D&D 5E It is OK for a class to be the worst

[ninjayeti]

If you don't care about class balance, then why do you care if players want to tweak their classes to be more powerful?

Let the beastmaster ranger have a T. Rex pet at 1st level if that makes him happy. After all, some class has to be the best right? If the other players complain you can just explain how someone has to be the worst and it just happens to be them. I am sure they will be cool with it.

 

[DND_Reborn]

There are no worst classes IMO as they all have strengths and weaknesses. A lot of people go on about rangers or monks or whatever, and I've done a lot of retooling myself but that is more for flavor than balance or the ability to contribute to the game.

The PLAYER is what contributes, not the class. Good planning, good role-playing, etc. make a heck of a lot of a difference. I've seen too many newer players, especially, rely on class fluff as their way to contribute to the game instead of using their brains and simply playing their character well.

The other thing that happens is people make one-type of character and find the table plays a different type of game. But even THEN, it is on the player to contribute by playing well as that always improves the game, no matter what the table style.

 

[jaelis]

Sure, I have no objection to theorizing, optimizing, or changes, even wholesale, anything about the rules. But practical experience will always outweigh forum theory in my view. Practical experience has shown me that many of the complaints are way overblown in my view.

I do more or less agree. I guess my feeling is that the PHB ranger is good enough, just not as good as it could be. (For some value of "good".)

 

[Asisreo]

Yeah I was trying to explain this to one of the other players, who is normally good at min-maxing, but looked at Frenzy and was like "Wow that's amazing, I should definitely go Berserker!", and it's like, dude, even 1 Exhaustion will make you bad at all the stuff you do (he loves to grapple and to do all sorts of crazy stunts which require athletics checks and so on), 2 Exhaustion will basically you having to be dragged by the party, and useless in most combat, and 3 Exhaustion will make you almost entirely ineffective. He's like "But I can get rid of it, right?" and I'm like "No. There isn't any way short of a long rest.", but I think he just doesn't think I've looked hard enough.

The Frenzy mechanic is a big one to wrap your head around. Whether it's good depends on where you are in the adventure and where you'll be afterwards, as well as the type of adventure anyways.

Being exhausted even at 1st level exhaustion can be debilitating. You have disadvantage on all checks, including initiative. After you get exhausted past the first level, the number of days you have to recuperate equals the amount of times you've been exhausted.

Frenzy, though, greatly increases your attack power. If you go reckless, you're making 4 attack rolls at 3rd level, each with their ability to crit and the fact they're more likely to hit makes your damage more likely. At 5th level, you're making 6 attack rolls which makes missing unlikely and critting more likely.

Ironically, as a barbarian, you have to be tactical about how you frenzy. If you imagine you'll be fighting the next day, you'll want to frenzy only once. If you know that when the adventure's over, you get to relax with downtime, you can frenzy upwards of 3 times before things get really obnoxious but you can always reckless attack to off-balance the effects on the 4th and 5th frenzy.

The thing is that the higher levels you get as a barbarian, the better frenzy becomes due to the synergy of your other features. At 7th, the first disadvantage of initiative rolls are offset by your feral instincts. At 9th, with the 6 attack rolls per turn, you're more likely to be rolling those 3d12+8 (or 3d12 +18 if you picked up GWM) damage rolls. At 13th level, you're doing a whole 4d12+8 or (4d12+18) damage with higher likelyhood to crit.

15th level is when things get good because you never have to end your rage. Which means you'll have all the aforementioned benefits all day without having to suffer any exhaustion.

So if your campaign is a list of everyday encounters with no consecutive days of rest, Frenzy suffers. The problem is, if your campaign doesn't do random encounters during travel, those 6 day journeys between one location to another is a perfect time for the barbarian to recuperate from their overdone frenzies.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Just about every time I see someone say that they've "fixed" something in D&D, it 95% of the time just makes a mess or that thing wasn't really broken in the first place.

One thing I've learned is that no matter how much someone on the internet might say that this or that class is underpowered, in real life there will always be someone that loves the heck out of that class, and it gives them joy just to play it. They don't care about the supposed problems with the Beastmaster Ranger because they just think it's darn cool to have a wolf companion.

In play, I've yet to really see the supposed power differences make that much difference. The only times I've really seen a particular character be that much more powerful than the others (assuming same levels and magic item distribution) has been when that player has gotten the rules wrong (either accidentally or intentionally) or when they were just cheating with their dice rolls.

Since day 1 of 5e, and probably RPGs in general, someone always seems to bring up a "fix" for their favorite class. The problem i have is that no 5e class really needs it.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Flawed logic.

Labeling something "most honest" in no way labels other things dishonest. Its not a true/false question, its a sliding scale. Would it have felt more appropriate to you had i said "my favorite?" Then you respond with "how could I have a favorite if I haven't yet seen all the answers?" Its a silly point to get hung up on, but I guess its no sillier than any other arbitrary line folks like to draw.

Calling something your favourite is totally different, in every way, from saying something is the "most honest", especially as the OP of a thread. There's no getting away from the fact that it means you regard any other answer, no matter how serious and honest, as "less honest". The issue isn't future answers, it's labeling people who contributed to your thread with a blanket implication that they're not being fully honest.

