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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 9019601" data-attributes="member: 87792">Three obvious reasons:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">The fighter gets diddly squat at high level; they pretty much entirely stop scaling in a way that other classes simply don't making them a poster-boy for the problem</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">The monk, rogue, and barbarian have the same problem but to a lesser extent. Fighter is where it's easiest to make the argument, partly because it's clearest and partly because it's most popular.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">The monk's issues are a different but overlapping set.</li> </ol>If you look at the <a href="https://www.dndbeyond.com/classes/fighter" target="_blank">5e fighter</a> at tiers 3 and 4 one thing is immediately obvious. Between levels 12 and 19 the fighter gets precisely zero class abilities that are not either extra uses of lower level abilities or feats/ASIs that were not good enough for you to take at level 4. This is the plain and simple fact of the 5e fighter and demonstrates that there is literally no vision as to what a high level 5e fighter is supposed to look like. For all you can (and I probably have) said about the <a href="https://www.dndbeyond.com/classes/monk" target="_blank">5e monk</a> Diamond Soul at level 14 is an awesomely good ability, Empty Body is at least interesting, and Tongue of the Sun and Moon and Timeless Body may be little more than ribbons but they are something new. Does this mean the monk doesn't need TLC (IME especially starting at level 7)? No. The monk has their own issues. But they aren't the poster child for the high level fighter's clear issues.The other non-casters all have some  major version of this. They in general don't have a lot that wouldn't be appropriate for level 1 when the primary casters are getting something new and powerful that changes their abilities at every odd numbered level (except 19). But the fighter is the one that makes this distinction both thematically and mechanically the clearest. The monk, for example, continues to get stuff every odd numbered level, even if e.g. "stops aging" will almost never come up in play, unlike a daily use of a seventh level spell  (and even when it does come up it won't be more useful than a seventh level spell). So we start with the fighter; the barbarian and to a lesser extent the monk are meant to be balanced with the fighter (I'd argue the monk's more of a rogue or fighter/rogue type than a fighter) and if the fighter can have cool stuff at high level everyone can.The monk also has issues of their own, not least of which are level scaling. The monk is, in no small part due to flurry, right at the top of the damage curve levels 1-4 but falls off a lot when the second attack goes to the martials; they get one but it's a far lower proportional increase. Stunning fist gives them a different type of offence of course - but this also falls off because as you level what you fight simply gets bigger and so has better con saves, and that from level 7-13 all the abilities they get are passive while nothing other than a die size helps their offence. This isn't a deep rooted conceptual issue so much as one of balancing.</blockquote>

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