animemetalhead's page

The point is, it'd be one thing if the fighter was far and wide the best class for hitting things with other things, but there are other classes that do so just as well and with a plethora of other features that they bring to the table. The fighter just falls behind, and if he wants to contribute out of combat as effectively as another martial (not another face class, mind you, just another martial) he has to dedicate a significant portion of his limited resources into doing so.

Meanwhile the wizard is pumping his Int to infinity and making rude gestures that may or may not be arcane.

The Forge of Combat is always a good guide.

It's a point that forms of combat require you to have intelligence and fighters have more broad options for combat so should probably have intelligence to cover the facets that require it.

That's a lot of inference applied to his one sentence that made no mention of the likes.

And none of this changes the fact that a fighter benefits from intelligence. The benefit is access to feat lines, using some items, and skills of which people like to use as a selling point for how much they think the fighter doesn't contribute.

But the fighter isn't benefiting from intelligence, he's being taxed into raising it, rather than having any sort of meaningful class feature that promotes it. The ONLY use a fighter has for Int is meeting prereqs for Combat Expertise, and a few extra skill points.

Again back to the generic stats I posted and you can see that anyone can be built to have skills, good saves, OoC utility, in combat utility, good DPR(although not the huge optimized numbers). The level 10 stats and the level 20 stats show it. No one NEEDS a 18 or 20 starting strength. I haven't built a character above a 16 starting stat in years. They function great at all levels and have far more versatility than anything with an 18 open. Sure my characters aren't one hit McSmasherton, but they'll kill you on the second swing and have good enough defenses to not worry about what happens in between the first and second swing.

But that's the point, at best you're par with a moderately optimized martial of another class in combat, and still behind them in terms of out of combat use. At worst, they're better than you out of combat (between skills, spells, and class features) AND kicking your arse in DPR AND they've got better defenses because they didn't have to blow all their wealth on both of the +6-to-all-stats items.

Nicos wrote:

Flawed wrote:

2+INT skills per level sucks when int isn't really a big stat for you. Fortunately things like combat expertise exist to a show you that a fighter can do well with a 13+ int

Really? Combat expertise cannot be used in any serious defense of anything.

What are you even talking about?

Combat expertise IS used for defense. That's the point of it. Combat expertise is also a prerequisite for combat maneuvers of which the fighter is capable of using. It requires a 13 intelligence. The end.

I think you misunderstood Nicos there. Combat Expertise is widely regarded as the WORST feat tax in the game and a general waste of design space, locking combat maneuvers (which a fighter should be able to excel at) behind a stat wall that makes no sense. Using it as a 'defense' of high-INT fighters is laughable.

Definitely keeping this on the back burner in case my next campaign doesn't go over well. My group should have some fun with it, at any rate.

And while I would really like to crib the spellcasting, especially for prepared casters, the problem is that many of the spells were changed, too. Changing one but not the other may cause even more balance problems than just changing both.

Yeah, if I was to take the spellcasting from 5e, I'd take the whole shebang, and tweak whatever Pathfinder spells a player may still want on a case-by-case basis.

Especially because martials can full attack while moving their speed, splitting up movement and attacks as desired.

And the fact that, as far as I can tell, martials are the only ones getting multiple attacks now. (Outside of TWF of course)

There's a lot of things I'd like to steal from 5e for Pathfinder, but my next campaign is already loading up on so many houserules in my pre-campaign prep that I'm wary about adding anything else that may tip the balance too far one way or another.

The one thing I'm really tempted to do is what was suggested above and rip the spellcasting system out wholesale and slotting it into Pathfinder. Spells scaling by spell level rather than caster level just makes more sense to me, period. Especially since it reduces the amount of "Like spell X, just better/worse and at a higher/lower level."

The whole bounded accuracy thing is something I'd love to steal, but I have a feeling it'll be WAAAY more trouble to port over to Pathfinder than it's worth. At that point it'd probably be easier to take the things I DO like from Pathfinder (the classes, skills, and feats a lot of the feats some of the feats) and convert them to work with 5e, rather than the other way around.