DocRoc's page

So I've been re-reading the beta rules, and I really don't feel like monk's been improved much at all. Is this a common opinion? Are there plans for a change?

If not, I need to know why not, because it seems that all the other base classes have grown immensely in power, particularly classes like paladin or ranger which were already a full tier above monk. I like those changes, and in general, I feel very good about the life of a melee specialist in 3.5. But why is monk still so weak? Even the stances, though they help, just don't feel like they help enough.

The Good:
Scaling stunning fist!
Save-or-Sucks like scorpion style!
Increased number of attacks from flurry by spending ki.

The Bad:
Standstill is still more attractive than scorpion style.
Bab is still painful.
MAD seems worse, not better.
Must spend ki to overcome DR?
Relatively fragile
Mobility class that demands a full-attack to function.

Opinions and known changes in final would help me put this in better perspective, but right now, it remains the single most worrisome aspect of Pathfinder for me.

The BBEG Fallacy

So... Let's talk for a moment or three about some of the structural underpinnings of D&D. Basically, in higher powered play, or just at higher levels, the only meaningful economy is economy of actions. Entire books have been written about it at my home on WotCO 339, so I'll spare you the long talk. Suffice to say that the average character can cast 2 or at most 3 spells in a round, before the application of significant optimization kung-fu.

So you have a party with two casters, and two warriors.
And a BBEG with three mooks.

So far, so good.
Except that the mooks are gonna need to close to melee, leaving them a standard action to use for combat at best. Worse, the villain is going to need to deal with the buffs and prep that the team has taken time to lay out. They may know more about him than he does about them. This means he may be busy fighting reactively, and unable to support his mooks with battlefield control or debuffs. War Weavers and other interesting classes can help fix this, but it's a core problem in the fact that D&D has uneven valuation for certain kinds of actions.

In other words, he has to fight you. You just need to kill him.
You have 6 spells to his three, and two full attacks on top of that. It's even worse if one of the melee roles is being filled by a gish build.

So you think, that's not a problem, I'll be fine with just upping his class levels. Well that may work, or more likely it will either fail or result in a TpK. After level six, each level a character has in a player class starts to matter more and more. This leads to bad places.

You need to prepare your BBEG to deal with more spells coming in than he can put out. Or you need to provide him with more caster support...

Suddenly this isn't about the BBeG anymore.

And that's fine.
In fact, that's probably for the best.

Why?
Combat in D&D is brutal, and unless you fudge dice, a really powerful villain is either going to die rapidly or cause some very serious and irreparable damage to the party. If that's okay, go back to the first post, and consider using one of those villains. Or go down to the next post and start thinking about how a tactically minded villain can mitigate these problems. Forgive my brevity.

I have a number of handbooks for rarely played or weaker classes over at 339 that I'd love to have updated to Pathfinder rules, to see if the case for these classes becomes stronger. Do you think it's worth the trouble of reformatting them extensively to be readable on these boards, should I just not bother, or should we start entirely new handbooks?