sorry, i'm not quite up on the terminology, what does 'it's just an elf game' mean? asking this genuinely.
It can be used in multiple ways. Sometimes 'you're being too serious about what is a frivolous activity (that we all love, but that doesn't change what it is) about fictional worlds.' Sometimes a response to insistence that D&D is supposed to be more realistic, more challenging, about optimization, never about optimization, and so on (in this case, an implied 'it's about whatever lets people enjoy playing it, as I see that as the actual primary goal'). Like any other cliched response, it can be anything from a hackneyed canard to perfectly apt for the situation, depending on the where and when it is used.
I find that to be a bit of a straw man. I don’t see anybody saying they can’t be effective with a 14, but rather that they like being more effective with a 16.
I tend to want to play characters who are extraordinary. If I play a warrior, I want him to be mighty. If I play a rogue, I want him to be incredibly quick and agile. Yeah, it’s shallow. If I were writing a novel with these characters it would be in the YT section, not classics & literature. I’m just not interested in playing joe average, or slightly above average.
It has nothing to do with beating the game, or comparing my character to others’ characters, or following a guide on the Internet.
Anecdotally, on reddit and other places I look that are not old fashioned forums, I've seen plenty of complaints that I'll summarize as
'I want to play my orc druid from WoW, but the game implies that's not what you should do.' That certainly leads me to think that many (no way to know what proportion with the information I have) gamers did want a change, and it wasn't specifically about optimization, needing the boost to survive, or anything else except a communicated norm about which races go with which classes and disliking the old model.
Part of the problem, what does being "broken" mean?
A pretty meaningless term without additional context, to be sure.
As DM, broken is when the features of a class make encounters too easy, which is precisely what
@Clint_L describes. It is especially obvious when certain synergies between classes and features regarding two or more PCs allow them to really steamroll over challenges.
Twilight Cleric isn't broken so much in what it
can do, it is broken in how
strongly and often it can do it. Other class features (like the Bear Totem Barbarian having resistance to
all but psychic damage) are broken in a similar way as well and should be nerfed IMO.
So, for me, broken isn't about stealing the spotlight from other players, it is about ruining the challenge of the game.
As loathe as I am to throw out 'can always send more dragons,' I think it applies here. The problem, therein, is that -- if you have to throw out extra dragons, and then the cleric quickly drops, will it be a TPK? That's my eternal fear about raising the strength on both sides of the scale--it turns fail states from merely failure to total catastrophe. I think the Twilight cleric is, if not at that level, absolutely skirting the edges of it. I don't know if it fits in the term broken for me, but it decidedly changes the way the game plays out (sufficient that I would rebalance challenges*). It's a literal game-changer.
*or since I'm running all sandboxes at the moment, adjust how I communicate the challenges of potential choices.
That said, so are dragging around skeleton archers, or polymorph, or plenty of the summons. The game already has plenty of minefields with regards to PCs suddenly (compared to the last party they ran) having a huge potential power spike. That's not a dismiss it, just that DMs have already had to be wary of such things.
