4rt From the PHB

Some sneaky person at the GAMA trade show snapped a few shots of the PHB, and the pics are up at EN World:

Pic 1

Pic 2

Pic 3

I'm hesitant to say much about the art, since the shots have a lot of glare and such in them, though it is interesting how many lightsabers we see being used. ;)

The middle one has the most legible text, and we can see that rangers are "strikers" by role who "concentrate on either ranged attacks or two weapon melee fighting to deal a lot of damage to one enemy at a time." We knew that was coming, but I still expect the 4e-is-a-MMOG-clone crowd to foam at the mouth over that.

We can also see that armour proficiencies are much more specific. It's not light, medium, and heavy, but now lists specific types of armour: cloth, leather, hide. Hit points are also fixed now; instead of rolling for them, you get a flat 12 plus your Constitution score at first level, and 5 more every level after that.

The classes are clearly more heavily defined now than they were under 3rd edition. I'm very curious to see what people do with them when they actually get to use them in play.