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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Derro" data-source="post: 4356542" data-attributes="member: 51010">That's the heart of it. Optimization is not in the playtest equation. I said it earlier in this thread. Optimization comes after hours and hours of play and pouring over rule-books. Playtesting is usually done by a mass of people that all start at ground zero. So if you have 20 groups doing 50 hours of playtesting apiece the 1000 hours of playtesting is misleading. A lot of that play is parallel and the overall experimentation and optimization tends to peak in roughly the same area with each group.Optimizing is the product of repeated play and the occasional eureka moment when an interesting combination is discovered. The balance of the game is in its most basic mode of playing, a typical or only slightly skewed party going through the full level progression facing foes of roughly equal challenge throughout. Consider the cardinal rule of CR with classed characters. A standard character has a CR equal to their class level. This means that a character of equal CR should use up a quarter of the party's resources whatever their class.Horse-puckey. A 9th level wizard is going to do a lot more to a party of equal level than a 9th level rogue or even a 9th level cleric. Balance is not something that can be achieved with an equation. Challenges have to be constructed to challenge parties on a case for case basis. As far as the CR/EL guidelines are concerned they are only that, guidelines. It is up to GMs to make the final decisions about where challenges lay, not numbers on a table or at the end of a stat block. I think that this dissatisfaction that the OP has with inter-class balance is a product of his particular game instead of a problem with the rules overall. Again, I'm not trying to be derogatory here but if PvP happens with such frequency that you've come to gauge the capabilities of PCs against each other as the measure of balance then that sounds like a dysfunctional game to me. D&D is not about man to man combat, particularly when the men are supposed to be on the same side.My quickest fix for the OP is reducing Cleric and Druid casting progression to that of the Bard. It slows down their spell power considerably and since spells are the fly in the ointment for you it will most likely bring equity to your game as far as the PvP element is concerned. What that will do to standard play I can't say but it sounds to me like a lot of your play is pretty non-standard anyway.</blockquote>

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