This argument has gone on for a while now and I think I have forgotten what this has to do with "EN World's D&D 5.5e: Somebody Finally Got Tired of Waiting for Wizards to Do It."
Could someone enlighten me?
To return to discussion of En World's money grab, I don't see anything of merit to be gained in trying to make 5e more like 4e. I mean, 4e is widely considered the worst edition ever.
4e books are also easy to get, so if a gamer really wants to play it, they can.
Lots to say to this even if it's only three sentences, but in the interest of staying on topic I'll limit this to suggesting this feels much more like a move towards 3E/Pathfinder than towards 4E.
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Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
This argument has gone on for a while now and I think I have forgotten what this has to do with "EN World's D&D 5.5e: Somebody Finally Got Tired of Waiting for Wizards to Do It."
Could someone enlighten me?
To return to discussion of En World's money grab, I don't see anything of merit to be gained in trying to make 5e more like 4e. I mean, 4e is widely considered the worst edition ever.
4e books are also easy to get, so if a gamer really wants to play it, they can.
Lots to say to this even if it's only three sentences, but in the interest of staying on topic I'll limit this to suggesting this feels much more like a move towards 3E/Pathfinder than towards 4E.
I have to agree. Reading through what they have released, it seems more like a middle ground between 3.5/Pathfinder and 5e. I am not sure if that is good or bad at this point. I would need to actually see the full rules and try it out to make my mind up one way or the other.
This argument has gone on for a while now and I think I have forgotten what this has to do with "EN World's D&D 5.5e: Somebody Finally Got Tired of Waiting for Wizards to Do It."
Could someone enlighten me?
To return to discussion of En World's money grab, I don't see anything of merit to be gained in trying to make 5e more like 4e. I mean, 4e is widely considered the worst edition ever.
4e books are also easy to get, so if a gamer really wants to play it, they can.
Lots to say to this even if it's only three sentences, but in the interest of staying on topic I'll limit this to suggesting this feels much more like a move towards 3E/Pathfinder than towards 4E.
I have to agree. Reading through what they have released, it seems more like a middle ground between 3.5/Pathfinder and 5e. I am not sure if that is good or bad at this point. I would need to actually see the full rules and try it out to make my mind up one way or the other.
This argument has gone on for a while now and I think I have forgotten what this has to do with "EN World's D&D 5.5e: Somebody Finally Got Tired of Waiting for Wizards to Do It."
Could someone enlighten me?
To return to discussion of En World's money grab, I don't see anything of merit to be gained in trying to make 5e more like 4e. I mean, 4e is widely considered the worst edition ever.
4e books are also easy to get, so if a gamer really wants to play it, they can.
Lots to say to this even if it's only three sentences, but in the interest of staying on topic I'll limit this to suggesting this feels much more like a move towards 3E/Pathfinder than towards 4E.
I have to agree. Reading through what they have released, it seems more like a middle ground between 3.5/Pathfinder and 5e. I am not sure if that is good or bad at this point. I would need to actually see the full rules and try it out to make my mind up one way or the other.
Or even PF2e
True. It does make me really curious as to what WotC has in store for us with their upcoming changes. A lot of people on these forums have been asking for more meaningful choice in character creation/leveling as well as more options in combat beyond "I attack with my sword". A greater focus on exploration is another one I see on these forums a lot too. I think it would be a bad idea to not address this in 5.5 (or what ever WotC decides to call it).
A spell can be halted from being cast by being grappled. A stomach is not a giant room. It is a sack, so to speak, filled with acid and whose contents are constantly experiencing peristalsis.
Further, at 20th level, you aren’t fighting kobolds.
You are going to have to hope that you manage to not be disarmed of your arcane focus as you get constantly squeezed and ground and that it doesn’t get destroyed and that you get free from grappled, while you are continually being digested.
you are also going to have to hope that you have access to planar travel such as Dimension Door and Demiplane and that the Legendary Demon Lord didn’t just use some sort of Dimensional Anchoribg.
