Pretty simple question.
Like anyone else who knows the system decently well, I have an understanding of the kinds of Gestalt character builds that would be possible. However, I know next to nothing about the mythic rules.
Which is more unbalancing in terms of power? Just curious.
I'd assume Gestalt, but entirely unsure.
I love gestalt, but know nothing about Mythic.
It's the d@mn players that are the most unbalancing!
You can give them a core-only, 15pt buy, single class build and at least one of those clowns is going to show up with some obnoxious break-neck grappling Wizard, or whatever.
You can paint a picture that tells the entire story of your character with gestalt... some classes/archetypes blend together just that well... it's a thing of beauty sometimes.
With the rules that I have for gestalt, I don't find it overly unbalanced, but your mileage may vary.
Mythic, no questions asked. Exponentially by each tier.
Generally gestalt is a more linear increase, assuming not shenanigans.
Both can be abused to game breaking levels. I've played and DM'd both and it really depends on your players.
IMO gestalt is far more unbalanced but mostly because I feel it's easier to unintentionally abuse via optimization.
As a DM I would MUCH rather run mythic over gestalt. It's easier to predict what the players are capable of doing when prepping an adventure.
Who needs multiclassing WITH gestalt?
You can't come up with a build combining two full classes?!?!
You still need to multiclass DURING gestalt?
That's just sad.
GTFOH with that multiclassing BS in my glorious gestalt game. J/K.
But seriously, I don't allow multiclassing or VMC on either side of gestalt.
I understand that gestalt rules will vary table to table, so how unbalanced your gestalt is will also vary.
PS. For what it's worth, here are the basics of my gestalt rules:
Combine maximum recommended starting gold of each class.
Combine class skills of both classes, repeats do not equal free ranks.
Take the best skills per level.
Take the best Hit Die, BAB, and saves of each class.
You can have a maximum of 10 spell level slots per day... spellcasting classes can be mixed as follows:
4+4=8
4+6=10
6+4=10
9+0=9
There is no mixing two 6th level spellcasting classes, nor is there mixing a full 9th level caster with any other casting class.
Point Buy is 35 minus the RP cost of your chosen race.
No stats below an 8, after racial modifiers are applied.
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I'll throw my vote on Mythic.
Gestalt is definitely powerful but the power ceiling is still 9th level casting.
***
You can give them a core-only, 15pt buy, single class build and at least one of those clowns is going to show up with some obnoxious break-neck grappling Wizard, or whatever.
It was named Neckbreaker Mage, actually. ;)
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Are you asking which is more powerful, or which is more unbalanced? While it may seem like they are the same thing that is often not the case. If you have a powerful character going up against equally powerful foes that can actually fairly well balanced. It may be deadly but still balanced. On the other hand if you have that have more abilities than his opponents that would be unbalanced.
The mythic rules have a lot of options not just form players, but also for monsters for the GM to use. So while they may be more powerful than most characters they are also often facing more powerful opponents. In some cases both sides have enough raw power to obliterate the other side. It can be like playing dodge ball with nuclear bombs.
Gestalt rules are often used when the party is small in order to give the party access to all the things that a normal party can do. Most of the time only the players are using gestalt rules but the opponents are normal. This gives the players an incredible amount of abilities to use compared to their opponents. It also often allows them to shore up any weaknesses the character may have. It is not uncommon for a gestalt character to have full BAB, all good saves, 9th level casting and good skills. The other thing gestalt characters can achieve is incredible synergy between abilities. Take a unchained monk/inquisitor for example. Combining flurry of blows with bane can get some incredible damage. With both stalwart and evasion they take no affect from anything if they make their save. Both classes give a lot of abilities that work very well together. When this type of character goes up against the standard opponents he has a hell of a lot of options.
To me mythic is more powerful, but gestalt is more unbalancing.
I largely agree with what mysterious stranger said. The other thing with mythic is that you only gain more mythic tiers by over coming mythic challenges, which in my experience seem to always take the form of boss level monsters who are also mythic.
Mythic has a lower floor and higher ceiling as you can do things like make the campaign only go up to mythic tier 2, and as gross as some of the options are, there's not a WHOLE lot you can do to get too out of control with 2 mythic powers and d6 surges.
