Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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My example was at level 17, level 20 is around 160. I didn't list any damage spells because none of the best level 9 spells are damaging, though both meteor swarm and psychic scream are easily superior to PWK in most situations.
See, it is hard to take you seriously when you admit you have not run high level campaigns, then assert so strongly “evidence” to back up your claims that shows your lack of experience.
There is a reason I said a “properly equipped” character. At high levels, a properly equipped character is going to have more than the +3 weapon you assumed - they are going to have weapons that deal significant additional damage per hit. They are going to have feats and other abilities that stack damage. Subclass nonsense. All the things you ignore in your math that do not even require a particularly broken set of optimization combinations.
As a general rule, when you don’t know what you are talking about - as your post clearly admits - your best course of action is to listen, not continue to confidently assert false competency in a subject.
In my experience playing with a lot of different online groups, the average DM is not great at those things. Especially not resourcing taxing, as they offer PCs far too many opportunities to recover between encounters. So does it really make sense to balance things around good DMs (or at least ones good at this particular thing) rather than typical DMs?
I think if one were starting a new edition from scratch, that might be feasible - but it is not something that would work well a decade into an existing system. Shifting the balance point of an “adventuring day” fundamentally requires changes to how all classes function, as you still want classes to feel an opportunity cost for burning high level, limited resources. Changing recovery also has drastic implications on entire gameplay staples - Dungeon Crawls, for example, which are the most generally resource racing of gameplay elements, would have to become shorter or otherwise more liberal with rests to offset a game balanced around more regular recovery.
That said. I think Wizards already took some of this into account with the 2024 update, giving more short rest or repeatable recovery to martial classes, while keeping spellcasters more limited in what they can do on a short rest. In the “average” group, this means martials can be more liberal with their powerful abilities, while Spellcasters still need to restrain themselves, creating a slight facsimile of the balance the game was actually designed around. All of these 5.5e changes do a pretty decent job helping what you call the “average” DM close the gap, without fundamentally requiring a rebalance of the whole system.
I think the real failing though is one of education. Wizards focuses a lot on how one should run a game, but very little on the considerations one should be running through as one prepares for sessions. Every iteration of D&D is also notoriously terrible at teaching how D&D changes over a game, and the different metrics a DM should use at different levels of play. I think every portion of D&D kind of trusts DMs with the basics and expects them to learn the rest, when a “so you’re at higher levels, here’s what you need to know” section might be helpful.
Frankly, I think the clickbait is also part of the problem. A DM with a modicum amount of self reflection might ask themselves “huh, something is not right, maybe I should look into this?” Instead of finding the helpful resources that exist on running high level games, those folks are going to find content pushing things like a “martial caster divide” either by folks who should know better, but have a financial incentive to make rage bait due to how the algorithms are designed, or folks like OP, who admit they are not experienced yet are trying to push a narrative regardless.
This also is why Wizards should try to help educate folks on their platform with their content - social media companies have acknowledged they adjust their algorithm to promote bad takes and anger, as those have higher levels of monetization than informative content. Wizards should be doing more to inform players who might have legitimate questions, and, finding no official answers, might seek them out in a system with financial incentives to push bad information.
The biggest thing 2024 did to help with balance was to move a bunch of martial resources to a long rest basis; any time one class is mostly short rest or at will and the other is mostly long rest you're going to see relative power vary depending on the number of short rests during a day.
That said, it doesn't require a wholescale rebalance to deal with a lot of the problems, because a lot of it isn't fundamental to the system, it's just a handful of significantly outperforming spells that could really use some attention.
It was a bit more than that. They all followed the same pattern. A weapon users at will would be 1W damage + minor effect themed to their archetype, like a fighter might cause a penalty to hit anyone who isn't them, a leader type might give someone in the party a small bonus to hit or ac, the controller might create difficult terrain in like 2 whole squares. But the theme was the same use weapons damage die and add some minor effect, the encounter power would be like 2 weapon dice damage and a slightly less minor effect, and the daily would be 3-4 weapon dice in damage and a somewhat notable effect. Yeah there were a handful of exceptions to these rules but probably 90% of the powers went like that.
I'm not sure that the same-ness of 4e was as much of a problem as the fact that they chose to pursue balance by nerfing or eliminating strong or difficult to balance abilities, rather than by giving everyone special abilities.
For example, consider flight. Now, it's true that flight spells can cause a lot of balance problems, but their solution was to banish the flight spell to level 16 (which in 4e means "requires a level 16 character", though since 4e went from 1-30 that's equivalent to 11 in 5e), at which point it gave you a flight speed of 8 (40'), was self only, and usable once per day for 5 minutes. There was a mass fly spell at level 22, with similar constraints.
Casters can reshape the world, yet in an era where the average session only features 1.5 encounters, there is no effective resource drain to keep them in check.
The only logical solution is to allow weapon scaling to keep pace with cantrips. For example, a Warlock using Eldritch Blast with Repelling Blast and Illusionist's Bracers can reliably output 8d10+48 damage. They do this from the safety of being 120' away in Shadow of Moil (granting Disadvantage on incoming attacks+ Advantage on EB) and potential resistance to all damage via Boon of the Night Spirit.
Meanwhile, the melee martial "face-tanking" the front line often deals the same—if not less—damage, all while being tossed around like a rag doll.
Healers and melee classes are grossly underpowered compared to casters once you hit Tiers 3 and 4. This disparity is exactly why so many veteran DMs rely heavily on homebrew at those levels. While the issue is less glaring in Tiers 1 and 2, the fundamental imbalance is always present.
I would think that running more encounters per LR would be a logical solution, and one with significantly less overhead than trying to rework baseline performance targets.
Also, if we’re going to be assessing cantrip performance with a Very Rare magic item in the mix, we should be applying that to the weapon user as well. Hand them even just a rare Flametongue and the disparity will nosedive.
There's also the issue that a character who depends on being able to snipe targets before they can get into melee range is rarely able to fight every battle on a salt pan where nothing can get close without being spotted a mile away.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
The solution to this example is not scaling weapon damage. The solution to this is giving melee characters (and monsters) enough mobility that a mere 120' separation is no big deal.
Ah yes, one of those super-common Epic Boons that most Warlocks have
Active characters:
Edoumiaond Willegume "Eddie" Podslee, Vegetanian scholar (College of Spirits bard)
Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric)
Peter "the Pied Piper" Hausler, human con artist/remover of vermin (Circle of the Shepherd druid)
PIPA - Planar Interception/Protection Aeormaton, warforged bodyguard and ex-wizard hunter (Warrior of the Elements monk/Cartographer artificer)
Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
1. Warlocks are pretty close to working like a martial anyway. 2. one broken magic items does not say much about the disparity, just that they poorly designed that one item.
I liked how they moved a lot of the reality shaping spells to rituals that anyone could cast. I think there could of been some fine tuning on the skills needed and costs to cast the rituals but the concept was pretty awesome imo.