D&D 5E (2024) How 2024 design interacts with class features and resources (poorly)

[Distracted DM]

if you're quoting mearls here and i think you are, you might want to make it slightly more clear for people who haven't heard his opinion on BA before that you are quoting and that's not just your own thoughts, unless those are your thoughts.

Those are my thoughts I can see how you might have been confused but I would've thrown quotes around it if it were someone else's.

 

[TheSword]

No 7th level Divination or 8th level Illusion - although you don't have to take that spell level. Still very sloppy of WotC

Why is that sloppy. As you say you don’t have to take a spell of the max level.

 

[Zardnaar]

It's not about "optimization" at all, it's simply a matter of remaining relevant.

Keep in mind that two-hander and two-weapon builds already outdamage sword-and-board builds in 2014 5e—which is reasonable, that's the point of the shield being a trade-off for defense. But if enemies get 33% stronger, two-hander and two-weapon builds become 33% stronger, and sword-and-board builds don't get 33% stronger...then sword-and-board builds are significantly weaker in the new scheme of things. You're contributing less to defeating enemies. You're taking more attacks to defeat enemies, which can easily result in taking more attacks and overriding the intended benefit of using a shield in the first place.

If another build can do nearly twice as much damage as you do and have just as good AC in melee (if not better), then sword-and-board builds feel much worse as a result.

One thing worth pointing out is you dont wa t to get hit in 5.5. Indirectly buffs sword and board espicially with shields being a lower rarity.
Good magic one handed weapons are a lot more common in published adventures.

Had a legendary day drop recently just because thats what the adventure had.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

This is a great summary.

I would actually add Paladin to the list; the Divine Smite change clogs up their action economy much more than it would appear. Paladins generally always want to build into an Bonus Action attack of some sort, for higher chance to go critical and past level 11, more damage per turn.

Changing Divine Smite to always use a Bonus Action means paladin builds have baked in class features that compete with themselves. It now has the ranger problem of everything always and all the time wanting to use your Bonus Action.

2024 made building into any Bonus Action attack horrible, confining you to only running dual-wielding pretty much, and only with specific weapons with specific mastery properties.

There's basically only one option for weapons for Paladins now, dual-wield for the Vex and Nick extra attack per turn and Advantage critical fishing.

The game doesnt exist for optimisation.

 

[rabirin]

The game doesnt exist for optimisation.

Again, there's a difference between "optimization" and "making builds feel like crap because they've been directly nerfed or effectively nerfed by being less effective by comparison".

It's also hard to say such a statement is accurate for the 2024 game, where numerous mechanics were changed in ways that make characters built to exploit them much more powerful. 2014 didn't make it possible to cast a levelled spell for your action and your bonus action on the same turn, then use your reaction in the same round to bestow a buffing spell on an ally. A 2024 character can be built to do so repeatedly. 2014 didn't let you use two-weapon fighting with one hand. 2014 doesn't have builds for martials that do double the baseline number of attacks, every single turn without fail or resource requirement. 2014 doesn't let casters hand-pick 1st-level spells of their choice from other spell lists and cast it just as if it was on their own class's spell list.

 

[Sulicius]

Yeah I have not had any issues with those stated by the OP.

Spend less lime optimizing and more time playing, it’s more fun!

 

[Corinnguard]

The game is more about you, the player, as you perform a particular role within a given adventuring party.

 

[Neonchameleon]

How is it "cherry picking" to point out that the Monk's purported big-deal damage increase, something that's on par with other martials getting Weapon Mastery, is barely consequential

The monk's damage increase is comparable to Cleave or Nick on a monk chassis. The monk's huge 2024 power boost wasn't about damage, it was about survivability; the reason the 2014 monk was truly terrible in practice unless you had a DM who only threw softballs was that they were a melee class with no melee defensive tech and not great AC.

This meant that when a monk got caught in melee (and remember they are a melee class so it would happen against any but a softball DM) they got hit easily and turned into strawberry jam. Their damage was decent and could be applied to squishy targets - but they were easy to hit and easy to hurt. This got fixed by letting the melee class parry melee attacks for some serious damage mitigation.

