kardar233's page

Also because the Bard's spell list is mostly limited to Enchantment, which is a fairly situational school, and Illusion, which is also situational (though the power of Illusion spells are mostly based on your DM rather than your opponents). It lacks a lot of the powerful Conjuration and Transmutation spells that make the Sorcerer so good.

Anzyr wrote:

Bookplate of Recall,

Which the thief simply peels off and it destroyed when the mob burns the book. And even if the thief doesn't think to peel off "If the item is in the possession of another creature, the spell does not work, but you know who the possessor is and roughly where that creature is located when the summons occurs."

Yeah, I thought it was something like this. meh.

There are lots of good ways to defend a spellbook. Shrink Item can hide it in difficult-to-access places, like in your mouth; something that would make it very difficult for someone to get it. Assuming your spellbook is reasonably tough (make a cover out of mithril or magically harden it) you can put Explosive Runes on the cover, so just by looking at it a potential thief would explode, something that would definitely wake the party up if not kill the thief (no save because of proximity). You can buy decoy spellbooks and fill them full of Sepia Snake Sigils and Explosive Runes so that if the thief tries to determine which one is real they get spells to the face. You can use Secret Page to hide the text of your spellbook and make it look like a decoy or entirely different book. At higher levels, you can keep your spellbook in a safe place and use Greater Scrying to prepare from it without actually having it on you.

It is extremely difficult to steal the spellbook of a competent wizard, to say the least.

Tiers vary depending on optimization level.

If the goal is to aid GMs, this is very important to take into consideration. Especially for newer GMs, who are both more likely to need the aid and more likely to have a newer group with low understanding of optimization. The post also states that it is assuming "everyone in the party is playing with roughly the same skill and optimization level". I think that what it assumes is that everyone in the party is playing with a high level of optimization. Because while all classes gain from optimization, a badly optimized sorcerer will far underperform a badly optimized paladin. Some classes (like sorcerer) have a high roof and a low floor. Others (like paladin) have a floor and roof far closer to each other.
This is true both for build optimization and optimized play in terms of in-game tactics.

Classes do have variable optimization floors and ceilings, but they don't vary quite as far as you are positing they do. In the party of the sword-and-board Fighters, the fireballing Sorcerer is king. Even the worst plausible options of the casters are still flexible and powerful in comparison to the mundanes. Granted, it's not a difference of the same magnitude as it gets with any sort of actual competence on the casting side, but I have rarely read threads of the blaster wizard being overshadowed by his equally unoptimized sword-wielding friends, while the converse is quite common.

In a campaign where the party gets trapped in a dead-magic plane and has to fight their way out, the wizard - as a class - will be incredibly weak, because it's abilities are mostly useless. Now, this is an extreme example of course, but there are many gray areas inbetween; it was mostly used to highlight that "tiers are campaign independent" is a claim that is only relevant if you completely ignore the goals of having tiers in the first place.

You are presenting a false equivalence here. There are far more ways in which the circumstances of the campaign will render a Fighter irrelevant than ones that will render a Wizard irrelevant. Sure, a Wizard who is randomly transported into a dead-magic plane will suck, but even just ten or twenty-five minutes of warning will allow the Wizard to Planar Bind a powerful Outsider to fight things for them. A dead magic plane can also be very bad for Fighters, as without magic items (or the assistance of their magic-based allies) they have little in the way of dealing with flying or invisible foes, for example.

More importantly, there are all sorts of quite reasonable campaign ideas that totally screw Fighter-types over, or make them totally reliant on the casters. I'll throw out a few: dragon-hunting campaign! Race for the Macguffin! Mage wars! I could go on. It takes a very specific kind of campaign to negate casters (discounting DM fiat such as "your spellbook's gone" "but there were traps and alarms and-" "IT'S GONE!") but it's easy to render fighter-types functionally helpless without even trying.

Tell you what here's a thought experiment. New class- the Dreadnought. D20hp. Can't use bows.

BaB is 2,4,6,8,10 (double full), all Good saves. Double level as bonus damage every hit. Adds level to AC and gains Dr/- per lvl. By passes DR as a weapon (level 3= +3 weapon) No skill points (you gotta have int, etc or no skills). Np special movement, no other special abilities. All martial weapons, heavy armor.

What can this class do? Tank. It's a super tank. OOC- it's got nuttin. No ranged combat. It does just one thing, but that one thing super well. Technically, this monstrosity is T4.

Technically Beguiler and Warmage are T2. Yeah.

So- Tiers? Yeah, nice to know. But the Tier system is heavily biased toward spellcasting- and doesn't rate "best" at all. Even JaronK said that.

The reason the Tier System is favourable towards spellcasting is because spellcasting provides options, and the Tier System measures options.

Counterexamples are those classes such as the Healer and Warmage, which are low-tier because while they have nine levels of spells those spells only do one thing, which is heal and blast respectively.

Your "Dreadnought" class is tier 4. All it has is big numbers and big numbers are not enough to rise in tier. What is your Dreadnought going to do against any non-melee flying monster, like a dragon, or high-level Outsider like a Balor or Pit Fiend? Or against invisible enemies, or incorporeal ones, or ones that can teleport, etc.

I'll tell you: it has three options:
a) Use WBL to get the tools needed to solve those problems. Not a glowing statement on the effectiveness of your class.
b) Rely on the casters of the party (as they're the ones who can cast Fly, or See Invisibility, or Magic Weapon, or Dimension Door) to make you capable of doing your hitting. Again, not a glowing statement on the effectiveness of your class.
c) Stand there like a chump.

More importantly, what do you think it's going to do in a scenario that isn't purely focused around hitting people in the face? Talk to people, with its complete lack of skill points? Solve mysteries with no mechanical ability to do so? How does the Dreadnought start a rebellion, heal the dying king, stop the demonic invasion, get through any part of the campaign that doesn't involve beating people to death?

Short answer: he doesn't. Thus, Tier 4.