D&D 5E Is the imbalance between classes in 5e accidental or by design?

[Undrave]

Assuming you meant "shouldn't."

I'm all for this. Also bring back spellcasting provoking OAs.

Yes! Should not.

I like to mention the DS game ‘Rondo of Swords’ when talking about Spellcasters. The game is a tactical RPG where, to attack, you need to move your units through the enemy’s spaces and they will attack any unit they pass, and they gain bonuses for passing through an ally’s space (the same for the enemy of course). Because of this, your unit’s turn ends when they stop their movement so you gotta use your items and stuff BEFORE moving.

This includes casting a spell. This makes the Spellcasters in this game incredibly difficult to use because you have to anticipate where the enemy will want to move and make sure you’re in range for your NEXT TURN. Spellcasters also tends to give the bet bonuses to allies who pass through them, but, of course, be weak to enemy attacks. I think it also applies to archer types but I haven’t played in a while.

At one point the scenario asks you to only use your main character and your spellcasters and I got punished HARD for not leveling them up and learning how to use them properly

Point is that it made a huge difference in how you played either types of units. That said, I can see how that kind of stuff could be hard to do in the sacrosanct ‘theatre of the mind’.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

this entire part will be discredited as cherry picking and white room... but sure I'm game.

5th level with a with an 18 int (I will be taking a 14 and 13 as well)

2 builds:

Spoiler: Diviner

a 5th level diviner gets a spell book of 14 spells only 2 can be 3rd level and 4 2nd level the other 8 have to be first level. I will take a 14 con and a 13 dex (I mean it might make more sense to have higher AC, but if I get hit I want a good con save)
spellbook: 3rd level clairvoyance, fireball 2nd level Hold person, crown of madness, misty step, rope trick, 1st level charm person, comprehend lang, detect magic, find familiar, mage armor, magic missile, shield, tasha laugh, identify

cantrips known: Minor illusion, Mold earth, prestidigitation, chill touch
spells preped: charm person, mage armor, magic missile, shield, tasha, misty step, rope trick, hold person, fireball

pre cast: find familiar (owl) and mage armor
rituals: comprehend lang, detect magic, identify

Spoiler: bladesinger

a 5th level bladesinger is ALMOST a 5th level fighter without action surge (they don't get that extra attack till next level though) but lets go... useing a rapier (refluff as an elven sword) wearing studded leather and will take the 14 dex and 13 con.
spellbook: 3rd level Haste, Counterspell 2nd level Hold person, misty step, rope trick, ray of enfeeblement 1st level charm person, comprehend lang, detect magic, find familiar, magic missile, shield, tasha laugh, thunder wave identify

cantrips: Green Flame Blade, Prestidigitation, Minor illusion, shape water
spells preped: Haste, Counterspell, Hold person, Misty Step, Rope trick, Ray of enfeeblement, shield, Thunderwave

pre cast: find familiar (Raven)
rituals: comprehend lang, detect magic, identify

So I am now thinking that there was nothing done intentionally—-one way or the other. I think they tried to balance damage to an extent but think the diversity of abilities cannot be balanced while retains differentness.

I really appreciate your example and explanation of spells etc.

My friend did much of that with his gnome diviner. We made tactical errors but he was not real effective. We played Saturday night and we’re trying to recover a meteorite. As it turned out it was in a cave complex in the side of a mountain/hill.

In any event the main creatures were a young red dragon, a fire giant and some minions. We snuck in as far as we could and sent his flying monkey ahead (alt familiar). It was clear he was spotted. It was dark around the corner but the fire giant responded to an unseen ally and was alerted to us. The dragon had blindsight and for a he time was out of sight on a pile of coins and our meteorite. The giant was faster than our slower members.

He charged, we took up defensive positions and fought. That is when the red dragon appeared.

Our diviner wizard was handing out rolls and supporting but really was not very effective.

In place of Tasha’s he had I think scorching ray? But know he had rope trick, charm person and several others you mentioned. Without the muscle we would have never won.

We also had other encounters in which he put a lot of wounded creatures to sleep…

Anyway anecdotes are like a—-aardvarks.

I suspect balance issues are just hard when there is such diversity in abilities

I am going with unintentional since some encounters highlight the “imbalance” while others don’t.

All members had a role in that fight I mention and the wizard was not top dog.

 

[FrozenNorth]

What consensus? The consensus of people who believe the wizard is not balance who claim that you must require house rules to make them balanced? Because I don't have many house rules, certainly none that would shift the balance towards casters. I don't see an issue in games I play. I don't recall anyone who doesn't see the issue stating that they have many house rules on this.

You have admitted that you play with the house rule that short rests are 8 hours and long rests are 3 days. That pretty clearly affects the balance between short rest classes and long rest classes.

 

[Nefermandias]

Perhaps I misunderstood you, but they certainly did not try to make it stronger than in previous editions. The casters in 3.X had tremendeously power, 5e is clearly trying to reign them in.

Why are you comparing it to 3e instead of comparing it to 4e which was the immediate predecessor of the current edition?

Compared to it's 4e version, they have clearly tried to give the wizard back at least a portion of it's power to alter reality and dramatically change the state of the game.

 

[Oofta]

If I consider that a class has less abilities to impact the game than another, I don’t know why I wouldn’t call it negative? I’m not like ECMO3, I don’t think having a class superior to others in a class-based game is a good design or, somehow, fun.

The poll and title start and end with an assumption that makes a judgement call as fact. I don't think any one class is superior to another, they are different and serve different roles and purposes. The reason to have different styles and classes is multiple, not least of which is to support a wide variety of player preferences and styles. I think 5E does that reasonably well.