The Monk got a weapon mastery type buff boosting its damage slightly because damage was never the problem. Instead it got a significant buff where one was actually needed. Which is why it shot up the rankings.

And here's all the problems in a nutshell. There's the people who actually play the game, where Monks are strong party members who combine high mobility with versatility, having damage and control options in addition to subclass features. Then there's the people who pretend movement speed and mobility options never matter at all, who pretend Patient Defense and Deflect Missiles literally do not exist at all, that every other martial is a hyper-optimized GWM/PAM build, that every single use of Stunning Strike is doomed to fail (but also in the same fantasy enemies will never succeed on saving throws against spells) but also players will do nothing but waste ki on Stunning Strike which repeatedly fails.

And then there are the people who may play the game but have the GM placing a thumb on the scales and making sure that squishy classes with bad defensive tech that want to get into melee such as 2014 monks and 2014 non-hexblade bladelocks don't actually go down because the weaknesses of those classes aren't exposed.

The thing about Deflect Missiles is it only actually did anything when ranged enemies shot you. And that leads to the question "Why are these enemies shooting you when you have the anti-arrow tech?" Ranged attackers generally have a wide choice of who to attack. Melee attackers are more limited but to hit with a monk you have to get into melee.

You have the people who run two-weapon builds and have strong characters because it takes advantage of its strengths—a consistent bonus-action extra attack, which benefits from damage boosts on attacks, on a setup that's compatible with Dexterity or Strength and which requires no feat investment but still has feat options to strengthen it.

If we are talking 2014 rules we again have the issue that if you set the difficulty all the way down to casual things work that don't at higher levels because you're just gonna die. 2014 two weapon fighting did not scale properly; it was fine and possibly even strong at tier 1 when you had one attack and one bonus attack

And then you have the people who complain that it's absolutely useless because you can do more damage with a build that requires several feats combined to outperform two-weapon fighting with no feats.

And you also have the strawmen.

Just to put the basics out there; Level 5 with a fighting style and no feats, 2014 rules, Dex 18:

• Paired short swords: Attack: 2*(d6+4) + bonus action d6+4 (duelist style). Total: 3d6+12. Average: 22.5
• Rapier with duelist style: Attack: 2*(d8+6). Total: 2d8+12. Average: 21
• Monk without spending Ki: Attack: 2*(d6+4) + bonus action d6+4. Total: 3d6+12 - and that is why the monk didn't need so much of an offensive boost.

So with the appropriate fighting style and no feats two weapon fighting does about 7% more damage than sword + board ... but is two points of AC behind and eats your bonus action which you might want for something.

Heck, one of the most consistent problems with 2024 design is that instead of actually acknowledging how the game actually plays or what people who enjoy certain options like about them, 2024 consistently panders to the latter people in the above examples, overcompensating for such people's complaints and wildly unbalancing the game.

Not even close to true. The problem is that the way your group played appears consistently to have been with the GM pulling their punches, leading to you consistently advocating for positions that only hold in low lethality games. Meanwhile the 2024 designers have a much broader understanding of the game than you do. And balance matters more in high pressure games.

This genuinely might be one of the worst takes and generalizations I've ever seen about the game, ever.

If the only players you acknowledge are the ones obsessed with white-room optimization where hypothetical damage numbers are the only thing in play—where nothing else, not a single other factor can ever possibly impact the game—then this might be true. But the vast majority of players value versatility, and very very few of them only care about having damage options for their bonus action and reaction.

Again you have been playing low pressure games where you know you are going to win the fights and it's not going to be close. The harder the game gets the more the extra damage (or control) matters as the best control condition is dead. And the most popular two classes in the game are, of course, fighter and rogue. It's a generalisation - but a more accurate (and data driven) one than yours.

Again, there's a difference between "optimization" and "making builds feel like crap because they've been directly nerfed or effectively nerfed by being less effective by comparison".

The only things that were actually nerfed were the min-maxed builds that were ahead of the curve. Meanwhile many many things were buffed in 2024 meaning there's a whole lot more that's viable (especially if we look at the OG ranger not the Tasha's). So I'll admit that optimised builds have been "effectively nerfed" not because they are ineffective but because there's far less they can point at and say "sucks to be you" - but that's not where I get my fun.

