| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
So unlike the Actually Broken Stuff thread, this is an examination of things in 3.x D&D which are out of balance one to another, but not necessarily out of balance with regards to a universally agreed upon measuring stick. While we can all agree that "infinite power" or "instant death" are bad for the game, it is not immediately obvious whether a Monk or a Druid is "unbalanced" just because they fight side by side in naked glory and the Druid is much much better. One could make a point equally compelling that the Monk is underpowered or that the Druid is overpowered. One could easily in fact have in mind a power level of "balance" which lies between those characters (rendering both the Monk too weak and the Druid too strong) or on one side or the other of both characters (determining that both characters are too powerful or not powerful enough, just to greater or lesser degrees).
To facilitate discussion and to be p front about my personal bias, I will state my own personal rubric for determining the relative power of characters. I call it the Same Game Challenge and it works like this: A character of Level X is a valid NPC of CR X; and a party that is twice as large is expected to fight enemies of EL 2 higher, while a party of half the size is expected to fight enemies of EL 2 lower. An EL of Party Level + 4 is supposed to be 50% likely to kill the party. Which means that mathematically the ideal of 3rd edition is that a "party" of one character of Level X should have a roughly 50% chance of winning against a random monster of CR X in single mortal combat. Now obviously some characters are a better fit than others, Clerics are more "in their element" fighting the undead than giant oozes. But ideally, were we to take a list of encounters of a level then a character of that level should be able to win roughly half those encounters (and die in roughly half those encounters, so it's not recommended for a campaign).
The Cleric Archer - more recently this has been known as "CoDzilla" but the original formalization was with a Cleric outperforming an Arcane Archer in literally every way. It goes like this: if you play a Cleric, and then you take half of your daily spells and you set them aside as personal combat buffs; then you will noticeably outperform most of the "martial" classes in the realm of stabbing people in the face. And you'll still have spells left over to, you know, raise people from the dead. You can logically conclude from this fact that Clerics are too powerful, that Fighters are too weak, that Fighters lack enough depth, that Clerics have too much versatility, or some other combination. But the Cleric > Fighter paradigm is well established especially at levels 9+.
Monks vs. Everyone - if your game has ever included a Monk you have probably noticed one of two things: either the Monk character got some stupidly sweet magic items like artifact grade adamantine gloves or a pendant that allowed him to transform into a giant monster - or the monk was constantly sucking. Really really badly. This is completely understandable, as Monk defenses are numerically inferior to simply wearing armor. Monk attacks are smaller than using martial weapons. Monk fists can't hit incorporeal opponents, ad if they use magical weapons they lose what few "Monk Powers" they actually have. Monks underperform relative to any Martial class, including the straight Fighter, by a substantial margin. Or you could make the equally valid interpretation that Monks are the ideal and it is the other classes and the monsters that monks play with which are overpowered.
Magic Missile and Color Spray - Those of us who have been playing since AD&D or before remember when fireball and magic missile were the iconic spells of their level because they were crazy good and packing any other spells required some sort of mental competency waiver. The spells haven't changed, but folks at the CharOp board will tell you with a straight face that packing them is a "sucker's game" - so what happened? The key here is that the rest of the game changed massively even as the basic evocations stayed in one place. An AD&D Troll had only 30 hit points and if a fire attack brought them to zero they were dead. A 3rd edition Troll has 63 hit points and killing it with Fire requires not only that you inflict all 63 points with fire, but that you do the next 10 points of death margin with fire as well. Where a 9th level Wizard could literally expect to clear a room of trolls with fireball in the old days, in 3rd edition you're better off just clubbing them into unconsciousness with a warhammer and then drowning them. So it's not surprising really that Wizards in 3rd edition tend to skip over the old classics like magic missile and pick up the new classics like color spray.
-Frank
|
The Cleric Archer -
At some point, someone on the 3.0 design team said, 'playing the healer is boring, let's give the Cleric some red meat.' And this was apparently done by committee, as the Cleric is now barely visible armored figure, heaped with thousands of pounds of juicy red meat.
For those of us who've been playing and loving Clerics since 1st edition, it's a gluttonous orgy beyond our wildest fantasies. I *never* thought that playing the Cleric was boring! And now I'm being laden with goodies for *playing the class I wanted to play!*
I begrudglingly admit, with downcast eyes and a pout, that the Cleric and Druid could use a serious look.
Monks vs. Everyone -
Give them some sort of parry / evade blows mechanism to avoid giving them a monstrous AC bonus for being nekkid. Sort of like Deflect Arrows, but for melee attacks.
The Monk is a strange beastie, and I'm not a big fan of the whole martial / ki / mystical whatever it's got going on, but there are people who like it (if Book of Nine Swords is any indication) and it should be a viable choice for them.
