Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
Sign in- Marketplace
Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
Sign in
I recently watched a Tube video on how to make damage made by the different classes more even. Some of my suggestions are:
1. The easiest way would be to give melee classes more Extra attacks. Also move the last extra attack feature from 20 to 17, for a
fighter. You're already increasing Action Surge and Indomitable. Maybe just drop 3 attacks at 11.
2. Give melee a straight up bonus action attack. No requirements or prerequisites. BTW, I'd be ok with Spellcasters getting to use
2 spells per turn if one was labeled an Action and one was labeled a Bonus action. Forget the One spell slot per turn or One spell
per turn stuff. Also, if something requires activation, extension, or healing make that part of the bonus action or just give us 2.
When you cast a cantrip, do you use a spell slot? Wondering.
3. Stop nerfing feats like Sentinel or creating ones like Zhentarim Tactics. Attacking is much better than a need to hit.
We are all in danger!
The spellcaster/Martial divide is not as large as players think - and certainly not as large as clickbait videos feeding on YouTube’s algorithm which is explicitly designed to promote hate and conflict want you to believe. Frankly, I think most of the divide can be fixed by a DM who actually plans their game around the entire party and their respective strengths and weaknesses.
Melee classes are designed around consistency - even after Spellcasters run out of resources and are down to cantrips (which, to answer your question, do not use spell slots), Martial classes keep going. DMs often fail to adequately tax Spellcasters between long rests, which creates a larger divide than the game rules anticipate. If your spellcaster is nearly always at full power, then the consistency of martials never gets its chance to shine.
Turning to your first two solutions, both problematic from a gameplay stance. Both add extra time to turns in ways that are boring for others at the table - anyone who has watched a high level fighter or Monk play knows extra attacks can get old very fast, particularly when every turn. Further, stepping on the toes of other martial classes, which are balanced around some of these, is not a meaningful solution as it causes other design problems.
I agree with your third point - some feats got nerfed in ways that were not necessary. I think it is entirely fair for a DM to allow the legacy version of these feats and still provide the single ASI of the new feat.
Other fixes include playing the game as intended. More combat encounters between long rests. More out of combat problems designed to tax spellcaster resources. Giving martial classes the items their gameplay is designed around.
I'm currently running a level 18 campaign and when designing combat encounters it's not the spell casters I'm worried about but my Fighter with twin magic scimitars and the Dual Wielder feat. I don't have a full wizard in the party which might play a part but on the first two rounds with action surge and extra attacks from the light and nick properties the Fighter is consistently doing 8 attacks and 70 to 80 points of damage, she just chews through everything I throw her way and with 22 AC she's also pretty hard to hit with anything other than a spell with a save DC. It's really made me agree with Caerwyn that the divide isn't as great as YouTube and Reddit likes to make out
Just for the record, you are already allowed to do this; the only limitation is that they can't both use a spell slot. There is not and has never been a rule that you can only cast one spell per turn.
No, you don't. That's kind of the point of cantrips.
pronouns: he/she/they
I have to agree with caerwyn that the martial-casters damage thing really isn’t much of an issue. I just finished a campaign where we hit level 15 playing a wizard. There was a champion fighter in the party doing crazy damage. Neither one of us really had much of an edge in that department.
But after the fight ended, the fighter didn’t really have much to do unless there was something that needed climbing.
Where for most problems, I was saying things like, I’ll just levitate it, Or telekinesis, or dimension door, or fly. Between the cleric and I, we could magic our way out of most problems and the warlock was talking us out of the rest while the martials were along for the ride.
Though I do think 5.5 has gone a long way towards helping that by letting fighters and barbs have more out of combat utility.
To me before 5.5. a simplified view is fighters protect mages at low level, but it is reversed at high level. If you start at level 1 or 2 what is the big deal? would a lot of this discrepancy of unevenness of damage stem from people who start high level?
Wizards & Sorcerers get Wish. There is no martial equivalent of Wish.
That's where most of the Dragon Ball Z-style power level discourse comes from.
DM, player & homebrewer(Current homebrew project is an unofficial conversion of SBURB/SGRUB from Homestuck into DND 5e)
Once made Maxwell's Silver Hammer come down upon Strahd's head to make sure he was dead.
Always study & sharpen philosophical razors. They save a lot of trouble.
The OP claims that Sentinel was nerfed. How was Sentinel nerfed in 2024? It looks essentially identical except the 2024 version has an ASI. Just because it was moved to level 4 (which only affected variant humans anyway)?
You are right, however wish is all but theorycraft considering how few campaigns get to level 17.
And even then, it’s mostly just going to be used to replicate a lower-level spell. It’s not doing direct damage.
I think most of the unevenness comes from white room scenarios which have assumptions built in about idealized numbers and situations.
If we were fighting a lot of enemies, and my fireball could hit 4-5 of them, sure, I was doing effectively 90-100 hp total across all the enemies. But if it was a solo enemy, now the same fireball is being outclassed by the fighter, and she’s not using a limited resource to do it.
I think people just obsess about damage because it’s easy to quantify. But the other bigger issue with the divide (besides utility) isn’t really damage casters can do, it’s control spells. Fireball can hurt a lot of bad guys, but hypnotic pattern completely takes them out of the fight. That’s something martials can’t really do, and it can’t be measured.
While I do think casters outpower martials at higher levels, you're right that it's more about utility and control than raw damage output. (Though damage output in the form of crowd control is not to be sneezed at.)
Martials have better staying power, but that's not something that regularly becomes relevant in most D&D games, especially at high levels.