However the mythic campaigns cap for "unbalanced" is way way higher than gestalt.
To put it another way, on a scale of -100 to 100, with 0 representing baseline core book play, gestalt is like a +50, and mythic is anywhere from +25 to +100 depending on how far you take the ranks
While gestalt does add an excessive amount of power to each character by opening doors for so many utterly broken combinations of abilities... it pales in comparison to some of the things mythic enables...
Just 1 mythic feat alone can increase a martial damage exponentially... Mythic Vital Strike can turn The entire Vital Strike feat chain (including Devastating Strike) from mediocre and hardly worth the investment into the most overpowered tool in a two-handed fighters arsenal...I can make some very broken builds with Gestalt... but none of them will ever compare to a Mythic Bloodrager build hitting for an average of 200 with a maximum critical hit of well over 1000... as a standard action every round... add in th ability to spend a mythic power point for an extra standard action to do it a second time... then a 2nd mythic power point to do it once more but this time ignore all resistances and DR... potentially dealing 3000+ damage in one round... of course just about anything will be dead from the first hit of 1000 alone... and if that wasn’t scary enough already, let’s just add in a mythic ability to remove the randomness from those Criticals and maximize their damage, but why stop there, another mythic ability will give you auto confirm on anything non-mythic... and if the randomness on the non-crits gets to be too much, there’s a mythic power to make those perfectly average or if your daring enough to take the dual path feat to go Champion and Trickster you can turn your attacks to pure devastation with Fickle Attack 3x giving making your 1-3 on your damage dice = to max (which will 9 times out of 10 be 6s by this point)
And that’s just some of the shenanigans that a vitalstrike build can do in mythic... casters have their own set of absurdly broken mythic powers and feats as well... always roll at advantage to overcome spell resistance... swift action casting of any spell on your class spell list at +2 CL even if not prepared or known... ignore various spell components... spells that automagically spread to affect nearby foes... supercharged mythic versions of spells... illusions that become 100% real at your whim... and that’s just a few mythic path abilities... feats are even more broken... especially when it comes to mythic metamagic... ever wanted all your metamagic’d spells heightened to the level your other metamagic raised them to without adding more spell levels? Well that is exactly what Mythic Heightened spell does... automatically... there are even options to ignore certain immunities and cause any spell to still fully affect targets for at least one round even on a successful save...
Pretty simple question.
Like anyone else who knows the system decently well, I have an understanding of the kinds of Gestalt character builds that would be possible. However, I know next to nothing about the mythic rules.
Which is more unbalancing in terms of power? Just curious.
I'd assume Gestalt, but entirely unsure.
From the variety of responses apparently, it's not a simple question. I have no experience with Mythic, though I have looked at the rules and have read what it can do online. I do have a lot of experience with Gestalt. My 1st question would be, unbalancing in what way, Pc vs Pc, pcs vs monsters, unmodified Pc vs modified Pc? The 3 biggest factors at play in relation to your question seem to be Gestalt, Mythic and player skill. And I think player skill and willingness to make a powerful/broken character is the most important factor.
If you are assuming the player factor is taken out, Mythic sounds much more unbalancing to me. There is little using Gestalt that 2 players making characters as a team can't do. And 2 team characters have twice as many actions as an single gestalt character. But you can do things with mythic that you just can't outside of using those rules.
If you are assuming the player factor is taken out, Mythic sounds much more unbalancing to me. There is little using Gestalt that 2 players making characters as a team can't do. And 2 team characters have twice as many actions as an single gestalt character. But you can do things with mythic that you just can't outside of using those rules.
While I don’t disagree about Mythic adding much more power to the hands of a single character... I do disagree about gestalt doing very little that 2 team characters can’t... if you’re gestalting Martial+Caster then yeah, more often than not your not adding anything that a 2nd character couldn’t have done better... however if you do something like Barbarian+Fighter then your going to catapult your power, and depending on your archetype choices you could easily triple your power... really fighter+any martial class is a recepie for high power in gestalt... some partial casters provide the same level of extreme power jumps too. War Priest, Inquisitor, Magus, Bloodrager, even Paladin, all provide class features that when combined with other martial classes at full strength are quite broken.
