D&D 5E Class Analysis: Fighter and Bard

Sacrosanct · Aug 17, 2014

Andor said:
Look, to be clear, you are not wrong, and Sacrosancts position is absurd. (With apologies, but it is.).

Which part of my position, specifically, is absurd:

1. Casters might not have the perfect spell in their spellbook
2. Casters might not have the perfect spell prepped
3. Casters might not have the available slots to cast the perfect spell
4. Casters might not have the proper components to cast the perfect spell

Any one of these disproves the white room theory, because the very premis of white room (the caster is better than/can replace class X) is dependent on the caster casting that spell when the appropriate scenario comes up.

I'd be very curious to know which part of the above you find absurd, and if you can explain why. Because those limitations are things that come up in games pretty often.

Andor · Aug 17, 2014

Storminator said:
I'm going to do a terrible job of contributing to this thread . . .

One of the things I love about 4e is the way it's enforced balance means I don't have to analyze the party's capability to make a fun encounter of whatever difficulty I like. If the party is 12th level, that's all I need to know.

In 3e days (and it looks like in 5e), I had to scour every capability of every PC to figure out how well their abilities would interact with my encounter and guess how well things would go. Or I could ignore that and risk either the TPK or the trivial boss fight.

So for me, as a DM, balance and fun go hand in hand.

PS

Well yes, Fun for the PCs and Fun for the GM are, or can be very different things. As I said in another thread as D&D classes level up they go through transformative shift in ability and power. And which direction they transfom in and when is a bit unpredictable. I recall a 3e game where my large 7th level party ecountered a mooncalf. This critter had High Int, a fly speed and Call Lightning at will. Our party in spite of being 7th level was a mix of odd-ball and multiclassed characters none of whom could fly and who were pretty weak in ranged damage. It should have been a TPK, but the GM played the critter like a moron instead and we barely managed to beat it. It was ... pretty unsatisfying. Personally I'd rather have had us wiped and started over with a more coherant party. A 7th level party in 3e should be able to deal with a flying foe with ranged attacks. We couldn't. Although thinking back on it the Druid could have done a lot more, but the player hated his character and sandbagged a lot.

So yeah, any system where the characters growth/abilities are unpredicable is a burden on the GM. The 40k RPG series is pretty popular where I am, but none of the GMs will touch Black Crusade with a 10' pole because designing encounters for it is such a pain.

Now, can you wind up with a 5e party that was in the same boat as my 3e party? Yes, but you'ld have to try pretty hard. The barrier to entry on abilities like flight and (especially) competant ranged damage is lower.

I think that with 5es bounded accuracy and flatter growth curve encounter building will be easier than in 3e. While Jack has valid points about encounter ending spells they apply more towards "Boss monsters" and not so much towards hordes. And hordes of Orcs will remain a valid threat just and the necromancers horde of skeletons does.

Andor · Aug 17, 2014

Sacrosanct said:
Which part of my position, specifically, is absurd:

1. Casters might not have the perfect spell in their spellbook
2. Casters might not have the perfect spell prepped
3. Casters might not have the available slots to cast the perfect spell
4. Casters might not have the proper components to cast the perfect spell

Any one of these disproves the white room theory, because the very premis of white room (the caster is better than/can replace class X) is dependent on the caster casting that spell when the appropriate scenario comes up.

I'd be very curious to know which part of the above you find absurd, and if you can explain why. Because those limitations are things that come up in games pretty often.

Actually your claim that they disprove the white room scenario is the absurd bit. You're setting up a strawman. Jack isn't claiming that perfection is needed. He is correctly pointing out that the transformative abilities of a spell caster accomplish things that a non-spell caster cannot. It doesn't need to be perfect. There are some very flexible and generally applicable spells which are usefull a lot of the time. Not all of the time. But even swords don't work all of the time, so where does that leave the fighter?

If you want to claim the corner case where the spell caster is out of luck, again the Antimagic Field spell is right there in the PHB. Ergo anti-magic areas are possible. And in that area the wizard doesn't even has his cantrips, he is a hireling with a crossbow. (Assuming he has one. I don't know why a 5e wizard would carry one actually.)