I mean, if you picked Champion Fighter, then you kinda set yourself up for a pure combat niche. It's explicitly the most basic bash and whacker option in either iteration of 5e.
At the end of the day, you can't really get away from the fact that utility control is going to be almost entirely magic's sphere if you're including substantial magic but building weapon users from the premise that they're roughly analogous to IRL practices and adding a few fantastic elements to some of the variants, rather than starting the setting in a more anime-esque "all fighting powers are derived from the magic system" format. That's part of the "role" in "roleplaying game"- some roles specialize in pounding faces in, some roles can specialize in making the faces easier to pound or getting you to the point where you get to pound the faces.
Did you see Mike Mearls blog post about exactly this?
His argument was basically what you’re saying in that we let caster do anything a game designer can imagine, because magic. But a martial gets to walk 30’ and smack something be use martials need to be more strictly bound to reality.
He’s making his own system which will allow martials more crazy powers, I don’t think he specifically cited anime, but that kind of thing is the impression I got.
Like if a caster can use chain lightning to hit 3 targets kind of near each other, maybe let a martial run around and attack 3 targets kind of near each other. Not every time, but sometimes.
I'm not opposed to the concept in principle, just pointing out it's a different vibe from the classic fantasy one core D&D aims for.
And "let a caster do anything a game designer can imagine" is rather hyperbolic. Practically speaking, casters are capped by slots, known spells, and prep method. If you're a Sorcerer, Bard, or Warlock then the utility options are contingent on how much of your spell list you're willing to lock into niche uses, and the rest mostly need to anticipate what they'll want on a given day- Wizards got some flexibility there in '24, but they also don't get instant access to their entire list so there's still the requirement of either investing an on level pick or getting DM cooperation to acquire the spell. As Caerwyn pointed out, this should also create the dynamic of "do I use a high level slot to get around an obstacle, or save it for a fight"- casters mostly become broken late game when there's few obstacles and/or strong encounters, allowing them to consistently nova the one real fight per LR.
Building on the above, I feel players forget skills exist when trying to fabricate a large divide. Yes, Wizards can do a lot - but only insofar as they have the slots to do so. Martials have plenty of access to skills, often focus the incredibly useful Dexterity stat, and, particularly in 2024, have access to numerous ways to buff rolls or otherwise improve their skills. Fighters and Barbarians, for example, explicitly received new out of combat abilities.
Once again, consistency versus flashiness at the cost of a resource tax. That is actually a good dynamic for a team game, since it allows players to work together to conserve resources and ensures players hold different roles and can set themselves apart from other party members.
The "more strictly bound to reality" thing was a joke the second a spear did less than a longsword.
What people seem to want is stuff like what Pathfinder does w/martials:Permanent positive spell effects & other benefits on w/less-to-no costs and/or downsides to match their personal headcanon.
One proposal I've seen as a fix is a feat(& now Path thanks to the newest UA) that makes it so all "Pools/points"-type systems to no longer deplete after the last level a feat can be gained, thus giving Martials closer power to casters w/their 9th Level spells unlocked. Very other media-ey/Pathfindery. Still not Martial Wish.
So there is no solution that fits infinite headcanon.
Hence why the status quo botched by Mearls regarding 5e martials remains.
DM, player & homebrewer(Current homebrew project is an unofficial conversion of SBURB/SGRUB from Homestuck into DND 5e)
Once made Maxwell's Silver Hammer come down upon Strahd's head to make sure he was dead.
Always study & sharpen philosophical razors. They save a lot of trouble.
I skipped 4E, but my perception is that the highlighted sentence above was a fair bit of the design philosophy in 4th Edition. I seem to recall that same-i-ness for class abilities just with a little bit different flavor text was why I dismissed it after a couple of Player's Handbook flip-throughs, but I could certainly be remembering wrong all these years later.
If you talk traditional roles, a strong melee is going to go after a high HP targets that deal high damage as well. A caster is going to AoE and control groups, generally weaker mobs. Since we are in Discussion, I'm going to suggest Cleaving. If a melee goes into a group of weak targets, heavy hits continue to drop targets until all damage is done to something. Example 1, Barbarian swings a great axe for 30 points and takes out several Goblins in a single attack. Example 2, Rogue gets a sneak attack in the middle of that same group mentioned, performing a whirlwind of stabbings to reconcile the damage rolled. This damage spillover could work on spells AoE and high single target ones as well.
As someone who played a Fighter with a ridiculous amount of hard hitting attacks, I personally feel that more meaningful and interesting attack options would easily trump more attacks. D&D doesn't seem like it will have 100s of specific martial moves created like there are spell options.
First, I should be clear I was paraphrasing, and he might say I’m missing a nuance in his description, or I misunderstood it.
And my recollection of 4e was that it wasn’t quite as same-y as its reputation, but yes, there was a lot of — do damage a move the enemy 1 square, only this time we’ll also a different name on the card.
But with that disclaimer that I could be missing something, you do make an interesting point, and you’re quite right. I would think there could be a way to give martials more combat options without those options just being basically just re-named spells. But the way I phrase it, that’s pretty much what they’d be doing.
Not sure if you folks noticed but, the weapon abilities and attacks in 5.5 have pushes, slow, zero movement etc now. Very 4 E in my opinion.
I think the same-i-ness of 4E was more in the overall types of powers all classes had access to, no that all of the powers did the same thing. Everyone had at-wills, encounter powers, and daily powers. That said, I don't recall what else casters had access to since I never played one in the couple games (that also didn't last very long).