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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Schmoe" data-source="post: 5398788" data-attributes="member: 913">That's what made it effective, though.  Moving to the CMB significantly watered down its power.  As the question is "Has Pathfinder narrowed the gap between casters and melee," this is a point to the contrary.Not when compared to casters.  Casters don't have to spend twice as many feats for something they used to only spend 1 feat on, so the casters come out 5 feats ahead while melees come out only 4 feats ahead.  Again, it favors the casters.If we're talking about relative boosts to classes, the casters were buffed more than the melees.  Casters went from 1d4 to 1d6, whereas melees either went from 1d8 to 1d10 (a smaller  percentage buff) or weren't buffed at all.  Again, Pathfinder buffed casters more than it buffed melees.The two most obvious that come to mind are the sorcerer bloodlines and wizard Arcane Bond.  The Arcane Bond allows a wizard to cast one extra spell every day, chosen from any spell he knows in his spell book.  Basically, if you have THE perfect spell anywhere in your spell book but didn't have the foresight to prepare it, no need to worry, Arcane Bond lets you pull it out when needed.  It encourages loading up on the most effective spells and saving the oddball spell to be accessed with Arcane Bond if it should come up.The Arcane Bond is only a minor boost, though.  The bloodlines are huge boosts.  Not only do they add 9 extra spells known (a 25% increase), they also provide 3 additional feats and a possible +2 stacking bonus to spell DCs, often on the "I win" spells.  That's not even counting the various special abilities you can get from the bloodline like immunities, wings, incorporeality, etc.The point, though, is that the extra spells known make it more likely that a sorcerer will have access to the appropriate "I win" spell, and the boosted DCs make the "I win" spells more likely to land.At any rate, this is an active debate that has spawned pages and pages of discussion on other forums.  I'm not trying to convince anyone that "melee sucks" or "casters rock" or how they should play the game.  But for someone who feels that there is an imbalance between classes and is concerned about that imbalance, I think they should be aware that Pathfinder did little to nothing to correct those imbalances, and may in fact have made them worse.</blockquote>

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