Yora
Legend
All of them.
All 800?
All of them.
A druid is a wilderness themed wizard with summoning and shapechanging. Summoning is a complete drag for everybody but the druid player. Shapechanging is broken or purely cosmetic, there is no middle-ground.
Role-playwise druids are so boring you don't even notice they're there until they put the brakes on every single combat. (They make for great low-level villains, though).
Wow. I'm finding it very hard to disagree with any of this. Honestly, the druid does seem more arcane than divine. And summoning *is* a drag. There's got to be a way to simulate it other than giving the summoned beings all initiative slots and their own attack rolls.
Shapechanging can perhaps find a middle ground between purely cosmetic and broken, but 3e Wild Shape is right out, yes. Honestly, as I far as I can recall, 1e Wild Shape wasn't so bad. It wasn't the heart of the class, either.
This I disagree with. They have plenty of roleplaying potential.
Let me rephrase. All of them, but not necessarily as classes.All 800?
The thing is we've seen lots of attempts at a fighter/mage via multiclassing and none really worked (the closest anything came was elven fighter-mages in AD&D or 4e hybrids, both of which suffered from severe MAD). Whereas the duskblade works okay and the swordmage works well. And I think fantasy fiction says the arcane melee guy has at least as much right to being a core class as the divine melee guy (and the 4e hexblade as the warlock isn't really where I think I want the warlock to go, if you must have the warlock).I really only want to see classes that cannot be done as multi-classes.
Something lie the Duskblade, can be a multi-class, if WOTC gets over casting in heavy armor.
I honestly think Pathfinder has done a wonderful job of balancing shapechanging without making it completly cosmetic.A druid is a wilderness themed wizard with summoning and shapechanging. Summoning is a complete drag for everybody but the druid player. Shapechanging is broken or purely cosmetic, there is no middle-ground. Role-playwise druids are so boring you don't even notice they're there until they put the brakes on every single combat. (They make for great low-level villains, though).
A bard is spread pretty thin, being a jack of all trades, but bard players always inject fun into D&D. Bard is in. Bard is the crazy choice. We need some humour in the game. Most of the other classes take themselves far too seriously. Even rogues do.
I honestly think Pathfinder has done a wonderful job of balancing shapechanging without making it completly cosmetic.
do you still find the pathfinder method OP?
Certainly!
My thing is that the character who mixes martial and magical might is pretty common in fantasy literature, and it simply isn't covered fully by the Bard. Classes like Hexblades, Duskblades and BattleSorcerers- not to mention classes from D&D cousins like AE's Mage Blade- fill that niche all in one base class.
But good prestige classes and/or multiclassing rules might also work.
I'd really hate too much expansion of the Bard role.
The Hexblade, for one, has a very different flavor, in that the source of their arcane power is a ritual agreement. This works well for things like Adepts of the Blue Star (Thieves' World)- Bards would be a poor fit.