For all the awesome power of high level casters, they can find their magic seriously hampered in ways that a sword isn’t.
I mean which is more likely....a spellcaster has no useful spells that only have V/S components ( hint there is a lot)
Or rage boi gets their sword taken away?
I’d love to observe your all’s high level games. I’ve never seen one in which a 20th level martial is carrying only one weapon and that one being a sword..
Whereas spellcasters regularly are without options for foci? It's not likely that a martial is without a weapon, but it's equally unlikely that a spellcaster doesn't have access to material components.
The majority of spellcasters I've observed carry only one Arcane focus. The next most common is for a Cleric to carry two, but that is vanishingly rare. Beyond that, if they have any other focus, it is in a backpack and not easily accessible in combat.
By contrast, a martial type typically isn't as concerned with encumberance and will carry multiple weapons on their belt, on bandoliers, and on their back.
That's what I've observed in about four decades of gaming.
Well, you haven't observed that in four decades because the entire focus concept hasn't been around that long, but the reason people don't carry a lot of foci is because the odds of it making any difference is vanishingly small. As for fighters carrying multiple weapons, the golf bag of weapons is mostly a 3.5 phenomenon due to varying damage resistance in 3.5e, most warriors in other editions carry around their main weapon, an offhand weapon if they use two weapon fighting, and a ranged weapon.
1: Split weapons since the dice rolled doesn't matter usually after 5th, just make all one handed weapons light (Maybe excepting the Bludgeoning type) And make all 2 H weapons Heavy, And yes give us more types and a few more interesting weapon traits would be nice as well.
2. Make the healing more interesting, The i touch you heal mechanic is just old and rather boring, and probably the reason you about need to bribe a PC to play a healer. Give us some healing spells that are AoE but maybe risk healing monsters so that the healer gets to engage their brain from time to time. Also more damage prevention would be great, as that often works better than restoring Health. Buffers and THP as well as absorbs and brief invuln or evade may be fun to play with at high levels.
3: Fix the Ranger and Monk. They lack any synergy between their abilities so they just feel like a grab bag of disjointed but cool abilities. These could use to be given some synergy similar to the fighter and rogue
4: Spells: So this may be a bit much, but 5E went all in the wrong way on these, In 3.x the problem with spells was really the unmakable save DC, and it came back in 5E but it is you need a 17+ to save. Make the Save DC static, and use the casting ability for bonus spells. better to have more spells but the save be makable than have a few spells but each can just end a combat outright. As a caveat, the rest spells are also completely broken, Hut and Mansion let parties long rest pretty much with impunity, making resource management irrelevant. These need to be modified to at least allow there to be a counter, especially for Mansion, which has no way to dispel or detect.
5: Monsters. They probably could use a boost to either AC or hit by about 1-3 but not to both. Monsters currently hit like a truck, but accuracy, or defense needs to be able to keep up.
6. Fix the sorcerer's spell list, This is just sad and wrong, The sorcerer needs some love since it got the raw end of the stick transitioning from 3 or 4 to 5 and that needs to be fixed.
7. Tone down the cleric. Any group that has more than one cleric quickly realizes that this class is one of the more unbalanced in the game. Now my suggestion is make the paladin a full caster, and just give them very short range melee oriented spells. then make the cleric the Priest, they are a clothie who is basically a healing mage with hybrid support and control spells all castable at range.
I would like WotC to look at the Combat Maneuver system that Level Up is using. I have always believed that Battle Master should be the baseline for the Fighter Class and while I don't know the details of Level Up's system, it does seem to be basically expanding the Battle Master's abilities into a full fledge system for all Martial characters to use. I am sure WotC's team could give us some thing similar, maybe tied directly to Weapon Type so that the weapon you use matters more. I would like weapon selection to be more than just choosing the highest dice size available to you.
This argument has gone on for a while now and I think I have forgotten what this has to do with "EN World's D&D 5.5e: Somebody Finally Got Tired of Waiting for Wizards to Do It."
