I need to amend my previous statement that I only have one big wish for OneDnD Warriors; I think the designers need to give the Warrior classes more features they can use outside of combat, because as it currently stands, casters can solve problems with a snap of their fingers, whereas martials are stuck having to make skill checks to see if they can succeed.
This very much. Martials tend to be so heavily combat focused where as casters have ways to interact with all three pillars of play with their spells. This is a huge factor in the caster martial divide.
Except the most of the community doesn't want this based on their actions. Any martial right now can get a ton of out of combat utility just by taking Ritual Caster (wizard), but people don't do that, they take GWM, PAM, SS, XbowXpert, Sentinel, Resilient and Tough - all feats that are combat focused. There are plenty of subclasses that have out of combat features but they are considered bad because they don't have as many or as powerful combat abilities - consider Fey Wanderer or Horizon Walker Ranger vs Gloomstalker, Samurai vs Battlemaster ... or that nearly every EK I've witnessed played takes combat-oriented cantrips, or that Ancestral Guardian and Totem Barbs never use their ritual spells (and usually MC into fighter before getting them)...
If you play a warrior you probably want to optimize your combat options. If you want utility, you play another class. Being good in combat is what defines a warrior. That's why you have to focus on the redesign of the warriors. In being better than anyone at it. But on the other hand they have to make them fun to play, and because of that they have to give him more options during combat. And that is the reason why subclasses like the battlemaster or the rune knight, are some of the most played within the fighters. Because they are effective in combat, and they are fun to play since they have so many different options and decisions to make. If you have to sacrifice in-combat effectiveness for off-combat utility, you most likely don't want to play a warrior.
I need to amend my previous statement that I only have one big wish for OneDnD Warriors; I think the designers need to give the Warrior classes more features they can use outside of combat, because as it currently stands, casters can solve problems with a snap of their fingers, whereas martials are stuck having to make skill checks to see if they can succeed.
This very much. Martials tend to be so heavily combat focused where as casters have ways to interact with all three pillars of play with their spells. This is a huge factor in the caster martial divide.
Except the most of the community doesn't want this based on their actions. Any martial right now can get a ton of out of combat utility just by taking Ritual Caster (wizard), but people don't do that, they take GWM, PAM, SS, XbowXpert, Sentinel, Resilient and Tough - all feats that are combat focused. There are plenty of subclasses that have out of combat features but they are considered bad because they don't have as many or as powerful combat abilities - consider Fey Wanderer or Horizon Walker Ranger vs Gloomstalker, Samurai vs Battlemaster ... or that nearly every EK I've witnessed played takes combat-oriented cantrips, or that Ancestral Guardian and Totem Barbs never use their ritual spells (and usually MC into fighter before getting them)...
That is because they have to pay for it. Its not that they don't want to have out of combat utility, they don't want it at the expense of in combat power.
I will say this is one of the reasons I do not like class groups. What people are talking about with out of combat utility, that is basically the expert. That is their gimmick. So finding a way to give it to the warrior group without stepping on their toes is hard. If they were not doing this group thing it would be easier, the rogues/rangers/fighters/barbarians would all be designed around doing a lot in all tiers of play. When they design groups with niche protection its harder. Not saying its impossible but it wont be easy to give them solid out of combat ability that feels martial/warrior like without stepping into expert territory and vice versa if the ranger is too close to the fighter in damage will their spells, expertise etc make the fighter look like crap overall as they now dwarf them in the other tiers of play.
Personally I wanted the battle master maneuvers to become a universal warrior trait. For team simple make the core maneuver just a basic bonk of extra damage. Think cantrips there is fire bolt it just does d10 and effects objects I guess, something else does d8 and stops healing.If you want the easy one where you don't have to think about reminding the DM hey they can't heal take firebolt. But I would roll in a lot of non combat features into those maneuvers. Extra jump distance, breaking objects, intimidating auras etc. Have mid to high level ones start breaking the bonds of mortal man into the supernatural. The extra jump is now hundreds of feet, the breaking objects is shattering a castle wall, the intimidate can act as a paralyze effect etc.
There are ways to make it simple in use so players of any experience or desired complexity level can use it while still being entertaining to those who want more complexity. Like if it was just once per round like the rogues sneak attack I'm pretty sure any one can use it. But if some of the maneuvers were more complex those driven towards that style of play would still find it interesting.
To be fair, you're pretty biased, what with being a Steel Clad Lad and all. The +2 to hit is already in the game in the form of the Archery fighting style, and I don't think people complain about that too much.
