels I've still yet to provoke an OA. So while Voranna's not a Hybrid, I very well might not have noticed if she was.

At-Will Powers
Hybrids get one At-Will from each class. Keep this in mind. Some characters have a tendency to use the same At-Will every round, while others have cause to use both. My Voranna uses Twin Strike almost exclusively, so she wouldn't have minded giving up her second At-Will for that of another class. But a Cleric, for example, might miss having both Astral Seal (which is very useful but doesn't do any damage) and an actual Cleric attack power. The worst is the Hybrid Druid, who no longer gets that extra At-Will for their alternate form. I hope they errata that, but as of this writing a Hybrid Druid is pretty limited IMO.

A lot of players are talking about making Hybrid Rangers, because Twin Strike is one of the most coveted At-Wills in the game. Other players are condemning that combo as pure cheese, but welcome to the world of D&D.

Armor
As I mentioned earlier, Hybrids only get the lesser armor of the two classes. However, the armor prof for the other class is regainable with the Hybrid Talent Feat. This makes Paladin a particularly attractive choice because you're only one feat away from plate armor. So you could take whatever you want as your primary class, and use the Paladin simply for the armor.

Skills
Your skills are a mix of the two classes, but some combinations yield more skills than others. If you want a skill-heavy character, you might consider making a Hybrid Rogue, as they get two more skills than the norm. Bards and Rangers each get one more skill than the norm.

Personally, I'm itching to abuse this system with a character so versatile that she's not even playable. Have a hybrid that also takes multiclass feats. Make her a Half-Elf so I can take her Dilletante power from a third class. Make one of her classes Bard so I can take even more multiclass feats. And so on, until she knows how to do a little bit of everything (and sucks at all of it).

Some combinations suffer or excel simply depending on which class you want to put in the background. For example, I've been considering making an Elf Ranger/Rogue, or possibly a Rogue/Ranger. Yeah, same thing, but stay with me here. With either combination, I'm going to want the following feats as early as possible:

Lethal Hunter (+ Quarry Damage)
Weapon Focus Longbow (+ Damage)
Weapon Expertise Longbow (+ Attack Rolls)
Treetop Sniper (Elf Only, Use Longbow for Rogue Powers)
First Strike Hybrid Feat (Have Combat Advantage at start of battle)
Backstabber (More Sneak Attack Damage)
Improved Initiative (+4 Initiative)

The first three are all I need to have a happy archer at level 4, and I already mentioned the Hybrid Rangers don't lose anything that I'll miss. But the other 4 feats are fairly important to have an effective Longbow Rogue, IMO. So my plan would be to simply forget the Rogue part until I'm level 6, other than the extra skills. Of course, this also means I can't take whatever else normal archers would be taking from levels 6-10, but them's the breaks with specialized classes.

Now, if I were to do it the other way around, emphasizing the Rogue over the Ranger, I'd probably want to take Backstabber and First Strike early on. I'd forget the bow altogether at first, and probably wouldn't even buy one until I had the Treetop Sniper feat. So for the first 4-6 levels I would act as a normal Rogue, my only disadvantage being that because of Hybrid First Strike, I'm starting one feat behind most Rogues.

The third way to approach this is to embrace the Hybrid - take Treetop Sniper first, because the combo is built around that feat. Then just live with the fact that I'm not going to be as effective as either class for a few levels. Maybe I'd use my 1st level experiences to decide whether I want to emphasize the Rogue or Ranger feats early on, or I could just alternate them.

Or course, this doesn't matter so much if you're in a campaign that lets you start at a higher level. But I've been playing for over a year and I still haven't played a character over level 6. So the order of feats at early levels is critical to me.

So in short, while you certainly can build some highly effective builds if you do the research, IMO Hybrids better thought of as flavor for people who want to play versatile characters. But useful or not, Hybrids are definitely one of the more interesting things in the PHB3.

Players Handbook 3

I realize I'm late to the game here, but it took me a while to actually look through the Player's Handbook 3 and play around with the new builds in the Character Builder. I still haven't looked closely at a few of the classes, but I've seen enough to know that the PHB3 is not quite as big a release as the PHB2.

Races: Githzerai, Minotaur, Shardmind, Wilden

We seem to be scraping the bottom of the barrel here. Not only are there only four, but they're a bit too exotic for a PHB, in my opinion. None of these are races you expect to see walking around town, or serving beer at the local tavern. But then that's one of the big differences between the tone of 4e as opposed to previous editions. D&D used to be about ordinary people who were destined for greatness, farmers and apprentices who only became heroes after doing great deeds and earning experience points. But Fourth Edition is about people who were exceptional to begin with, people who stood out from the crowd even before the first play session. I'm okay with that, but it turns some players off.

