D&D 5E Why the claim of combat and class balance between the classes is mainly a forum issue. (In my opinion)

[MichaelSomething]

Well what's balanced for people with little system mastery can be quite broken for a person who has system mastery.

 

[Remathilis]

@Remathilis I would say those are fine characters as long as everyone at the game is using the same level of play.

Which was my point. The most optimized character is actually my semi-NPC (a dawnflower dancer bard) and she's no-where near broken. Overall, the group is diverse rather than lazer-pointed optimized, and that is a good thing for me.

I dunnnoooow... having a +2 to Str AND Cha is not bad at all! With the PF smite evil, he has the same striking power as a Fighter with Str 18, with better saves to boot. Con boost is great. Not a damage dealer, but one hell of a tank.

Now, the optimal pick is human with Cha bonus. So the dwarf paladin is by no means min-maxed, but there will not be any aspect of the game where he will not have an opportunity to shine. Especially if your party is full of jerks who make him check for poison traps (I would!).

With a +3/+3 Str/Dex, this guy is a potential beast with TWF. Obviously Weapon Focus is a must. Out the gate, you're only -3 behind each attack vs a greatsword fighter with 18 Str, with double the chance to crit at least once. I'd take rapiers or scimitars (not matching incurs added feat cost, but the Fighter will have more than enough to cover that), and focus on improving critical hits. You may whiff more often, but you also burst more often. I'd say this is balanced, and definitely not sub-optimal. Focus on light armor to take advantage of high Dex, and play the swashbuckler.

The point wasn't that they were weak or useless, merely that if you ever read Paizo-boards Optimization guides, you'd see that both characters have picked non-optimum choices. Which is great; they are playing the characters they like/want and I don't have to worry about them chewing through creatures way above their CR.

 

[captnq]

My Cut and Paste from the noob handbook for 3.5. I think it applies here as well.

The Tier System
We’ll go into detail on classes later, but let me mention the tier system. The tier system is both brilliant and idiotic. It is a system for breaking down the classes and rating them in tiers as to which one is more powerful (one is best, six is worst) all other things being equal.

That last part is the important part. For you, the player, it’s useful. For comparing different players to each other, it’s useless. The tier system puts wizards at one and monk at five. Yet, in the campaign I am running, the monk PC is the scariest thing I’ve ever seen. By the rules, I cannot kill her and she mops the floor with everyone. I’ve mind controlled the whole party and turned them against her and she not only won, but took them all alive. I’ve cheated and broke the rules and made monsters ten challenge ratings higher then her and in personal combat she mangles my worst monstrosities. I have literally stripped her of all equipment, dropped her in an alien dimension where reality does not work as intended, and nullified all magic. She never broke a sweat.

Now, when she was playing a wizard, it was ten times worse.

Some players have a gift. A knack for the game. She’s an accountant in real life and worked dealing with state and federal regulations and had to stare down the ATF more then once and won each and every time. (She does my taxes, btw.) Some people are deadly with a spreadsheet and she’s one of them. I don’t care what class or race you give her, she’s going to optimize it in ways that will make you gape and then…

She’ll get bored. Once she’s used a trick or combo, she’s done. It’s lost it’s luster. That’s what makes her so nasty. She never looks back. Never does the same thing twice. Once she comes up with something, I can prepare against it, but she never uses it again. We joke she’s kind of like Doctor Who. Unarmed, outgunned, outmatched, you still know the bad guys are going to lose. It’s not in the script, it’s just what she does.

This might be you. You might never reach this level of nerdvana. My point is, the tier system is only good at comparing the classes to each other. The mistake people make is to compare them across players. I’ll put my group of five players up against any other group of eight on the planet because my players are a lean, mean, optimized dungeon crawling machine.

What’s this got to do with the tier system? People are going to try to tell you to play X or be a Y because someone else told them that this was the way to play. Sometimes not knowing something won’t work is good, because you don’t know you can fail. It isn’t all about the best PC, because if it was, everyone would play Pun-Pun and be done with it. It’s a balance between teamwork, power level, optimization, and style. I got one player who couldn’t optimize his way out of a paper bag, but nobody makes the group fall down laughing more then he does. He also has the record for most resurrections with the same PC. So go look at the Tier System thread sometime, but take it with a grain of salt.

 

[captnq]

From the most common play traps section:

Trap 3
Everything has to be awesome.

Borderlands illustrates this absolutely perfectly for me. For those who are not familiar with it, it includes a weapon drop system that is randomized based on the power and type of creature that you kill, as well as the area in which you kill it. This leads to a phenomenon that most people who play the game are familiar with. You end up collecting terrible weapons that you wouldn't use even at 10 levels lower dropping from enemies at a frequent rate, weapons that you used to use at an uncommon rate, and then a new weapon to use every couple levels, or what seems like 15 bajillion hours later. People hated this (at least, people I knew), because, well, you just killed a boss, and he dropped some crap weapon that you can't use, they wanted something interesting dropping every time. While that makes sense from a player's standpoint, it's a horrible idea from a developer's standpoint. Those crap weapons need to exist to make the good weapons actually be good. If you constantly got better weapons (or even good weapons) you would end up with vastly overpowered weapons halfway through the game, and it would just not be fun. Not only that, but the choice would be hard, and people don't like that. And finally, it would make all of the guns seem the same (at least guns of a certain type). Does that last one sound familiar?

