Im kind of suprised that nobody started a thread on the bladesinger preview..

[D'karr]

Some people always allow their first reactions to something to be negative. There hasn't even been enough time for most people to even give this a try once, let alone several sessions to make a judgement.

This reminds me of the "gnashing of teeth" and the "legendary suffering" that followed the release of the monk class and the mystic theurge in 3e. There were entire threads written about how broken these classes were and how they totally changed the balance of the game. These threads of course by people that had not played one single minute with these classes, they were for all intents and purpose "theoretical playtesters".

In actual practice the monk class was one of the weakest classes in 3e and the mystic theurge suffered from the obvious balancing act that was a spell caster without a full spell progression. That didn't stop the "chicken littles" of the interwebs from over reacting.

When I first got the 4e PHB I looked at the classes there and after reading them I surmised that the Warlord was an interesting class but really did not grab my attention. A couple of months later I had to "volunteer" for the D&D Championship Open to fill a seat. I had no skin in the game so I took the last pregenerated character left after everyone had picked, the Warlord. Let me tell you, the class played significantly differently than it had read, and was a total blast to play.

That is one of the reasons that I don't "judge" anything anymore unless I've at least played it once or twice.