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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Composer99" data-source="post: 9171641" data-attributes="member: 7030042">I'm not really speaking to effectiveness in and of itself - rather, inter-class balance. (And, to be sure, I do think a better-balanced D&D would be a better-designed D&D, as per <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/symmetric-balance-vs-asymmetric-balance.700330/post-9170959" target="_blank">my remarks</a> on another thread discussing a related topic.)Contrary to your paraphrase ("players really don't care at all about effectiveness, only concept"), which I must point out is... not really related at all to what I wrote, I would expect that players who prioritise "realise a character concept that feels awesome in play" for their gameplay experience actually are going to be concerned with effectiveness, and are, of necessity, going to be unsatisfied if a character class or subclass that intuitively seems like it ought to be the correct choice for any given character concept is not up to the task. A character who is ineffective as a result of their subclass isn't going to feel very awesome in play, after all.For instance, I expect, say, berserkers don't score poorly on player satisfaction surveys because clerics or druids or wizards have a wider breadth of capabilities. I expect they score poorly on such surveys because they can't even enable playing a berserker the way you would expect to play them - e.g. frenzying as often as possible and striking fear into the hearts of your enemies. (The berserker is notoriously terrible at that last option, being able to use an entire action to maybe make one creature frightened of them.)So while I would agree inter-class balance matters, and for good reason, there is a certain extent to which it only matters if it matters to the player base writ large.</blockquote>

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