Sacrosanct
Legend
A vial of acid had many uses other than combat, so I feel it's well worth it.
On the weak side, almost certainly Fighter (especially Champion) and Warlock (especially Pact of the Blade). Both of them are sensitive to campaign pacing and are at risk of a sort of "reverse" five minute workday problem because of the in-game length of time for a short rest. The Fighter, as usual, got seriously shortchanged for noncombat stuff; Battlemasters get a tool proficiency (because Know Your Enemy is about combat stats, nothing more) and Champions can jump a piddly bit further and get a +1 or +2 (for most of the game) to stuff they aren't proficient in (with most of the benefit being, again, to combat)... On the powerful side, Paladin and Druid are the major standouts. Paladins have a robust, solid baseline, and a bunch of really nice class-specific spells, and an aura which "breaks" (or, IMO, fixes) saving throws substantially, since it gives almost everyone (and always the paladin) effective proficiency in ALL saves...which STACKS with any proficiency the recipient might already have...
Now that some folks are mentioning clerics, I must chime in on that as well.
1. I truly do hate the lack of differentiation with cleric cantrips. Sacred flame does not fit even half the clerics in the PHB.
2. Not giving light clerics access to sunburst and sunbeam was pure garbage. I added those to the level 17 light cleric ability. A light cleric that can't call on the power of the sun is poor conceptually.
3. Need more domains.
You don't know how fast D&D ducks fly.
You don't know how fast D&D ducks fly.
If you're going to criticize the fighter for being combat-oriented, you don't have much standing to praise the paladin for his combat prowess unless you also show how much better he is at non-combat. Divine sense is nice, and healing is nice but really a part of combat just like the fighter's Second Wind. Other than that they play pretty similarly outside of combat--backgrounds will provide more differentiation than classes in this case.
Oookay, so you already did part of my work for me, because Divine Sense is still a pretty potent and useful non-combat ability (though it does have some potential use in combat, too--if you know the location of an invisible undead, it effectively loses the benefit of being invisible). Then there's Lay on Hands' ability to remove Exhaustion, Disease, and Poison; * snip* And all of that is just the baseline Paladin, without spells. Speaking of spells! The Paladin can cast Command, Detect Magic, Detect Poison and Disease, Purify Food and Drink, Find Steed, Lesser Restoration, Locate Object, Zone of Truth, Create Food and Water, Daylight, Magic Circle, Revivify, Banishment, Locate Creature, Geas, and Raise Dead. * snip* Ancients adds Speak with Animals, Misty Step, Plant Growth, Commune with Nature, and Tree Stride; plus there are some minor noncombat benefits to Undying Sentinel. *snip* This is, again, compared to the baseline Fighter class, which adds...nothing non-combat from its actual mechanics (since I don't count "you get two skills" any more than I counted skills provided by your class in every other edition of D&D I've played, unless those skills were over and above what is normally available.) And compared to the subclasses, one of which adds a few feet of jump distance and half proficiency (meaning +1 or +2 until level 13) to physical checks you aren't proficient with, and another which gives you a free additional artisan tool proficiency (of highly, HIGHLY debatable merit) and a way to...compare the combat stats of enemies to your own. *snip*
1.) Lay on Hands doesn't remove Exhaustion. Too bad or else Paladin/Frenzy Barb would be a much more attractive party.
2.) Good point about Oath of Ancients. Plant Growth/Speak with Animals/Commune with Nature does actually add a new dimension of utility to the class. I don't find most of the rest of the list very useful in a non-combat setting; Create Food and Drink, Find Steed, and Zone of Truth are the most useful.
3.) If you're considering subclasses and 20th level characters, Eldritch Knight must be considered too:
Battlemaster evaluation a la "compare the combat stats of enemies to your own" should definitely not be sneered at in a noncombat setting. Who but a battlemaster can safely tell you whether it's safe to throw down with the mafia don's bodyguard or if he'll eat you alive? What are you going to do, risk your life on a guess that you'll be good enough to play nasty?
The utility of that ability is highly campaign-dependent and I believe you come from a 4E background, so I'm not surprised you don't value it in your campaigns, but the same thing is true of Commune With Nature and disease resistance.
Overall you make a good argument that paladin utility is somewhat wider than fighter utility outside of campaign (primarily the arguments which resonate with me are the Oath of Ancients spells, and disease resistance), and thank you for making that argument explicitly, but they're both still quite limited out of combat compared to either backgrounds or especially to classes like Tome Pact Warlock, Wizard and Druid.
I can enumerate the ways in which druids are versatile and fun out of combat (wildshape, Transport Via Plants, ritual Water Breathing, ritual Water Walking, Animal Shapes!, Awaken!, Conjure Elemental + Planar Binding!, Meld Into Stone, Wind Walk, Plane Shift, Wall of Stone, Polymorph--all of these are awesome and most of them are awesome in completely different ways from each other) and it ought to be clear that they're on a completely different level from paladins, so much so that paladins and fighters look pretty much the same. IMHO. It's obviously a matter of taste to some degree, so YMMV.
25 gp is about how much I typically price cantrip scrolls, and 2d6 to a single target feels cantrip-level to me. Alchemist's fire, on the other hand, is way overpriced. For 50 gp, there shouldn't be such a big possibility that it will deal less damage than a flask of acid would. A scroll of the same price would deal around 2d10 damage to a single target. I make alchemist's fire deal 1d8 + 1d6 damage on the initial hit, and 1d6 on subsequent rounds.
That said, magic item pricing is weird, too, and it may well be that both things are overpriced. If you make the prices follow the exponential trend from start to finish, inserting midpoints so you get a price for each spell level, acid should cost 8 gp and alchemist's fire, 25.
Wizards do nothing but study the Arcane. They get up in the morning. They study the Arcane. They have a bite to eat. They study the Arcane. They get a bit of dinner. They study the Arcane. Then they go to bed.
Wizards, not Bards or Clerics, have always held the central place of knowledge -- in literature as well as in-game. They're the most intelligent and their low hp was always attributed to their eschewing the real world for knowledge and magic.
Bards, in the context of D&D, study music. And fighting. And poetry. And thievery. And odd bits of lore. And diplomacy. And healing. And a little bit of everything. If there's one thing a Bard should never, ever be, it's an expert. Maybe an expert in music or the arts or hisotry, but certainly not an expert when compared to anybody who has dedicated their life to a very limited range of study, as most every other class has.
I suppose so. I mean, if we had three classes, then it would be obvious which class any given character belonged to. That's really what it all comes down to, is I strongly believe that there must be exactly one way to represent any given character. There should never be a question about which class a character belongs to, and if there is, then there are too many classes. If you have to change the in-game nature of the character in order to justify changing the class, then that is as it should be.
I can't think of many rules, game mechanics, etc. that doesn't have at least as many proponents as haters (and even the two mentioned aren't considered "burn WotC to the ground" bad by everyone).