Pretty much everyone recognizes it as far and away the best fighting style. That might not be a complaint about it, but its the reality. +2 to hit dwarfs all the other fighting styles. Its limited to a sub set of weapons so people may take a different style because if they are melee it does nothing for them. But I've seen great weapon wielders take it because the GW fighting style was so bad the times they'd use a bow the +2 was still the better option in their mind.
Mundane armour has a hard enough time in this game as it is. Frankly, I'd like to see all ACs from armour get a solid +5 bonus across the board...
While I agree AC probably needs a boost +5 is a bit much. I think its more that AC needs to scale better as people level, so assumed magic armor or something. Its pretty easy to rock a 17+ Ac in low levels and most enemies will be at +4 or so to hit so you will be missed a decent amount of times and you will generally knock that up to 19+ as the enemies get to +6-7 to hit and you can afford better armor. If people were easily rocking a AC of 22 and bumping it to 24+ they'd almost never get hit.
at low levels in play I think AC focused characters without needing crazy optimization seem to work out fine. But there is a mid game turning point where suddenly a lot of enemies are rocking +9-+13 to hit and the players are in some range of auto getting hit or getting hit half the time(hyper optimization can drop that %).
I dare say that this might be nice to become baseline. Attack values grow throughout the game while AC barely does. And the difference is PB. Late game combat changes hit/miss ratio drastically.
It might be interesting if that is what magic armor did. As PB as the norm +magic armor might push it too far. Though they could remove +X armor and just have armor with special features.
The math imo should be that a character should be roughly as hard to hit at all levels and I'm not talking some crazy multi class optimized out to the nines build being necessary. Generic fighter taking the best armor available when facing mobs and bosses should keep needing roughly the same roll to hit them at all levels. As they progress if they optimize to the nines for it, it should get harder for them to be hit as they level.
I will say monsters need this as well. AC for monsters scales poorly with a few exceptions.
I think AC not scaling with power is a feature, not a glitch.
The game is (rightly or wrongly) designed around power levels being reflected by increasing health and damage. Increasing AC as well starts to break the game.
I think AC not scaling with power is a feature, not a glitch.
The game is (rightly or wrongly) designed around power levels being reflected by increasing health and damage. Increasing AC as well starts to break the game.
Yeah, I'm inclined to agree. Getting better at avoiding death as you level up is represented by more HP. AC was supposed to be pretty static, or at least 'bounded' to a smaller range.
I think AC not scaling with power is a feature, not a glitch.
The game is (rightly or wrongly) designed around power levels being reflected by increasing health and damage. Increasing AC as well starts to break the game.
It might be interesting if that is what magic armor did. As PB as the norm +magic armor might push it too far. Though they could remove +X armor and just have armor with special features.
The math imo should be that a character should be roughly as hard to hit at all levels and I'm not talking some crazy multi class optimized out to the nines build being necessary. Generic fighter taking the best armor available when facing mobs and bosses should keep needing roughly the same roll to hit them at all levels. As they progress if they optimize to the nines for it, it should get harder for them to be hit as they level.
I will say monsters need this as well. AC for monsters scales poorly with a few exceptions.
Monster AC scales to exactly match player attack rolls in the absence of magic items (always 65%) this is deliberate so that a +1 weapon is always equally good regardless of player level, and it is never required that players recieve magic items to progress in the game. DMs are supposed to be rather conservative with awarding magic items, and magic items are deliberately mostly utility. Note that if using the magic item tables from the DMG +1 items don't appear until magic item table F which has a 4% chance of being used in CR 0-4 loot, and only 20% chance of being used in CR 5-10 loot. +2 items don't have a significant chance of appearing until CR 11-16, and +3 items not until CR 17+.
In order to preserve expected AC scaling based on the DMG, with proficiency bonus added to player ACs then all armour and unarmoured AC would have to be reduced by 3, as +1 armour should not be available until ~level 9 which is proficiency bonus equal to +4. And all +X armors would need to be removed. Players getting easier to hit as player levels increase is a deliberate design choice by WotC to keep combat length stable across levels while remaining equally dangerous. Making players harder to hit than they currently are would do one of the following:
1) make combat incredibly easy with 0 chance of death at higher levels.