Magic Missile and Color Spray -
Damage is becoming suboptimal, and the trend seems to be that it's getting *less* useful a choice as time goes on. Spells like Color Spray or Glitterdust or Grease or Web or Sleep or Sleet Storm that can incapacitate or weaken an entire encounter are now teh sexy.
I remember Fireballs being cool, but in this edition, I'm always gonna get more mileage out of a good Slow spell.
There are conflicting design paradigms at work here. A lot of 'save or dies' or 'save or loses' like Hold Person have been getting cut back, while others, like Color Spray and Scare, have snuck through un-nerfed. At what point have they been cut back so much that people don't use them anymore? I haven't seen Hold Person used since 3.5 cut it back, and it was never that popular anyway...
Should damage spells be buffed up?
One school of thought is that casters should do the same damage as tanks, using magic instead of weapons, Eldritch Bolts instead of Composite Longbows, but that just makes everyone the same. Pew pew, lazors, ftw.
Another school of thought is that casters should have a few Big Bada Booms per day, and hoard them to pull out when the going gets tough, but todays damaging spells aren't all that and a bag of chips. Ooh, Fireball, I've managed to lightly brown the entire encounter, but they are still fighting at full effectiveness, and now I get to intercept a dozen arrows with my bony backside as they retaliate...
The idea that an encounter that is damaged will be less effective (M&M and True20 use such rules, as does 4E, I think) would at least make throwing that encounter-damaging spell meaningful.
Increasing damage notably, but limiting times / day as well, could also be an option, which would drag the caster classes back towards their 1E roots, when the Wizard could blow up an encounter, once, and then sat back for a time. 4E seems to be trying to balance this out, with a few 'dailies' that do the big stuff, and some Pew Pew for the round-to-round action. This might be the ideal fix. Some big showy stuff once or twice a day, and some functional lower-damage stuff that doesn't show up the Fighter for round-to-round use. (Because if the Per Round stuff equals the Fighters Per Round damage, it makes it less fun for the Fighter when the Wizard *also* has the Big Bada Boom hidden away in the folds of his robe...)
|
Increasing damage notably, but limiting times / day as well, could also be an option, which would drag the caster classes back towards their 1E roots, when the Wizard could blow up an encounter, once, and then sat back for a time. 4E seems to be trying to balance this out, with a few 'dailies' that do the big stuff, and some Pew Pew for the round-to-round action. This might be the ideal fix. Some big showy stuff once or twice a day, and some functional lower-damage stuff that doesn't show up the Fighter for round-to-round use. (Because if the Per Round stuff equals the Fighters Per Round damage, it makes it less fun for the Fighter when the Wizard *also* has the Big Bada Boom hidden away in the folds of his robe...)
I am going to have to disagree here. If you give the wizard encounter ending abilities then the party will try to wait for when the wizard is ready before advancing to the next encounter. IMHO, 4e is going to suffer from this in spades as all classes now have dailies that are "teh shnitz" and I can just see everyone wanting the 6 hours of rest before any encounter they feel will be challenging. In effect 4e balanced the group out by making them all wizards. Bada-bing, problem of wizard/fighter class balance issues solved. And then they made everyone a cleric, and viola they addressed the "cleric is the battery and thus boring to play" problem. This is certainly not the direction I want PRPG to go.
Where I do agree is that the wizard should get some per-round abilities that do not compare to any of the martial abilities (augmented with feats maybe?). This will give him something "class appropriate" to do when at lower level and out of spells that have a larger impact. He should continue to get measured spells that enhance the party's chance of success without ending the encounter 1e fireball style. I believe 3.5 is pretty close to this power level now, but am open to ideas that it could use some tweaking.
I've actually seen hold person used a lot since 3.5, it's quite horrifying. Since you don't know when it's going to end, the "correct" use of it is to cast it into melee and then have your compatriots immediately Coup de Grace the victim so they don't get a chance to wake up. It's only slightly less effective than the 3rd edition version, and it's incredibly more lethal. I would prefer the 3rd edition version as a Player, both because it lets the caster feel like a star, and because the rest of the team gets a chance to save the victim.
But really what I'd like to see is a lot more spells like sleet storm and slow, and less spells like color spray and sleep. Having magicians curse large numbers of enemies or create terrain makes them star players without making them directly overshadow Rogues at "killing fools." Frankly, I think slow shouldn't even have a Save.
And that's not just hyperbole, I really want people to be casting spells like slow and bestow curse. Giving your enemies a relative penalty is just like giving your allies a relative bonus, only you have to cast the spell when the enemies are actually around so it doesn't tweak out into the 5 minute workday nearly as easily.
-Frank