In all honesty... gestalt and mythic both actually add a whole lot more power to martial classes than to casters... in either system a caster gets only really a slight bump... and typically offer very little that a second caster couldn’t have offered just as easily...
Mythic gives you crazy megadamage, which looks intimidating, but it also kind of makes damage less relevant in the doing. Once you hit the point where there's available builds for basically everyone that do damage that is almost definitely going to kill whatever gets targetted, getting the action economy to defend yourself, move around, and actually land your hits becomes even more vital.
Anyway, Mythic changes the scale of a game drastically, but that doesn't really make it more or less balanced. Gestalt lets you make characters who can kind of do everything, which is not necessarily a balance issue, but it tends to exacerbate balance issues, because it's a lot easier for one character to make the other characters seem irrelevant.
So I'd say neither is inherently unbalancing as long as the game is built around it, but I think gestalt seems more likely to make existing balance problems worse. But then to me, the only purely mechanical balance that matters is between PCs and other PCs, since the point of a GM is basically to BE the balance point between the players and the setting.
While I’ve already said my piece, I have to say what my friend said:
“Would Mythic Gestalt or Gestalted Mythic be more unbalancing?”
Gestalted Mythic being Mythic, but you Gestalt Mythic Paths instead of class levels, and Mythic Gestalt being Gestalt with Mythic thrown on top of it.
I'm trying to wrap my head around what you mean by Gestalted Mythic. Mythic already has the feat Dual path. Additionally, mythic is more like a template then it is a class since it doesn't increase your base attack, Hit Dice, or Saves, the same way that classes do. Mythic grants specific abilities at each tier. One of the abilities you gain each tier is an ability chosen from a list determined by the path you chose. Mythic tiers are already gained along side your regular class levels and the highest you can go is tier 10. Meaning if you gained tiers at the same rate you gained levels then the campaign would end at 10th level.
Gestalted Mythic sounds like a misunderstanding of how mythic works, unless what you mean is picking two paths instead of 1 and getting to mix and match between them in which case all you're actually talking about is getting the feat dual path for free, since that's what it does.
Gestalting mythic with mythic makes as much sense as Gestalting fighter with fighter and has pretty much the same effect. So... what are we really saying? You just get twice as many feats? (There is a mythic universal path ability that grants an extra mythic feat, and a mythic feat the grants an extra mythic path ability making them interchangeable up to a point)
Besides being psuedo-Dual Path, gestalt mythic could also get a couple more hit points per mythic tier, for archmage with guardian. But the difference is so small, I don't think it'd be noticeable compared to regular mythic. I just can't see gestalted mythic ever being worth the house rule.
As for Mythic Gestalt, it'd be pretty powerful, since almost everyone would be a caster and mythic casting is even more broken than regular casting. Arcane Surge is a swift action bonus spell, that's harder to save against and resist. At first tier, you can already do this 5 times per day. That's something so much more impactful than doing some above average damage per round.
Gestalted Mythic means you get twice the path abilities, since you get them once on each side of the Gestalt. Just like how regular Gestalt works with getting class abilities from both sides. Not that hard to understand.
Getting twice the path abilities was never implied, because that's more of a generic part of being mythic. You don't even have to pick an ability from your own path, because there are a lot of good universal path abilities too.
But anyway, getting twice the path abilities would be a pretty big deal. Most are just minor buffs, but they add up nicely. And a handful of them are rather powerful. I'm not so concerned about twice the endcap abilities. Most people will never see tier 10, and if they do, it won't be for very long.
Gestalted Mythic means you get twice the path abilities, since you get them once on each side of the Gestalt. Just like how regular Gestalt works with getting class abilities from both sides. Not that hard to understand.
Furthermore, Dual Path is not even close to fully having both paths, as they don’t get the MT 10 unique ability of the second path, only the MT 1 unique ability of the second path.
Except that "normal" gestalt rules don't let you double up on class abilities like that.
Class features that two classes share (such as uncanny dodge) accrue at the rate of the faster class.
In the same way that getting uncanny dodge twice doesn't make it stack (you just get the better of the two) the mythic path ability also wouldn't stack, you just get "the best" of the two at each level.
