Class Balance - why?

[WarlockLord]

I was never referring to 3.5. 1E / 2E.

But it IS the root of the problem and why when 4e promised "class balance", a lot of people listened.

 

[Jiggawatts]

I think one thing everyone forgets about pre 3E wizards is that if you were hit by anything before your initiative came up in the round, even 1 point of damage, you lost your spell, no saving throw, no concentration checks, no nothing, fizzle fizzle. This was the balance.

The other balancing factor is that in AD&D wizard hit points are utter crap, the absolute most a single classed mage could have at 20th level is 70 HP, and that is if he had a 16 or higher Con and rolled max on his HP rolls every level from 1-10. So a 10th level mage will have on average about 30 HP. You let a specialized Fighter get close to him with his damage bonuses and extra attacks, that mage is toast...oh and lets also not forget that in AD&D, warrior classes get the best saving throws across the board.

 

[Dellamon]

Alright. I am currently laboring under the impression that the OP (and several other posters) have absolutely no idea what the hell a properly played caster in 3.5 can do. Let's just take a straight up wizard for now, if you'd like.

The common example is fireball. This is widely regarded as a crap spell for many reasons, mainly because it does less damage than a properly built fighter. However, the common response is "well if we make it immune to fire/immune to magic, we can balance it so we need the fighter". There are several problems with this approach.

1) Too much crap in 3.5 ignored spell resistance. I can use telekinesis to (at the level I get it) throw 9 large greatswords for 27d6 damage a shot. This ignores spell resistance. I can also use animate dead or planar binding to acquire minions which are straight up better than the fighter. I don't actually care that Sir Bob the Knight thinks he's the boss, my zombie hydra probably has more hit points and attacks. And I can ride it, so there.

2) Too many attack vectors for casters, too few for melee Casters get it pretty good. They've got attacks which attack all three saves, ignore armor, and straight-up no save or be removed from combat.. You can force people to grapple with Evard's black tentacles, or snare them in webs while your skeleton archers whittle them down. You can magic jar the target's bff and stab them at the dinner party, or mind control a loved one into assassinating them from afar. The fighter is... a moron with a stick.

3)In 3.5, fighters are actually really bad at their jobs. Fighters have bad saves, AC doesn't matter at high levels, they can't see through illusions (without whining at spellcasters or getting magic items) and they can't close to melee with high level enemies. They don't have defenses against common status afflictions (guess what casters get?) and go down pretty quickly. By contrast, casters are stacking up miss chances, damage reduction, and flight to ensure that they don't get hit.

So the "wizard-fighter imbalance" is not so much a "this character is slightly more powerful than the others" as "this wizard is tall enough to ride, and you are actively hurting your team by playing a fighter". Being in the latter category because you wanted to play Sun Tzu (or someone else cool) and have him be competitive is a terrible thing for a game system to support.

Dynamic initiative and a higher challenge level to concentration checks would solve the majority of these problems. Pretty easy fix IMO. But then, you would have all the wizards up in arms screaming about how they are dead before they can get their spells off and how fighters with a bow or ranged weapon are gods in combat.

 

[avin]

I think one thing everyone forgets about pre 3E wizards is that if you were hit by anything before your initiative came up in the round, even 1 point of damage, you lost your spell, no saving throw, no concentration checks, no nothing, fizzle fizzle. This was the balance.

Mirror Image wasn't made for dealing with this?

The other balancing factor is that in AD&D wizard hit points are utter crap, the absolute most a single classed mage could have at 20th level is 70 HP, and that is if he had a 16 or higher Con and rolled max on his HP rolls every level from 1-10. So a 10th level mage will have on average about 30 HP. You let a specialized Fighter get close to him with his damage bonuses and extra attacks, that mage is toast...oh and lets also not forget that in AD&D, warrior classes get the best saving throws across the board.

And Wizards went to Wotc boards, with all reason, complaining cats could kill them... so Wotc listened and, tah-dah, we had 3.5 overpowered casters... then everybody else complained and, tah-dah, nerfed Wizards.

So, IMO, it's time to fix Wizards back to what they used to be in therms of utility, but not in therms of overpowering...

 

[Chris_Nightwing]

1) Too much crap in 3.5 ignored spell resistance. I can use telekinesis to (at the level I get it) throw 9 large greatswords for 27d6 damage a shot. This ignores spell resistance. I can also use animate dead or planar binding to acquire minions which are straight up better than the fighter. I don't actually care that Sir Bob the Knight thinks he's the boss, my zombie hydra probably has more hit points and attacks. And I can ride it, so there.

The trouble with SR was that it was all or nothing. Swingy. I don't know why they didn't make it read like Empower Spell (X% of ALL NUMERICAL EFFECTS and so on). You resist by taking less fire damage, not making the fireball wink out.