However the fact is that corner cases do not invalidate the general statement that for any given problem the Wizard has more options, and usually more effective options for dealing with it than the Fighter. Even in the case of the anti-magic field the Wizard could use Detect Magic to explore the boundaries of the zone more efficiently than the fighter could by waving his magic sword through the edge. And if they have to go in, he can use Animal Messenger to send his familly his love and last will and testament.

Or teleport home and hire an army of mooks.

The Champion does not benefit from any special rules that the Magic-user cannot access aside from his inherant toughness and extra attacks. If he can improvise a mug to the face the Wizard can too. What he cannot do is ignore an encounter he doesn't want to face with flight, or call a long rest in the middle of a dungeon with Rope Trick, and the Wizard can.

The error Jack is commiting is in ignoring the truth that these facts are not spoiling the Fighters fun for the simple reason that if he wanted to do them, he could get some spells by simply taking a different subclass, or multiclassing, or taking the right feats. 5e has an even lower buy-in cost to the magic system than 3e.

So he doesn't need to scream that fighters are worthless because a well played Wizard can solve problems they cannot, and you don't need to claim Wizards are useless because they need the perfect spell (they don't) and that swords always work (they don't.) D&D is game. The correct question is "Can my friends and I have fun playing this?" If the answer is no, then the whys of that question are worth arguing about.

Uskglass · Aug 17, 2014

Sacrosanct said:
Actually, the conversation has long since shifted to the age old "casters are always better" conversation

Better than what? The terms of comparison are martial classes, so yes, we are talking about the fighter, as it is a martial class.

So what? The claim was that casters are better/can replace the other classes. If the fighter can do more combat damage and take more damage himself without using any "magic power" than the wizard, then that's all that's needed to invalidate that claim. If the rogue can open locks better than a wizard without using any "perfect spell", that also invalidates the claim. I.e., the fighter doesn't need a perfect spell or option or a white room to prove the claim false.

Ok. The fighter is better (at combat specifically) than any spellcaster without spells (or dead).

ZombieRoboNinja · Aug 17, 2014

While I'm still cautiously of the opinion that "caster supremacy" isn't a big problem (with many provisos which I'll explain below), I want to thank Jack the Lad for his detailed and informative arguments on this issue. If I were scoring a debate here he would frankly have won pages ago, because he's the one providing the most appropriate and detailed arguments. But I'd like to go into it in a bit of detail, starting from a convenient list he made:

Jack the Lad said:
I’ve given gameplay examples of many different situations in which a caster obsoletes a Fighter, and I will compile them for you here, by level:

Level 1: Faerie Fire contributing more damage over the course of an encounter by giving the entire party Advantage than the Fighter does.

Level 1: Jump allowing even casters with 8 or 10 strength to outjump even a Champion Fighter with Remarkable Athlete.

Level 3: Wizards using Counterspell to shut down enemy casters entirely.

Level 3: Wizards using Levitate to be safe from melee-only opponents.

Level 5: Wizards using Fly to be safe from melee-only opponents and trivialise environmental barriers and challenges.

Level 7: Fabricate obsoleting mundane crafting by instantaneously creating things it would take a Fighter 300 days to create.

Level 7: Wizards using Animate Dead to summon skeletons that do more DPR than the Fighter and that only cost the Wizard a bonus action to command, meaning they can continue to cast alongside those attacks.

Level 9: Fabricate serving as a way to quickly make thousands of gold per day.

Level 9: Wall of Force allowing you to trap enemies under an inescapable barrier through which you can ping them down with cantrips at your leisure.

Level 9: Contagion's Slimy Doom option stunning enemies (including - for instance - CR16 and CR17 dragons with Legendary Saves) for 3 rounds, guaranteed - more than enough time to kill them.

Level 17: True Polymorph obsoleting the Fighter entirely past level 17 by allowing the Wizard to permanently turn into a CR17 Adult Red Dragon designed to be a challenging encounter for an entire party.

