D&D 5E Best designed classes in 5e

[Ovarwa]

Anyway, to actually answer the question, best designed are Paladin and Rogue. Worst designed, BY FAR, is the Ranger; in fact, it's the only 5e class I truly disapprove of. Guess that's why it's getting revised.

*lol* I concede. It's so badly designed that I forgot all about it!

 

[The Crimson Binome]

If you leave one of the keeps / temples / undertemples (say, to take a rest) they're supposed to restaff in your absence. You're more-or-less forced to take the entire place on a single long rest -- and even short rests aren't guaranteed.

Right, but chump fights don't really matter, because they don't result in appreciable resource expenditure. When everyone gets to the boss, they're still essentially at full power, and then the paladin wrecks face because it's the only class that can burn through all of its resources before the fight is over.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

And, empirically, the paladin is also receiving accolades for good design on this very thread. Please don't assume the mantle of objectivity for a subjective opinion.

This isn't a thread about favorite classes. This is a thread about best designed classes, and the Paladin class is designed inconsistently with the rest of the game. Its design is directly at odds with the guiding principles behind class design and the entire spellcasting mechanic.

Preference is subjective. Quality is significantly less-so.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Why they'd design one class to burn through its resources over the course of 1-2 fights, while every other class is designed to go all day long, we'll never know.

*coughcough*Berserker*coughcough*

It is also possible to play wizards and clerics in such a way that they are as 5MWD-ish as always-smiting paladins are. That is, a paladin who blows all of his spell slots is still a capable adventurer and even combatant (especially an Oath of Devotion paladin with Improved Divine Smite). He just doesn't have a nova capability any more. Likewise, a 17th level Evoker who has already cast Meteor Swarm is still a capable adventurer and combatant--he just no longer has a nova capability. Both classes are probably about equally-susceptible to 5MWD, for those players who are so inclined to do.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

What enabled the five-minute workday game flaw was your DM allowing you to long rest while cultists work to unleash the forces of hell with no consequences.

This is a bit of a tangent, but I've been toying recently with the notion of metagame time limits. If there is no particular way for the PCs to know when the kidnapped princess is going to be sacrificed offscreen to the dark gods, then from a roleplaying, in-world perspective, any time is as good as any other. But from a metagame standpoint, it's no fun for the players to show up and discover that the princess is dead because the DM rolled a 1 on the 1d20 check to see how many hours they had.

So why not embrace the metagame? Tell the players that, "the sacrifice happens whenever the clock strikes eleven here in the real world." They can still take long rests and short rests and such, but now instead of random encounters being awesome (because free XP!), random encounters are now painful because of the table time they take to play through.

This aligns the incentives of the players and the PCs: the players are trying to get in as much fun gameplay as possible in the time they and the DM have, and therefore need to minimize the amount of time the players and the DM spend on dealing with random encounters and tabletalk; and the player characters want to rescue the princess while she's still alive, and therefore need to minimize the amount of time the players and the DM spend on dealing with random encounters and tabletalk. (Although the PCs don't actually know that they need this.)

Thus, no more 5MWD.

I don't actually have a problem with 5MWD at my table but I might implement this anyway for certain adventures because I like the clarity of the failure condition and the way it lets the night's adventure be truly episodic.

P.S. What happens if the time limit runs out? Well, once you lose the scenario there's no use spending lots of time playing out the denoument. Assuming you set the time limit to coincide with "whenever we run out gaming time," the DM can simply narrate an ending: "after many more adventures, you cautiously work your way into the main base of the Cthulhu Cult. There you find the mutilated remains of Princess Jasmine. So sad. You take the remains back to her father the king, who cries a lot and asks you whether there was anything you could have done to save her faster. The end, for tonight." Then everybody goes home and tries harder next week.

 

[RonLugge]

Right, but chump fights don't really matter, because they don't result in appreciable resource expenditure. When everyone gets to the boss, they're still essentially at full power, and then the paladin wrecks face because it's the only class that can burn through all of its resources before the fight is over.

They shouldn't be chump fights; they should be medium difficulty fights intended to represent small to moderate resource drain.

This isn't a thread about favorite classes. This is a thread about best designed classes, and the Paladin class is designed inconsistently with the rest of the game. Its design is directly at odds with the guiding principles behind class design and the entire spellcasting mechanic.

Preference is subjective. Quality is significantly less-so.

And perspective is definitely subjective. Your complaint about the paladin's design is subjective, because you're running under assumptions that don't match how a good DM should allow it to be played. When the DM enforced the 6 encounter a day rule, with 2 short rests, the paladin works. Your complaint is that DMs all to often don't enforce that.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

They shouldn't be chump fights; they should be medium difficulty fights intended to represent small to moderate resource drain.

Medium difficulty fights are chump fights unless the DM is deliberately gimmicking the system. A strong party will defeat them with essentially zero resource expenditure, sometimes literally zero resource expenditure.