The only thing that matters is if people have fun playing the game, even if some classes do not work for specific individuals.

 

[lingual]

After thinking about 1e, maybe more "imbalance" could be better. Make Wizards REALLY suck in combat. Stuff like Dex bonuses to AC and Con bonuses to HP could be restricted to certain classes, move them back to d4 HP. That's might fit better narratively. A high level Wizard should be able alter the world. They should also be really fragile. It's too easy for a Wizard to get 14 Dex and Con under point buy. As it is, I throw my low level Wizard into combat quote a bit. With Mage Armor, 14 Dex, and 8 HP at first level - dual wielding daggers actually works way better than it probably should.

 

[Oofta]

You have admitted that you play with the house rule that short rests are 8 hours and long rests are 3 days. That pretty clearly affects the balance between short rest classes and long rest classes.

That's an alternate rule from the DMG, not a house rule. I do it for pacing and because I prefer longer than a night's rest for full healing. Before I chose to do it, I still regularly had the same number of encounters between long rests.

The only house rule that I apply for spell casters is that any spell that lasts for half an hour or more gets it's duration multiplied by 5 to balance out the change to long rests which ends up being a fairly significant buff.

 

[Maxperson]

People seem to be conflating 'balanced' as 'the same', which I feel is a grave mistake that's become damaging to game design because it tells designers to not even consider it because any attempt at game balance is going to result in things being 'bland' and 'the same', which isn't true.

Because true balance does = the same. Once you introduce variety of any sort, things are no longer balanced. Some of those various things will be better than others, even if only a little bit. The more different things you introduce, the worse the balance disparity gets, but as Morrus said, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

I consider 3e to be the most imbalanced edition of the game, and also the most fun. I'd prefer less disparity between classes than exists in 3e, but I'm still a fan of lots of choices for making characters and level increases.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

So, in the recent thread "Are Wizards really all that?", fellow user @ECMO3 claims that:

• Yes, the Wizard is 'all that', it's the most powerful class in the game
• It was designed that way
• The game is better like that

IMO, the first and second are only half-true. IMO, #3 isn't true at all, but as requested, I'll leave that aside.

But it's important to note, "it was designed that way" does not mean "the designers knowingly wanted it that way." Instead, it could be subconscious bias. From Rob Heinsoo's interview about the design for 4e, archived here, we can see how this almost happened even then:

I shouldn't act like this was a simple decision to make or carry out. There are a lot of people who don't want to let go of the idea that the wizard should be the most powerful class. The first Player's Handbook teetered back and forth between design drafts and development drafts, and sometimes the wizard had been deliberately bumped up to be slightly better than all the other classes. I wasn't comfortable with that, and the final version of the wizard is, if anything, possibly on the slightly weak side; the wizard was all alone as the first practitioner of the controller role and we stayed cautious knowing that we could improve the class later if we needed to.

We have little reason to doubt him...and it seems just as likely that 5e experienced the same push, but had no Heinsoo to push back.

I doubt it was active effort. I truly believe the designers want a balanced game with equitable character power. But tradition, unconscious bias, and subconscious acts continuously push "magic" (read: spellcasting) higher, and thus weaken non-"magic" by comparison. Wizards, the effective "specialists" (more on that later!) in using spells, are inherently buoyed by anything which boosts magic overall.

They clearly tried to both cut down on caster power (fewer slots, only cantrips auto-scale, hard to raise your spell DC, etc.) and add new limits (Concentration.) Such things are silly if the goal is greater spellcaster power. So, was it covert intent, subconscious actions/biases, or accident?

I think we can rule out covert intent right away, simply on charity and respect. I just can't imagine them rubbing their hands with glee about deceiving players into thinking fighters and wizards are equal while knowing they aren't. Likewise, "accident" seems much too uncharitable. I certainly think they had some foolish accidents they should have foreseen, e.g. the "ghoul surprise," but I can't see them so foolish as to stumble butt-first into this situation. Which leaves subconscious acts and bias, augmented by "tradition" and other things. Given the Heinsoo interview, we even have precedent for this pattern.

So: Yes. I 100% believe that this was "designed intentionally," but I do not believe that "intentionally" there means "we explicitly want wizards to be the best class in the game." I think that what it actually means is powering up individual spells without heed for how that powers up magic generally. That it means underestimating the power gap in past editions, and thus barely shifting casters down or non-casters up. That it reflects (long-standing) unwarranted skepticism of "always-on" power, and (likewise long-standing) unwarranted permissiveness with power gated by daily resources. That it comes from not understanding the math/stats behind features (e.g. Champion's crit range bonus is horribly weak.)

As a result, I was forced to vote "any imbalance between the classes is on purpose," even though I DON'T believe it was conscious purpose. Instead, I believe that their explicit and genuine intent was NOT to make unbalanced classes, but their subconscious impulses pushed them continuously away from balance in a way that favored spellcasters over non-spellcasters.

Which brings me to something I said I would cover later: wizards as the "specialist in magic" (or, rather, specialist in spellcasting.) Only Land druids can match wizards for daily spells cast. This results in de-flavoring the wizard (it gets essentially zero features to support its bookish, academia-driven, "ivory tower researcher" theme) while at the same time empowering it, which is the worst of both worlds. Spellcasting has always been very powerful. 5e very, very slightly blunted that power, without meaningfully addressing the real issue, which is that non-spellcasting characters are simply not capable of affecting the world on the same level as spellcasting characters, especially full casters.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Because true balance does = the same.

No, it doesn't, and never has. That's trivial balance, which is axiomatically boring. Nontrivial balance, on the other hand, is extremely difficult to design, but very, very worthwhile for cooperative gaming.