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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ZombieRoboNinja" data-source="post: 6361800" data-attributes="member: 54843">So, a couple things are going on here that muddy the waters.First off, the bard is using smite spells. This is perfectly legal but also extremely powerful and annoying. (Why is a bard SIGNIFICANTLY better at smiting than a paladin?) I would disallow this as a DM, as a house rule. If you get rid of the smites, the bard's damage falls below the fighter's more significantly.Second, as much as it simplifies things to ignore magic items, it really SHOULD be taken into account that a level 20 fighter will get more benefit from them than any other character (except a monk with a magic monk weapon). Twice as much as a bard, in fact. So we don't even have to dip into house rules to fix this issue; just give everyone in the party a Flametongue weapon (+1 weapon, +1d6 fire damage on hit), and the fighter with his extra attacks will get a proportionally higher benefit from it. Likewise, AC bonuses are more powerful the higher your AC already is: if we assume the fighter has 19 AC and the bard has 17 AC, that means an enemy with +8 to hit needs an 11+ to hit the fighter and a 9+ to hit the bard (50% chance to hit vs. 60%). That means that giving everyone +2 armor will reduce the damage to the fighter by 20% and to the rogue by only 16.6%. So aside from the fact that this chart inexplicably ignores the impact of AC, if we assume that the fighter normally has even slightly better nonmagical AC, giving the entire party magic armor will still benefit the fighter more.Third, the fighter is a champion who is apparently taking only three feat out of his eight ability score increase slots. Of those three, one is GWM (hard to argue with), the next is Durable, and the last is, um, Linguist. As I mentioned in a previous post, if the goal is for the fighter to "win" this chart, he should be taking stuff like Inspiring Leader, Ritual Caster, Healer, and Magic Adept. Possibly Alert and Observant too. (Plus plenty of other combat-related stuff, like Sentinel.) Assuming 3 short rests per day, Inspiring Leader alone would add 80 "health points" to the fighter's total at level 20, if we're following the rules and only counting the healing he does to himself. The +2 Con he takes instead only adds 20.While we're at it, if the goal is to find a non-magical warrior who can rival a bard's broad array of tricks and powers, why on Earth are we looking at a Champion fighter? A rogue or Battlemaster is just as nonmagical. In fact, given generous short rests, the Battlemaster will do MORE damage than the Champion, and also have lots of in-combat utility the Champion doesn't (much of it hard to quantify, granted). And a rogue will have better skills than the bard as well as some other great class abilities (Reliable Talent, Stroke of Luck).Why do these possibilities not occur to the OP? Why is this board not flooded with complaints of "OMG RITUAL CASTER OP, FIGHTER STOLE MY UTILITY"? Because most people actually don't value such utility that highly. If I'm a fighter, I let the wizard deal with setting up Alarm spells and interpreting riddles and whatever; it's my job to hit stuff. You want to spend a bonus action every round healing some chumps or yourself? Enjoy, I'll be using MY bonus actions to hit stuff. (Or to protect allies or whatever.) If you are running a campaign that DOES focus more on non-combat encounters, AND you're not the kind of "old-school" role-player who enjoys contributing to those scenarios without mechanical support, AND you want to play a nonmagical character, then use some of the feats and subclasses I just mentioned to do so.The game still isn't perfectly balanced on this axis, ESPECIALLY after level 17 or so. (Following the progress of the play tests, you can just tell that they were aware of this and kept trying to add awesome stuff for super-high-level martial characters, but apparently kept getting shot down by the players, because most of that was gone by release. Apparently a lot of people really, really want to play a level 20 fighter who still Just Hits Stuff.) Dealing with level 9 spells while maintaining some semblance of balance is probably never going to be easy in 5e; if you want to play a campaign that high up, you might have to just ride the lightning and let the necromancer have his skeleton horde, and be sure to give the martial characters fortresses and personal armies and whatever else they need to keep up.</blockquote>

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