D&D 5E Zard's S Tier Archetypes

[Zardnaar]

Yeah, I'm inclined to disregard abilities of that level - I've never seen a character over 14th level in 5e. Never really looked at Peace - unappealing theme.

I've kinda liked peace since 2E Eldath SP and vow of non violence in 3E.

As long as they can make it work mechanically willing to look at it.
When I rate the classes I consider 1-10 mostly with an emphasis on 1-7.

Even if the class is better later that's to late and probably only makes up 10-20% of a campaign.

I suspect campaigns mostly wrap up by 10, online I know they do lol (90% done by lvl 10, 1% epic levels). Online 70% are lvl 1-7.

I doubt the numbers are drastically different irl. Explains 3E lasting (mostly casuals playing lvl 1-7) as well.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Meh, Peace looks very dull to play. It basically about passive buffing the team. Which is strong but doesn't give you much to actually do.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

What the heck games were you playing for 35 years that you never came across this? Like, seriously. I was familiar with it by, what, 1992? 1994? Something like that.

I think your dates are a little on the early side. This (not necessarily exhaustive) list on Giant Bomb shows it first appearing in 1993 in the Fatal Fury games. After appearing in a handful of other Japanese titles it seems to have pretty abruptly become an order of magnitude or two more common in Japanese games around 1998 or '99. Western developed games seemed to have hopped on the bandwagon roughly a decade later.

It is possible that some games on the list did not necessarily preserve use of the S rank in all localizations (and that some games were excluded because those taging them for this list were not playing a localization that preserved them). Converting "grades" to the familiar local grading system seems like a pretty basic and superficial localization move.

The exact timeline is interesting to me personally as someone who played plenty of Nintendo in the 90s but checked out of console gaming completely when I left for college in the early 2000s. Having not happened to own any of the still relatively small number of titles featuring S-ranking from the tail end of my console gaming days I had no idea it was considered a familiar aspect of console gaming until this thread.

 

[Ancalagon]

The tier analysis in 3.x/pathfinder was over a very broad swath of power. The difference between an optimised tier 1 character and a poorly designed tier 5 character was immense. Literally BMX Bandit vs Angel Summoner (if you aren't familiar with the concept, ).

In 5e the spread of power is far less (although it's slowly growing as the number of option increases), so perhaps this analysis is less important.

However, I think it's important to remember how it used to be done previously - it's not about "combat performance" (although that is definitely a portion). Rather it's a lot about the capacity of a character to help solve a complex problem. These three problems were:

A a dragon is harassing an area. You know it lives in a cave. Deal with hit.

B: a large city is going to be attacked in a week or so by a large army. Prepare the city for defense and then assist in its defence

C: you must infiltrate the city state of an enemy overlord, and make contact and gain the trust with the leader of the underground slave rebellion.

Damage per round matters sure, but....

 

[Paul Farquhar]

A a dragon is harassing an area. You know it lives in a cave. Deal with hit.

B: a large city is going to be attacked in a week or so by a large army. Prepare the city for defense and then assist in its defence

C: you must infiltrate the city state of an enemy overlord, and make contact and gain the trust with the leader of the underground slave rebellion.

Where is

D: The Blurgs and the Zurgons are on the verge of war. Negotiate a peace treaty.

 

[TheSword]

I think your dates are a little on the early side. This (not necessarily exhaustive) list on Giant Bomb shows it first appearing in 1993 in the Fatal Fury games. After appearing in a handful of other Japanese titles it seems to have pretty abruptly become an order of magnitude or two more common in Japanese games around 1998 or '99. Western developed games seemed to have hopped on the bandwagon roughly a decade later.

It is possible that some games on the list did not necessarily preserve use of the S rank in all localizations (and that some games were excluded because those taging them for this list were not playing a localization that preserved them). Converting "grades" to the familiar local grading system seems like a pretty basic and superficial localization move.

The exact timeline is interesting to me personally as someone who played plenty of Nintendo in the 90s but checked out of console gaming completely when I left for college in the early 2000s. Having not happened to own any of the still relatively small number of titles featuring S-ranking from the tail end of my console gaming days I had no idea it was considered a familiar aspect of console gaming until this thread.

