A critique and review of the Fighter class

[GMforPowergamers]

As for Leadership: giving you a second character to control is pretty powerful. Seeing as how they couldn't even get Beastmaster right initially, and all the gripes about summoning or using familiars to do, well, anything, I rather doubt WotC would be like, "sure, have an NPC you can control" without either making it next to useless or the subject of many complaints about it's "brokenness".

yeah I wonder if a feat/ability that gave you an apprentice/squire ect that had set stats (like the iron defender or the new companion animals) and a second that gave a small squad of guards would work

 

[Mannahnin]

Cha- you by pure force of will/personality drive the weapon to success...

of these cha is teh only one that needs a bit of supernatural flar... but even that not really

Could be more "Your force of personality and aggressive fighting spirit helps you overwhelm your opponent's defenses"

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

That bold bit is a bit off the mark. Some of what you are calling a "power boost" was just an option. The thrown weapon fighting style is an objective boost for thrown weapon fighter builds. Sure 99.999_ percent of fighters will ever use it, but it's a boost. The ability to swap cantrips does nothing about the problems with cantrips and is likely of marginal use beyond mere flavor for a similar percentage of wizards.


Edit: not giving enough consideration to the system as a whole and how things combine/compare is no doubt responsible for a lot of 5e's self inflicted wounds & problematicaly designed elements.

Compare thrown weapon style is no different than creating a new feat or subclass. It offers an option for a single point of customization that can, at best, be changed every four levels (so maybe twice total). You may as well say a new race is a boost. Your entire defense on fighters seems to be a Schroedinger's Fighter situation, as though their extra ASI/feat can solve all problems because they could pick anything, but really it at best helps one thing, because once it is picked, it is locked in.

Compare it to The druid's ability to use wild shape to summon a throwaway scout. Or new spells, which they automatically know. These are straight up power boosts because all druids have them and can use them each day.

I don't object to fighters being improved in a well considered way. The objection is trying to use bad data & questionable anecdotes that ignore how the system as a whole functions to justify problematic & overpowered features.

Hahaha. I do not believe you for one second.

 

[James Gasik]

I think that fighter needs to be broken up to buff it and wizard needs to be broken up to weaken it.

in wizard case some spells need to be sorcerer only (what ones I will leave to debat...I wont pretend I could do this off the cuff) then the specialist subclasses need to be broken up between 3-4 classes with each having spells limited only to that one class and also some going to only some of those 3-4 classes... off top of my head warmage (evocor abjurer) beguiler (enchanter illusionist) and Arcanisit (diviner transmuter) with a dedicated necromancer is how I would do it.

then break fighter into champion, battlemaster (I would call it warlord but warblade or sword sage works too) and eldritch knight (i would call it swordmage or magus) then I would give that eldritch knight class some of it's own spells, and some paliden spells (like smites) and some warmage spells.

the idea to break up the cleric isn't REALLY to break it up... I would just go back to the 2e concept of spheres (you can keep them called domains if you want) where no 1 cleric gets all the spells but you MAKE your list by taking 3 major and 2 minor lists and adding it to a small 'general cleric list'

I almost WANT to break arcane trickster out of rogue to give it it's own spells too... but I am not sure on this one.

I like some of these ideas, but the Cleric is basically the game's main "I heal/remove afflictions guy"; much of the spell list is devoted to this, and they do that better than anyone else. So while I do want Clerics to have a stronger identity when modeling a Cleric of this god or that god, I don't want to go back to 2e Specialty Priests who had less healing power than a 2e Druid. The Cleric class has a strong chassis because they are the #1 class for keeping the party going strong.

People will note that the Bard and the Druid do have a lot of these sorts of spells, but the Bard has no default access and have to carefully pick spells known. And Druids, well...they're Druids. Asking a Druid to stock a Greater Restoration usually gets you the stink eye for some reason, lol.

 

[James Gasik]

The old Marvel Super Heroes game (FASERIP) had an example of an Endurance (Constitution) attack: Charging.

"Charging combat is a form of attack that combines movement and combat. Whereas making any other attack or action halves movement, a charging character may make his full movement and still strike.....

A character scoring a Hit result inflicts up to his maximum Endurance or his Body Armor rank in damage, whichever his higher..."