Could someone enlighten me?
To return to discussion of En World's money grab, I don't see anything of merit to be gained in trying to make 5e more like 4e. I mean, 4e is widely considered the worst edition ever.
4e books are also easy to get, so if a gamer really wants to play it, they can.
Lots to say to this even if it's only three sentences, but in the interest of staying on topic I'll limit this to suggesting this feels much more like a move towards 3E/Pathfinder than towards 4E.
At best, any comparison to 3e would be to 3e as it approached it's death - 3e bloat.
WotC released Unearthed Arcana (which this feels like to me) for 3E in 2004, about a year into 3.5, just past halfway of the edition's shelf life. There was a lot of content then, but it had certainly not devolved into bloat yet. In fact, I'll posit rules bloat was never really a problem for 3rd edition. Bloat is not a problem of volume, it's a problem of relevance and thematically almost every release for 3E was interesting right up until the end even if some should probably have been conflated into a single volume (the environment books for instance should have been a single exploration book IMO). Third's main problem was a not infrequently sloppy implementation of an otherwise solid system.
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Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
WotC released Unearthed Arcana (which this feels like to me) for 3E in 2004, about a year into 3.5, just past halfway of the edition's shelf life. There was a lot of content then, but it had certainly not devolved into bloat yet. In fact, I'll posit rules bloat was never really a problem for 3rd edition.
Bloat (in the form of splatbook explosions) was a problem with 3.5e -- bloat doesn't mean any given book is a waste of space, it means the system has become unmanageably large and complex.
WotC released Unearthed Arcana (which this feels like to me) for 3E in 2004, about a year into 3.5, just past halfway of the edition's shelf life. There was a lot of content then, but it had certainly not devolved into bloat yet. In fact, I'll posit rules bloat was never really a problem for 3rd edition.
Bloat (in the form of splatbook explosions) was a problem with 3.5e -- bloat doesn't mean any given book is a waste of space, it means the system has become unmanageably large and complex.
Was that the case with 3.5 though? Honestly? What was was so unmanageable about it, or overly complex? 3.5 was no more complicated than 3E was when released, the system itself remained 95% unchanged. Volume by itself doesn’t make anything unmanageable, especially when every sourcebook was optional.
I would like WotC to look at the Combat Maneuver system that Level Up is using. I have always believed that Battle Master should be the baseline for the Fighter Class and while I don't know the details of Level Up's system, it does seem to be basically expanding the Battle Master's abilities into a full fledge system for all Martial characters to use. I am sure WotC's team could give us some thing similar, maybe tied directly to Weapon Type so that the weapon you use matters more. I would like weapon selection to be more than just choosing the highest dice size available to you.
That has always been the primary criteria for weapon selection by fledgling optimizers and min/maxers since day one of the hobby.
I would like WotC to look at the Combat Maneuver system that Level Up is using. I have always believed that Battle Master should be the baseline for the Fighter Class and while I don't know the details of Level Up's system, it does seem to be basically expanding the Battle Master's abilities into a full fledge system for all Martial characters to use. I am sure WotC's team could give us some thing similar, maybe tied directly to Weapon Type so that the weapon you use matters more. I would like weapon selection to be more than just choosing the highest dice size available to you.
That has always been the primary criteria for weapon selection by fledgling optimizers and min/maxers since day one of the hobby.
In 1e there was also weapon speed, meaning smaller, lighter weapons could strike quicker or get more attacks in. However outside of such additional rules when they exist, you are right
They would be making a big mistake not to do something to improve the the excitement factor for martial characters. Everyone talks about how human fighters are the most commonly played combo but IMO it’s because that’s the logical entry point for new players (of which there are so many). Folks quickly move on and i think there are loads of creative ways (as demonstrated by EN Publishing and Level-Up) to make these character types just as fun to play as a wizard or warlock.
There are times that tradeoff can be worth it, if enemies have particularly high-impact attacks the paladin is working hard to avoid. Mirror Image is a very powerful defensive layer. It's also not available to paladins at all outside of multiclassing, so I'm not sure why it even came up.