2) force a monster redesign to increase their damage so that their expected DPR remains the same with lower chance to hit. This would make combat extremely swingy as a critical hit by a monster would have a decent chance to instantly drop a PC to 0 hp from full hp or insta-kill them if they were close to 0 hp. Thus if the monsters got lucky with 2-3 critical hits in the first round of combat there would be a high chance of a TPK.
3) force a redesign of monster survivability to increase the length of combat to scale with their to-hit chance thus increasing their whole-combat expected damage by increasing the number of rounds they remain alive. However combat is already the longest & slowest part of the game, increasing its length is not desirable.
4) require DMs to increase the number of monsters in each combat scaling with player AC. This combines 2&3 as most monsters == more HP and more DPR per round. However this is more work & stress for the DM and favours casters over martials by having AOE spell damage scale better than weapon damage.
5) require DMs to increase the number of combats per adventuring day. This is effectively the same as #4. However we know already many tables have only 1-3 combats per day so seems extremely unlikely to happen.
In order to preserve expected AC scaling based on the DMG, with proficiency bonus added to player ACs then all armour and unarmoured AC would have to be reduced by 3, as +1 armour should not be available until ~level 9 which is proficiency bonus equal to +4. And all +X armors would need to be removed. Players getting easier to hit as player levels increase is a deliberate design choice by WotC to keep combat length stable across levels while remaining equally dangerous. Making players harder to hit than they currently are would do one of the following:
1) make combat incredibly easy with 0 chance of death at higher levels.
2) force a monster redesign to increase their damage so that their expected DPR remains the same with lower chance to hit. This would make combat extremely swingy as a critical hit by a monster would have a decent chance to instantly drop a PC to 0 hp from full hp or insta-kill them if they were close to 0 hp. Thus if the monsters got lucky with 2-3 critical hits in the first round of combat there would be a high chance of a TPK.
3) force a redesign of monster survivability to increase the length of combat to scale with their to-hit chance thus increasing their whole-combat expected damage by increasing the number of rounds they remain alive. However combat is already the longest & slowest part of the game, increasing its length is not desirable.
4) require DMs to increase the number of monsters in each combat scaling with player AC. This combines 2&3 as most monsters == more HP and more DPR per round. However this is more work & stress for the DM and favours casters over martials by having AOE spell damage scale better than weapon damage.
5) require DMs to increase the number of combats per adventuring day. This is effectively the same as #4. However we know already many tables have only 1-3 combats per day so seems extremely unlikely to happen.
This is pretty much the reality of it. Raising AC further would take changes across the board and we'd be back in 3.5e. I think a lot of perceptions around AC are sometimes skewed by the way individual games are played. Unfortunately the value of high AC is dependant on the CR of monsters you fight, the number of times per day you fight, the magic items available, the buffs your party can provide, the terrain you can use, and other similar factors. These at all DM and player controlled aspects. So they are going to vary a lot between tables.
It might be interesting if that is what magic armor did. As PB as the norm +magic armor might push it too far. Though they could remove +X armor and just have armor with special features.
The math imo should be that a character should be roughly as hard to hit at all levels and I'm not talking some crazy multi class optimized out to the nines build being necessary. Generic fighter taking the best armor available when facing mobs and bosses should keep needing roughly the same roll to hit them at all levels. As they progress if they optimize to the nines for it, it should get harder for them to be hit as they level.
I will say monsters need this as well. AC for monsters scales poorly with a few exceptions.
Monster AC scales to exactly match player attack rolls in the absence of magic items (always 65%) this is deliberate so that a +1 weapon is always equally good regardless of player level, and it is never required that players recieve magic items to progress in the game. DMs are supposed to be rather conservative with awarding magic items, and magic items are deliberately mostly utility. Note that if using the magic item tables from the DMG +1 items don't appear until magic item table F which has a 4% chance of being used in CR 0-4 loot, and only 20% chance of being used in CR 5-10 loot. +2 items don't have a significant chance of appearing until CR 11-16, and +3 items not until CR 17+.
It is supposed to, but it doesn't is my point. The design goal seemed to be keep AC at a sweet spot to hit for its CR, but the end result is more logic based on what the monster is. Oh it is a suit or armor give it that suits of armors AC. Oh it does not wear armor but is mostly humanoid give it a crap AC. There are ways to fix it I suppose with excessive Hp, or just improving ACs for enemies with a to low AC for their CR. But the CR system is broken in 5e. hopefully they will fix it or at least improve in in one.
