D&D 5E Spellcasters and Balance in 5e: A Poll

[Maxperson]

3.5, not 3e. That's what I was saying.

3.5 was not day 1.

You think 3e was different? The 3e MM has a section under half-dragons called "Half-Dragon Characters" Anything with a level adjustment has always been available for PC use, assuming the DM allows PCs with level adjustment.

 

[Maxperson]

Then yeah, we maybe just don't have anything further to say to one another. I have much higher standards for what I expect of classes and find subclasses mostly inadequate to address the underlying gaps in the class itself.

It is worth noting, though, that at the very least you're specifically saying that the first two levels should thus leave Fighters and Rogues completely high and dry, since (unlike all full-casters except Bard) they have to wait for 3rd level to get their subclass.

They can fall over, squish a mouse and make 3rd level. It doesn't take long to get there and the DCs at that level are so low that you're making many of them half the time with no bonus at all. Fighters and Rogues are hardly high and dry. Oh, and the other classes for the most part don't have their good stuff for all the pillars, either. Classes don't really reach first level until they hit 3rd.

Even if you're averaging 6 combats a day (which, again, most groups express that that would be an impractical pace), that only means 6 combat spells are needed. Every full caster can do that (and, admittedly, little more) by 3rd level, aka the moment a Fighter or Rogue get their subclass. By 5th level, when casters are getting access to things like fireball, the caster has enough mojo to drop a spell every combat and still have three left over. It only gets worse from there. And, yes, you can certainly argue that 1st-level spells become less valuable for combat (for example), but they usually do not become less valuable for utility--meaning the Wizard can dedicate most of her high-level slots to combat while still offering extremely strong utility. (And that doesn't even count ritual casting, which blows the whole "spell slots are precious" thing out of the water.)

If you're like a more typical group, where you do roughly 4 combats a day (give or take one) and get 1-2 short rests between them, the full-caster can quite easily have about as many spell slots as the Battle Master has total expertise dice that day. 5th level Wizard who forgets she has Arcane Recovery: 9 spells. 5th-level Fighter getting two short rests a day: 12 superiority dice. Are spell slots really that precious? (Spell-recovery features, such as Arcane/Natural Recovery and Harness Divine Power, can potentially let you exceed the number of expertise dice a BM gets.)

1 spell per combat is a tight budget. But let's look at a 7th level caster. With 9 spell slots, that leaves him just 3 spells for other things, which may include more spells in a tough combat. Anything out of combat assumes that he has on his list the right spell for the situation at hand, which is far from guaranteed.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

And this is where things tend to break down.
People seem to be perfectly comfortable allowing mages reality bending powers because MAGIC (even if they argue with the specifics etc. magic is accepted).

Give fighters abilities beyond the norm and suddenly people are arguing about reality, about physics , about "how is that possible.." etc. Sadly "because mythic" doesn't have near the weight of "because magic..."

Bottom line there is no consensus on what the fighter is supposed to be - so arguments are rampant.

Why do the people not wanting to play a class get to dictate the class? They can keep the Fighter naughty word to suit their own impotence fantasies. Let me have the Paragon.

 

[Mort]

Why do the people not wanting to play a class get to dictate the class? They can keep the Fighter naughty word to suit their own impotence fantasies. Let me have the Paragon.

But they DO want to play the class - they just don't want to play the same version of the class that you do.

That's the problem.

 

[Minigiant]

These are mostly wrong. For example bard is not just some entertainer, they're a practitioner of powerful magical tradition, nor is a rogue necessarily a criminal.

Who said any of that.

I said "Archetypes can be expressed as background and class."

You can be a thief by taking the criminal background or the rogue class.
You can be a guitarist by taking the entertainer background or the bard class.

Class is just a stronger extension of the idea than background.

If you say "we have no need for a noble class since we have the noble background" someone else can say "we don't need the cleric class we have the acolyte background." Then you are back to the "how many classes" fight.

I'm sure they do. That's represented by their battlemaster manoeuvres.

How do 5e maneuvers display his intuition and insight AKA wisdom in this "game built on ability checks"?

No, they aren't. Or the can be, but they don't need to.

No, the fighter is a big violent ball of stupid. You can just choose to weaken your fighter in combat to make it not play to its strengths.
It gets one of the lowest amounts of mental class skills and have no base class features that benefit from it having a positive mental score.

Here's a pair of questions.
1) Do you think the Fighter should have Persuasion as a class skill to represent the common trope of fighters of merchant, noble, and royal social class?

2) Do you think the Fighter should have a base class feature based on Charisma that boosts the morale of allies to represent the natural leadership D&D claims mid-level fighters possess?