Now, first off, I only intend to argue that in the context of a typical combat-heavy adventure, in a situation where the DM is either pacing the adventure or tweaking the resting rules to mostly uphold recommended encounters per short and long rest, below level 17, and barring or houseruling the occasional broken spell, martial characters in general are able to contribute meaningfully alongside casters. That is a long, long list of provisos, and several of them frankly shouldn't be necessary: the "DM as rest-police" requirement came about when they basically officially decided that 5MWD was a DM problem, while the "many 9th-level spells and some others are broken" problem came about due to what can only have been insufficient testing, a desire to hew closely to the broken pre-4e iconic spells, and the almost unavoidable vagaries of having a spell chapter that's like 5 times as long as all the other combat rules in the game put together. That said, if you either stop at level 16 or add some crazy broken martial-only feats and abilities to even things out at high levels, and if you take a red marker to the spell chapter, I still think things will work pretty well.

Let's go through that list:

1. Faerie Fire is not a wizard spell. You've been pretty careful about not mixing things up here, but let's keep the class distinctions clear. For whatever reason, the "Fighter and Bard" thread turned into a "Wizard vs. Champion" thread, so let's stick with that comparison. (Which, we should remember, means that a chart similar to the OP's would result in a lot less "total health" for the wizard, since he doesn't get heal spells without special feats or multiclassing, and also has crappier armor.)

2. At level 1, Jump costs a very valuable spell slot, and it only lasts a minute, and it still will probably only give the wizard a jump distance of about 24-30 feat, about double that of the fighter. Meanwhile, the rest of the day the fighter can jump about twice as far as the wizard without spending any resources. Now, at higher levels this MIGHT be something to come back to, because a level 20 wizard will have enough preparation slots and level 1 spell slots that he can spend one on Jump if it seems potentially useful; however, by high levels the fighter's jump distance is 20-25 feet, depending on subclass, so by that time the spell barely pulls them ahead. I'd say this particular spell is actually pretty balanced.

3. Counterspell is great, but it's an even trade of your wizard's spell slots for the enemy spellcaster's. (Also, you can't get it until level 5.) If the enemy spell caster casts high-level spells than you can, you're very likely wasting a reaction and a spell slot, while if he starts casting level 1 or 2 spells, you're making a very inefficient resource trade. The Mage Slayer feat is way better (as it better be, since a feat is way more of an investment than a spell prepared).

4. Levitate may occasionally be useful against groups of melee-only enemies in an open area when you don't have to worry about the rest of the group, but that's a fairly limited circumstance. One goblin with a crossbow can screw you over pretty royally by breaking your concentration (or just shooting you until you die).

5. Fly has some of the same issues. It's especially poor for environmental obstacles, since (1) you're burning a pretty high-level slot, (2) you're only carrying yourself, and (3) a rogue or monk can probably do the same for free (or for 1 ki point), as can a fighter with good Athletics and some rope. That said, again, when you're level 20 you might not care about a level 3 slot. (Of course, at that point barbarians and sorcerers can fly for free.)

6. Fabricate is indeed stupid, at least the part about instantly crafting detailed stuff as long as you're proficient in the tools. Get rid of that last phrase and you're fine. (But also, I don't know why any fighter is manually crafting mundane armor for 300 days. Those are rules I'll be ignoring.)

7. I'd like to see some math on the undead skeletons out-damaging the fighter. Do you mean individually, or once you have a skeleton army? Because I'm really not that worried about skeleton armies. The situations where those are actually practical are pretty rare in a typical adventure scenario.

8. Fabricate again.

9. Why do you think you can cast cantrips through the wall? "Nothing can physically pass through," and I don't see an option for Forcecage-style gaps.

11. Contagion is poorly designed because it evades legendary resistances. Ugh. I'd rule that using a legendary resistance on your first Con save ends the spell.

12. True Polymorph is probably the worst-designed spell in the game. It seems like maybe they wrote the spell before they figured out what CR meant? Because surely they don't actually intend polymorph and true polymorph to be THREE TIMES as powerful as a druid's shapeshifting. And the permanency is just silly and broken. If I'm DMing, this spell can only become permanent on a form of CR2 or less, and it and polymorph are both limited to creatures of a CR=level/3 rounded down, just like druid shapeshifting. Honestly, I expect an official errata for this.

