5 years of aging and potentially killing yourself did though. Permanent constitution loss if raised.
We never made it to level 18 legit either to cast the damn thing. Even if we did price is to high.
Irrelevant flavour that does not impact how the character plays is not a balancing factor. All of the other times D&D did "You have to do this specific party-destroying RP thing" it just made the class unplayable. I get old editions liked to think you'd have your character around for years and years, but the reality of it was characters getting rolled once and discarded after the campaign. Aging and 'if you roll bad you just die' are not comparable to the class who just has no interaction with this system at all and their best thing is bending bars
Like, call it my "Of course I didn't play 2e, the game came out when I was 2 months old" level of coming into the game, but these don't really make it seem like a bad idea.
If nothing else, to give some guidance for DM adjudication when someone casts one from a device - Ring of Three Wishes, Luckblade, etc. - or gets one (or several!) from a Deck of Many Things, or earns a favour from a wish-granting entity such as a Djinni. From all appearances, such things were intended to be (relatively) considerably more common in play than PCs hard-casting the Wish spell.
Still though, one class has access to all of these ridiculous subsystems whereas the other one has sweet FA. While there's games that it can work in (DotA I'd argue pulls off the idea a bit more gracefully), the long campaign structure of D&D and sticking with the character over time practically requires that there be an overall increase of power for everyone that's roughly even, otherwise your character just stagnates and it leads to easy resentment whereas other characters keep getting stuff.
And, well, your average DotA support hero is doing a lot more than a D&D fighter could ever do.
Can't speak to 2e so much but pre-UA 1e did have some class balance, though achieved in what today are considered less-than-ideal ways:
--- staggered xp progression (which works quite well IMO)
--- uncommon classes gated behind stat and-or alignment requirements (stat requirements are fine, alignment requirements don't work as well)
--- long-term-averaging balance i.e. you're good now but poor later (Ranger), or vice-versa (MU and Monk).
Not perfect, of course, but it worked well enough to be and remain playable over the long term.
That said, Unearthed Arcana butchered it if used as written.
Oh yeah, Unearthed Arcana is basically the actual opposite of balance. The cavalier and barbarian are the easiest targets in the world to drag for it
Though, I will say I don't believe the staggered XP progression really helps and I would say the long-term average balance of feast or famine on classes is a negative in how D&D plays, and especially how D&D developed. Its basically making the classes that go 'live' late. Its basically the precursor of the carry problem in DotA, where you've got to babysit one player in the early game so they can be super strong in lategame. The difference is DotA is a reasonably quick game of 35 minutes, and not a months long campaign where you have to come in week after week and watch your character slide into irrelevancy. Now, maybe that wasn't as bad in the mainly dungeon exploring days, but those days were long gone in 2e to the point 3e tried to make going back to it an advertisement point and, well, we all know how that went.
