D&D 5E You Cant Fix The Class Imbalances IMHO

[Scribe]

All of which is excellent evidence for the claim I've made for years, that players care a great deal about concept and presentation, but they do in fact also care about effectiveness.

Objection your Honour, the question of effectiveness never came up, nor has it been defined.

How so? The explicit standard was simply that the player gets to feel awesome and the concept is present. No consideration for being dissatisfied with the way that the concept actually works in practice. "Feeling awesome" is far too nebulous, and by the poster's own words must have little to nothing to do with mechanics.

Because the response was to my comment on the first page. Having nothing to do with 'feeling awesome' and instead having to do with the unproven claim that 'balance' is an issue at all.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Objection your Honour, the question of effectiveness never came up, nor has it been defined.

Why should it need to be?

We have data. Folks are highly dissatisfied with particular classes and subclasses. Or are you now going to claim that the Champion, Berserker, and Beast Master are suffering low (sometimes critically low) satisfaction ratings without any relation whatsoever to the fact that these are some of the weakest subclasses in all of 5e?

Also, in reply to the part I cut out, I see no connection to any quote or statement of yours. I was quoting someone else, who did not quote you. How is this a chain from your original comment?

 

[Scribe]

Why should it need to be?

The either unwillingness or inability for people to define the terms of the discussion, is exactly why while 'everyone' knows there is imbalance or dissatisfaction, there is seemingly no agreed upon solution.

Also, in reply to the part I cut out, I see no connection to any quote or statement of yours. I was quoting someone else, who did not quote you. How is this a chain from your original comment?

Because on the first page, the discussion took place where I called out exactly what Composer99 refers to in regards to balance maybe not even being a concern to any but the terminally online.

Apropos of the thread topic, I find the point raised that class imbalance is not, for most players, the big deal it can be to the "terminally online" crowd because it doesn't interfere with their realisation of their character concept (up until the point where it does, of course) to be very insightful. The neo-trad play of modern D&D just requires that characters can (a) feel awesome for their players to play and (b) fulfill the concept they desire (subject to the way that certain classes are more suitable for some concepts than others).

Or, the way the majority of people (thats "all the players for which 5e is the only edition for 500 Alex") play does not reinforce or highlight the imbalances that are perceived by an aggrieved portion of the terminally online playerbase?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Indeed. Moreover, something can be "popular" while also being "unpopular," because people use these terms in squishy, inconsistent ways.

If something is played frequently, it is called popular. But if something has low player satisfaction, that pretty clearly would seem to be **un***popular. Yet there are things in 5e that are, demonstrably, both widely-played *and suffering abysmal player satisfaction. They are "popular" by one metric and "unpopular" by another.

Hence why I say the amount of people playing something is the lesser half of the story. It's also a perfect example of surrogation. The quantity or rate of people playing something is an indirect measure of whether that thing is good or successful at its intended purpose. Yet for years and years folks have ised it as though it were a direct measure: clearly, there's no way players would frequently play things they don't really like! But the satisfaction survey data, which actually does directly measure how folks feel about these things, paints a very different story, one of shockingly low player satisfaction despite continuing to play these things. All of which is excellent evidence for the claim I've made for years, that players care a great deal about concept and presentation, but they do in fact also care about effectiveness.

The problem is that all WotC needs is for people to spend, which they are apparently doing despite the low satisfaction rate. Thus, there is no motivation to improve.

 

[Oofta]

Because popularity and quality are not directly related. The most popular thing is not always the best.

There is no barrier to playing other classes, no hidden costs of playing anything other than a fighter. The choices of class is wide open and easily understood.

So in many cases, popularity is no indication of what people want. But that's only really true if there are other factors at play.

With no external factors at play in this case the obvious answer is most likely correct. People play fighters because they want to play them and have fun doing so.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

The assumptions are amazing to me.

We “know” feature X sucks. It bothers us so that is how we know it sucks. It does not bother most others based on their buying habits or statements but we know they still hate it. Hence everyone knows it sucks.

Wth?

The much more parsimonious explanation is some sample of people don’t like feature X. But we don’t say the most obvious thing because that sounds much less factual and authoritative.

This stuff is straight up opinion based and there is no great consensus on much of anything. Opinions differ.

 

[SteveC]

Honestly, I don't think WotC is able to fix these issues because they are trying to come to a consensus and hit a magical number of players who like an option, and that's hard to do. Other game companies can certainly do this, and some have already (with varying levels of success). If there's no consensus that there is a problem, or if there's the belief that the problem is a feature and not a bug, you're not going to see any major changes.

We will really have to see. I've been watching Treantmonk's videos from the playtests, and it looks like there's an attempt being made, so I could be full of hooey. And it's another case of where I would be very happy to be wrong.

 

[MGibster]

Because the response was to my comment on the first page. Having nothing to do with 'feeling awesome' and instead having to do with the unproven claim that 'balance' is an issue at all.

That's kind of the problem with pointing out potential flaws in 5th edition. It's so darned successful that just about any flaw can be ignored because it doesn't really matter.

 

[Minigiant]

We “know” feature X sucks. It bothers us so that is how we know it sucks. It does not bother most others based on their buying habits or statements but we know they still hate it. Hence everyone knows it sucks.

Most of D&D's product before 2022 or so is not be purchased individually.

You had to purchase X which sucks with Y which was good as X, Y, and Z were in the same book.

A lot of low quality stuff was purchased by being bundled with high quality stuff.
A lot of low popularity stuff was purchased by being bundled with high popularity stuff.

 

[Scribe]

That's kind of the problem with pointing out potential flaws in 5th edition. It's so darned successful that just about any flaw can be ignored because it doesn't really matter.

I mean flaws can be pointed out, but people need to understand that a whole bunch of that boils down to nothing more than personal bias and perception.

"Fighters suck at anything outside of the Combat pillar!"

"I, a Fighter, do not care about anything but the Combat pillar!"

Both of those COULD be true, and if the latter is ones position, and the 'balance' in Combat is fine for Fighters, then does the Fighters 'balance' suck?

I suppose it would be in the eye of the Beholder.