Of the new races, I really don't see myself trying any of them out. I can see Minotaurs appealing to the same people who play brutish Dragonborn, Half-Orcs, and Goliaths. The other three appear to have been added just to fit the new classes. The Shardmind seems especially alien to me; I just don't know how someone would roleplay one. It's hard enough to think through your motivations when you're playing a Dragonborn, but I can't even imagine the wants and desires of a creature made of animated crystal.

Classes: Ardent, Battlemind, Monk, Psion, Runepriest, Seeker, Hybrid

Well, we finally got the Monk, and we'd been needing that for a while. I like what they've done to the class, giving them both moves and attacks in their powers. I really want to try one sometime.

The new Psionic classes are very different. The biggest change is the "Power Point" sytem - instead of encounter powers, you get a certain number of PP per encounter. (C'mon, WOTC, think about the potential abbreviations before you name things.) The PP can be used to augment your At-Wills, to make them as powerful as Encounter powers. It's a lot more versatile than normal Encounter powers, because you can either spend 1 PP to make your At-Will a little bit more powerful, or 2 PP to make it a lot more powerful. So if you have 2 PP per encounter, basically you can use two mediocre Encounter powers that battle, or 1 really good Encounter power instead.

Since the Psionic power source is the PHB3's big thing, they had to make sure they had at least one Psionic class for each battle role. So whether you prefer Controllers, Strikers, Leaders, or Defenders, there is something Psionic you can try out. Personally I'd like to try the Battlemind. They're the second 4e class to use CON as their primary stat (the other being certain Warlocks), but they have the same armor proficiencies as Fighters. So they get high AC and a lot of hit points right off the bat. Plus their marking system is pretty neat - They can damage adjacent marked enemies who attack the Battlemind's allies, and they get to shift with their marked foe as an immediate reaction to the foe's shifting.

The Hybrids are complicated but interesting, and combinations range from useless to potentially gamebreaking. A lot of really creative combinations could come from this, and there's a few I'm hoping to try sometime. I'll give them a blog of their own.

Skill Powers

One of my favorite things in the PHB3 is the skill powers. These are utility powers that can be taken by any class, as long as they're trained in a specific skill. I used to hate the choices of utility powers, as a lot of them are worthless to me. So this is a nice way to give us more options.

A lot of them are kind of useless unless you're in a completely roleplay-based campaign. For example, they might let you reroll certain skill checks, or let you roll one kind of check in place of another. Meh. Some of them have been done before for specific classes, but are now available to anyone who trains in a certain skill. For example, Graceful Maneuver is a level 6 Acrobatics power that lets you shift half your speed, which is similar to the Rogue Level 2 power Tumble.

My favorites are the ones for Endurance and Heal, as they can give any class a little bit of healing. I'll likely make sure all my characters are trained in at least one of those from now on. One really neat one is the Level 2 Endurance Daily power Invigorating Presence, which allows you to give nearby allies 10+(CON mod) temporary hitpoints when you use your second wind. There's also Third Wind (Endurance Daily 6) which lets you spend a healing surge as a minor action, Physicians Care (Heal Encounter 6) which lets you or an ally spend a surge, Reactive Surge (Endurance Encounter 6) which lets you spend a healing surge as an immediate reaction to being bloodied, Miraculous Treatment (Heal Daily 16) which heals an ally without spending a surge, and so on.

In a pinch, almost character could fill in for the party healer. So in addition to Hybrids and Multiclass feats, we now have a third way to dabble in another role.

Feats

The PHB3 does include some new feats, but most of them are just extras for the new races and classes. There is one interesting feat that's been the source of a lot of debate on the D&D forums. Versatile Expertise is like taking Weapon Expertise and Implement Expertise at the same time. You can choose one weapon group and one implement group, and you get an attack roll bonus when using either. With two feats for the price of one, why would anyone still take Weapon or Implement Expertise? Some say that the feat is broken, giving an unfair advantage to implement users. Other say it's a math fix, helping the classes who unfairly had to take more feats to be as effective as their allies. And still others say we're reading the feat incorrectly, and that it's not nearly as powerful as it first sounds.

Wrap-Up

There's also some new items, but nothing really big to report. Overall, this was the least interesting of the PHB series to me, and I hope they don't feel the need to release a PHB4. Now that we have the Monk - the last missing "core" class - there's just no need for more. If they want to make more playable monster classes, like goblins or kobolds, I'd rather they make that a book in itself. Actually, a whole book dedicated to playable monsters would actually be kind of interesting. But I can't imagine where else the PHB series could possibly go.