If you'd said it was your favourite post, my only response would have been to put a Like on your post. If that was actually what you meant, okay cool, I'll understand it that way. Was it?

 

[jaelis]

Calling something your favourite is totally different, in every way, from saying something is the "most honest", especially as the OP of a thread. There's no getting away from the fact that it means you regard any other answer, no matter how serious and honest, as "less honest". The issue isn't future answers, it's labeling people who contributed to your thread with a blanket implication that they're not being fully honest.

If you'd said it was your favourite post, my only response would have been to put a Like on your post. If that was actually what you meant, okay cool, I'll understand it that way. Was it?

... I read his comment as more like "truest," which I don't think is offensive in the way you're taking it.

 

[Gladius Legis]

Regarding the beast master ranger, I think talking about it as “the worst class/subclass” is a red herring. The issue isn’t really that a beast master is mechanically inferior to other classes, it’s that it doesn’t play the way most people who want to play a pet class expect or want it to.

You can say that about the Ranger class and its core features in general.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

In play, I've yet to really see the supposed power differences make that much difference.

The trouble is Ralif, whilst I don't doubt you're sincere when you say this, that "I haven't seen any problems!" always seems a bit facepalm-y because of the lengthy usage it saw in 3.XE, with the LF/QW problem. If you ever mentioned LF/QW back then, or even any suggestion that maybe Fighters fell behind compared to full casters, especially as you got above L5, in 3.XE, someone would chime in with "Well I haven't seen any problems with it in my game!". And the sad thing is, I suspect the vast majority of them were being honest. Either they played games where it didn't matter for some reason mechanically (often because they just didn't play higher levels much, whether by design - i.e. E6 and the like, or because people just tended to restart/start new campaigns a lot), or where the players or DM just played in a way that avoided it (usually meaning they were anti-optimized in certain ways, but whatever, nobody has to play optimized - but equally the DM could have been a really high encounters/day guy with a lot of lower-end encounters).

But let's be real, 5E isn't 3.XE. The difference between the weaker classes, with sensible play and stat placement, and the stronger, is not gigantic. Someone did a detailed Tier analysis with points and everything and the spread between the highest and lowest was just like, 20% or something, and that feels kinda right.

At the same time, I have seen a subtle thing where people gradually get disenchanted with characters that just can't do the stuff other people are doing, and I've seen it with Sorcerers. It's not like 3.XE or some games, where the PC obviously sucks, but when they don't really have a cool gimmick (and metamagic tends not to cut it, because again you don't really have enough choices or enough sorcery points in single-digit levels to really make it sing), they don't have access to a breadth of spells, and yet they also don't have deadly cantrips of Warlock, so they just seem a bit second rate. And this wears players down, in my experience.

It's particularly bad if the player is one of those ones who both likes a strong concept and roleplaying, but likes to be mechanically effective, and not sidelined. And that's exactly the kind of person who picks Sorcerer, in my experience. They get this strong concept and it works for RP, and when we're all doing RP and stuff they have fun - but the more mechanical stuff gets, the less fun they have, and the more they seem overshadowed and to have no "good tricks", not "Omg make the Sorcerer do that thing!". This is especially true if they want to be effective but aren't willing to actually powergame it. That works for a lot of classes (Paladins and Warlocks, for example, where its hard not to be effective), but not Sorcerers.

I say this because I've seen it before with these sort of players. With a character they like and which is mechanically effective, they're fully engaged in all areas of the game and have a great time. With one that they just like the idea of, but which doesn't really deliver, and/or has mechanical meh-ness, they gradually get less engaged. Then either they are the one who keeps turning up late or not being able to make it, or they make a new character they like better, in my experience.

 

[iserith]

The Frenzy mechanic is a big one to wrap your head around. Whether it's good depends on where you are in the adventure and where you'll be afterwards, as well as the type of adventure anyways.

Agreed. Every person who has played a berserker in my game was happy for it and thought it strange the internet seems to hate the class. In particular, they feel lucky when the Mindless Rage feature has a payoff because a charmed barbarian is a big problem for the rest of the party (depending on the nature of the charm).

Exhaustion is also something I find most players are terrified of accruing, even if it's not all that bad in context. It can be bad, but not all the time. A player should be trying to avoid making ability checks anyway, if possible, by working to remove the uncertainty of the outcome and/or the meaningful consequence for failure. This reduces the number of ability checks the player has to make for the character which mitigates the disadvantage on the roll from one level of exhaustion. Plus there is Working Together or the Help action to offset disadvantage on ability checks, and also Inspiration and guidance, if available and appropriate. Halving one's speed isn't great, but Fast Movement helps with this and, depending on where the fight is taking place (e.g. a dungeon with smaller chambers), the barbarian might not need to move very far to engage anyway.

Mostly I see the fear of exhaustion come up with forced marching and the encumbrance rules. Players will try to avoid this like it's the Worst Thing Ever when, really, it only starts to get bad at three levels of exhaustion (depending). That gives a berserker some leeway to Frenzy, depending on what's going on in the adventure.