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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celtavian" data-source="post: 5703295" data-attributes="member: 5834">When you attempt to support a position that is entirely founded in personal preference and make it seem as though this something that can be proven empirically, you don't know what you're talking about.I don't care how well someone knows the rules. That person should still know the difference between personal preference and empirically proveable fact. The way Stream of the Sky and quite a few others speak, you can tell they very much confuse the two. Just like they confuse ideas of balance with comparable power rather than party role. I can prove that Pathfinder is a very balanced system according to party role. I can also prove it is balanced according to character capability. I can also name what classes have advanatages in certain areas like versatility and what classes have advantages in areas like damage dealing, damage taking, and saving throws.Which players like Stream of the Sky seem to want to boil down into "If this class went against this class, this class would win. Thus the game isn't balanced". That isn't how D&D has ever been balanced or ever should be balanced in my opinon.It should be balanced as Pathfinder is currenlty balanced, which is balance built around party roles. If you look at it from that perspective rather than like this is some kind of battle royale, you can empirically prove the game is balanced.I always hear the example of time stop and gate being tossed around like that combination is easy and inexpensive execute. Yet I rarely hear anyone say "Wait a minute. By the time you can summon a balor, a lvl 20 physical damage dealer can vastly outdamage and can probably kill one or more balor level enemies a round in melee combat". Because physical damage dealers do indeed do that much damage.So it's irritating to see someone post on a game, claiming knowledge of the game, when things have changed dramatically from the previous edition and I have experenced these changes first hand at 1st through 20th level for multiple classes. So when a person claims Pathfinder is imbalanced while I'm having a tougher time dealing with the Come and Get Me Invulnerable Rager Barbarian and the Two-hander Fighter than I am the wizard or cleric, I have to call "horse puckey" on that person.That person pointing about "But you can do this and this and this to deal with them", all of those options involving statting out a caster with the perfect spell set up to deal with them as though they were alone, sounds like a ridiculous fool to me. When I do set up that spell option to deal with them, they seem to forget Mr. Wizard or Mr. Cleric in the group is cleaning off whatever spell I just tried because he knows Mr. Barbarian or Mr. Fighter does way more damage than he could ever do and pretty much guarantees that whatever Mr. Fighter and Mr. Barbarian get their hands on is going to die. Whereas all I have to do to deal with Mr. Gloryhound Wizard or Cleric is make a creature with high spell resistance or high saves that shrugs off their save or die spell, toss on a spell turning so they're saving against their own spell, or make the creature outright immune.While I can't even allow a big powerful physically damage dealing creature like a dragon or shoggoth near Mr. Barbarian or Mr.Two-weapon Fighter or Mrs. Archer because each one of them does 1.5 times to 2 times the damage the dragon or shoggoth can and they have magic items to counter some of their best attacks like grapple.The Come and Get Me barbarian once he enters melee range hits for 60 points a hit with +40 bonus to hit or so using power attack, gets his 4 attacks, and then gets to attack every time the dragon or creature swings at him, took the Step Up line of feats so the dragon couldn't use reach against him, and is dead by round two if tries to go toe to toe with the barbarian who has over 450 hit points while raging and a DR of 12/- against every physical attack and saves where he only misses on a 1. He bought a ring of evasion so he evades easier than the rogue.The two-hander fighter can do a standard action attack that averages 270 points of damage against any creature not immune to crit. The archer can fire 7 times a round without haste for an average of 35 points an arrow. If she crits, it gets much, much worse.There's no save against these forms of attack. And I can't make every encounter a powerful magic using creature with the perfect defenses. Even when I do toss one in, all the party wizard or cleric has to do is counter the guy and any one of the physical damage dealers can end him in a round or two.So when I hear about this caster-phyiscal damage dealer disparity, I think "What game are you playing and who are you playing with?" Physical damage dealers are nightmares to deal with. They have their weaknesses like any class. But within the group dynamic that D&D is built around, they aren't lacking. They have more options in Pathfinder than they ever had in 3.5.And liking Prcs versus Archetypes is purely a matter of preference with nothing to do with balance.I would say given the success of Pathfinder, it is much improved over 3.5 in terms of intersting options for physical damage dealers. The caster-martial disparity in power versus each other was never as big an issue as people made it out to be. The issue was making physical damage dealers more fun to play with more options. Pathfinder successfully accomplished that without neutering casters, which only a small minority cared about because this game is not now, and never has been, a battle royale.I'll leave the discussion as it is never ending. Stream of the Sky has his opinion...and it is nothing more than an opinion...I made sure to let new players wanting to try out Pathfinder know the tier system is not the same any longer.Casters cannot do everytying. CoDzilla does not exist anymore. Wizards cannot summoner creatures or buff themselves to equal physical damage dealers any longer. Physical damage dealers have quite a few options for their builds. And physical damage dealers are quite fun to play.Including the monk, which just got a whole lot better with the expanded number of weapons they can use and the new martial arts. I've never seen it so good for physical damage dealers as they have it now.</blockquote>

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