Yeah most defending the spell casting are picking spells that requires multiple classes for some reason.... Not sure why.
Overall it's better the vast majority of the time to just attack is the point.
Is there time it's not? Likely but it's not going to come up nearly as often as it's just a better idea to smite
I brought up those spells because multiclassing is a very common tactic with Paladins, in fact I have never played a single class paladin, always a sorcerer or warlock which opens a lot of additional and very powerful options. I have a paladin playing in the giants quest, I went Oath of the Open Sea and Fathomless (The Lady of the Lake from Arthurian myth is my patron) and it has been amazingly effective. When you are going up against multiple giants solo at times you simply can't take them out in a single round. - A fire giant has 18 AC, 162 hp average, +11 to hit and 6d6+7 damage. Fighting one solo is hard enough but when there are two or more you simply can't out damage them. Going toe to toe and trading blows is just pointless. However, my current paladin has the devils sight invocation so the party wizard casts darkness, I use mirror image while moving in to melee then round 2 cast hex and attack. I get advantage due to the darkness, they have disadvantage to hit me. Then even if they do get lucky they still have to contend with the mirror image. Generally that gives me enough time to spend 4 or 5 rounds taking them down.
The thing about character builds and the options of boosting damage, boosting defence etc is they they are all heavily dependent on the party you play with as well as the enemies (and their numbers) that you are fighting. There is no 1 choice that beats all others.
I would like WotC to look at the Combat Maneuver system that Level Up is using. I have always believed that Battle Master should be the baseline for the Fighter Class and while I don't know the details of Level Up's system, it does seem to be basically expanding the Battle Master's abilities into a full fledge system for all Martial characters to use. I am sure WotC's team could give us some thing similar, maybe tied directly to Weapon Type so that the weapon you use matters more. I would like weapon selection to be more than just choosing the highest dice size available to you.
That has always been the primary criteria for weapon selection by fledgling optimizers and min/maxers since day one of the hobby.
I know, but that doesn't mean it should continue to be that way nor is it a good reason to not change things.
Combat maneuvers are organized into 10 traditions, roughly analogous to spell schools. These are Adamant Mountain, Biting Zephyr, Mirror’s Glint, Mist and Shade, Rapid Current, Razor’s Edge, Sanguine Knot, Spirited Steed, Tempered Iron, Tooth and Claw, and Unending Wheel.
Not all classes have access to combat maneuvers, and of those that do, not all have access to all of the traditions. The fighter, as the master of trained combat, has access to all traditions, whereas the berserker has access to about half of them. The wizard, you won’t be surprised to hear, has access to none.
Each tradition represents a different style of combat maneuver.
This is what Level Up has going. It provides all Martial with a little bit of something while giving the lion's share to the Fighter. This obviously creates some power creep, but it is power creep across the board and frankly I expect we will see a bit of power creep in the upcoming revised PHB. I think WotC should be capable of game design that allows the Fighter to be a bit more dynamic while keeping generally in line with the other classes. Game design is what they are paid to do.
I keep hearing this about the lack of excitement for martial characters. Fighters have always had that kind of 'boring' reputation. The game has survived.
Rogues, rangers and paladins are most definitely not boring. They do not need to be 'martial wizards' and if they were, then either casters would have to be bumped up in power to compensate, or the martials would have to work that much harder to achieve what they already do now. Some people prefer simpler to play characters.
I keep seeing this argument, and others like it.
"Some people like simple characters!" "If you gave martial characters more stuff, everything else would have to be buffed too!" "Fighters being boring has never actually been true/mattered!"
So on and so forth.