Jack the Lad · Aug 17, 2014

ZombieRoboNinja said:
While I'm still cautiously of the opinion that "caster supremacy" isn't a big problem (with many provisos which I'll explain below), I want to thank Jack the Lad for his detailed and informative arguments on this issue. If I were scoring a debate here he would frankly have won pages ago, because he's the one providing the most appropriate and detailed arguments.

Thank you - and I really mean that. Talking to Sacrosanct is starting to feel a bit like banging my head against a brick wall, but it's heartening to know someone's getting something out of my posts.

ZombieRoboNinja said:
Now, first off, I only intend to argue that in the context of a typical combat-heavy adventure, in a situation where the DM is either pacing the adventure or tweaking the resting rules to mostly uphold recommended encounters per short and long rest, below level 17, and barring or houseruling the occasional broken spell, martial characters in general are able to contribute meaningfully alongside casters. That is a long, long list of provisos, and several of them frankly shouldn't be necessary: the "DM as rest-police" requirement came about when they basically officially decided that 5MWD was a DM problem, while the "many 9th-level spells and some others are broken" problem came about due to what can only have been insufficient testing, a desire to hew closely to the broken pre-4e iconic spells, and the almost unavoidable vagaries of having a spell chapter that's like 5 times as long as all the other combat rules in the game put together. That said, if you either stop at level 16 or add some crazy broken martial-only feats and abilities to even things out at high levels, and if you take a red marker to the spell chapter, I still think things will work pretty well.

That's a good, reasonable list, and I agree that it shouldn't be necessary. I will point out that Fighters are penalised more by a scarcity of short rests far more than Wizards, which is why I've been querying Sacrosanct on his insistence that players should get so few; each short rest gives them their Second Wind, Action Surge and Superiority Dice if they're a Battle Master as well as the chance to spend Hit Dice, which they will need more than people who aren't deliberately engaging in melee. Healing aside, the Wizard only needs one short rest in the day to spend their Arcane Recovery.

ZombieRoboNinja said:
1. Faerie Fire is not a wizard spell. You've been pretty careful about not mixing things up here, but let's keep the class distinctions clear. For whatever reason, the "Fighter and Bard" thread turned into a "Wizard vs. Champion" thread, so let's stick with that comparison. (Which, we should remember, means that a chart similar to the OP's would result in a lot less "total health" for the wizard, since he doesn't get heal spells without special feats or multiclassing, and also has crappier armor.)

This is true. During the playtest, Faerie Fire was spell that had a description but did not appear on any class spell list, and I took it on my Wizard and found it enormously effective and easily sufficient as a contribution to low level encounters all by itself. Only Bards and Druids have it now, but it's a very strong spell.

ZombieRoboNinja said:
2. At level 1, Jump costs a very valuable spell slot, and it only lasts a minute, and it still will probably only give the wizard a jump distance of about 24-30 feat, about double that of the fighter. Meanwhile, the rest of the day the fighter can jump about twice as far as the wizard without spending any resources. Now, at higher levels this MIGHT be something to come back to, because a level 20 wizard will have enough preparation slots and level 1 spell slots that he can spend one on Jump if it seems potentially useful; however, by high levels the fighter's jump distance is 20-25 feet, depending on subclass, so by that time the spell barely pulls them ahead. I'd say this particular spell is actually pretty balanced.

I see this argument (Fighters can ___ all day) a lot. People rarely stop to consider how often the ability will be relevant, though. With Jump, for instance, I think it's unlikely that you'll need to leap across a chasm more than once per day.

In fact, realistically, I find it very unlikely that a party will be presented with a chasm too wide to jump and a DM who won't allow them to shoot some kind of arrow + rope thing across it instead. I mention this spell mostly as a demonstration of the 'do anything' problem, but also as a demonstration of the weakness of Remarkable Athlete.

