Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
His opinion on that matter is not one of authority. It's his opinion about the class. He thinks he should have given it more flavor. That doesn't make it a fact that it needs it or that an authority has spoken. It was just his personal opinion on the matter.An appeal to authority is only inappropriate if the authority is not relevant. The man who led the design team is a relevant authority, for exactly the same reason that (say) one would expect Lin-Manuel Miranda's opinion on the weak points of Hamilton to be relevant.
4e has classes that are in fact better at combat than other classes. Those classes are not balanced in combat. And it's just hubris to think that you can perfectly balance ability in combat with ability out of combat. Those two things are apples and oranges.Who on EARTH said that two things have to be identical to be balance? And who on earth ever said 4e "failed miserably at balance"? Even its most ardent detractors, the people willing to completely invent random crap about it, recognized 4e's balance. I am completely baffled by these assertions. I emphatically, absolutely reject the idea that "balance" means being identical. People tout StarCraft, for example, as an excellent demonstration of "asymmetrical balance."
This is not equivalent to what happens with classes or with what 4e did. The 4e classes were torn down mathematically and some are just better than others at combat.Rock paper scissors is partially asymmetrical ("x wins against y" is a non-transitive relation on the set of moves, but each player engages in the same gameplay loop), yet (by definition) perfectly balanced. No two moves are identical, yet each is perfectly balanced with every other, such that the only way to gain an advantage is to exploit player psychology and long-run behavior, because the rules themselves (again, by definition) prevent any such exploitation.
So balance =/= balance, and that's the accepted definition. If there's a range, then it's not balanced. Period. Try balancing a pencil on your finger. If it's not equal on both sides, it will fall because it's NOT BALANCED. Balance = equal.Ooooooor...you could just use the actual, accepted definition of "balance," which is that "balance" includes the idea of acceptable ranges, because we're talking about statistics, rather than about precise equalities and perfect, diamond rules. And, as I said, I've run those numbers on things like the Champion, and they are not acceptable for it, for something specifically geared for doing damage and almost nothing else. The Champion does not even get up to 80% of the Battlemaster's damage output until you've had at least five reasonably-sized fights a day, and it takes 7-8 to actually be in the same ballpark. This is why it--in some restricted sense--is "bad." It has a clear purpose, dealing damage, and it is demonstrably bad at achieving that purpose relative to equivalent options (other Fighter subclasses) unless the 6-8 (combat!) encounters per day assumption is met. Since that assumption is generally not true of 5e games, this means players who want a low-engagement Fighter subclass are--statistically but consistently--shortchanged in a codifiable way compared to those who are comfortable with other Fighter subclasses.
All you are doing is making my argument for me and then calling it "balance." Okay then, 5e Fighters are "balanced"(your definition of it) with the other classes.As with any statistical thing, you have to set what reasonable bounds are. Fortunately, we have ready-made examples thereof, like the traditional alpha value (0.05, a 5% chance of committing a false-negative error) and standard deviations/z-scores, so these are not absolutely-arbitrary, "we invented a number that sounded nice" things, but rather ones with over a century (in some areas, pushing two centuries) of established use.