2) Too many attack vectors for casters, too few for melee Casters get it pretty good. They've got attacks which attack all three saves, ignore armor, and straight-up no save or be removed from combat.. You can force people to grapple with Evard's black tentacles, or snare them in webs while your skeleton archers whittle them down. You can magic jar the target's bff and stab them at the dinner party, or mind control a loved one into assassinating them from afar. The fighter is... a moron with a stick.

I also don't know why more non-magic powers didn't target these defenses (I suppose poison did). Otherwise why not have 'melee defense' and 'magic defense'?

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I agree 100% that this is what D&D was derived from. However, just because it was derived from a tactical wargame did not mean it did not evolve from being a tactical wargame.

It's still both. You talk to people, you get quests, you explore, and then you fight monsters in a tactical war game.

Also, 100% agree. The same can be said with a roleplaying game. If a player wizard is inherently more powerful, the DM needs to make sure the NPC / enemy wizard is just as powerful to balance things out. The same could be said with clerics, fighters and rouges.

This is what we call the Oberoni Fallacy. It essentially means that "You cannot make the argument that the rules don't have to be correct/balanced/work as written because the DM can fix it by doing X because that argument is invalid."

You can't state "The rules work fine, you just have to change things so they work fine." It's an illogical argument.

The enemy should be able to be whatever you want them to be. There's no way to guarantee that the enemy even has a wizard or a cleric or anything else. There's no way to guarantee that the enemy wizard attacks the PCs' wizard or vice versa.

It isn't going to help the fighter one bit if the enemy wizard has the ability to paralyze all of the PCs at once, but the PC wizard is unaffected because he has his Protection from Paralysis spell up or his Resistance to Magic spell up.

The wizard and fighter are both powerful, just each in their own way. The wizard has a lot of negatives that the fighter does not suffer from - vancian spell limitations, low hit point, crap armor, limited weapons, poor physical saves, etc. I enjoy playing fighters, especially when playing with a good DM. A single good throw of a rock could ruin a mega arch-mage's spell of instant party doom and end a big-boss battle.

The answers to this depend on which edition of D&D you were playing in. Wizards in 1e/2e WERE actually weak enough that their immense power was balanced...up until about 5th or 6th level. Then they had enough hitpoints to survive an attack or two by most enemies. Plus, they began to have the spells that allowed them to ignore attacks. In 1e, spells were fairly easily disrupted(you still had to go first).

In 2e, it was very difficult, since you had to act in the small window between when the spell started and ended, had to be ready to disrupt the spell, be in range, etc. Most of the time the first spell a wizard cast was something like Mirror Image or Stoneskin that made it nearly impossible to hit them and do damage...therefore making the rest of their spells undisruptable.

This got even worse in 3e/3.5e. Most Wizards in 3.5e had better AC than the fighters, since they could stack 2 or 3 protection spells on themselves. Most of the time they were nearly immune to attacks from the enemy while able to fly, teleport, and use any other number of means to never get hit.

I think when you get too involved in the math of the game (which is fairly broken, even in 4E), it takes away from the game.

4e math isn't broken. There are a couple of feats and powers that when combined together in ways they weren't meant to break the math. Those need to be corrected, I admit. But the whole system itself is based on very accurate math. If you can give me an example of what is broken in 4e math, I would like to know.

As

Never seen it happen this way, especially at the levels where you are encountering orcs. Fighters and rouges shine at those levels.

At 5th level, wizards got fireball. Back in 1e/2e, it was the be all end all of 3rd level spells. It had a HUGE radius that could be made even bigger if you were in an enclosed space. It did 5d6 points of damage at the level you got it. Most of the enemies you were fighting were 1-4 hitdice creatures at that time, which meant you killed most enemies you were fighting on an average roll of a fireball. If not, they were so low in hitpoints at that point that you could sit back and watch the fighters pick off the last couple of points of damage.

Thieves in 1e/2e weren't good at combat at any level. Being limited to daggers for damage and encouraged not to have a high strength meant they were often doing 1d4+1 points of damage at early levels. Which averages 3.5 damage or about 1/5th that of the wizard's fireball. Backstabs could only be used if the enemy didn't know you were there...which meant you couldn't use it most combats that you started by walking in a door.

And it isn't about concentrating too much on the math. It doesn't require concentrating on the math for longer than a couple of seconds and a simple understanding of numbers to say "I have a THAC0 or 15, so I need a 15 to hit this enemy for 1d8+3 points of damage to one enemy. You have an 70% chance of doing 5d6 points of damage and a 30% change of doing half that to all 20 enemies we are fighting(for a total of 350 points of damage if no one saves and 175 points of damage if everyone saves) ....how is that fair?"