 

[tetrasodium]

I'm not even sure it is JUST wizards... even warlock (the simple easy caster with most limits) blows any non caster out of water... upgrade to sorcerer and it's worse. go to cleric, bard or wizard and it is worse still

Warlock falls into the same short rest nova king niche as fighter and has a (1d10+stat mod)*(number of attacks) that scales like fighter extra attack. They are just as if not more overpowered as fighter. That's thanks to the ability to dump a couple of whatever the best "intentionally overtuned" spell they have access to before falling back to repelling eldritch blast till they can buddy with the fighter to call for or simply dig in & guilt the group/GM into letting them take yet another rest so they can repeat it the next fight.

I think that fighter needs to be broken up to buff it and wizard needs to be broken up to weaken it.

in wizard case some spells need to be sorcerer only (what ones I will leave to debat...I wont pretend I could do this off the cuff) then the specialist subclasses need to be broken up between 3-4 classes with each having spells limited only to that one class and also some going to only some of those 3-4 classes... off top of my head warmage (evocor abjurer) beguiler (enchanter illusionist) and Arcanisit (diviner transmuter) with a dedicated necromancer is how I would do it.

then break fighter into champion, battlemaster (I would call it warlord but warblade or sword sage works too) and eldritch knight (i would call it swordmage or magus) then I would give that eldritch knight class some of it's own spells, and some paliden spells (like smites) and some warmage spells.

the idea to break up the cleric isn't REALLY to break it up... I would just go back to the 2e concept of spheres (you can keep them called domains if you want) where no 1 cleric gets all the spells but you MAKE your list by taking 3 major and 2 minor lists and adding it to a small 'general cleric list'

I almost WANT to break arcane trickster out of rogue to give it it's own spells too... but I am not sure on this one.

I'm not sure how fighter could be broken up to fix anything short of doing so in order to rebuild the poorly done monolithic base chassis & provide room for more choices or even archetype features like the levelup fighter does. Wizard was actually recombined by 5e's oversimplifications though. Back when SR was a thing

Spoiler: spells fell into a few general categories

• Solid nukes where the damage was less important than the damage type accomplishing something. Acid arrow turning off troll regen is an example
• very awesome high level nukes. Fireball & others fell into this category
• Solid & reliable buff/debuff/control spells Haste Web Bulls strength/cats grace/etc fit in here
• Save or suck control & debuff spells like web glitterdust solid fog stinking cloud & others fit here
• Save or lose spells like flesh to stone/feeblemind/etc

There were a few other areas spells fell into, but largely spells tended to fall into or close to those groupings. The bolded groupings tended to be SR:no spells while the others were usually SR:Yes with the unbolded SR:no spells tending to fall in around drawbacks like the 8th level incendiary cloud's 4d6 damage. Feat choices & spell spell selection was generally going to change depending on a PC's build & there just weren't really enough to excel at both so wizards would self divide as a result.

That self divide was demolished by 5e's oversimplifications with a cascading avalanche of change that no doubt led to other last minute fixes

• Spells changed to do what they do based on slot level rather than caster level so a wizard no longer shook up their lower level slots with now more powerful versions of previously unworthy spells. This meant that a caster's lower level slots were only useful for upcasting came with a cost & few if any spells had their scaling adjusted to make casting a high level version worthy. Worse still it caused a lot of buff/debuff spells like bulls strength & such to be pretty trash.
• With a bunch of spells shifted from "really want to prepare" over to "why the heck would I ever prepare that" the spell list really narrows down to the best of the best & the versatility that was once important is no longer of any real value so a caster can do both sides of the self divide suddenly.
• concentration was overused & applied to nearly any spell with a duration not instant or basically instant. Right away borderline spells that could have been worthy of preparing in case or casting became flatly unusable because the caster can only concentrate on one spell & it needs to be amazeballs. Low level low cost buff/debuff/control spells were no longer low cost force multipliers & came with significant opportunity cost causing them to be tossed in the trash bin rather than being sprinkled around to make everyone else at the table a little better/safer as fitting.
• Spell Resistance(SR) was removed in favor of magic & legendary resistance with all the finesse of a cinderblock. Those apply to anyspell & casters no longer have the reliable SR:no force multiplier stuff that made everyone feel awesome/safe to fall back on when they hit the big boss dragon/fiend/etc so need to burn through it feeling useless before switching to save or lose or the biggest baddest nukes they have.
  • That removal of SR in order to simplify something in 5e's relentless quest to streamline & simplify at any cost dealt another blow to the self division that once existed among casters though. Without SR the associated Spell Penetration choices were simply out the window & now casters no longer had to choose between spell penetration vrs something else since every spell effectively became SR:Yes with the magic resist/legendary resist.
• To further rejoin the self division wotc decided that some spells were "iconic" & overpowered them while just nerfing the heck out of many others that were once bread & butter in the bolded categories.

