SamhainIA wrote:
some people have a hard time meeting the requirements of 3 ranks in a lore skill
There's no good reason that an Expert Archetype can't have 3 ranks in a Lore skill by Step 9.
My general opinion of Experts is they are one of the most flexible and strong Archetypes in the game. With 3 advancements they can get any 3+Passive Logic skills at 3 ranks per tier. That's typically 6 or 7. They can opt to specialize in particular skills at the beginning rather than have breadth because it's easy for them to add skills later at good ranks. They won't keep up with a hyper specialist caster of any build from a Talent perspective. But unless the caster is planning on taking more than 2 casting related Talents per tier, they can certainly keep pace. Even with adding more than 2 they can do it at an opportunity cost. They have the hardest time keeping up with a Martial Archetype, but if they selected Expert over it, it's because there is some other area of focus requiring 3 ranks / tier or lots of skill Talents.
The difference is that at a minimum, the Expert's secondary if not primary focus is always skills. If you want a more martial caster then a Martial archetype with secondary casting is probably best.
Even with that an Expert can with minimal effort keep a combat skill and casting skill maxed, and for one advancement take the best Martial Technique and A/DSC talent every tier with a ton of room left over for further specialization. The mechanical advantage can be seen in the poll Cody posted for characters. While a limited sample set, 40% of primary characters are Experts. The second most common is Arcane. I expect that's because you can't start with full casting as a Elder or Eldritch caster as an Expert. You can with Primal, Sarishan Sorcerer-Priest and Psionics now using the Undisciplined Psion from CoH.
Expert is a good foundation for a lot of characters. A bit of tweaking would help the balance between the Archetypes. I like that the system supports so many different ways to get to the same concept. Choices such as Archetype just help put the spin on it.
With a sweep of his hat,
Paul