I actually think it's the DMs JOB to understand the math behind the system and to correct for it when possible. Perhaps you aren't thinking enough about the math.

 

[hanez]

I am happy to see that for my main points it seems we are actually ALL AGREEING.

I agree with many people who have been on the other side of the argument.

I agree that a critical eye should look at the spells and remove or lessen spells that creep on other classes main roles. I also agree that the damage a wizard can do shouldn't make Conan the wizards sidekick. Perhaps the wizard can just be better at AoE and Conan should be better at one on one damage.

I also agree that it should not be left to the DM to fix imbalance problems, the rules should strive to fix it. Perhaps part of this can be a part of "making magical items magical again". I always thought that items for martial classes were to tame. They should do powerful and amazing things to allow martial classes to feel powerful and magical now and then too.

I agree that maybe the wizard needs some weaknesses (e.g. rules for making the spell fizzle if hit, longer castimes). I agree with this on all classes, tinker em to be about the same usefelness!


What I am glad that I am not seeing very much is people arguing for "all classes have the same amount of powers, gain the same amount of powers at every level, and all powers are roughly equal in combat". I kind of see 4e as having gone that way and it will be a dealbreaker for a lot of people if its in 5e.

 

[Deadboy]

• Let the fighter be an unbeatable brute that people are truly scared of and regularly run from.
• Let the rogue have adventures where he says "well I just killed everyone in the keep before they knew we were even here, guess we can just walk to the treasure",
• Let the wizard rain fire down from the sky raising an army.
• AND let all classes have different areas to shine in noncombat too! If the bard bypasses a whole adventure or convinces an army to join the party because of his charm it is JUST AS SATISFYIN as "causing x damage". I played an illusionist not because I wanted to do as much damage as everyone else, but because I occasionally want to bypass battles because of my whit.

But the thing is, what you're describing is 4e and balanced classes, not earlier editions. In earlier editions (particularly 3.x as the problems with balance in 1e/2e only really crop up at highest levels, it's:

Let the Wizard cast Tenser's Transformation, Enlarge, Stoneskin and/or various other buffs and be an unstoppable brute everyone runs from.

Let the Wizard cast Improved Invisibility and have adventures where he says "well I just killed everyone in the keep before they knew we were even here, guess we can just walk to the treasure."

Let the Wizard rain fire from the skies and raise armies.

AND let Wizards have different areas to shine in noncombat too with their big spellbook full of "I Win" buttons!

The problem is 3.x turned Wizards into Gods who can do everything cause magic, and everyone else into mundane schlubs who can't keep up. There's enough different myth (CuCulain, Beowulf) and modern pop references (God of War) to suggest that choosing Fighter or Rogue as your class shouldn't necessarily mean "can never do anything beyond what a medieval soldier could do." In 1e/2e, high level spells eventually made Wizards the most powerful but it wasn't THAT bad, because fighters had better saves, better non-weapon proficiences and more attacks. 3.x took ALL of that away and gave the fighters feats. It wasn't a fair trade.

 

[Li Shenron]

Balance, at least intended as balance between players characters of the same experience*, is a good idea because it strives to make none of the character types inferior in the game.

*note that same level does not equate to same experience in early editions, I personally prefer the 3e way that level progressions are identical but ultimately it doesn't have to be for the classes to be balanced

Actual characters can still be unbalanced with each other because of lucky/unlucky rolls in characters creation, but this has a much different magnitude of effects across the editions, and goes away if you don't use any rolls at all in the process.

But indeed "balance obsession" doesn't sound good at all to me. If you don't stop at some point and accept that this balance is enough, ultimately the only fully_balanced game is the game where everyone plays the same character.

I suppose everyone has a different "enough balance" threshold... but generally speaking balance works against character differentiation.

Here's a quote from 1ed AD&D PHB by Gygax:

"Classes have restrictions in order to give a varied and unique approach to each class when they play, as well as to provide play balance"

Trying to balance everything at any cost may give you a game where there is not much varied approach to different characters.

This is especially evident when different classes traditionally had their "spotlight" in different moments of the game: exploration, combat or even downtime.

One of my favourite features of D&D 3.0 was that it felt different whenever I played a Wizard rather than a Fighter rather than a Rogue... playing each archetype almost felt like having different games to play! I had only short experiences at low levels with even older editions, but I suspect the differences were even greater.

I really prefer to risk a moderately unbalanced game rather than give up diversity for comfortable balance.

 

[avin]

The problem is 3.x turned Wizards into Gods who can do everything cause magic, and everyone else into mundane schlubs who can't keep up. There's enough different myth (CuCulain, Beowulf) and modern pop references (God of War) to suggest that choosing Fighter or Rogue as your class shouldn't necessarily mean "can never do anything beyond what a medieval soldier could do."

My XP jar is empty... but you hit the nail.