So in a roundabout way 5e's simplifications intended to reign in what could absolutely become out of control with casters directly nerfed the fighter who could no longer reasonably expect to be fighting with someone regularly throwing out low level force multiplier buff/debuff/control spells. Any kind of split needs to be done with more attention to how things work as a system & a better understanding of human nature than 5e gave this area. Unfortunately it's a very high bar to rewind this even a little because they purged all traces of it & monsters don't have the support for it any more than anything else.
edit: The shift from DR X/Thing & resist Y/Element to blanket resist had a bunch of followup problems created as well both to nerf (some) fighters & exacerbate the problems with unsplitting of casters

 

[James Gasik]

Tetrasodium, I love that post for it's excellent breakdown of how we got to this strange place with Wizards and how they cast spells- I've often pointed out that concentration caused as many problems as it cured with regards to casting buff spells on allies.

The only reason I didn't actually love the post is that it's a sad state of affairs. I want to play a Transmutation Wizard that's constantly throwing out buffs on my allies, it's a fun thing for me to do. But there are so many more efficient spells I could be using my concentration on instead that I find it hard to do so. Like enlarging my party Fighter- so a handful of d4's get chucked over the course of a fight. Or I could instead drop a cloud of daggers in an ideal spot. Or just web a few monsters to take them out of the fight until we're ready to deal with them. And so on, and so forth.

And as I get higher level spells to work with, the priority of what I can select to concentrate on increases. You wanted haste? Why, when I can instead slow up to 6 creatures?

 

[Mort]

Tetrasodium, I love that post for it's excellent breakdown of how we got to this strange place with Wizards and how they cast spells- I've often pointed out that concentration caused as many problems as it cured with regards to casting buff spells on allies.

The only reason I didn't actually love the post is that it's a sad state of affairs. I want to play a Transmutation Wizard that's constantly throwing out buffs on my allies, it's a fun thing for me to do. But there are so many more efficient spells I could be using my concentration on instead that I find it hard to do so. Like enlarging my party Fighter- so a handful of d4's get chucked over the course of a fight. Or I could instead drop a cloud of daggers in an ideal spot. Or just web a few monsters to take them out of the fight until we're ready to deal with them. And so on, and so forth.

And as I get higher level spells to work with, the priority of what I can select to concentrate on increases. You wanted haste? Why, when I can instead slow up to 6 creatures?

But at least Wizards now face choices, they can't Haste the party AND slow (also, slow has a save it's "better" if it hits but not as reliable as haste) the baddies AND banish the big bad etc.

And frankly, as levels increase, buffing (for the wizard) becomes a VERY good option - as more and more bad guys have magic resistance, legendary resistance or outright immunity (highly campaign dependent, of course, but that's a high % of DMs goto).

At least with the fighter, DMs usually give him the tools for his schtick to work (granted, it's usually just the one schtick). This why I'm not really focusing on the combat pillar in this thread. Fighters, in the combat pillar, are quite effective, they can be boring with the lack of varied options, but effective. It's the other pillars that need a step up. IMO, of course.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

At least with the fighter, DMs usually give him the tools for his schtick to work (granted, it's usually just the one schtick). This why I'm not really focusing on the combat pillar in this thread. Fighters, in the combat pillar, are quite effective, they can be boring with the lack of varied options, but effective. It's the other pillars that need a step up. IMO, of course.

For sure. I got all kinds of idea for making fighters more interesting in a fight, but none of it is needed to bring them up to viable levels.

I’d love to make action surge also useful out of combat, and give the fighter more of it.

 

[Mort]

For sure. I got all kinds of idea for making fighters more interesting in a fight, but none of it is needed to bring them up to viable levels.

I’d love to make action surge also useful out of combat, and give the fighter more of it.

Yeah, an "out of combat" action surge mechanic and maybe a separate maneuver die pool for outside of combat - would go a long, long way!