It's also hard to say such a statement is accurate for the 2024 game, where numerous mechanics were changed in ways that make characters built to exploit them much more powerful. 2014 didn't make it possible to cast a levelled spell for your action and your bonus action on the same turn, then use your reaction in the same round to bestow a buffing spell on an ally.

And 2024 doesn't make it possible to Sharpshooter triple shot with a hand crossbow doing +10 damage per shot or the multi-attack multi-smite paladin burst damage. The two actually broken things in 2024 rules are opportunity attack buffs and emanation lawnmowers. (Weapon juggling is mostly annoying).

 

[rabirin]

The monk's damage increase is comparable to Cleave or Nick on a monk chassis. The monk's huge 2024 power boost wasn't about damage, it was about survivability; the reason the 2014 monk was truly terrible in practice unless you had a DM who only threw softballs was that they were a melee class with no melee defensive tech and not great AC.

This meant that when a monk got caught in melee (and remember they are a melee class so it would happen against any but a softball DM) they got hit easily and turned into strawberry jam. Their damage was decent and could be applied to squishy targets - but they were easy to hit and easy to hurt. This got fixed by letting the melee class parry melee attacks for some serious damage mitigation.

The Monk got a weapon mastery type buff boosting its damage slightly because damage was never the problem. Instead it got a significant buff where one was actually needed. Which is why it shot up the rankings.

So let's actually acknowledge reality. A 2014 Monk has AC comparable to any other martial with a two-hander or two-weapon build—16 AC to start, 17 by level 5, 18 by level 9, etc. They have a unique defense against ranged attacks that no other martial possesses. They can Dodge as a bonus action. They get Evasion to significantly improve their ability to avoid damage from many Dex-save effects, which are often the bane of high-AC builds. That's all by level 7.

What you're claiming isn't based on reality at all, but the people who wanted the Monk to be this invincible anime protagonist like Goku or Naruto. It's people who lived in a world where they wanted the class to have the offense of a two-hander/two-weapon build, but also get the defensive benefits of a sword-and-board class—at the same time.

And that's what 2024 gave the class. It didn't give the Monk new and engaging options, it didn't improve the Monk's action economy or give them any meaningful improvement in offense. It didn't even improve their subclasses because almost all of them were massively dumbed down. All the Monk got was a cheat. All the 2024 Monk has going for it is a feature that lets them lazily cheat through low-level play for people who desperately wanted their Asian-flavoured power fantasy to be virtually invincible with zero effort or thought required whatsoever.

(Of course, this falls apart at higher levels when anything that deals multiple hits will crumple a Monk with ease due to damage inflation, using any option other than Flurry of Blows means you contribute almost nothing offensively, and Defensive Duelist massively outperforms Deflect Attacks. Balance!)

And there's no point in responding further, because you genuinely do believe that people who make use of a class's features, who actually acknowledge their existence, are just being babied by their DM—because any real DM would obviously metagame against the Monk player. (But of course this doesn't extend to metagaming against any other PC—why would a ranged attacker target the guy with a shield with ranged attacks, he'd have better AC! Why would the ranged attacker target the Wizard, they'll obviously cast Shield! Heck, it doesn't even extend to the idea of a DM running a 2024 game metagaming against the Monk PC by focusing save-based spells on them instead of attack rolls.)

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Again, there's a difference between "optimization" and "making builds feel like crap because they've been directly nerfed or effectively nerfed by being less effective by comparison".

It's also hard to say such a statement is accurate for the 2024 game, where numerous mechanics were changed in ways that make characters built to exploit them much more powerful. 2014 didn't make it possible to cast a levelled spell for your action and your bonus action on the same turn, then use your reaction in the same round to bestow a buffing spell on an ally. A 2024 character can be built to do so repeatedly. 2014 didn't let you use two-weapon fighting with one hand. 2014 doesn't have builds for martials that do double the baseline number of attacks, every single turn without fail or resource requirement. 2014 doesn't let casters hand-pick 1st-level spells of their choice from other spell lists and cast it just as if it was on their own class's spell list.

None of that means thst the game is built for optimization, or that optimization matters or should ever be a priority.