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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7178985" data-attributes="member: 996">[sblock="More not-re-hashing of the not-edition-war, brought to by Imaro, reporting to you live from the banks of The Nile..."] Yep.  AEDU brought them to a close resource parity and neatly balanced the classes.  Relative to class balance in other editions of D&D, that is. 'Greater' by a much smaller margin.   Of course, perfect balance is impossible, so all actual balance is relative.  Compare half-a-dozen imbalanced games and one is much less imbalanced than the others, it's fair, in the context of that set, to call that one 'balanced.'  Correct.  No one was.  Thus 'balance,' at least in the combat pillar, though that wasn't a formal thing yet.  If there'd been pillars, and balance-across-pillars had been attempted, than 'king of combat' might've 'balanced' the fighter's relatively poor showing out of combat...   Not in terms of DPR, the strikers get to vie for that.  In terms of Defender, sure.  But not 'best at combat,' a broader idea, and certainly not 'king,' a very different take on 'best.'  Nod, it's another clear evolution, consolidating bonuses.  From 3.0's consolidation of everything on the d20, to 4e consolidating named bonus types to a much smaller list & multiple attack-bonus/loss-of-DEX-bonus mechanics into 'Combat Advantage,' to 5e BA & Adv/Dis. Feats in 3e & 4e are a prime example of just that sort of numerous/fiddly little choices that didn't always add up to much.  Thus 5e 'bigger' feats - also optional, just in case it's still too fiddly for a give DM. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> It's resource parity.  And the level of power was still balanced, even though the lists, themselves, were still very different.  And, the gap in versatility or flexibility, even after vastly reducing the more versatile class and significantly increasing the less flexible one, was still there, it was just much narrower than before or since. Sure, 4e pushed spells like that to much higher levels and greatly restricted them with the Sustain:Standard duration, and 5e didn't completely un-do all of that.  And, no, I'd hardly call that the main source of power for 3.x spells or casters.  It was the proximate cause of the self-buffing CoDzilla, and the closest thing to a plausible claim of full casters having strict superiority over melee types even in the melee domain.I pointed to a more profound source of 'spell power' in 3e, the scaling of save DCs with slot level and the optimization of them to the point that they could be virtually impossible to make.  4e obliterated that issue with the treadmill & DC-10 'save ends' duration, and 5e's bounded accuracy only brings it back in a small way, in that all save DCs scale with caster level, while most saves do not - and save-every-round spells do still use that same DC.I did mention the progressive loosening of concentration limitations, from strict requirements and any damage and sometimes even distraction breaking it automatically in the classic game, to many sources of interruption, some avoided with a check in 3e, to costing an action (even a standard action) in 4e & various common 'riders' able to directly or indirectly prevent sustaining completely, to even fewer spells requiring it, needing no action to 'concentrate' and allowed checks to maintain concentration even when interrupted in 5e.But, I was talking about the limitation on casting, which has, IMHO, a clear trend, while some spells get nerfed and others buffed with much less of a pattern as editions roll.    Read back up the thread a bit.  I know, there were a /lot/ of imbalances back in the day, and, as we were talking about, a lot of attempted balancing mechanisms....  Possibly not /all/ the same ones, but many of them - the various versions of the classic game were not that radically different from eachother, 'evolution' was slow from 0e-1e-2e.   Technically, no, it's an "issue."  It's not a problem, for instance, if you want to reward 'skilled play' or 'strategic thinking' with a greater chance of overcoming a given encounter if you can arrange to take it on fully-rested, and with minimal need to reserve resources for subsequent encounters.  You can do /that/ in absolutely every edition.  It's also not a problem if you don't care about class balance, or prefer class imbalance to favor classes with powerful daily resources (traditionally casters, obviously).  The 5MWD, OTOH, impacts balance much more profoundly in most editions than it did in 4e, so in that specific sense, the 5MWD 'wasn't a problem' (didn't impact class balance) in 4e, even though it was certainly a thing that could happen.  And there are plenty of ways it re-captures the classic feel.  It doesn't need to clone mechanics to do that.[/sblock] Warning:  on-topic content may follow....In the classic game (and 3e, for that matter), the 5MWD favored classes with more of their power locked up in powerful daily resources (typically spells). By balancing daily abilities with at-will abilities over the course of a 6-8 encounter day (assuming it's done so successfully), 5e has returned to that classic model.   As valid a ruling as any, I suppose.   Or you could just cut it and similar spells, or return it to it's traditional functionality of protection from the environment, not would-be attackers. Yep, it's not that there's no latitude there, at all, just that there could have been some with the time requirements.</blockquote>

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