D&D 5E "My X is underpowered compared to Y." So?

[ExploderWizard]

The primary reason that combat & damage is the basic user of character measurement is because game play became encounter-centric as of 3rd edition. It has remained that way ever since.

Combat encounters are simply the most common. The driver of XP by default is the "challenge". A challenge is generally anything that can be overcome by pushing the correct buttons on your console/character sheet. A few character types have decent options for dealing with trap and interaction challenges, but all classes have a variety of options for combat. Thus combat effectiveness has become the measure of overall usefulness.

XP for treasure acquired was more neutral with regards to the means used to acquire it. Combat effectiveness was still needed but not the only way to gather treasure and earn XP.

Value will be placed on that which is most rewarded.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

Too many good posts here to XP, maybe I'll come back later and get some more ...

It's a WoW thing. I used to be really into it, and I can tell you that the forums explode if one class or spec gets 5% ahead of another in DPS. There are enough people that play both WoW & D&D that the mindset bleeds over.

It's a bad thing there and a worse one in D&D. First, damage is not the only important thing in combat. There are plenty of other ways to contribute and if everyone was dps only, it would be a boring game.

Second, it's okay to be strictly weaker at combat than another character if your strength is in one of the other pillars. There are plenty of people that would like to play a PC whose strength is in exploration or interaction, and if you insist that all damage be the same you lose these design options. You don't want a PC to be useless in combat, because then the player's bored in that part of the game, but doing half the damage of anyone else then getting your spotlight time in dealing with NPCs, frex, is great.

 

[Remathilis]

Why should the Wizard ever dominate? Most of the other classes don't get to remake themselves based on what they need to be good at a particular day, or to decide that today they're going to be nearly as good as the Wizard at the areas the Wizard is 'supposed' to dominate. So why should a class which gets to be a Jack of All Trades also get to be a Master of One and a near-Master of a bunch of others?

Situationally. For example, ending a fight in one round due to a sleep spell. The wizard dominated that fight. That's his job. He can't do that EVERY fight, but for that one, he shined. Next time, the rogue's SA dominates, or the barbarian's crit.

It's not a call to caster rulership, merely caster competency.

 

[nlghty]

I feel like casters are often but hurt because their every round action is not as good as barbarian. But it just comes from misunderstanding everything that happens during a fight and under-evaluating stuff like "getting attacked with advantage if you attack with advantage."

 

[Aribar]

I have no idea why people are blaming WoW for this. If this was back in the 3E days, would we blame Diablo? Balancing player choices is hardly new with video games, let alone D&D. People typically like to have equal amounts of agency in games and don't like it if they're overshadowed. If I try to play a deadly gladiator and I'm consistently outdone by others in combat, chances are I won't be having much fun and will feel useless, especially if I had to dedicate ability score and feats to combat and I'm not even decent at the other pillars.

Since at least 3rd edition, the rules have been primarily focused on combat. Except when spellcasters come in and just bypass it, HP and damage are pretty much the main numbers to look at in combat. You want to deal damage because 'dead' is the best status effect, and non-offensive actions better be worth the tradeoff in damage.

Yeah, there are two other pillars of the game. But they've always had fewer rules and classes typically have poor balance between them. (You're a 3E fighter? You're not doing anything skill-related)

 

[Ashrym]

People don't complain that clerics do less damage because they have other powerful abilities like healing.

A monk should do similar damage to other classes. He doesn't do a great deal else in the course of battle. He pretty much hits things. In a group game have fast you do damage is the only way to balance classes that bring nearly nothing else of substantial value to the table.

Monks do good damage. A free bonus attack plus kind for another additional attack plus extra attack plus scaling weapon damage isn't bad damage at all. What they lack is feat support for their combat abilities but not taking one feat is just taking another for a different advantage.

Monks are good at getting to key targets for attacking by speed and mobility, and using stunning fist attacks. They are also the only class with proficiency in every save and can give themselves advantage on the saves.

Open hand monks have an SoD attack and that tends to trump higher damage anyway.

The poster from the other thread that you seem to be referring to was complaining that his blaster sorc is ineffective at dealing damage, relative to a barbarian. I think it's fair to complain that a class that is forced to be tightly focused at what it can do (small number of known spells), and using a subclass specifically made for blasting, is ineffective at dealing damage.

When does the barbarian can launch AoE damage or twin a control spell? Believing that the sorcerer should do more damage than the barbarian because of the sorcerer's small toolbox is backwards when the barbarian had an even smaller toolbox. ;-)

Why should the Wizard ever dominate? Most of the other classes don't get to remake themselves based on what they need to be good at a particular day, or to decide that today they're going to be nearly as good as the Wizard at the areas the Wizard is 'supposed' to dominate. So why should a class which gets to be a Jack of All Trades also get to be a Master of One and a near-Master of a bunch of others?