The reason so many guns were worthless was a mathematical certainty. If you have a good gun, then you have three options on any weapon drop: a better gun, the same gun, or a weaker gun. If there's a finite limit to power (which there is), then you will eventually run out of better guns, and every gun will be as good or worse. It's just a matter of how fast that happens. The slower you go, the more bad guns you'll experience on the way to the best, the faster you go the more time you'll spend with the best (making encounters too easy if you get better guns faster than you need them). And there's always room for complaint here because of it, since the balance is a subjective thing.

That same principle applies to D&D, though for a slightly different reason. In D&D, you have so many options that the likelihood of it not being a good option increases with each new system you add. Heck, each new tiny little ability (skill use, feat, etc.). It's a matter of complexity, it's so complex that it's absolutely impossible for any one person to look at every reaction and say "yup, that's going to affect this in this precise way". You can whine and such about how the core game is poorly balanced, but knowing what they knew then, it was balanced. Knowing what they know now, it's not. That's why ToB came out. And the classes like Beguiler, Warmage, Dread Necromancer, Binder, Incarnum, etc. The later you go into a system's development, the more reasonable the abilities become (note the balance and design on early supplements and core vs later supplements). And it's still really hard, because there's still combinations that they don't think of checking for.

So not every character has to be awesome. It’s okay to be okay. Sure, the game has a I-WIN mentality, but if you fit in with the group, then it’s okay to be average. And if you want to be the best, be the best, but don’t force everyone else to be the best right along with you. Every player is different and if you want to get people to improve, focus on talking about it in a friendly way, “Hey, ya know, if we work out your buffs ahead of time, we can really improve our chances of survival.” That’s a good way to put it. Ordering the Wizard to set aside certain slots for buffs, that you “need” because the combo is perfect with your X, will only make people want to strangle you.

 

[Incenjucar]

Icenjucar,
Do you have a link? I, probably, have read it in the past. Was it a post from his site or from WOTC's when he was, temporarily, working on 5e? I did a google search for Essay of Revealing which just turned up this thread. The Wayback Machine also did not have the article on his site.

Sorry to confuse you and set you on all that work! I meant the Ivory Tower article you linked and was just trying to be cute about it since it was an Essay that Revealed why so many of the options are sub-par.

--

Something to keep in mind: Balancing combat does NOT remove anything from the rest of the game except the range of effectiveness between new/casual players and old/hardcore/used-the-forums players.

Now, if you prefer the old school wargame combat where the wizard is your deadly deadly artillery protected by the infantry and medic, instead of the new school "just one of the troops", thing of 4E, hey, I can understand that. That's a totally legit thing, RTS videogames use that all the time! But a lot of people prefer to play D&D like a band of equals instead.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Well what's balanced for people with little system mastery can be quite broken for a person who has system mastery.

Thus proving that the balance that matters is created by the people at the table, not a generic set of rules.

 

[Stormonu]

Thus proving that the balance that matters is created by the people at the table, not a generic set of rules.

I mostly agree, but every so often someone finds - or stumbles (or to my chargrin, searches out) - on a game combo that throws balance out of whack. But that's why we have DMs - and it goes back to it falling on the shoulders of the folks at the game table.

Generally though, I appreciate a game that doesn't lend itself to being easily abused, but still lets me (or my players) have my character concept.

 

[ImperatorK]

I like to play competent heroes, not incompetent peasants. In a game with mechanics you do it by using mechanics. Sure, I could pretend that my character is a great hero, just like I can pretend that my bicycle is a Ferrari, but why would I do that when I could have the real thing?

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Requiring a minimum combat profiency automatically excludes all characters who do not qualify.
Also, making combat powress a requirement elevates combat over the other "pillars" (A term I do not agree with but use for convenience sake) which is in my eyes not a good thing for the future of D&D.

the lets start again because in no way is that what I want... I want EVERYONE to get to play what they want... my problem is that the game has not always done so... that swashbuckler if he WANTS to suck at combat can, but if he want to rock he can't I want both allowed and for it to be the players design... not the systems

 

[Derren]

the lets start again because in no way is that what I want... I want EVERYONE to get to play what they want... my problem is that the game has not always done so... that swashbuckler if he WANTS to suck at combat can, but if he want to rock he can't I want both allowed and for it to be the players design... not the systems

And what exactly is your definition of "rock at combat" and how much should the player work for it (like chosing a fighter instead of rogue for his swaschbuckler)?