Cool list. Most of those I never got close to playing. With the exception of the Resident Evil games when it was just the end mission ranking... I always thought it meant S.T.A.R.S. The Police Special Ops lol. Though one game franchise out of 187 games explains why I never recognized it.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Well my PS4 currently has Assassins Creed Odyssey, Tomb Raider, Dad of War, FF7 remake, Witcher 3, loaded on it? Oh and Minecraft. My apologies playing these games doesn’t make a gamer enough. Perhaps “Japanese games with letter rankings” is too narrow a subject of expertise.

RPG tiers have always been colour coded as far as I have seen. But hey, by all means come up with your own. It’s a futile endeavor in any case.

Final Fantasy VII literally includes this tier system that you're trying to say doesn't exist - it uses it for Chocobo racing (no idea if remake does, I've been avoiding spoilers about it). Several other FF games include systems which use the F to S ranking system - FFIX and FFXV for example (the MMOs also do, but that's kind of a given).

Re: RPG tiers - nope, they haven't "always been" colour-coded. It's easy to prove, given the original 3.XE tier list was numerical (note this is a repost of a repost of something from the WotC forums, I forget when it was originally posted, but at least a couple of years before that).

Tier System For Classes (Repost)

Tier System For Classes (Repost)

web.archive.org

I don't know when colours came in, but I first started seeing it in 4E. They're dominant in situations where you're ranking a very large number of things, because you don't have to put a letter or number next to something, or group under a letter or number, you can just write naturally and colourize stuff to quickly indicate value. That's a different approach - you don't normally rank things like entire classes that way.

I think your dates are a little on the early side.

I mean, that list is definitely very incomplete and the sudden burst of games using "s rank" in 1998/1999 is likely a result of the list being impacted by the fact that most of the people adding to it are of a certain age (early-mid 30s and younger). You can see this with GiantBomb lists in general - despite a lot of the writers being a little older, any game that came out in the later PSX era or after that is vastly more likely to be on a list than stuff from the SNES/Megadrive era. Also for whatever reason, stuff that came out on Nintendo consoles is vastly more likely to be covered, as is stuff that came out in the US. You can see they missed out FFVII, I note, perhaps that's because it's from a minigame, but it's more likely they just didn't know. But they also missed out FFIX, FFXIV and FFXV, where it's not as obscure. So I imagine they're missing most games which use it.

But I agree with the general timeline. Whilst I think we could probably dig up some games from before 1993 if we systematically went through SNES/Megadrive (maybe even NES/Sega Master System), and we could almost certainly dig out a lot more in the mid-1990s, it's clear that the system of F to S rank became more popular over the 1990s, before becoming very popular in the very late '90s and beyond. At this point, if you play any kind of retro-indie game that's emulating the style of 1990s-era games it's reasonably likely to use F to S ranks - Streets of Rage 4, for example (even though SoR 1/2/3 didn't have it AFAIK).

 

[TheSword]

Final Fantasy VII literally includes this tier system that you're trying to say doesn't exist - it uses it for Chocobo racing (no idea if remake does, I've been avoiding spoilers about it). Several other FF games include systems which use the F to S ranking system - FFIX and FFXV for example (the MMOs also do, but that's kind of a given).

Re: RPG tiers - nope, they haven't "always been" colour-coded. It's easy to prove, given the original 3.XE tier list was numerical (note this is a repost of a repost of something from the WotC forums, I forget when it was originally posted, but at least a couple of years before that).

Tier System For Classes (Repost)

Tier System For Classes (Repost)

web.archive.org

I don't know when colours came in, but I first started seeing it in 4E. They're dominant in situations where you're ranking a very large number of things, because you don't have to put a letter or number next to something, or group under a letter or number, you can just write naturally and colourize stuff to quickly indicate value. That's a different approach - you don't normally rank things like entire classes that way.



I mean, that list is definitely very incomplete and the sudden burst of games using "s rank" in 1998/1999 is likely a result of the list being impacted by the fact that most of the people adding to it are of a certain age (early-mid 30s and younger). You can see this with GiantBomb lists in general - despite a lot of the writers being a little older, any game that came out in the later PSX era or after that is vastly more likely to be on a list than stuff from the SNES/Megadrive era. Also for whatever reason, stuff that came out on Nintendo consoles is vastly more likely to be covered, as is stuff that came out in the US. You can see they missed out FFVII, I note, perhaps that's because it's from a minigame, but it's more likely they just didn't know. But they also missed out FFIX, FFXIV and FFXV, where it's not as obscure. So I imagine they're missing most games which use it.

