WaywardWaffle
First Post
This is still extremely vague in my mind, but I have been looking over a number of classes recently as I have been making lots of new characters, and through playing through these classes I have found that often their main draw shows up so sparingly that it makes them feel incredibly underwhelming.
The biggest offenses to me are Ki for the Monk
Superiority Dice for the Battlemaster
and less so Sorcery Points for the Sorcerer
It seems to me like full casters have the advantage here on their resources, that is, they can cast every turn and assuming a typical adventuring day, run out right around the end of the day.
Meanwhile, playing a monk I barely have enough Ki to last me through one fight let alone 6, even with a short rest recharge. It becomes even more strained for resources playing an elemental discipline monk. The Ki is so important to the monk, do you think that they should be able to use that every turn as it is their main flavour?
An easy change for this I think would be to move the Ki capstone down to say, 6th level, maybe earlier, and reduce it to just 1 ki when you roll initiative. Or going probably too far just add 1 if they have 0 in their pool, that way they always have access to their core abilities but there is still an incentive to rest in order to take your stronger actions.
(this is all without getting into the math to calculate avg damage beside fighters when you need to spend ki to make more attacks)
Then the Battlemaster which is the very roughest for it, I think. They have 4 superiority dice per rest, eventually 5 and eventually after that 6. The battlemaster's main draw is the ability to control the battlefield, shouldn't they be able to do that at least once every turn? Any change here would be slightly harder to balance due to maneuvers adding dice to attack rolls and damage rolls and such but it's easily possible to make some modifications here (maybe just remove the bonuses to the rolls for example).
The main change here to keep them able to use their abilities each turn would be to create a kind of cantrip maneuver, maybe they get 2, where they can use it however many times they want. It would not work to just make sure they always have 1 dice in their pool because there is no higher costs for maneuvers.
The sorcerer I'm sure I don't need to explain as much, they get a bunch more options to spend their SP on and balance here would be much more difficult. Essentially, they are a less (far far far less) effective wizard with a wildly constrained number of spells known (only 15 max, really?) So their draw is that they can modify the spells that they cast, but the cost of metamagic gets high when you also need to use flexible casting.
Solution for this I think is relatively the same as the Ki solution above but far less so. Instead of 4sp on a short rest, 4sp when you roll initiative, essentially the monk capstone. 4sp is not a lot at all, it would let them get off a few extremely valuable meta magic casts late in the adventuring day and would keep the cast functioning. The only problem here is that due to flexible casting they could get at least somewhat infinite level 1 or 2 spell slots, though only 2 slots max at a time.
Sorry that this is all so unedited its very late and this is something that has been bugging me for a long time. Classes with a "main draw" can't actually access that draw for very long because their resources are so tight (cantrips being the weak exception but only spellcasters get a small number of them). Making resources roughly infinite (or to a point of nigh worthless returns) would have crazy effects on the adventuring day layout, the balance of most other features in the game, but I think, deep into it with lots of changes (hello goals for 6th edition?) an ultimately satisfying balanced change.
The biggest offenses to me are Ki for the Monk
Superiority Dice for the Battlemaster
and less so Sorcery Points for the Sorcerer
It seems to me like full casters have the advantage here on their resources, that is, they can cast every turn and assuming a typical adventuring day, run out right around the end of the day.
Meanwhile, playing a monk I barely have enough Ki to last me through one fight let alone 6, even with a short rest recharge. It becomes even more strained for resources playing an elemental discipline monk. The Ki is so important to the monk, do you think that they should be able to use that every turn as it is their main flavour?
An easy change for this I think would be to move the Ki capstone down to say, 6th level, maybe earlier, and reduce it to just 1 ki when you roll initiative. Or going probably too far just add 1 if they have 0 in their pool, that way they always have access to their core abilities but there is still an incentive to rest in order to take your stronger actions.
(this is all without getting into the math to calculate avg damage beside fighters when you need to spend ki to make more attacks)
Then the Battlemaster which is the very roughest for it, I think. They have 4 superiority dice per rest, eventually 5 and eventually after that 6. The battlemaster's main draw is the ability to control the battlefield, shouldn't they be able to do that at least once every turn? Any change here would be slightly harder to balance due to maneuvers adding dice to attack rolls and damage rolls and such but it's easily possible to make some modifications here (maybe just remove the bonuses to the rolls for example).
The main change here to keep them able to use their abilities each turn would be to create a kind of cantrip maneuver, maybe they get 2, where they can use it however many times they want. It would not work to just make sure they always have 1 dice in their pool because there is no higher costs for maneuvers.
The sorcerer I'm sure I don't need to explain as much, they get a bunch more options to spend their SP on and balance here would be much more difficult. Essentially, they are a less (far far far less) effective wizard with a wildly constrained number of spells known (only 15 max, really?) So their draw is that they can modify the spells that they cast, but the cost of metamagic gets high when you also need to use flexible casting.
Solution for this I think is relatively the same as the Ki solution above but far less so. Instead of 4sp on a short rest, 4sp when you roll initiative, essentially the monk capstone. 4sp is not a lot at all, it would let them get off a few extremely valuable meta magic casts late in the adventuring day and would keep the cast functioning. The only problem here is that due to flexible casting they could get at least somewhat infinite level 1 or 2 spell slots, though only 2 slots max at a time.
Sorry that this is all so unedited its very late and this is something that has been bugging me for a long time. Classes with a "main draw" can't actually access that draw for very long because their resources are so tight (cantrips being the weak exception but only spellcasters get a small number of them). Making resources roughly infinite (or to a point of nigh worthless returns) would have crazy effects on the adventuring day layout, the balance of most other features in the game, but I think, deep into it with lots of changes (hello goals for 6th edition?) an ultimately satisfying balanced change.
(The one in our group kicks serious ass with his ability to teleport around the battlefield stunlocking foes, and otherwise help the group escape detection)