In answerance:
1.) And some people like more complex characters, with depth and nuance and options beyond "I BUST OUT MY HITTIN' STICK." There is not one single martial in the entire clucking game with the barely half-exception of the Battle Master fighter - and even the Battle Master, as cool as it is, isn't that complex or nuanced - that has any degree of depth or versatility to it whatsoever. Every single time someone says "but the martials are so braindead and boooring!" , they get told "then play a caster instead." Ahem: no? All parties need a mix of both casters and noncasters, and if the noncasters are all third-grade Tic-Tac-Toe game levels of total autopilot oversimplistic, there will be many, many tables where playing The Weapons Guy is basically punishment duty. The "Guys, we NEED a barbarian or a fighter or something that can take a hit, you can't all play wizards, warlocks, and bards" conversation nobody wants to have. And at some tables the opposite is true - forcing someone to deal with playing The Magic Dude is punishment duty, because the sorcerer is as simple as Magic Guys get and it's still apparently beyond the grasp of people who think the Champion fighter is too complicated to run well. A party with absolutely no magic does very poorly indeed.
2.) Untrue. And also, why? Nobody's asking for martials to be made better than casters. Nobody's asking for a giant, sweeping revision or to triple the damage output of martials. In fact, most people aren't really asking for much damage increase from martials at all. They're asking for options, ways to be tactical and influence the fight instead of rolling initiative and then saying "Okay, I walk to where the enemy is and I hit it with my hittin' stick." That's why so many people focus on maneuvers as the way to start the process. Maneuvers let you do neat things, and careful and considered deployment of them can change the course of a fight. Yes, their current iteration also does more damage, but frankly I'd be willing to lose the damage on most of them to proliferate the system out and give martials some way, ANY way, to actually impact a fight beyond 'take hits for the Magic Dudes while the Magic Dudes go about actually winning the fight for you.' That would even give the Church of (Over)Simplicity folks a re course - they can take the "Forceful Blow" maneuver that just adds the die to their damage roll and not worry about anything else. They get a pool of "I hit it harder" dice, and people who want to actually use their brains can take regular maneuvers instead.
3.) You're literally arguing "this part of the game being boring doesn't hurt things." Examine that statement. Turn it over a few times. Look at it real carefully. And ask yourself if it's really, truly okay to say "it's fine if [X] game chunk is boring." Is that really a valid statement?
When someone says "make it simpler! Make it simpler! it's too complicated, make it simpler! Make it simpler!" a hundred times, and then keeps saying it? There eventually comes a point where even the most forbearing DM has to say "No. I can't make it simpler. I'm sorry, but at some point you have to learn how to play the game. I'll help you learn. Your friends will help you learn. But if you want to keep playing, you have to learn how to play. I'm sorry, that's just the way games in general work. If you just can't stand the thought of learning the rules, then there's not much we can do to help you play."
I just wanted to say that I look forward to reading your comments on just about any topic. They are always well-reasoned, encourage thought, and as far as I have seen, are well-intentioned. Thank you for being a presence on the forums.
If people actually played the suggested encounter amount then maybe but that seems to be the rub.... And if the stuff casters got to do by T4 wasn't just so crazy.
Wish/Sim combo literally gives you a second PC for free that has almost all of your spell slots.... So you effectively double them.
That comes down to how the GM runs their sessions and has absolutely nothing to do with Game design or character balance. The designers can only do so much. People have to step up and take responsibility for running a session badly or being a poor DM if the complaint is 'Wizards are more powerful because they always have all their spells when they get to the BBEG' but as a GM the only encounter you gave them that day was a single end boss fight. In my games generally players will have had maybe 3 encounters if it is a short session or as many as 5-6 in a full day session prior to arriving at the end fight and will have used up at least half of their spell slots.
For fighter, I find them kind of interesting. The base class is perhaps the most flexible of the base classes, not really having much flavor beyond being good at attacking a lot. But the subclasses really save fighter for me. Battlemaster to be strategic with manuevers. Arcane archer for cool magic arrow tricks. Rune Knight runes etc. On top of that, if you get into tier 3 play, they're also the only class getting extra attack going to 3, meaning once a short rest you can throw out six attacks which is pretty cool.
