First off: wow. This thread is absolutely epic and I absolutely love it. I joined this site just to be able to participate. Two years in and it's still being discussed actively (including the original poster). What a great thread.
Of course, like anyone else, I also have an opinion on this thread.
I think the rankings, on the whole, are brilliant and generally spot-on. Of course there's room to wiggle a little (apparently 43 odd pages plus another 50-page thread's worth), but generally I think these statements have stood the test of time. I must confess I have not read the entire thread (nor the one before it), so forgive me if I'm beating a dead horse here, but my main thought on the rankings was that the original poster seemed to be focusing a lot on end-game play - which I think the majority of games never reach. These rankings are absolutely right for level 16+, and maybe even 12 or 13 through 20. But levels 1 to 2 - a place the vast majority of games
have experienced - do not match these ratings. Of course, levels 1 through 2 or so also do not accurately represent what a class is capable of: but I submit they
do in fact represent what the majority of players actually
see from a class. Which ultimately means these rankings almost need a caveat, or perhaps a bit of a weighting with respect to early, mid, and late game play.
For example, some (unscrupulous) player who wishes to be all "tier 1" may read this thread and decide to play a wizard - only to learn that a level 1 wizard is decidedly NOT tier 1. In the early game, I'd rank fighters as tier 3 at worst and wizards as tier 4 at best. Using the "how would someone solve this situation" example, let's try a more level-appropriate scenario: kill some goblins.
Round 1: the fighter moves to the goblin and kills it.
Round 1: the wizard casts grease; the goblin makes its save and nothing happens.
Round 2: the fighter move to another goblin and kills it.
Round 2: the wizard casts magic missile and hurts the goblin.
Round 3: the fighter move to another goblin and kills it.
Round 3: the wizard casts magic missile and kills the goblin.
At the end of the encounter, the fighter continues forward.
At the end of the encounter, the wizard realizes he has spent his entire magical arsenal for the day to kill one goblin. He decides to go home.
During the next encounter, the fighter kills a skeleton.
During the next encounter, the wizard stares at a wall.
During the third encounter, the fighter continues to move to things and kill them.
During the third encounter, the wizard mercifully falls on his own dagger.
The thing is, we all know this is (somewhat) true and we all know it doesn't get better for a long while. The wizard doesn't really "catch up" to the fighter until mid-game, which in my opinion is around level 6 or 7. A wizard is SO limited in his options due to the spells-per-day mechanic that even being properly prepared doesn't give him much advantage (and at those levels, he'd be hard pressed to be properly prepared) - and this continues until he finally gets enough spell slots plus enough interesting spells to really do something. (And then, of course, around level 13, the power mechanic changes so rapidly he practically ceases to need the party anymore.)
I think you could have a more accurate assessment - and thus, a better tool for DMs - by dividing the game into three basic categories:
early game (1-6), mid game (7-12), and late game (13+). (The level ranges are suggestions.) The rankings in this thread are perfect for late game. They're pretty good for mid game. And they are sometimes inaccurate for early game. As a DM, you may always plan to take every game from level 1 to 20. And if you're someone for whom this has happened, you are amazingly lucky!
(Never happened for me in all my gaming years.) In reality, life happens. Life gets in the way and most games never make it to mid game, much less late game, unless they start there from the beginning of the campaign. If you're a DM and you care about your players having equal tiered PCs, I think you'd be better suited to this information if you also knew about how long your game would go (or at least how long you'd expect) and could keep that in mind. In that case, having a party with a wizard and a fighter is probably a fine idea if you know you'll never make it past level 6 before Jim has to move for that job and Sally has her baby and the kids go back to school or whatever.
In fact, early games probably only have tiers 3, 4 and 5. Fighters and barbarians are tier 3 or 4 in that case, and casters are generally tier 5 at best. In fact, you might even be able to make the case that a level 1 commoner has about as much raw functionality as a level 1 wizard (3.5, anyway). If you know you'll never make it past level 4ish, a "low magic" campaign is actually (ironically) a power-gaming campaign. Then, by mid game, wizards start to push tier 3 while fighters and barbarians slowly transition down (but not by much). Finally, in the late game, wizards have turned into gods and fighters fell to tier 5 by comparison.
These examples are just my opinions - the numbers aren't really that important here and are certainly open to interpretation - but I think the larger point is key:
power levels fluctuate, and therefore so do rankings.On a different note, I am also interested in how others believe Pathfinder changed the rankings in this tier system. Personally, I think tier 5 and 6 were removed (not that 6 was really a tier in the first place) and tier 1 was pushed down closer to tier 2 (no more summoned diva cascades, for example). ALL classes were boosted a bit, but a lot of the high-end spells were given realistic constraints (or removed). Assuming that you're focusing on "core" Pathfinder material and only including 3.5 splat books that didn't intentionally re-break what Pathfinder fixed, I'd put the base classes something more like:
tier 1.5: wizard, druid, cleric
tier 1.75: sorcerer
tier 3: rogue, bard, maybe ranger, paladin (yeah, that much)
tier 4: barbarian (pushing 3), fighter, monk
This is trying to keep the relationship closer to the original rankings, thus the silly "1.5" and "1.75". Of course, given ONLY the core Pathfinder materials, I'd bump everything above 2 down to tier 2 and maybe lower a few others, but generally I'd say if the main goal of Pathfinder was to make it so that all the classes were slightly more "even" in power, especially through the early and mid game:
they did it.
I'm not sure how I'd rate the new classes, since I've only seen a couple in action for a very small amount of time, but the alchemist and the summoner seem like solid tier 3s (potentially 2s late game) to me. I'm curious as to what others believe about these classes so far. (One thing that I was very happy to see is that unlike many of the late-product cycle 3.5 splat books, which blatantly embraced power creep, so far Paizo has been trying to keep things under control. We'll see how that continues as the product matures.)
In any case thanks again for a great thread and great discussion! I'm happy to be a part of it.