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what spread sheets? where are you getting this. Nothing they have said indecated that... the class balance is so out of wack I can give 100 examples if you want (but I mean just searc
From the Mike Mearls Happy Fun Hour. He couldn't share what was in the balance spreadsheets, but he talked about their internal math tools quite a bit. Crawford has also talked about them a bit here and there.
Yes, the balance works best in a Dungeon environment designed for the working day. Anything less will be lacksidasical...can still be fun, but it won't be "balanced." Not everything has to be.
spells that turn people to stone or kill them out right are encounter enders.
spells are NOT just damage, they are the most versatile tool (and most over used tool of the dev team) in the game
I can't imagine anyone not understanding that having a choice form a dozen+ options that CAN do damage, CAN end and encounter or could manipulate and change the game in dozens of ways is NOT balanced by 'gets an extra attack'
Though the frustrating thing about this is that nearly every critic took "clearly defined" as meaning "absolute ironclad straightjacket, you will never do anything else, don't even think about it," which is patently untrue. All or nearly all classes had at least one baked-in secondary role, and a little bit of elbow grease could usually blend some other role into a character until they were cromulent at both their "innate" role and their adopted one. Fighter, for example, could quite easily get into Striker levels of damage, or could specialize in polearms and become a surprisingly effective local-area Controller. Paladin could straight up become a full Leader in addition to being a Defender. Etc. Point being, roles were never rigid, but boy howdy would people doggedly insist that they were.
okay lets see if this is true... DMG says at level 11 you should have 6-8 encounters in a day.
I will go with 7, nice middle
now AC is hard to acunt for an average I am pulling 16 out of my but
fun fact: a CR1 Hobgoblin has AC 18 while a CR24 Ancient Red Dragon has AC 22. That's 23 CRs of difference, but only 4 AC between them. What?
give a fighter a 20 str a +1 long sword and 3 attacks per round + action surge 1/short rest.
Prof is +4 (I think) so fighter has 4+5+1 for +10... he only needs a 5 or higher in this example that should give him a BIG head start he also crits on a 19+ so that too is a big boon. average hit deals 10 slashing (magic) and crit deals 15 slashing magic and he hits 70% of the time and crits 10% of the time... so 7+1.5= 8.5 dpr but I HATE decmils so lets round up and call that 9.
average fight is like 4 rounds, he can use his action surge lets say 2/day (so 1 or 2 short rests) so 28 rounds 3 attacks per round +6 extra attacks 86 attacks... but I mean he might get like an opp attack here or there lets just call it an even 90...
90x 8.5 is 765 damage
now I am not super great at math so everyone please check my math... but I'll call that 770 just to keep with rounding up... how many spells do I need to use to do 770 damage?
the wizard has 4/3/3/3/2/1 and can use arcane recover to call back 5...
disintegrate does 10d6+40 or 0 lets say I am smart and target someone without legendary rest and with a low to mid con save... we will give a +3 (a lot of monsters don't have that high in all saves) my DC will be based on a +1 item like fighters sword and 20 int like fighters str... so 8+1+5+4 DC 18 and so they need a 15 or higher to save so success 75ish % of the time for 75 force damage average... but thats only 1/day.
lets move to the 2 5th level spells. cone of cold does 8d8 to 2+ targets but they get a save for half... lets say 1 makes it 1 fails average damage so 36 damage to one and 18 to the other
I will do that twice and say 75+36+36+18+18=183pts and my 3 best slots are gone.
4th level Blight doest 8d8 save for half and phantasmal killer would most likely do better or even up cast AOE, but lets go with 3 blights they make teh save twice and fail once... so 36+18+18=72 bringing my total up to 255
down to ONLY 3rd level spells... fireball it is and with 3 of them I think it's only fair to say at least once I get 3 enemies in there... so 9 targets over time I will say 4 make teh save 5 fail (this you might argue is too nice to wizard) average damage is 28 or 14... 28*5 + 14*4 196 that brings my total up to 451 damage
2nd level spells I am going to skip and just up cast magic missile (not to be nice just cause I am sick of math) so 12 missiles from 2nd level and 12 from 1st level spells each missile auto hits for 3.5 force on average so 84 damage total up to 535...
but what about cantrips... how many rounds was that 16 rounds to unload my spells and there are 28 rounds so that leave 12 more for cantrips... I will take toll the dead, only target less then full hp targets and 1/3 of targets make the save... so 8* 3d12+3 damage. 22 damage 8 time is 88
so that brings the wizard with cantrips and spells all to damage (not even all the most optimal cause I got sick of math) to 623. I'm going to round that down to 620.
so that brings teh TLDR to 770 damage from the fighter and 620 damage from the wizard that is ONLY trying to do damage...
that almost looks good, 150pts of damage over the course of the day.
but wait we have that the wizard can get that close when doing what the fighter does best...
how do you DPR hold person, or charm person ending an encounter, tasha's uncontrolable laugh that might as well be hold a level sooner. how does making an enemy spell caster skip there turn do to noting since it was counter spelled?