No, that's not brainpower, that's being a divine champion.

Divine power strengthen by brainpower.

Simply not true. Seriously, take skills, take feats for noncombat stuff, use your feats and skills. It is getting really tiresome when people just keep pretending that half of the existing mechanics in the game do not exist.

No one says that people shouldn't use them.

People are saying that fighters are naturally bad at those things even if you take those skills and feats. And if you attempt to make a fighter good at noncombat,you are either nerfing your fighter or the feats/skills come in power so late that you likely never get to play your concept in the campaign.

AKA WOTC made it take 12 levels of play to create a proper knight

 

[Maxperson]

If you say "we have no need for a noble class since we have the noble background" someone else can say "we don't need the cleric class we have the acolyte background." Then you are back to the "how many classes" fight.

Yep. My Bladesinger is a priest of Corellon. He took the Acolyte background and carries around his holy symbol and prayer book every bit as proudly as any Cleric.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Who said any of that.

I said "Archetypes can be expressed as background and class."

You can be a thief by taking the criminal background or the rogue class.
You can be a guitarist by taking the entertainer background or the bard class.

Class is just a stronger extension of the idea than background.

If you say "we have no need for a noble class since we have the noble background" someone else can say "we don't need the cleric class we have the acolyte background." Then you are back to the "how many classes" fight.

Having divine connection a deity that grants you power does something; it does that irrespective whether you're ordained priest of some religious organisation or not. Being noble doesn't really do much by itself. What do you imagine it doing? I mean perhaps you could use it to impress some people or get out of legal trouble in some countries, but those seem far too situational and setting dependent to be codified rules.

How do 5e maneuvers display his intuition and insight AKA wisdom in this "game built on ability checks"?

Very well, thank you for asking!

No, the fighter is a big violent ball of stupid. You can just choose to weaken your fighter in combat to make it not play to its strengths.
It gets one of the lowest amounts of mental class skills and have no base class features that benefit from it having a positive mental score.

And none of this stops you making a smart fighter with intelligence skills. That you don't is your choice.

Here's a pair of questions.
1) Do you think the Fighter should have Persuasion as a class skill to represent the common trope of fighters of merchant, noble, and royal social class?

Perhaps it should. Then again, it doesn't terribly much matter as you also get skills from background (which you can customise) and races and even via feats if you need more, so if you want to give your fighter a persuasion, you can.

2) Do you think the Fighter should have a base class feature based on Charisma that boosts the morale of allies to represent the natural leadership D&D claims mid-level fighters possess?

D&D 5e has no morale rules, but battle master can use their rally manoeuvre to bolster their allies or commanding presence to inspire NPCs via a skill check. I probably wouldn't make such a thing part of the base class, as many people might want their fighters to be gruff slayers to whom such a feature wouldn't fit.

Divine power strengthen by brainpower.

Charisma is not brainpower.

No one says that people shouldn't use them.

People are saying that fighters are naturally bad at those things even if you take those skills and feats. And if you attempt to make a fighter good at noncombat,you are either nerfing your fighter or the feats/skills come in power so late that you likely never get to play your concept in the campaign.

AKA WOTC made it take 12 levels of play to create a proper knight

Fighters get the most amount of feats. If you want to use all that for combat stuff, that's your choice.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

They can fall over, squish a mouse and make 3rd level. It doesn't take long to get there and the DCs at that level are so low that you're making many of them half the time with no bonus at all.

My experience with 5e reflects neither of these. Not even close, in fact. The only games I've been in that reached at least 4th level within the first 10 sessions were the ones that started above 4th level. I've never, ever, seen a game where you reach 2nd level within the first four sessions.

People talk a lot about a lot of supposed "virtues" of 5e that I've literally never seen myself. But of course I'm supposed to be happy about this, since this is the DM being empowered, right? This is the DM deviating from the rules whenever and however they like, because that's axiomatically better for the game no matter what, right?

Fighters and Rogues are hardly high and dry. Oh, and the other classes for the most part don't have their good stuff for all the pillars, either. Classes don't really reach first level until they hit 3rd.

I explicitly said 1st and 2nd level for a reason. You're saying subclass is supposed to fix this problem. Subclasses don't exist for Fighters or Rogues prior to 3rd level, meaning you're specifically giving (most) casters a benefit that Fighters and Rogues don't get. It doesn't matter if those levels are supposed to be fast, or skipped over, or whatever. It's still shortchanging the Fighter, yet again.

