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.