But I agree with the general timeline. Whilst I think we could probably dig up some games from before 1993 if we systematically went through SNES/Megadrive (maybe even NES/Sega Master System), and we could almost certainly dig out a lot more in the mid-1990s, it's clear that the system of F to S rank became more popular over the 1990s, before becoming very popular in the very late '90s and beyond. At this point, if you play any kind of retro-indie game that's emulating the style of 1990s-era games it's reasonably likely to use F to S ranks - Streets of Rage 4, for example (even though SoR 1/2/3 didn't have it AFAIK).

Very long post to say what? That I should have learnt about S ranks from the Chocobo racing mini-game that I only did to complete the story? The point was not that S ranks didn’t exist, but that I and other gamers weren’t familiar with the term... certainly not until Bloodborne with weapon rankings being integral to the system.

Treantmonks very famous guides used colour coding for 3e. Was the internet even around outside university libraries when AD&D was around?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The tier analysis in 3.x/pathfinder was over a very broad swath of power. The difference between an optimised tier 1 character and a poorly designed tier 5 character was immense. Literally BMX Bandit vs Angel Summoner (if you aren't familiar with the concept, ).

In 5e the spread of power is far less (although it's slowly growing as the number of option increases), so perhaps this analysis is less important.

However, I think it's important to remember how it used to be done previously - it's not about "combat performance" (although that is definitely a portion). Rather it's a lot about the capacity of a character to help solve a complex problem. These three problems were:

A a dragon is harassing an area. You know it lives in a cave. Deal with hit.

B: a large city is going to be attacked in a week or so by a large army. Prepare the city for defense and then assist in its defence

C: you must infiltrate the city state of an enemy overlord, and make contact and gain the trust with the leader of the underground slave rebellion.

Damage per round matters sure, but....

Agree that 5E has a much narrower range of power than 3.XE/PF, so it matters less in theory.

However, re: your example, generally if we're talking about a character's capacity to help solve a complex problem, as opposed to the capacity of a player to help solve a complex problem, then there is still some correlation with tier systems. Typically casters perform even better than their tier rating in that way, and non-casters significantly worse. Remember, talking about the character's capacity to solve problems, not the player. If anything, players of weaker/less effective classes often have to work harder to help, and are more likely to come up with the plans to solve big problems in my experience. But then often they have to be largely carried out by other PCs (esp. in earlier editions).

5E combat is intended to be somewhat balanced (well, significantly balanced by RPG standards), so power does matter there. But again not as much as 3.XE/PF.

Treantmonks very famous guides used colour coding for 3e. Was the internet even around outside university libraries when AD&D was around?

Is this a joke? You know AD&D lasted until 2000, right? And that the internet went huge around 1994? Amazon was founded in 1994 for goodness sake. That's the year Planescape came out!

I've been discussing RPGs online since 1993. Even before that people were discussing via more primitive/specific online communication methods, back into the 1980s. By the mid-1990s, it was extremely common to have internet access, and yeah, loads of us were discussing it. Suggesting "only university libraries" had the internet until 2000 is absolutely wild and makes me wonder when you were born, and if it was before 1990, where you spent the 1990s!? I mean, were you in silent meditation on a hilltop in Tibet or something?

 

[TheSword]

Agree that 5E has a much narrower range of power, so it matters less in theory.

However, re: your example, generally if we're talking about a character's capacity to help solve a complex problem, as opposed to the capacity of a player to help solve a complex problem, then there is still some correlation with tier systems. Typically casters perform even better than their tier rating in that way, and non-casters significantly worse. Remember, talking about the character's capacity to solve problems, not the player. If anything, players of weaker/less effective classes often have to work harder to help, and are more likely to come up with the plans to solve



Is this a joke? You know AD&D lasted until 2000, right? And that the internet went huge around 1994? Amazon was founded in 1994 for goodness sake. That's the year Planescape came out!

I've been discussing RPGs online since 1993. Even before that people were discussing via more primitive/specific online communication methods, back into the 1980s. By the mid-1990s, it was extremely common to have internet access, and yeah, loads of us were discussing it. Suggesting "only university libraries" had the internet until 2000 is absolutely wild and makes me wonder when you were born, and if it was before 1990, where you spent the 1990s!? I mean, were you in silent meditation on a hilltop in Tibet or something?

...It was a Joke...

... but way to staggeringly over-react.