What you're describing violates the normal gestalt rules, making it a less than "obvious" interpretation.
Based on your definition, gestalt + mythic is probably more powerful. In both cases you're gaining 10 additional mythic path abilities that the character wouldn't normally have. But the gestalt character gains the other mythic stuff too.
Besides a normal mythic character can trade in their mythic feats for additional mythic path abilities anyway so even if a powerful combination required more than 10 path abilities from two different lists, a normal mythic character could already achieve this. So, anything extra gained from the "gestalted mythic" you're proposing, probably wouldn't have much impact in the grand scheme of things. At most the character gains early access to powers they would normally have to wait to grab. There is so little mythic content available it's pretty easy to cap out early on things you want.
For example, I have a mythic hunter I've planned out and I have no idea what to pick for my last two mythic path abilities or my last two mythic feats. If I had another 10 path abilities to pick then it would mean that after tier 4, I would probably convert those abilities into mythic feats, which I would then turn around and spend on regular feats.
Except because each side picks from a different list, it is like saying a Cleric//Wizard gestalt wouldn’t get both classes’ Spellcasting. They are the same feature technically, just drawing from different lists of spells. Another example would be saying that a Wizard//Sorcerer gestalt wouldn’t get both classes’ Spellcasting, cause they draw from the same list, even though the Spellcasting functions differently for each of them.
spellcasting is called out as an exception.
Gestalt characters with more than one spellcasting class keep track of their spells per day separately.
Let's just agree it wasn't "obvious" and move on. I can't imagine anyone running such a thing anyway, so it barely matters
To get back to the original question, and to reiterate some previous points, I want to bring up the topic of action economy...
No matter what classes you gestalt, you are locked in the standard action economy... VERY few combinations provide you the opportunity to abuse class abilities in any meaningful way that will liberate you from the aforementioned standard.
Most combinations just give you more options for what you can do with the limited actions you can take in any given round. Options are good, but you still have to choose to do this OR that...
From what I have seen and read about Mythic is that the abilities you receive are often designed specifically to break the standard action economy in direct and meaningful ways.
Mythic is like giving the players Legendary Actions... which used to be reserved for big boss level monsters in earlier editions.
Its more like a fighter and another class with bonus feats, say monk, don't get both at the same time. Both class' features are just "bonus feat".Except because each side picks from a different list, it is like saying a Cleric//Wizard gestalt wouldn’t get both classes’ Spellcasting. They are the same feature technically, just drawing from different lists of spells. Another example would be saying that a Wizard//Sorcerer gestalt wouldn’t get both classes’ Spellcasting, cause they draw from the same list, even though the Spellcasting functions differently for each of them.spellcasting is called out as an exception.
Gestalt characters with more than one spellcasting class keep track of their spells per day separately.
If the monk's bonus feat class feature granted bonus feats as a fighter, perhaps... but a monks bonus feats and a fighters bonus feats are distinctly different features despite sharing the same generic name. If sharing the same name was all that mattered then weapon/armor proficiencies for any gestalt combination of Monk, Druid, Wizard, or Shifter would be a nightmare... which one would be considered "the better of the two" they all only grant a limited selection of weapons rather than whole categories.
A Druid//Wizard or a Shifter//Wizard would be forced to choose between knowing Druidic or being able to Select Draconic as a bonus language if their race doesn't already have it, since both class features are called Bonus Language.
A Bloodrager//Sorcerer would have to choose which class their bloodline progresses as despite granting entirely different class features on many... for example: there is absolutely NOTHING in common between the Bloodrager & Sorcerer Arcane Bloodlines... Arcane Bloodline Sorcerer excels at empowering spells through metamagic, while an Arcane Bloodline Bloodrager excels at hindering nearby spellcasters.
The gestalt rules talk about class features that are shared between classes, not abilities that share the same name. Basically, if the ability would normally gain improvement from multiclassing then you only get the higher progression.
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Huh.
It's almost like literally every other thing that "stacks".
Weird.
Seriously, has this discussion really degraded to such extreme and petty examples?
Gestalt isn't rocket surgery.
It's only as complicated as you make it...