Acceptable to whom? It seems acceptable to the large number of people who play champions.
Given the number of complains I
have seen--even from people who have never touched a game forum in their lives--you're going to have to do a hell of a lot better than "the large number of people."
Even if (say) 60% of Champion fans don't
mind things being the way they are, is it really
good for 2 in 5 Champion players to be dissatisfied, even if only a little? This is a thing that COULD have been easily fixed. That's part of what makes it so frustrating.
So about the recommended number of fights... Seems that they did balance it!
Only in a white room! So many people get so
frustrated about that when it (allegedly) happened in 4e, so it should be a
huge problem here, right?
...right?
Because 6-8 encounters per day
of any kind is pretty rare in 5e games, and Crawford himself in a Youtube video explicitly said that this (coupled with taking fewer short rests than intended) is a design shortfall that they're trying to address (which is where a lot, though far from all, of those "Feature Variants" came from that got published in Tasha's). 6-8 encounters that are
specifically combat is even rarer. Particularly when almost everyone will INSIST that the 6-8 encounters do NOT all have to be combat. (Combats also tend to almost never last more than 3-4 rounds. If there were more rounds of combat it wouldn't be
so bad, as # of combat rounds could be more variable and thus soak up more of the difference between the two subclasses. Unfortunately, at least for this part of it, 5e was specifically designed to make combats significantly faster than they were in 3e/4e, which makes it a lot harder to balance "passive-only" options.)
Also, one thing in balancing, that at least used to be a thing in WoW (haven't played it in ages) was that the passive options were slightly worse than the active ones at their best. And I think this is a good principle. Idea being that if the person having the active option uses it consistently optimally, they'll do slightly better than the passive option, but if they fail to use it properly, they'll do slightly worse. I think this is something that would apply to Battlemaster/Champion comparison.
But I wasn't considering active options at their best. I was considering active options
on average, vs passive options
on average. If a Battlemaster is actually using their options ultra-optimally (which usually means going for accuracy rather than damage, but that's a separate conversation), they will
completely blow the Champion out of the water. I had assumed that the designers would have
intended such a thing, and thus didn't consider it. I looked exclusively at long-run (e.g., full-adventuring-day, which is actually a LOT
Then it arguably is balanced. It is balanced well enough that most people have fun playing it and it is massively popular.
[Citation needed.] Seriously. If you're going to say that "most people have fun playing it and it is massively popular," you have to demonstrate it. Otherwise, you're just making baseless assertions. Show me the surveys where the Champion is "massively popular." Show me the response reports that indicate most people who play it are having fun.
Since I know you can't do either of those things, we're back to the theoretical side of things, which we at least
can discuss. And I'm totally willing to do so! But throwing out these appeals to popularity when
you don't actually know what is popular isn't useful to the discussion.
And sure it could be improved, (I certainly have some ideas about that!) but it is rather questionable how much that's worth of WotC''s time. Would improving the balance by 5% significantly increase the player satisfaction and the sales? Would that be worth all the effort it would require? I doubt it.
I absolutely argue that it would significantly increase player satisfaction. I also would argue that this "improve balance by 5%" (whatever that even
means) is almost certainly under-selling the situation. Just as, for example, I think the complete lack of a spellcasting class of comparable simplicity to the Champion is a serious waste. Y'know what fandom would love a spellcasting class that just points and shoots a few core spells over and over again?
Harry Potter fans. They're legion, WAY bigger than D&D. Even if you only get 1% of all Harry Potter fans that don't currently play D&D to start playing D&D, you'd be making a HUGE positive impact on play.
And that's why this sort of thing is so complicated, like the video that was linked earlier. (Thanks for that video by the way
@Don Durito ! It was very informative.) Something can be unbalanced despite (for example) having a
low win rate and
reasonable pick rate, if it's something where low-skill players almost always lose and high-skill players almost always win. These are, of course, metrics of analysis for League of Legends (using the Akali example from that video), but there are other metrics that can, quite easily, be deceptive. What if Champion is popular
despite not being particularly good, because
it's the only game in town? It could quite easily be that there's a huge chunk of the D&D audience that
desperately wants a better Champion, but because
there is no such thing, they settle for what they're offered.
I mean, by this logic, Comcast must be an
excellent internet service provider, because they have millions of customers, and people almost never drop their internet service! ...except that that completely ignores the fact that
most ISPs are local monopolies. Never underestimate the possibility of a
Hobson's Choice.
Sure, it kinda is that, but I feel 4e and Pathfinder shows that they're not unbeatable, That was kinda their 'New Coke' moment. So it is not that they can just produce anything and people keep lapping it up. And of course there were times in the past when White Wolf was serious competition.
The PF example would be more of a meaningful argument if PF weren't "the previous product with the serial numbers filed off." As much as I appreciate some of the actually-new things PF1e did, 90% or more of the actual
game (not the adventures or setting) is "take 3.5e exactly as written and tweak two things." Which is why Pathfinder 2e came into existence, because
even the PF devs openly admitted, "This system is
too broken for us to keep trying to fix it."
Which, uh, yeah. Pretty much an open-and-shut example of "balanced =/= popular," among other things. Popularity
can be a useful metric for testing balance. It's far from universally useful, let alone the
only metric. In fact, in many games, unbalanced options ARE popular, BECAUSE they're unbalanced--the term in game design theory is "dominant strategy." People
will use exploitative strategies if they exist; not everyone, but most people. Because...why wouldn't you try to succeed more, if you were permitted to? Even if there isn't a hard win condition, there are
success conditions (succeeding on rolls in D&D, for example), and unbalanced options may make people hyperfocus on them because they generically do better with those success conditions.