But I have other reasons for absolutely hating the "1st level is actually 3rd level" problem, that would derail the thread if I discussed them here. Suffice it to say, I find this argument not just not compelling, but anti-compelling; it makes me oppose your position more than I did before.

1 spell per combat is a tight budget. But let's look at a 7th level caster. With 9 spell slots, that leaves him just 3 spells for other things, which may include more spells in a tough combat. And that's assuming that he has on his list the right spell for the situation at hand, which is far from guaranteed.

It's really really not, though, when you compare it to a Battle Master's 2-3 maneuvers per combat (6 combats; start of day plus two short rests gives 3*5=15 superiority dice, 15/6 = 2.5). Unless you're really, really bad at using combat spells, I just flat do not buy that a spell is worth less than 2.5 maneuvers. And if you're spending more spells on the combat, clearly you thought that was more worth you while than the non-combat stuff! It's not like the BM (or any Fighter) can just get to decide "hey, I need a little more combat oomph today, I'll just borrow from my non-combat pool this time." And if you aren't? Then your combat contributions were already good enough as-is, and you get 3 extra goodies to play with which the Fighter cannot even in principle compare to.

Spells are, pretty much automatically, much more powerful than maneuvers. Consider: chromatic orb, a solid combat spell, does 3d8 damage (of a chosen energy) to a target, based on an attack roll exactly the same way a BM's maneuvers are. 3d8 damage, so an average of 16.5 on a hit. A maneuver at max scaling does 1d12 bonus damage, average 6.5. That's 16.5/6.5 = 2.54ish. Even spells like thunderwave, which is only 2d8, compare quite favorably without any extra investment at all, especially since thunderwave is AoE and more widely available. And that's not even trying to compare things like how faerie fire is orders of magnitude better than the equivalent BM maneuver (spell applies to multiple targets and lasts for concentration duration, rather than only the single next attack roll. Even if your concentration is broken before you get to take actions again, it's still far more than twice as good as distracting strike, even despite faerie fire doing no damage.)

(Note that I'm ignoring the Fighter's base weapon damage here, because that's what the Fighter would get regardless, even if they weren't a Battle Master at all. I am comparing the benefit of the maneuvers specifically the spells.)

So...yeah. I'm not seeing "1 spell per combat" a tight budget. I'd argue two, even three maneuvers simply aren't as good as one spell, as long as we assume the spellcaster has even the tiniest bit of awareness of what they're doing. Not talking optimization here, just talking "you should cast fireball so it can hit at least two enemies because it's an AoE spell," that level of bare-minimum awareness of how one's spells work.

Why do the people not wanting to play a class get to dictate the class? They can keep the Fighter naughty word to suit their own impotence fantasies. Let me have the Paragon.

Because caster fans, particularly Wizard fans, have a demonstrably outsized influence on the direction of the hobby. It goes all the way up to the designers themselves. I linked an interview with Rob Heinsoo earlier--the lead designer of 4e--where he explicitly said he had to keep adjusting the Wizard back down again because members of the design team kept trying to make it the strongest class.

Or, to put it a bit cynically: They don't call it Wizards of the Coast for nothing.

But they DO want to play the class - they just don't want to play the same version of the class that you do.

That's the problem.

Ehren isn't talking about other Fighter players. They're talking about caster fans who complain about the "realism" of Fighters. Most Fighter fans don't seem to be that picky about ultra-realism. Some are picky about flavor, demanding that the class bring exactly nothing to the table so it can't prevent their personal concept (an argument I still to this day do not understand whatsoever; that's what refluffing is for). But I don't think I've seen a single legit outright Fighter fan who says, "No, I need the Fighter to be weaker than a real-world Olympian athlete in order to enjoy the class."

 

[Mort]

Ehren isn't talking about other Fighter players. They're talking about caster fans who complain about the "realism" of Fighters. Most Fighter fans don't seem to be that picky about ultra-realism. Some are picky about flavor, demanding that the class bring exactly nothing to the table so it can't prevent their personal concept (an argument I still to this day do not understand whatsoever; that's what refluffing is for). But I don't think I've seen a single legit outright Fighter fan who says, "No, I need the Fighter to be weaker than a real-world Olympian athlete in order to enjoy the class."

They don't phrase it that way no - but I have seen examples, on this very board, of people who say they like to play fighters but wouldn't if they lost the "realism" (To me it's a silly argument as realism in the D&D universe is absurd already, but I'm not the one making it).

 

[Vaalingrade]

You think 3e was different? The 3e MM has a section under half-dragons called "Half-Dragon Characters" Anything with a level adjustment has always been available for PC use, assuming the DM allows PCs with level adjustment.

Level adjustment didn't exist until savage species.