ZombieRoboNinja said:
3. Counterspell is great, but it's an even trade of your wizard's spell slots for the enemy spellcaster's. (Also, you can't get it until level 5.) If the enemy spell caster casts high-level spells than you can, you're very likely wasting a reaction and a spell slot, while if he starts casting level 1 or 2 spells, you're making a very inefficient resource trade. The Mage Slayer feat is way better (as it better be, since a feat is way more of an investment than a spell prepared).

The problem mostly arises in boss battles. You probably won't bother to dispel an orc shaman's Witch Bolt (or whatever), but if a PC Wizard decides that the big bad Lich isn't casting any spells today, he's just not. When it arose for us, it was more than a bit anticlimatic. In hindsight, if I was running it, I probably would have given him Counterspell to Counterspell the Counterspells. But that quickly becomes pretty dumb, as I'm sure you can imagine.

ZombieRoboNinja said:
4. Levitate may occasionally be useful against groups of melee-only enemies in an open area when you don't have to worry about the rest of the group, but that's a fairly limited circumstance. One goblin with a crossbow can screw you over pretty royally by breaking your concentration (or just shooting you until you die).

I've touched on this upthread, but being hit by ranged attacks, particularly ranged weapon attacks, which can't bring the DC of a Concentration save above 10 (except for a heavy crossbow wielded by a creature with a +5 Dex mod, which has a 0.78% chance of doing so by critting and rolling 17+ damage on 2d10 - an exceptionally niche circumstance). If you have War Caster and either Transmuter's Stone or Resilient, DC10 Concentration saves very quickly become very easy to make:

ZombieRoboNinja said:
5. Fly has some of the same issues. It's especially poor for environmental obstacles, since (1) you're burning a pretty high-level slot, (2) you're only carrying yourself, and (3) a rogue or monk can probably do the same for free (or for 1 ki point), as can a fighter with good Athletics and some rope. That said, again, when you're level 20 you might not care about a level 3 slot. (Of course, at that point barbarians and sorcerers can fly for free.)

Level 3 isn't all that high, and it's not something you'll need or want to do in every encounter. Out of combat, it's the "I do ___ without rolling" issue. In combat, though, other classes can't duplicate it. Like Levitate, it makes you immune to a melee-only encounter. Unlike Levitate, you retain (and improve upon) your movement.

ZombieRoboNinja said:
6. Fabricate is indeed stupid, at least the part about instantly crafting detailed stuff as long as you're proficient in the tools. Get rid of that last phrase and you're fine. (But also, I don't know why any fighter is manually crafting mundane armor for 300 days. Those are rules I'll be ignoring.)

Right.

ZombieRoboNinja said:
7. I'd like to see some math on the undead skeletons out-damaging the fighter. Do you mean individually, or once you have a skeleton army? Because I'm really not that worried about skeleton armies. The situations where those are actually practical are pretty rare in a typical adventure scenario.

It depends on what you deem an army. See below a chart of showing how many skeletons it takes to beat a Fighter's DPR; level down the side, AC along the top.

To the right, I've added a chart showing how many skeletons you can potentially summon and control at each level by spending all your spell slots on it, which obviously is more of a theory op thing. As you can see, it doesn't take anything close to the max to outperform a Fighter.

ZombieRoboNinja said:
8. Fabricate again.

Right.

ZombieRoboNinja said:
9. Why do you think you can cast cantrips through the wall? "Nothing can physically pass through," and I don't see an option for Forcecage-style gaps.

Because Forcecage says "prevents any matter from passing through it and blocking any spells cast into or out from the area" and Wall of Force doesn't. Also, leaving gaps lets them shoot back.

ZombieRoboNinja said:
11. Contagion is poorly designed because it evades legendary resistances. Ugh. I'd rule that using a legendary resistance on your first Con save ends the spell.

That seems a fair rule.

ZombieRoboNinja said:
12. True Polymorph is probably the worst-designed spell in the game. It seems like maybe they wrote the spell before they figured out what CR meant? Because surely they don't actually intend polymorph and true polymorph to be THREE TIMES as powerful as a druid's shapeshifting. And the permanency is just silly and broken. If I'm DMing, this spell can only become permanent on a form of CR2 or less, and it and polymorph are both limited to creatures of a CR=level/3 rounded down, just like druid shapeshifting. Honestly, I expect an official errata for this.