Honestly, what I would love to see are martial feats similar to 3.5 that build off of each other. They would, arguably, need to be simpler (I have a book of feats that's 200 pages long), but having them tied to the warrior types would allow them to specialize in a number of ways without making them available to every class. I would also love to see maneuvers be baseline for the class. *crosses fingers*
Honestly, what I would love to see are martial feats similar to 3.5 that build off of each other. They would, arguably, need to be simpler (I have a book of feats that's 200 pages long), but having them tied to the warrior types would allow them to specialize in a number of ways without making them available to every class. I would also love to see maneuvers be baseline for the class. *crosses fingers*
I don't mind the idea of Feat trees. Just as long as they don't turn into the only viable paths. It would stink if every melee warrior always followed the same progression of feats because the high level versions are so much more powerful. It's a hard balance to get right.
I agree that grouping feats by class type is nice for that kind of thing though. I wonder if they could use feat grouping to avoid some of the pitfalls of 3.5. Make trees that overlap more, with lots of paths to the same higher level sets. It's kind of hard to explain what I'm picturing. Hmmmm...
I know a lot of people really want maneuvers to be standard. I just wish they'd come up with a better version of the same idea. The current maneuvers are kind of... messy. I think they could get the same feel more elegantly.
I don't mind the idea of Feat trees. Just as long as they don't turn into the only viable paths. It would stink if every melee warrior always followed the same progression of feats because the high level versions are so much more powerful. It's a hard balance to get right.
IMO tree design is outdated. Exactly because it locks you down fixed paths towards the "ultimate" feat or perk and you end up taking stuff you don't need just to get to that wunderwaffe.
It might be interesting if that is what magic armor did. As PB as the norm +magic armor might push it too far. Though they could remove +X armor and just have armor with special features.
The math imo should be that a character should be roughly as hard to hit at all levels and I'm not talking some crazy multi class optimized out to the nines build being necessary. Generic fighter taking the best armor available when facing mobs and bosses should keep needing roughly the same roll to hit them at all levels. As they progress if they optimize to the nines for it, it should get harder for them to be hit as they level.
I will say monsters need this as well. AC for monsters scales poorly with a few exceptions.
Monster AC scales to exactly match player attack rolls in the absence of magic items (always 65%) this is deliberate so that a +1 weapon is always equally good regardless of player level, and it is never required that players recieve magic items to progress in the game. DMs are supposed to be rather conservative with awarding magic items, and magic items are deliberately mostly utility. Note that if using the magic item tables from the DMG +1 items don't appear until magic item table F which has a 4% chance of being used in CR 0-4 loot, and only 20% chance of being used in CR 5-10 loot. +2 items don't have a significant chance of appearing until CR 11-16, and +3 items not until CR 17+.
It is supposed to, but it doesn't is my point. The design goal seemed to be keep AC at a sweet spot to hit for its CR, but the end result is more logic based on what the monster is. Oh it is a suit or armor give it that suits of armors AC. Oh it does not wear armor but is mostly humanoid give it a crap AC. There are ways to fix it I suppose with excessive Hp, or just improving ACs for enemies with a to low AC for their CR. But the CR system is broken in 5e. hopefully they will fix it or at least improve in in one.
Just use the CR table then? All monsters of CR 7 have the exact same AC equal to that as stated in the CR tables.... IME CR actually works quite well, the problem is the encounter design sections. What WotC considers "Hard" really isn't very hard, I honestly just shift all the difficulty words down up by down by one, so what WotC says in "Hard" is actually "Medium" and "Deadly" is simply "Hard". Monsters of CR 7 are a good match to a level 7 party, just you need to have a number of them equal to 75% of your party size. Though all bets are off if you're playing with optimizers since the game is not balanced around Multiclassing, and even very simple MCing can very easily break the game.
PS I personally HATE feat trees. Either feat trees have such better progression to make up for the lack of choice that they become mandatory or their progression is identical to non-tree feats in which case why bother with the feat tree? It just makes it harder to figure out what feat you can or should take.
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If you play a warrior you probably want to optimize your combat options. If you want utility, you play another class. Being good in combat is what defines a warrior. That's why you have to focus on the redesign of the warriors. In being better than anyone at it. But on the other hand they have to make them fun to play, and because of that they have to give him more options during combat. And that is the reason why subclasses like the battlemaster or the rune knight, are some of the most played within the fighters. Because they are effective in combat, and they are fun to play since they have so many different options and decisions to make.
If you have to sacrifice in-combat effectiveness for off-combat utility, you most likely don't want to play a warrior.
