Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9802907" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I would offer a slight correction: This "have to be top-tier" thing only applies in one direction, namely, the spellcaster picking up martial ability. Even then, different implementations handle it differently. The Blade Warlock basically has to invest half their character resources into it, a significant opportunity cost relative to what they could get (e.g. investing into Chain for an actually fairly powerful pet, or having to pass/delay on Devil's Sight or similar useful and uniquely Warlock features). The Bladesinger? Gives up the mostly-pretty-weak subclass features of other alternative Wizard subclasses (Diviner being a meaningful but complicated exception), in order to get very powerful Fighter(-like) features.Blade Warlocks are not top-tier for martial capability, even when they invest everything they can into it. They're more or less a weaker, less-versatile Paladin when they do so. Getting the best martial capability as a Warlock requires functionally building yourself like a Fighter with good Charisma. By comparison, Bladesinger Wizards out-tank tanky Fighters, and with even a modicum of investment can begin to outpace in damage too. Faster than Zardnaar gives credit for, but, I admit, not as fast as it sometimes seems.Conversely, a Fighter choosing to pick up spellcasting? Absolutely cannot be very good at spells. Hard-capped to being only one third as effective as a Wizard at spellcasting. So....the Wizard-who-studies-Fighting gets to be at least half as good, usually much more, as the Fighter--but the Fighter-who-studies-Wizardry doesn't get to be more than one-third as good as the Wizard. Because that's totally fair and reasonable and not at all clearly biased toward one class over the other!Well sure. It's a Wizard subclass. It has to be the best, by demand.I'm not even joking here. That was openly and explicitly the reason folks gave for things like killing certain proposed Sorcerer and Warlock features in UA, back before TCoE was published: an Illusionist Wizard needs to not just be very, very good at illusions, they need to be the BEST at illusions, better than any other spellcaster; an Evoker Wizard needs to not just be very good at evocation, they need to be the BEST at evocation; etc. (That first one, illusions, was openly said on this very forum, as I recall.)Spellcasters generally, and Wizards very specifically, need to be the best at what they choose to specialize in. That's what the vocal minority demands. And what the Wizard fanboys want, the Wizard fanboys get, because their voice was one of the engines that drove the edition war.That said, a one-level Fighter dip has always been useful for "gish" classes/subclasses, so that's not really much of a change. It just makes more pointedly clear what the impact is. Cards on the table, I can't be TOO mad about this myself, because I literally have a Fighter 1/Warlock 4 character I'm playing on Saturdays now. I do in fact have skin in the game, so I can't really judge folks too harshly without being a hypocrite myself.</blockquote>

Verification