AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Right - R&D has a really bad idea about how damage works in their system - multi-attacking is almost always the way to go, yet most of the Essentials PCs don't have it unless they do something on the odd side.
If I were going to make a Slayer, I'd make it have Twin Strike+Stat damage - and that's it. No encounters or daily powers, Str for melee attacks and heavy thrown, Dex for finesse weapon or ranged attacks. Fighter armor & skills. There'd be a power called Fighter's Strike which essentially was 1w+stat - and Slayer would have an option to make two of them as part of a standard. Combat Challenge would use it when doing an interrupt, etc...
Yeah, brain dead simple and boring as all get out, but solves the 'hey, someone just wants to play a dead simple beat stick fighter or archer...'
I don't think R&D was in any doubt about the over-effectiveness of multi-attacks. That's why Essentials basically doesn't get them (there are some exceptions IIRC, but mostly you have to bring in 'classic' 4e material to get multiple attacks). I believe the performance level of Essentials classes is exactly what WotC designed it to be. They don't 'fall off' at Paragon and Epic, they do what WotC BELIEVED they were doing with the classic classes when they wrote them, but by the time they figured out it wasn't so they lacked time to go back and do another round of redesign to fix things. So classic classes are above the designed power curve at higher levels. Later they just went with it and figured people would sort out how to make it work. The fact that they mostly gave up on Epic made it semi-moot to them anyway.