That is because they have to pay for it. Its not that they don't want to have out of combat utility, they don't want it at the expense of in combat power.
I will say this is one of the reasons I do not like class groups. What people are talking about with out of combat utility, that is basically the expert. That is their gimmick. So finding a way to give it to the warrior group without stepping on their toes is hard. If they were not doing this group thing it would be easier, the rogues/rangers/fighters/barbarians would all be designed around doing a lot in all tiers of play. When they design groups with niche protection its harder. Not saying its impossible but it wont be easy to give them solid out of combat ability that feels martial/warrior like without stepping into expert territory and vice versa if the ranger is too close to the fighter in damage will their spells, expertise etc make the fighter look like crap overall as they now dwarf them in the other tiers of play.
Personally I wanted the battle master maneuvers to become a universal warrior trait. For team simple make the core maneuver just a basic bonk of extra damage. Think cantrips there is fire bolt it just does d10 and effects objects I guess, something else does d8 and stops healing.If you want the easy one where you don't have to think about reminding the DM hey they can't heal take firebolt. But I would roll in a lot of non combat features into those maneuvers. Extra jump distance, breaking objects, intimidating auras etc. Have mid to high level ones start breaking the bonds of mortal man into the supernatural. The extra jump is now hundreds of feet, the breaking objects is shattering a castle wall, the intimidate can act as a paralyze effect etc.
There are ways to make it simple in use so players of any experience or desired complexity level can use it while still being entertaining to those who want more complexity. Like if it was just once per round like the rogues sneak attack I'm pretty sure any one can use it. But if some of the maneuvers were more complex those driven towards that style of play would still find it interesting.
Pretty much everyone recognizes it as far and away the best fighting style. That might not be a complaint about it, but its the reality. +2 to hit dwarfs all the other fighting styles. Its limited to a sub set of weapons so people may take a different style because if they are melee it does nothing for them. But I've seen great weapon wielders take it because the GW fighting style was so bad the times they'd use a bow the +2 was still the better option in their mind.
While I agree AC probably needs a boost +5 is a bit much. I think its more that AC needs to scale better as people level, so assumed magic armor or something. Its pretty easy to rock a 17+ Ac in low levels and most enemies will be at +4 or so to hit so you will be missed a decent amount of times and you will generally knock that up to 19+ as the enemies get to +6-7 to hit and you can afford better armor. If people were easily rocking a AC of 22 and bumping it to 24+ they'd almost never get hit.
at low levels in play I think AC focused characters without needing crazy optimization seem to work out fine. But there is a mid game turning point where suddenly a lot of enemies are rocking +9-+13 to hit and the players are in some range of auto getting hit or getting hit half the time(hyper optimization can drop that %).
There is one feat giving damage reduction based on Proficiency.
We may get a feat giving +AC based on Proficiency.
I dare say that this might be nice to become baseline. Attack values grow throughout the game while AC barely does. And the difference is PB. Late game combat changes hit/miss ratio drastically.
It might be interesting if that is what magic armor did. As PB as the norm +magic armor might push it too far. Though they could remove +X armor and just have armor with special features.
The math imo should be that a character should be roughly as hard to hit at all levels and I'm not talking some crazy multi class optimized out to the nines build being necessary. Generic fighter taking the best armor available when facing mobs and bosses should keep needing roughly the same roll to hit them at all levels. As they progress if they optimize to the nines for it, it should get harder for them to be hit as they level.
I will say monsters need this as well. AC for monsters scales poorly with a few exceptions.
I think AC not scaling with power is a feature, not a glitch.
The game is (rightly or wrongly) designed around power levels being reflected by increasing health and damage. Increasing AC as well starts to break the game.
Yeah, I'm inclined to agree. Getting better at avoiding death as you level up is represented by more HP. AC was supposed to be pretty static, or at least 'bounded' to a smaller range.
It may be, but its a bad feature.
Monster AC scales to exactly match player attack rolls in the absence of magic items (always 65%) this is deliberate so that a +1 weapon is always equally good regardless of player level, and it is never required that players recieve magic items to progress in the game. DMs are supposed to be rather conservative with awarding magic items, and magic items are deliberately mostly utility. Note that if using the magic item tables from the DMG +1 items don't appear until magic item table F which has a 4% chance of being used in CR 0-4 loot, and only 20% chance of being used in CR 5-10 loot. +2 items don't have a significant chance of appearing until CR 11-16, and +3 items not until CR 17+.