Wizards almost never dominate. With less at-will damage than warlocks or weapon users, less burst impact than a sorcerer or fighter or paladin, higher squishy factor, legendary saves, and utility spells that are replaced by skills the wizard shine moments are the rare occasion a ritual or spell is actually available that might be important out of combat, AoE softening salvo's, and most commonly controlling effects and buffs to watch the heavy damage combat classes shine as a support option.

Wizards are often useful but dominating anything is an overstatement.



In general, balance is measured by perception of contribution because the contributions are often apples to oranges. Damage is more quantifiable than many contributions and often the topic for discussion because it's quantifiable. I use it frequently too. I don't think it's the only consideration and I think it's important to stress that other considerations have subjective value because the players don't start with the same priorities or values.

Damage comparison is more relevant with the monk and another similar class like a rogue or ranger but it's still only part of the package. All the arguing aside, I find it mostly an academic exercise.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

The primary reason that combat & damage is the basic user of character measurement is because game play became encounter-centric as of 3rd edition. It has remained that way ever since.

I remember reading back in... possibly the AD&D 1E DMG... how the encounter was the fundamental building block of any adventure. Or maybe it was the 2E PHB?

Regardless, my point is that the shift wasn't a new thing for third edition. The reason why 3E changed the perspective toward damage potential was because it included things like feats, and expected wealth by level, which combined to create a puzzle that was begging to be solved. In previous editions, you didn't really have any build choices beyond character gen, and even then the only way to optimize your damage was to roll a very high Strength score.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

People don't complain that clerics do less damage because they have other powerful abilities like healing.

A monk should do similar damage to other classes. He doesn't do a great deal else in the course of battle. He pretty much hits things. In a group game have fast you do damage is the only way to balance classes that bring nearly nothing else of substantial value to the table.

In my games, the monk's primary job is intelligence pre-battle. He's the one that tells you if there's a reaction squad of forty hobgoblins just beyond the goblin gate, or if the dragon if lurking just beyond the first bend in the corridor. That doesn't mean a monk can't shine in combat, but it's not usually her primary job.

Pro tip: purple worm venom on your weapons make anyone shine in combat when they need to. She might do this if she got cornered by a dragon during scouting and needed to kill it by herself; but normally she would prefer to just evade it and bring the intel back to the party. She's a hammer, not an anvil.

 

[Bluenose]

Situationally. For example, ending a fight in one round due to a sleep spell. The wizard dominated that fight. That's his job. He can't do that EVERY fight, but for that one, he shined. Next time, the rogue's SA dominates, or the barbarian's crit.

It's not a call to caster rulership, merely caster competency.

Dominating an entire combat sounds like a little bit more than competency.

And I think it's telling that the barbarian, which I think is generally seen to be a class that's among the best at combat and not terribly good at most other things, gets to dominate in the combats when the wizard thinks it's not important enough to. I bet that makes them feel like they're making a really significant contribution, getting to handle the jobs that are beneath the attention of Mr Wizard.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

This isn't helped by the fact that combat gets the most attention in the rules by far: we have exploration and social as other pillars for the game, but they aren't talked about in nearly the detail as combat.

I don't think this is true in general. The MM is packed full of stuff that is all about exploration: umber hulks, purple worms, giants and their ordnung-or-whatever-it's-called, dragons and demons. It only turns into "combat" if the PCs have the expectation that these things are there for them to fight, and that only happens if you deliberately design the world to be one-dimensional. My campaign has had a Rakshasa all along among the king's circle of advisors, and the PCs have only just barely tumbled to the fact that he's a bad guy at all--they still don't know he's a Rakshasa, and last session ended with the barbarian about to start a fight with the Rakshasa and four guards trying to arrest him. That is, when the Monstrous Manual says, "Rakshasas can cast Detect Thoughts and Disguise Self at will, and Suggestion 3 times per day," you don't have to view that through the lens of "combat" per se at all. It's just something that monster can do, and it affects exclusively non-combat actions up until the very point where the players decide to turn it into a combat.

Umber Hulks burrowing through the ground are the same way. So is a vampire who offers them an alliance of mutual convenience against a common foe, or a Slaad who occasionally joins their party and then Plane Shifts away when he gets bored. (My Grey Slaad got dismembered by umber hulks last session; the players were sad.)

Even a straight-up boring "combat" encounter becomes more exploration than combat if it's simply too big for the PCs to tackle in combat. A small village of 80 orcs isn't a combat encounter for 4th level PCs; it's a chance to hide in the huts, maybe murdering the occasional orc, while trying to avoid getting detected and slaughtered by the other 79 of them. This places a lot of burden on the DM of course to come up with an orc ecology and social structure, and admittedly the MM isn't much help at that... but your players won't mind if you just base orcs on the Mundugamor of Papua New Guinea.