In other words, if you roll up a random Medium encounter on kobold.com, it will be a chump fight. You can hand-craft a difficult or uber-deadly Medium fight but it involves certain exploits, e.g. leveraging Intellect Devourers or large numbers of drow with sleep poison, or building an uber-Deadly fight (5 Death Knights, 5 Liches, and 5 Ancient Red Shadow Dragons) but then giving the PCs two situational advantages (bad guys start surprised; fight takes place in a holy temple which inflicts 2d10 radiant damage per round vs. bad guys but not the PCs) which per DMG reduces difficulty by two steps from Deadly -> Hard -> Medium.

But without gimmicks like that, Medium fights are chump fights.

 

[RonLugge]

Medium difficulty fights are chump fights unless the DM is deliberately gimmicking the system. A strong party will defeat them with essentially zero resource expenditure, sometimes literally zero resource expenditure.

In other words, if you roll up a random Medium encounter on kobold.com, it will be a chump fight. You can hand-craft a difficult or uber-deadly Medium fight but it involves certain exploits, e.g. leveraging Intellect Devourers or large numbers of drow with sleep poison, or building an uber-Deadly fight (5 Death Knights, 5 Liches, and 5 Ancient Red Shadow Dragons) but then giving the PCs two situational advantages (bad guys start surprised; fight takes place in a holy temple which inflicts 2d10 radiant damage per round vs. bad guys but not the PCs) which per DMG reduces difficulty by two steps from Deadly -> Hard -> Medium.

But without gimmicks like that, Medium fights are chump fights.

That does not match my experience; sounds like you tend to have groups with a lot of combat optimization going for them, and need to up your hard fights a few percentages to rebalance to compensate. A medium fight that doesn't consume any resources is just... unusual.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

They shouldn't be chump fights; they should be medium difficulty fights intended to represent small to moderate resource drain.

They may have intended those encounters to be of moderate difficulty, such that they drain a noticeable amount of resources, but that doesn't make it the case. As it stands, there are some number of trivial encounters, and one meaningful encounter which the Paladin dominates.

And perspective is definitely subjective. Your complaint about the paladin's design is subjective, because you're running under assumptions that don't match how a good DM should allow it to be played. When the DM enforced the 6 encounter a day rule, with 2 short rests, the paladin works. Your complaint is that DMs all to often don't enforce that.

The DM doesn't have the ability to enforce six meaningful encounters in a day - let alone exactly two short rests, which was only ever a rough guideline with strong expected variance anyway - unless they are illegally meta-gaming by modifying the environment and the encounters to account for party composition and tactics. A game that requires the DM to cheat, in order to be balanced, is a broken game.

 

[Tony Vargas]

What enabled the five-minute workday game flaw was your DM allowing you to long rest while cultists work to unleash the forces of hell with no consequences.

The 6-8 med/hard encounter workday is just a guideline, a DM can deviate from it if he wants, following it 'on average' or not at all, he just needs to adjust encounters, both in difficulty and in terms of emphasis upon different PC competencies, to work for that actual pacing.

A 'best designed' class can't really be held accountable for it in the presence of other, presumably badly-designed classes. Or, no class in such a game could be considered a good design in context, only in a vacuum. Like the 3.x Fighter - an elegant, robust design, relegated to Tier 5 because all the other designs were so broken. ;(

This is a bit of a tangent, but I've been toying recently with the notion of metagame time limits. If there is no particular way for the PCs to know when the kidnapped princess is going to be sacrificed offscreen to the dark gods, then from a roleplaying, in-world perspective, any time is as good as any other. But from a metagame standpoint, it's no fun for the players to show up and discover that the princess is dead because the DM rolled a 1 on the 1d20 check to see how many hours they had.

So why not embrace the metagame?

Some games have done that. 13A, for instance, has a 'full heal up' instead of a 'long rest' that just happens after so many encounters or at a set point in the adventure. Players can 'take a campaign loss' - which could well be as bad as the princess getting sacrificed or whatever - if they need an early rest. Some FATE games take a more story-driven approach to pacing. But, in D&D, with managing resources traditionally a significant aspect of play, the decision to rest is something players tend to want (to at least believe) to be theirs to make.

Tell the players that, "the sacrifice happens whenever the clock strikes eleven here in the real world." They can still take long rests and short rests and such, but now instead of random encounters being awesome (because free XP!), random encounters are now painful because of the table time they take to play through....
Thus, no more 5MWD.

Rests don't take much table time, so I don't see how that eliminates the issue.

Medium difficulty fights are chump fights unless the DM is deliberately gimmicking the system. A strong party will defeat them with essentially zero resource expenditure, sometimes literally zero resource expenditure.

The encounter guidelines aren't that dependable, sure. If it takes 'gimmicking' to render a medium fight medium, so be it. Gimmick away.