It's ridiculous, yeah. At the moment, though, probably the best thing the Fighter can do at 17+ is ask the Wizard to turn him into a dragon. Which is a bit depressing.

Uskglass · Aug 17, 2014

Andor said:
the truth that these facts are not spoiling the Fighters fun for the simple reason that if he wanted to do them, he could get some spells by simply taking a different subclass, or multiclassing, or taking the right feats. 5e has an even lower buy-in cost to the magic system than 3e.

This is a good point. I too agree that providing a simple fighter option is a good thing for the game, for the sake of accessibility and ease of play - still I think more could have been done than the current incarnation of the Champion Fighter, even remaining on a low complexity paradigm.
However I would have expected the Weaponsmaster subclass to fit the bill, with an array of extraordinary manoeuvres available at higher level, but actually the Weaponmaster manoeuvres are quite mundane all around.

I'm less convinced about getting spells through multiclassing or other ways to make up for this. What I'm looking for here would be a way to play a fighter which is reasonably balanced with spellcasters all along progression, without having to resort to an hybrid build or a gish.

pemerton · Aug 18, 2014

Sacrosanct said:
We're not talking about fighters.

Sacrosanct said:
Actually, the conversation has long since shifted to the age old "casters are always better" conversation

Who is asserting that casters are always better?

I am asserting that there seems to me to be no domain in which non-spell-using PCs have clear mechanical superiority, whereas there are multiple domains in which it seems to me that casters have much greater versatiity and capabiity.

Sacrosanct said:
you're missing the forest through the trees. The point wasn't "how can a battle with lower level mobs last 5 rounds." The point was, "If you have 15, 20, or 30 (the number really doesn't matter as long as it's greater than the number of spell slots of the wizard), explain to me how the wizard is better than/replaces the fighter for all of those other rounds.

The wizard doesn't have to be better than the fighter in those other rounds, for two reasons.

First, if they're purely hypothetical rounds, it doesn't matter who would, hypothetically, be better, if the wizard was actually better in the actual rounds.

Second, if the wizard has dominated play in certain key rounds, the fact that she sits back and cools her heels in other rounds is irrelevant. One example of that is the wizard who softens everything up with a fireball, or cuts the battlefield in half with a wall spell, and then plinks away with cantrips while the fighters mop up. That is still an instance of caster dominance. Where is the ability of martial characters to do this sort of thing (analogously to, say, 4e's CaGI).

Sacrosanct said:
That whole list? It is dependent on the caster both preparing that spell ahead of time, and having the available slots to cast it.

The point is that if the caster has any of those spells prepared - and surely they will have some spells, won't they? - then they are in a position to exercise a type of impact over the ingame situation that non-casting PCs don't rival.

This is why I keep stating that I don't understand what you think 10th and higher level casters will be doing with their spells.

Andor said:
A Fighter, even the Champion you are fixated on, has access via a single feat to spells like Detect Magic and Water Breathing.

<snip>

there are no non-caster classes in 5e. Not one. There are only some non-caster subclasses for those who do not wish to use the spell system. Yes, it's true that people without spells do not have spells. So what?

For me, the answer to your question is that it becomes hard to play a powerful but non-magical character. (A long the lines of, say, Conan, or Boromir.)

Jack the Lad · Aug 18, 2014

Uskglass said:
I'm less convinced about getting spells through multiclassing or other ways to make up for this. What I'm looking for here would be a way to play a fighter which is reasonably balanced with spellcasters all along progression, without having to resort to an hybrid build or a gish.

I have to agree with this. 'If you want to be powerful, maybe you should play something other than a Fighter' is not a helpful or constructive argument.

ZombieRoboNinja · Aug 18, 2014

Jack the Lad said:
I have to agree with this. 'If you want to be powerful, maybe you should play something other than a Fighter' is not a helpful or constructive argument.

To be a bit more nuanced, i do think it's fair to say, "if you want to do clearly supernatural things, like punch through iron doors and leap half a football field, don't play the two "badass normal" classes (fighter and rogue)."