Which class do you hate the most?

I don't like the Cleric, despite its iconic status and my love of Paladins. The Cleric tries to cover too much in one class, and lacks historical or literary resonance.

Why is the default holy man class smashing people's faces in with a mace? And why a mace? Why not a sword or bow? Is the cleric supposed to be a priest, a monk, or a friar? What seperates its divine magic from the Wizard's arcane magicon a fundamental level other than that one has healing and the other doesn't?

The Cleric just feels like it lacks a clear identity.

1st/2nd edition thief
3rd edition bard
4th edition PHB wizard

Ratskinner said:

I know that different editions and takes on psionics have come at it in different ways. However, the arguments I've heard from psionics fans about why it must be so different all seem to fall back to the "I'm special-er".

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Why is a thief different from a fighter different from a druid, et c. It's about having a different play experience, not being more special than someone else.

Oni said:

Why is a thief different from a fighter different from a druid, et c. It's about having a different play experience, not being more special than someone else.

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I'd like to think so, but that's not the impression many psionics fans leave with me. That counts for in play, as well as on the net. For example: A Druid, Cleric, and Wizard all work magic and have special abilities. Psionicists basically do too. Nonetheless, its only psionics fans that I run into that demand that the basic spell mechanics won't work for psionics.

Incenjucar said:

Ehhh. Let's not get caught up entirely on class names, since they may not even exist in-game.

The class is a stealthy stabby guy who has shadow and death magic.

What are your feelings about stealthy stabby guys with shadow and death magic?

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The class was only that for 2 editions. Before that it was a thief with a percentile roll to kill you. My lingering hatred of the class comes from back then. I already agreed that I enjoy the 4E version, that it just has an unfortunate name.

I don't hate any. I'm happy for all of the listed classes to exist though I don't think the illusionist needs it's own class. I chose psion because it is the class I'd be least interested in playing. But I far from hate it.

Ratskinner said:

I generally agree. I'd be willing to bet you could carve off the "woodsman" part of ranger into a theme without getting too much static. Then you could tack that onto any class and have a woodsy themed Rogue or whatever. Of course, at this point its hard to say what (if anything) they are aiming for with the themes mechanically.

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Carve the "woodsman" part of the ranger and it isn't a ranger, it's a fighter. It would one issue I had with 4E. The wilderness aspects were almost completely regulated to skills and divorced from class.

Also I don't think themes will be complex enough to fully replace the flavor of certain class. A "woodsman" or "sorcerer" theme would have to be a page or 3 each just to be a justifiable replacement of classes.

I don't hate any class, but my least liked is the sorcerer.

In 3e it was a wizard, except worse. Less flexible, lags behind one level in spellcasting, and has to pay a price for using metamagic feats. Too heavy a price to pay if all you ever wanted was "not vancian".

In 4e I find them a little boring. Warlocks have more interesting flavor and mechanics which promote mobility and tactics, the sorcerer can literally just hang back and sling spells. Which is not very engaging to me.


But again, I don't hate it. I just like it least.

I wish this was a multiple-choice poll.

I hate Psions, because they always have to have their own special rules system that is different from everyone else. Easily one of the things I outright hated about 4e from the moment I heard about it is how they shoehorned power points back into the mix. It's completely unnecessary. And then everyone accuses you of being dumb or narrow minded when you don't want to bother having to keep track of multiple different casting systems.

I also hate Warlords. Not because I hate tactical fighting (I love it actually), but rather because the Fighter should be doing the tactical fighting. The division really hurts the fighter in the long run. There is also the question of why leaders have to heal, and why the warlord couldn't have been a controller but those take a backseat to the fighter issue.

Heck, Fighters themselves rub me the wrong way as of late. Simply because they are straitjacketed into playing with only one type of weapon in the later editions. Fighters who only use swords (or axes, or whatever other melee weapon tickles your fancy) are just horrible on the metagame level. Forcing encounters to revolve around the tip of a sword or render characters nearly useless. Which in turn makes anything as "complicated" as archers on top of a wall a "unbalanced." I would much rather have a "golf-bag" fighter than a "swordsman" fighter, at least the former could respond to a melee unfriendly encounter by pulling out a bow.

I'm not fond of the rest of the "redundant" classes: Paladin, Assassin, Warlock, Sorcerer, Illusionist, etc. But I don't really hate them because they don't impact the metagame as significantly.


So I voted psion, because I don't hate all renditions of the fighter, and the warlord thing is mostly in relation to the fighter.

Leatherhead said:

Heck, Fighters themselves rub me the wrong way as of late. Simply because they are straitjacketed into playing with only one type of weapon in the later editions. Fighters who only use swords (or axes, or whatever other melee weapon tickles your fancy) are just horrible on the metagame level. Forcing encounters to revolve around the tip of a sword or render characters nearly useless. Which in turn makes anything as "complicated" as archers on top of a wall a "unbalanced." I would much rather have a "golf-bag" fighter than a "swordsman" fighter, at least the former could respond to a melee unfriendly encounter by pulling out a bow.

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Part of this is the introduction of feats and the introduction of increasing ability scores. The concept of feat and ability score specialization says that Fighters are never going to be ranged specialists ever again. The mechanics determine the class features.

4E backpedaled a little bit on this with heavy thrown weapons, but that's pretty much a hack to partially offset the rules that do encourage players of Fighter PCs to not use ranged attacks.

It would be nice if 5E design did not include 46 classes like 4E, but instead allowed Fighters to be ranged specialists, Wizards to be Illusionists, etc.

5E could really get away with about 8 to 12 classes where each class allows one to specialize. For example, a Rogue-like PC could specialize into a Thief-like or Assassin-like class. A Ranger could be a Scout. A lot of the extra abilities that were thrown into the mix, just in order to have yet one more similar class, could be part of some type of class specialization.