I kind of like the idea of leaving the complexity of fighter up to subclasses. You can play a champion if you want to just go hit guys. You can take BM/AA etc if you want to have limited resources of cool moves to throw in on top of that.
Some of the subclasses are less interesting IMO, but hey that's true for all classes in the game. I find it kind of interesting how the fighter class kind of lacks an identiy beyond 'good at hitting stuff' but can go in a lot of cool different directions flavor wise with its subclasses.
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Lots to say to this even if it's only three sentences, but in the interest of staying on topic I'll limit this to suggesting this feels much more like a move towards 3E/Pathfinder than towards 4E.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
I have to agree. Reading through what they have released, it seems more like a middle ground between 3.5/Pathfinder and 5e. I am not sure if that is good or bad at this point. I would need to actually see the full rules and try it out to make my mind up one way or the other.
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
Or even PF2e
True. It does make me really curious as to what WotC has in store for us with their upcoming changes. A lot of people on these forums have been asking for more meaningful choice in character creation/leveling as well as more options in combat beyond "I attack with my sword". A greater focus on exploration is another one I see on these forums a lot too. I think it would be a bad idea to not address this in 5.5 (or what ever WotC decides to call it).
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
Well, you haven't observed that in four decades because the entire focus concept hasn't been around that long, but the reason people don't carry a lot of foci is because the odds of it making any difference is vanishingly small. As for fighters carrying multiple weapons, the golf bag of weapons is mostly a 3.5 phenomenon due to varying damage resistance in 3.5e, most warriors in other editions carry around their main weapon, an offhand weapon if they use two weapon fighting, and a ranged weapon.
Personally I would like to see this:
1: Split weapons since the dice rolled doesn't matter usually after 5th, just make all one handed weapons light (Maybe excepting the Bludgeoning type) And make all 2 H weapons Heavy, And yes give us more types and a few more interesting weapon traits would be nice as well.
2. Make the healing more interesting, The i touch you heal mechanic is just old and rather boring, and probably the reason you about need to bribe a PC to play a healer. Give us some healing spells that are AoE but maybe risk healing monsters so that the healer gets to engage their brain from time to time. Also more damage prevention would be great, as that often works better than restoring Health. Buffers and THP as well as absorbs and brief invuln or evade may be fun to play with at high levels.
3: Fix the Ranger and Monk. They lack any synergy between their abilities so they just feel like a grab bag of disjointed but cool abilities. These could use to be given some synergy similar to the fighter and rogue
4: Spells: So this may be a bit much, but 5E went all in the wrong way on these, In 3.x the problem with spells was really the unmakable save DC, and it came back in 5E but it is you need a 17+ to save. Make the Save DC static, and use the casting ability for bonus spells. better to have more spells but the save be makable than have a few spells but each can just end a combat outright. As a caveat, the rest spells are also completely broken, Hut and Mansion let parties long rest pretty much with impunity, making resource management irrelevant. These need to be modified to at least allow there to be a counter, especially for Mansion, which has no way to dispel or detect.
5: Monsters. They probably could use a boost to either AC or hit by about 1-3 but not to both. Monsters currently hit like a truck, but accuracy, or defense needs to be able to keep up.
6. Fix the sorcerer's spell list, This is just sad and wrong, The sorcerer needs some love since it got the raw end of the stick transitioning from 3 or 4 to 5 and that needs to be fixed.
7. Tone down the cleric. Any group that has more than one cleric quickly realizes that this class is one of the more unbalanced in the game. Now my suggestion is make the paladin a full caster, and just give them very short range melee oriented spells. then make the cleric the Priest, they are a clothie who is basically a healing mage with hybrid support and control spells all castable at range.
I would like WotC to look at the Combat Maneuver system that Level Up is using. I have always believed that Battle Master should be the baseline for the Fighter Class and while I don't know the details of Level Up's system, it does seem to be basically expanding the Battle Master's abilities into a full fledge system for all Martial characters to use. I am sure WotC's team could give us some thing similar, maybe tied directly to Weapon Type so that the weapon you use matters more. I would like weapon selection to be more than just choosing the highest dice size available to you.
