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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tetrasodium" data-source="post: 8117244" data-attributes="member: 93670">In no particular order... It doesn't matter what they "COULD" have done or considered doing for the purposes of "D&D needs to let go of the 'all classes are equal' concept" and how what they eventually settled on spotlights the need to do that.Yes it is a bad thing that 5e pretends "every class is treated as being able to pursue every niche if desired" as 5e does it.  It may have been a good or even noble idea to pursue, but the effort is too flawed and needed to protect the <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/class-balance-in-a5e-how-much-damage-should-a-damage-dealer-deal.674684/" target="_blank">one area</a> where it was tightly tuned by declaring that feats & magic items were "optional" in order to dismiss the complete collapse of that tuning as they were added.  Only a handful of classes are treated that way, the rest have secondary niche roles that are crippled in too many ways to pretend otherwise because  for whatever reason they were not willing to "let go of the 'all classes are equal' concept" as the thread is titled & instead decided to put making them equal in a bizarrely unusual white room setting  above making sure classes with one or more niche roles on some other brick in the combat pillar or different pillars felt competent in those niche roles.Buffing, debuffing, & battlefield control are a very tightly linked trio of abilities in a ttrpg where the three need to be used in conjunction as the needs are played out yet concentration ensures those play out in isolation while the spells are individually balanced as if they always play out in conjunction and thus need severe handicapping.  I talked about web because there is no real context needed and the combined flaws are too obvious to excuse as anything but bad by design.  Yes buffing and debuffing can be very powerful in a perfect situation but they can also be a nearly irrelevant waste of spell slots, I avoided them because the truth is usually somewhere in between & too complicated for simple generalized discussion like this. Also it was entirely possible to optimize a build for some variation of those three things, there is quite a bit of detail on examples of doing just that  or making those things have a unique twist <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/treantmonks-guide-to-wizards-being-a-god-in-d-d-3-5-treantmonklvl20-cantripn-tsuyoshi-dan2.471542/" target="_blank">here</a>.. 5e just fails by a combination of omission & excessive concentration.  The amount of power a character specializing in those is something that could be debated endlessly with specific scenarios played against each other till the end of time, what is more important is that 5e misses the mark to a significant degree by deliberately undershooting  nearly all of the tools such a character needs in every possible way.  The fact that a glass cannon can no longer really specialize to a notable degree like melee types using feats & magic items  has a severe repercussion on a character who optimized for or focused on buffing/debuffing/battlefield control because  now the two are not meaningfully divided when it comes to damage output. Using evoker as an example, the at will  & nova damage output from an evoker is not meaningfully different from any other wizard archetype & as a result those other archetypes are not meaningfully different in their little niche either.  Sure there might be some small differences here & there  but nothing too major & 5e lacks feats to meaningfully widen that gap.In the end it comes down to equality versus equity.  You can find zillions of articles <a href="https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS859US859&sxsrf=ALeKk0305hkwBR-1uHp0Oc61h0nirGwxcA:1604047814598&q=equality+vs+equity&spell=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjj9sPh99vsAhXFs1kKHS0VAskQirwEKAB6BAghECo&biw=1103&bih=614" target="_blank">detailing that on google</a>, but in a nut shell equality is everyone gets the same thing no matter if they need it, want it, or are even helped by it while equity is that everyone gets a fair amount of a thing based on needs. 5e design largely enforces equality on a limited subset of the class roles for one specific situation (no feats or magic items) then dismisses equity & hamstrings anything outside that specific role to make up for the fact that the one true niche few play in is the same rather than giving adequate equity.</blockquote>

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