and that's just the combat options, becuse the wizard can do OUT of combat things with those spells that change teh game in ways fighters can't... and any out of combat utility a fighter gets from creative rp or skill use the wizard can get too.
but wait at 10th level with a 20 Int how many spells can a wizard prep? 15 counting my debate about phantasmal killer or blight as preping both that is 8 spells... about 1/2 my spells preped... I can still prep shield and absorb elements and then 5 non combat spells... and if I know we are going to do no combat stuff I can trade a few combat ones for other nitch spells since I know 26 if we never found any as treasure.
and notice I didn't use arcane recovery even though I mentioned it... and I gave fighter the champion 19+ crit range but didn't give the wizard a subclass ability (some that are quite good... replace a SoD/SoS save with a low rolled portent can make a diviner 1 shot the BBEG)
wait.. what did I miss I know people sometimes argue martial classes shouldn't be balanced with casters but how many people reallythink any edition is more balanced then 4e?
One exception is your assertion that level - 7 to level +5 was fun. Due to hitpoints and AC going up with level, the scaling was quadratic instead of linear and easily threatened to turn an othewise balanced encounter into a boring hour long fight.
My experience is that these work, but yes, the further you get from level+0, the more tilted the balance becomes... that's the point. You want some combats where it's hard as heck and a bad decision or poor luck mean you cannot win. That's literally what you are asking for elsewhere in your post, so I am confused by this statement. You cannot have it both ways: either some fights are too tough (or too easy) without special dispensation or alteration, or all fights are lockstep balanced. There are no other options, because even "I have no idea how strong this is relative to you" means some fights will be too tough(/easy), you just have no idea which ones and no tools for tweaking things in the opposite direction.
A second exception is that what you call a feature: monsters on an index card, I felt was a bug. Especially with how scaling up and reskinning was promoted. We really despised how the outlook of a creature did not tell you anything about how hard it is to hit or how dangerous it might be (minion I look at you).
I don't understand what you mean by this. Why would you not have an idea of how tough things are? Why wouldn't your DM give you that information, at least in a qualitative sense? Isn't that literally what every edition expects, that players will be informed at least of a general idea of how tough the opposition is? Isn't that what being a competent combatant should entail?
There are two meanings you could be intending by this statement. Either it is simply false, or it is trivial.
That is, it is false to assert that the combats were meant to be balanced to one specific level, the party or anything else. 4e explicitly instructed DMs to include variety and to offer demonstration that the party had grown (e.g., fight some orcs that keep the same stat block from level 1 to 4, say, so you can see the progression.) If what you mean is "lockstep to exactly the party's level," then this is simply false.
On the other hand, you could be speaking in terms of encounters being evaluated relative to party level, e.g. that a level+2 encounter is a certain amount more difficult than a level+1 encounter. If so, this is trivial, because literally every edition of D&D has done this, including 5e, they just haven't used those terms. If that is what you mean, then what 4e did is no more than what 5e does now, and you clearly have no problem with that: it had a metric for monster power which necessarily considers the party's level because higher-level characters are stronger. Challenge Rating is literally balancing to the party level, so 4e is not doing anything you oppose if this is the sense you mean.
If I have misunderstood your intent and you are referring to something wildly different, please specify, but from where I'm sitting this is not a criticism of any weight.
That does not mean that if you took away the battelefield dependence and flatten the math a bit and add some more variance in AC and HP (and equippment that actually matters) that the system would not have been salvageable.
I'm sorry, what? How on earth does equipment NOT matter in 4e? It's hugely important! Much moreso than 5e.
Also, there IS variation in HP and AC... that's literally printed on the index card I showed, and DMs were always free to change things further as they desired...those are merely useful guidelines figured out by players, not any kind of "rule" you had to follow.
to start I would ignore the idea that fighters can't have supernatural or extrodianry abilities baked into the class
2nd i would start (litterlay just a starting point) with the Bo9S from 3e and warlord fighter and ranger from 4e to give them level up abilities then i would playtest with people who didn't like 3e or 5e fighter but did like 2e and 4e fighter... run 3-4 tests per tier and see what i need to change from there.
yeah, some people like fighter as is... that is why my fix for this edition would split the fighter into 3... a warlord/warblade/swordsage/animeswordsman for people like me, champion for people like that, and a dedicated gish like the eldritch knight
having 3 sepret classes would mean we could all have the melee martial class we want
the math is broken it doesn't work. You can not compare being slightly better at something everyone is okay to good at to the choice to be able to alter major things...
this is why I see 10x the hexblades sword bards and blade singers then I do fighters... and i almost never see just straight fighters
That doesn't answer the question. You have punted to the black box. How do you, the DM, consistently avoid the Scylla of "we literally cannot afford to read AT ALL, so short-rest classes are screwed," without falling into the Charybdis of "we're fine, we can take a night to recover so we're at full strength to finish this, so short-rest classes are screwed"?
Crawford has spoken in the past about narrative balance, giving each Class their moment to shine. The Fighter gets theirs by chopping enemies into bits without expending resources, or skill checks.