In order to preserve expected AC scaling based on the DMG, with proficiency bonus added to player ACs then all armour and unarmoured AC would have to be reduced by 3, as +1 armour should not be available until ~level 9 which is proficiency bonus equal to +4. And all +X armors would need to be removed. Players getting easier to hit as player levels increase is a deliberate design choice by WotC to keep combat length stable across levels while remaining equally dangerous. Making players harder to hit than they currently are would do one of the following:
1) make combat incredibly easy with 0 chance of death at higher levels.
2) force a monster redesign to increase their damage so that their expected DPR remains the same with lower chance to hit. This would make combat extremely swingy as a critical hit by a monster would have a decent chance to instantly drop a PC to 0 hp from full hp or insta-kill them if they were close to 0 hp. Thus if the monsters got lucky with 2-3 critical hits in the first round of combat there would be a high chance of a TPK.
3) force a redesign of monster survivability to increase the length of combat to scale with their to-hit chance thus increasing their whole-combat expected damage by increasing the number of rounds they remain alive. However combat is already the longest & slowest part of the game, increasing its length is not desirable.
4) require DMs to increase the number of monsters in each combat scaling with player AC. This combines 2&3 as most monsters == more HP and more DPR per round. However this is more work & stress for the DM and favours casters over martials by having AOE spell damage scale better than weapon damage.
5) require DMs to increase the number of combats per adventuring day. This is effectively the same as #4. However we know already many tables have only 1-3 combats per day so seems extremely unlikely to happen.
Add a feat where character gets to add one-half Proficiency Bonus (PB) to AC.
Good if not getting magic armor or low magic armor or armor that does not affect AC.
This is pretty much the reality of it. Raising AC further would take changes across the board and we'd be back in 3.5e. I think a lot of perceptions around AC are sometimes skewed by the way individual games are played. Unfortunately the value of high AC is dependant on the CR of monsters you fight, the number of times per day you fight, the magic items available, the buffs your party can provide, the terrain you can use, and other similar factors. These at all DM and player controlled aspects. So they are going to vary a lot between tables.
It is supposed to, but it doesn't is my point. The design goal seemed to be keep AC at a sweet spot to hit for its CR, but the end result is more logic based on what the monster is. Oh it is a suit or armor give it that suits of armors AC. Oh it does not wear armor but is mostly humanoid give it a crap AC. There are ways to fix it I suppose with excessive Hp, or just improving ACs for enemies with a to low AC for their CR. But the CR system is broken in 5e. hopefully they will fix it or at least improve in in one.
Honestly, what I would love to see are martial feats similar to 3.5 that build off of each other. They would, arguably, need to be simpler (I have a book of feats that's 200 pages long), but having them tied to the warrior types would allow them to specialize in a number of ways without making them available to every class. I would also love to see maneuvers be baseline for the class. *crosses fingers*
I don't mind the idea of Feat trees. Just as long as they don't turn into the only viable paths. It would stink if every melee warrior always followed the same progression of feats because the high level versions are so much more powerful. It's a hard balance to get right.
I agree that grouping feats by class type is nice for that kind of thing though. I wonder if they could use feat grouping to avoid some of the pitfalls of 3.5. Make trees that overlap more, with lots of paths to the same higher level sets. It's kind of hard to explain what I'm picturing. Hmmmm...
I know a lot of people really want maneuvers to be standard. I just wish they'd come up with a better version of the same idea. The current maneuvers are kind of... messy. I think they could get the same feel more elegantly.
IMO tree design is outdated. Exactly because it locks you down fixed paths towards the "ultimate" feat or perk and you end up taking stuff you don't need just to get to that wunderwaffe.
Just use the CR table then? All monsters of CR 7 have the exact same AC equal to that as stated in the CR tables.... IME CR actually works quite well, the problem is the encounter design sections. What WotC considers "Hard" really isn't very hard, I honestly just shift all the difficulty words down up by down by one, so what WotC says in "Hard" is actually "Medium" and "Deadly" is simply "Hard". Monsters of CR 7 are a good match to a level 7 party, just you need to have a number of them equal to 75% of your party size. Though all bets are off if you're playing with optimizers since the game is not balanced around Multiclassing, and even very simple MCing can very easily break the game.
PS I personally HATE feat trees. Either feat trees have such better progression to make up for the lack of choice that they become mandatory or their progression is identical to non-tree feats in which case why bother with the feat tree? It just makes it harder to figure out what feat you can or should take.