NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 5258839" data-attributes="member: 996">No, there's not.  There's no such thing as 'perfectly safe,' either, but I'll still put on my seat belt.The classes in AD&D (1&2) were hardly balanced at all, and some of the attempts at 'balance' were quite the opposite of what we tend to think of as balance, today (a class's superior features would be 'balanced' by higher stat requirements - yeah, right).3.x a DM could get to balance if he ran multiple-encounter days with a wide variety of challenges and relatively little 'telegraphing' of what challenges might be like - and if the players didn't powergame too agressively.   It was very difficult, but possible.4e is adequately balanced out of the box.  Encounters are reasonably balanced if you just follow the DMG guidelines - which are not hard to follow at all.  Classes are reasonably balanced if you're all powergaming at about the same level (from not at all, to fairly agressively), though, of course, talented optimizers /can/ and do break the system, there's little danger of sneaking such abominations past a DM. Sure, and 4e has accomplished that handily, while 3.x was only potentially balanced, if the DM worked hard enough at it, and the players behaved themselves.The relative balance of the Knight is more fundamentally problematic than an odd corner case like that.  If it really turns out to have minimal daily resource-management issues, then it simply won't be balanced with the standard 4e classes.  It'll be overshadowed durring 'short' adventuring days, and could dominate in unusually 'long ones.'  It's more complex than that, of course.  What it comes down to, though, is that when all classes share similar (not even identical) resource-management issues and have similarly-balanced sets of limitted- and unlimitted-use powers, the DM doesn't have to worry much about the number, variety, or predictability of his encounters.  He might through a too easy or too hard day at the party, or he might have a definite style that he tends towards (a lot of DMs like to have infrequent, but very tough, encounters, for instance), but it won't create class-balance issues, whatever he does.  When classes have very different resource-management issue, yes, they have been differentiated in a heavy-handed, mechanical way that is impossible to miss, but, they also become imbalanced relative to eachother if the DM deviates from a certain 'sweet spot' in terms of pacing and challenge.  If he deviates in a given direction consistently, it becomes problematic.  That's actually what I'm saying.  You put a class like a 3.x Fighter and a class like a 3.x Wizard in the same party, and there's an excellent chance one will outshine the other on a regular basis.   No class in 4e is quite like the 3.x Wizard or CoDzilla - yet, the Mage only edges very slightly in that direction.  The Knight is treading dangerously close to being like the 3.x Fighter, having a small set of always-available abilities of apropriately modest power.</blockquote>

Verification