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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6710147" data-attributes="member: 2067">In my view, the classes seem to be roughly balanced within the pillars, yes. Couldn't speak for those that imagine the Fighter is giving something up to be better at combat. I can say that I agree with Mearls that the fighter subclasses aren't as flavorful or narratively interesting as most other subclasses, and that can certainly contribute to a perception that they've got little on offer outside of combat abilities. In the Champion's case, this is even demonstrable - they don't have an apprentice-tier fluff ability. Likely, this is intentional (in the name of simplicity!), but it certainly means that a Champion doesn't have any special way to contribute to stuff outside of combat. If we want to talk about a Paladin using their spells out of combat, we should also talk about a Fighter using Action Surge outside of combat (double skill checks, for instance, or move + 2 dashes). In both cases, you're giving up damage capacity to do other things. As par for the course with action Surge, the Fighter seems to spike harder for a shorter duration on these. But at this point we're moving the goalposts pretty far away from "Fighters aren't overshadowed in a fight," which was my goal. If we can agree that fighters aren't inherently disadvantaged in combat, I'm happy to move onto what issues they face outside of it. I wouldn't say it's a mistake, I would say it's something that biases the game away from short-rest-recovery characters like fighters and warlocks if you do it as a default. While I think the pacing variation is kind of fascinating (1 short rest for 6 encounters is...gonna be rough in like a third of those encounters, hp-wise), I don't think you can hold the game's feet to the fire for not designing to gameplay behavior that works around its guidelines. The DMG clearly states what it expects. It's fine if you don't follow those expectations, but then you can't expect everything in the game to work exactly the same as it would otherwise. It'd be like playing 4e without each of the four roles - viable, possible, even fun, but certainly not what the game is presuming you're doing. Like I pointed out, I think that's a flawed assumption. 5e classes don't have hard roles. ANY character played as a damage-dealer should be able to meet some baseline damage potential. Any character played as a tank should have a baseline of staying power. Any character played as a controller should have some baseline ability to deny. Any character played as a leader should have some baseline damage negation (healing, AC spikes, disadvantage to enemies, etc.) and buffing.While there's some variation in the extreme ends of the bell curve for how easy it is to pull off some of these (ie, if you want to be a leader-fighter, you're going to have to focus on it, but if you want to be a striker-fighter you can do it without thinking; if you want to be a leader-bard, you can almost stumble into it, but if you want to be a striker-bard, that'll require some special attention), ultimately there is a sort of rough parity IMXP. My controller-sorcerer isn't the most natural thing for a sorcerer to do, but he does it, and he's good at it. I'm also not getting into a wang-measuring contest just because the low-level Sentinel/Polearm Master Fighter might have denied more actual damage to the party, though. Baseline is all that's necessary, my sorc hits the baseline nicely, I'm a happy camper. It's true, when you compare novas at level 8, a fighter with a d8 weapon and +5 STR has an average potential damage of 114 from 12 attacks during surge rounds over the course of the day, while a paladin with the same STR and weapon could do seven smite attacks for 143 average potential damage, pulilng ahead by 29 points of damage! So I guess it does actually come close to matching that. Given what was said upthread about ~20 points of damage not being much at level 5, I'd say this still falls within the bounds of rough balance, personally (especially considering the extra ASI/feat the fighter has under their belt - a CON bump, if nothing more, which might contribute another round or so to fighting after the paladin drops). You were beating his butt regularly circa level 5-6, he pulls a head a bit by level 8, it's kind of a rounding error either way, close enough to parity for the messy work of adventuring, I think.</blockquote>

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