Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="KidSnide" data-source="post: 5865928" data-attributes="member: 54710">Yeah, with prestige classes and paragon paths, there has been a lot more bad material published than good material.  Overall (except for kits), the mechanics have rarely been a good match for the concept.  With paragon paths and epic destinies, you had the major problem that they were mandatory and had to occur at a specific level that may or may not have had anything to do with what the PC was doing at the time.  The structure (1 action point ability, 1 L11 encounter attack, 1 L12 utility, 1 L15 class ability, and 1 L20 daily attack) was also too rigid, creating many paragon paths where the powers were strangely disassociated from the concept of the path. With prestige classes, you had a highly variable level of effectiveness with balancing prerequisites that often had little to do with the class.  As noted by others, they were also used to patch an otherwise unworkable multiclass system. (I see kits differently since you take them at character creation.  They are more like the ancestors of the modern "build" and "theme".)Going forward, I think WotC needs to improve in five aspects:(1) A level needs to be a level.  Each character class level should be balanced against the others.  Instead of using prerequisites to balance a prestige class, the individual levels of the class should be balanced.(2) The core classes need to have enough class abilities that you can create a balanced prestige class.  Wizards and clerics need to have enough class abilities beyond their spell casting, that you can create a class that advances in standard spellcasting but provides a different set of benefits.(3) WotC needs to get away from the idea that a prestige class defines a character.  That can be true, but it doesn't need to be true.  Instead, a prestige class (4) WotC needs to get a better grasp on what makes a good prestige class.  Archmage is a stupid prestige class.  Who needs a prestige class for "high level wizard"?  That type of character is just a high level wizard.  For that matter, let's can the idea of "prestige."  Let's just call them "minor" classes because they don't go 20 levels.  If you want to create a "town sheriff" class that is a fighter variant with some appropriate sheriff-y social abilities, why not allow the characters to take it at low levels?(4a) To the extent a minor class is a "prestige" class, it should be a game reward.  WotC doesn't need to say what the reward should be.  It just needs to provide a method of measuring how much more powerful it is than "standard."  For example, a 5-level "prestige" class might provide the benefit of gaining an extra 1000 (or 50,000) gp item at each level.  That way, allowing a character to take "super monk class" isn't really different than letting another character find a +4 sword or giving a third character a divine boon.  Yeah, it's powerful.  That's the point.(5) WotC needs to break from the tyranny of "10 levels."  A minor class should have as many levels as befits the class.  (I know that they did this some of the time, but the vast majority of prestige classes go 10 levels.)  Arcane Archer is a perfectly reasonable example of a character concept that probably needs some specialized mechanics to work.  But does it really need 10 levels?  This character needs some abilities to deliver spells through arrows, and maybe some special arrow-delivery spells.  But most of that character's abilities should be archery tricks and spells from the fighter (or ranger) and wizard classes.-KS</blockquote>

Verification