Justifying Your Place in the Party or Tiers for Your Character

[Hand_of_Vecna]

[Hand_of_Vecna]

Your Team

Your team is a group of characters who fill the iconic roles as some see them. I am willing to consider different roles or different ways to fill these roles. These characters are meant to be competent; neither heavily optimized nor built/played stupidly.

There are four characters and your character will replace whichever you feel is most appropriate.

The Frank the Tank
Frank is a Warblade he can specialize in whatever discipline you feel appropriate but, please stay consistent between examples if you try different levels. I choose Warblade both because it is Tier 3 non-caster and  because an undetailed fighter can get almost as silly as a undetailed wizard when people start saying but this feat. Ok. Not nearly as silly as a wizard but, pretty silly.

Derick the Generic Cleric
Not a DMM. But understands that in combat healing should only be done when it explicitly saves lives.

Paige the Mage
Sorceror; likes to blast but will do some buffing if you ask nicely. Has one orb spell in her second highest slot in case of spell resistence/immunity

Keefe the Thief
Rouge 3/Fighter(thug variant) 1/Swordsage X

[Hand_of_Vecna]

[Hand_of_Vecna]

Reserved for specific challenges

[Hand_of_Vecna]

reserved for specific challenges 2

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reserved for specific challenges 3

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Specific encounters 4

[Hand_of_Vecna]

Highest level specific encounters.

[Hand_of_Vecna]

Finally reserved for anything else.

[PlzBreakMyCampaign]

What is the purpose of this thread? Isn't most of this covered by JaronK? I would expect an attempt at something like this to atleast try to calculate tiers via base and prestige class ratios...

[Anklebite]

I, too, am a little bit confused by the purpose of this.

I once accidentally the entire dungeon with a lvl10 straight half-orc fighter. I was bored, it was a one-shot, and the DM wasn't much of an optimizer.  long story short, spiked chain + PHB and PHBII fighter feats killed it all without a problem.  hell, most things didn't even survive my single charge attack, with cleave dealing with the leftovers.


you don't need a class tier system to justify a character in a party.  level of optimization is entirely separate from tier, and is what is relevant. I'm sure any min/max regulars could make a tier4 that far outstrips an idiot's tier1 char.

[Hand_of_Vecna]

Hmmm I thought I was pretty clear in my intentions and the purpose of this thread.

It's a combination of things one is to consider how good a character is and if their too good. Kind of a gauge of when you have optimized enough and when you've started to push the boundaries between the vaguely defined terms of "practical" and "theoretical" optimization. Perhaps I shouldn't have used the term tiers but I'm not sure what else to call them.

I thought it might be helpful to create some kinds of benchmarks for how optimized a given thing is the entire build class, prestige class, feat selection, equipment selection etc.

maybe it was just me, like i said I was working on a build that I thought would be very effective and when I got to the point of filling a few open feats and debating whether to dip shadowblade at at the end for a 5th lvl stance I started obsessing over tweaking it to win 1on1 against iconic charOp builds.

Then I just slapped mysself and said "What the F*** are you thinking?!?!?"

Is it a strong build?

I think so.

Can it hold it's own in a fight against just about anything in th MM at whatever level it's at + a few?

Ya I think so. Haven't playtested it though.

Could it beat build X?

Maybe.

Does tit matter?

I guess not.

Would some groups prefer to have this build then X.

Sure they both have advantages.

Do you want to play your build?

ya.

Anyway if your reaction is generally shared I'll just let this die since I think just typing all of this out has already done alot of the work this build was intended to do for me on a personal level.

[dark_samuari]

I think you just need to get back to the basics of it all. Min/Maxing, minimizing your weaknesses and maximizing your strengths. Now where you go from this is where the power-debate will ensue as some people feel that their strengths should equal the divine but that's neither here nor there.

I've always been of the belief that all a really good optimizer needed to do to tone down their character (power-wise) was pick an extremely niche strength. A reasonable player who is really great with optimizing spellcasters might decide to play a cold-themed mage and thus will allow him to optimize to a lengthy amount but will still keep him contained in that specific idea.   

[Hijax]

I think you just need to get back to the basics of it all. Min/Maxing, minimizing your weaknesses and maximizing your strengths. Now where you go from this is where the power-debate will ensue as some people feel that their strengths should equal the divine but that's neither here nor there.

I've always been of the belief that all a really good optimizer needed to do to tone down their character (power-wise) was pick an extremely niche strength. A reasonable player who is really great with optimizing spellcasters might decide to play a cold-themed mage and thus will allow him to optimize to a lengthy amount but will still keep him contained in that specific idea.  

exactly.

this also makes it easy for the DM to regulate him if he's doing too good. onehitting every encounter? hit 'im wit some water elementals. boom bam, no cold damage for you.