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
WotC released Unearthed Arcana (which this feels like to me) for 3E in 2004, about a year into 3.5, just past halfway of the edition's shelf life. There was a lot of content then, but it had certainly not devolved into bloat yet. In fact, I'll posit rules bloat was never really a problem for 3rd edition. Bloat is not a problem of volume, it's a problem of relevance and thematically almost every release for 3E was interesting right up until the end even if some should probably have been conflated into a single volume (the environment books for instance should have been a single exploration book IMO). Third's main problem was a not infrequently sloppy implementation of an otherwise solid system.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
Bloat (in the form of splatbook explosions) was a problem with 3.5e -- bloat doesn't mean any given book is a waste of space, it means the system has become unmanageably large and complex.
Was that the case with 3.5 though? Honestly? What was was so unmanageable about it, or overly complex? 3.5 was no more complicated than 3E was when released, the system itself remained 95% unchanged. Volume by itself doesn’t make anything unmanageable, especially when every sourcebook was optional.
I guess I’ll make a note of that and move on then?
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
That has always been the primary criteria for weapon selection by fledgling optimizers and min/maxers since day one of the hobby.
They would be making a big mistake not to do something to improve the the excitement factor for martial characters. Everyone talks about how human fighters are the most commonly played combo but IMO it’s because that’s the logical entry point for new players (of which there are so many). Folks quickly move on and i think there are loads of creative ways (as demonstrated by EN Publishing and Level-Up) to make these character types just as fun to play as a wizard or warlock.
---
Don't be Lawful Evil
I brought up those spells because multiclassing is a very common tactic with Paladins, in fact I have never played a single class paladin, always a sorcerer or warlock which opens a lot of additional and very powerful options. I have a paladin playing in the giants quest, I went Oath of the Open Sea and Fathomless (The Lady of the Lake from Arthurian myth is my patron) and it has been amazingly effective. When you are going up against multiple giants solo at times you simply can't take them out in a single round. - A fire giant has 18 AC, 162 hp average, +11 to hit and 6d6+7 damage. Fighting one solo is hard enough but when there are two or more you simply can't out damage them. Going toe to toe and trading blows is just pointless. However, my current paladin has the devils sight invocation so the party wizard casts darkness, I use mirror image while moving in to melee then round 2 cast hex and attack. I get advantage due to the darkness, they have disadvantage to hit me. Then even if they do get lucky they still have to contend with the mirror image. Generally that gives me enough time to spend 4 or 5 rounds taking them down.
The thing about character builds and the options of boosting damage, boosting defence etc is they they are all heavily dependent on the party you play with as well as the enemies (and their numbers) that you are fighting. There is no 1 choice that beats all others.
I know, but that doesn't mean it should continue to be that way nor is it a good reason to not change things.
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
This is what Level Up has going. It provides all Martial with a little bit of something while giving the lion's share to the Fighter. This obviously creates some power creep, but it is power creep across the board and frankly I expect we will see a bit of power creep in the upcoming revised PHB. I think WotC should be capable of game design that allows the Fighter to be a bit more dynamic while keeping generally in line with the other classes. Game design is what they are paid to do.
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
I keep seeing this argument, and others like it.
"Some people like simple characters!"
"If you gave martial characters more stuff, everything else would have to be buffed too!"
"Fighters being boring has never actually been true/mattered!"
So on and so forth.
