D&D 3E/3.5 Issue with "Core" 3.5?

[Celebrim]

3.5 fixed....the ranger? description of action types? orc hp?

Harm and Haste... and that's about it.

The ranger didn't even really get 'fixed', as fundamentally the wide range of tiering of the classes wasn't tightened up. 3.5 ranger became more interesting, but I doubt it really went up a tier given that Druid - already a full spellcaster - got boosted by an even greater amount.

They fixed a few spells that were unbalancing but not overly harmful to the game. By comparison, they broke spells that let spellcasters change their physical form wide open, utterly broke 'blasphemy' and its variants, and broke a number of save or suck spells. Alter Self not only became unbalancing, but became far more fiddly and more of a burden on play to adjudicate. Then in an effort to reduce reliance on buffs, they altered buffs in a way that promoted the 15 minute adventuring day because buffs no longer lasted either 'about an encounter' or else 'most of a day' but perhaps an hour or two, which encouraged rushing and increased the burden on the DM to carefully track every minute of game play.

3.5 pretty much should have stuck to limited errata and fixing misprints, typos, and errors. The problem I had with 3.5 was that it was unprofessional. I've always said that the pro's just happen to be some regular DM's that do it for a living. Well, they really proved it with 3.5, by making a bunch of ill considered changes that no one was demanding and releasing them without any play testing at all. 3.5 changes collectively read like a series of tweaks by some neophyte DM in the house rule forums. A few made sense, but by and large they weren't ideals driven by needs in the community just private preferences of some guy.

I agree that 5e is a breath of fresh air that looks a lot more like I expected 4e to look like than what 4e ultimately did end up looking like. Just right now though, I'm so married to my homebrew 3e (having been playing it more than 12 years now and halfway through a campaign) that I'm unlikely to make any jump from what I'm doing.

 

[billd91]

Harm and Haste... and that's about it.

The ranger didn't even really get 'fixed', as fundamentally the wide range of tiering of the classes wasn't tightened up. 3.5 ranger became more interesting, but I doubt it really went up a tier given that Druid - already a full spellcaster - got boosted by an even greater amount.

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3.5 pretty much should have stuck to limited errata and fixing misprints, typos, and errors. The problem I had with 3.5 was that it was unprofessional. I've always said that the pro's just happen to be some regular DM's that do it for a living. Well, they really proved it with 3.5, by making a bunch of ill considered changes that no one was demanding and releasing them without any play testing at all. 3.5 changes collectively read like a series of tweaks by some neophyte DM in the house rule forums. A few made sense, but by and large they weren't ideals driven by needs in the community just private preferences of some guy.

On the subject of whether or not the ranger got fixed, we'll have to agree to disagree (since I don't really subscribe to the whole class tiering theory). The 3.5 ranger (and bard) are both much improved over their 3.0 counterparts. Both were highly demanded changes, as I remember. The fix to DR was a good change as well, as were several other changes scattered about (such as making wild empathy a class feature rather than a skill tax for druids and rangers).

But I agree that too many of the changes in 3.5 were unnecessary changes in detail and unnecessarily complicating. They did, however, offer some early foreshadowing to the direction WotC was going with their myopic combat-oriented focus for game balance that eventually culminated in 4e.