In answerance:
1.) And some people like more complex characters, with depth and nuance and options beyond "I BUST OUT MY HITTIN' STICK." There is not one single martial in the entire clucking game with the barely half-exception of the Battle Master fighter - and even the Battle Master, as cool as it is, isn't that complex or nuanced - that has any degree of depth or versatility to it whatsoever. Every single time someone says "but the martials are so braindead and boooring!" , they get told "then play a caster instead." Ahem: no? All parties need a mix of both casters and noncasters, and if the noncasters are all third-grade Tic-Tac-Toe game levels of total autopilot oversimplistic, there will be many, many tables where playing The Weapons Guy is basically punishment duty. The "Guys, we NEED a barbarian or a fighter or something that can take a hit, you can't all play wizards, warlocks, and bards" conversation nobody wants to have. And at some tables the opposite is true - forcing someone to deal with playing The Magic Dude is punishment duty, because the sorcerer is as simple as Magic Guys get and it's still apparently beyond the grasp of people who think the Champion fighter is too complicated to run well. A party with absolutely no magic does very poorly indeed.
2.) Untrue. And also, why? Nobody's asking for martials to be made better than casters. Nobody's asking for a giant, sweeping revision or to triple the damage output of martials. In fact, most people aren't really asking for much damage increase from martials at all. They're asking for options, ways to be tactical and influence the fight instead of rolling initiative and then saying "Okay, I walk to where the enemy is and I hit it with my hittin' stick." That's why so many people focus on maneuvers as the way to start the process. Maneuvers let you do neat things, and careful and considered deployment of them can change the course of a fight. Yes, their current iteration also does more damage, but frankly I'd be willing to lose the damage on most of them to proliferate the system out and give martials some way, ANY way, to actually impact a fight beyond 'take hits for the Magic Dudes while the Magic Dudes go about actually winning the fight for you.' That would even give the Church of (Over)Simplicity folks a re course - they can take the "Forceful Blow" maneuver that just adds the die to their damage roll and not worry about anything else. They get a pool of "I hit it harder" dice, and people who want to actually use their brains can take regular maneuvers instead.
3.) You're literally arguing "this part of the game being boring doesn't hurt things." Examine that statement. Turn it over a few times. Look at it real carefully. And ask yourself if it's really, truly okay to say "it's fine if [X] game chunk is boring." Is that really a valid statement?
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And frankly, let me say this.
When someone says "make it simpler! Make it simpler! it's too complicated, make it simpler! Make it simpler!" a hundred times, and then keeps saying it? There eventually comes a point where even the most forbearing DM has to say "No. I can't make it simpler. I'm sorry, but at some point you have to learn how to play the game. I'll help you learn. Your friends will help you learn. But if you want to keep playing, you have to learn how to play. I'm sorry, that's just the way games in general work. If you just can't stand the thought of learning the rules, then there's not much we can do to help you play."
Please do not contact or message me.
Hello Yurei1453,
I just wanted to say that I look forward to reading your comments on just about any topic. They are always well-reasoned, encourage thought, and as far as I have seen, are well-intentioned. Thank you for being a presence on the forums.
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That comes down to how the GM runs their sessions and has absolutely nothing to do with Game design or character balance. The designers can only do so much. People have to step up and take responsibility for running a session badly or being a poor DM if the complaint is 'Wizards are more powerful because they always have all their spells when they get to the BBEG' but as a GM the only encounter you gave them that day was a single end boss fight. In my games generally players will have had maybe 3 encounters if it is a short session or as many as 5-6 in a full day session prior to arriving at the end fight and will have used up at least half of their spell slots.
For fighter, I find them kind of interesting. The base class is perhaps the most flexible of the base classes, not really having much flavor beyond being good at attacking a lot. But the subclasses really save fighter for me. Battlemaster to be strategic with manuevers. Arcane archer for cool magic arrow tricks. Rune Knight runes etc. On top of that, if you get into tier 3 play, they're also the only class getting extra attack going to 3, meaning once a short rest you can throw out six attacks which is pretty cool.
I kind of like the idea of leaving the complexity of fighter up to subclasses. You can play a champion if you want to just go hit guys. You can take BM/AA etc if you want to have limited resources of cool moves to throw in on top of that.
Some of the subclasses are less interesting IMO, but hey that's true for all classes in the game. I find it kind of interesting how the fighter class kind of lacks an identiy beyond 'good at hitting stuff' but can go in a lot of cool different directions flavor wise with its subclasses.