Author Topic: In search for criteria for melee classes to be considered Tier 3  (Read 12782 times)

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Unbeliever

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Re: In search for criteria for melee classes to be considered Tier 3
« Reply #60 on: July 23, 2011, 02:05:52 PM »
...
Well, you get the idea. To get casters in the same boat as everyone else, they'd need the same depth of resources.
A D&D caster has:
Time - What can you do with your actions in and out of combat, out of combat spells and skills go here
Health
Casting Resource
Wealth

A D&D Fighter/Monk/whatever has:
Time - What can you do with your actions in and out of combat, feats and other permanent abilities go here
Health
Wealth
...
If a character (class, build, whatever) doesn't have some cool special thing it can do, then it's crap.  There's nothing that differentiates it, and it doesn't have anything awesome. 

I certainly think there should be abilities that fill that void that are, at least in flavor, non-magical ... i.e., "mundane" in nature.  Even if their mechanics are not.  I'm thinking of Aragorns or Roland Deschains or Conans or whatever. 

I also happen to think that such things are, w/ some effort, buildable in D&D.  I think it can be a bit challenging, in part for the issues w/ feats described above, but I think it's doable.  I also think building a powerful caster is challenging, too, though -- the build is really easy (Wizard 20, Druid 20), but picking the right spells, wildshape forms, etc. is quite hard.  We just have awesome handbooks to that effect. 

So, I totally agree w/ Veekie, I guess, I just think there should be mundanely flavored options for those character resources.  I kind of don't really care what their mechanics are -- I played a character who was a master woodsman who was mostly so b/c he was a Binder and Divine Anima Mage w/ Ranger spells. 

For what it's worth, and not to hijack the thread too much (though it seems to have strayed a bit), maybe it could be nice to just present a set of solid melee builds, whether "mundane" or not.  We talked about this a bit earlier in this thread, and I think it's really the sort of thing a thread like this can provide.  Especially since this board is filled w/ all the awesome tricks casters can do (and I know, there are more of them), it's nice to collect a few solid things you can bring to the table if you want to smack the hell out of things.  Back on the WotC boards there was a plague of gish handbooks, which I usually didn't find terribly helpful:  sure I have a great BAB and lots of caster levels, now what do I do w/ those again? 

Sorry, I'm rambling ...

Jackinthegreen

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Re: In search for criteria for melee classes to be considered Tier 3
« Reply #61 on: July 23, 2011, 08:01:26 PM »
A minor thought occurred to me: A class feature should be better than a feat, yes?  Sadly, a "feature" of many low-tier classes is their own features are barely more powerful than a feat, if at all.  This is the main reason why a Fighter is so craptastic: His main class feature IS feats!
« Last Edit: July 23, 2011, 08:05:27 PM by Jackinthegreen »

weenog

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Re: In search for criteria for melee classes to be considered Tier 3
« Reply #62 on: July 23, 2011, 08:15:50 PM »
This is the main reason why a Fighter is so craptastic: His main only class feature IS feats!, and many of the good ones are unavailable to him, except by way of the dark chaos feat shuffle, eating into his budget which is already in tatters thanks to the massively overpriced weaponry on which he is dependent.

A little closer.
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Bozwevial

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Re: In search for criteria for melee classes to be considered Tier 3
« Reply #63 on: July 23, 2011, 08:43:42 PM »
This is the main reason why a Fighter is so craptastic: His main only class feature IS feats!, and many of the good ones are unavailable to him, except by way of the dark chaos feat shuffle, eating into his budget which is already in tatters thanks to the massively overpriced weaponry on which he is dependent.

A little closer.
In fairness, he could be using dead levels.

veekie

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Re: In search for criteria for melee classes to be considered Tier 3
« Reply #64 on: July 23, 2011, 09:10:44 PM »
...
Well, you get the idea. To get casters in the same boat as everyone else, they'd need the same depth of resources.
A D&D caster has:
Time - What can you do with your actions in and out of combat, out of combat spells and skills go here
Health
Casting Resource
Wealth

A D&D Fighter/Monk/whatever has:
Time - What can you do with your actions in and out of combat, feats and other permanent abilities go here
Health
Wealth
...
If a character (class, build, whatever) doesn't have some cool special thing it can do, then it's crap.  There's nothing that differentiates it, and it doesn't have anything awesome. 

I certainly think there should be abilities that fill that void that are, at least in flavor, non-magical ... i.e., "mundane" in nature.  Even if their mechanics are not.  I'm thinking of Aragorns or Roland Deschains or Conans or whatever. 

I also happen to think that such things are, w/ some effort, buildable in D&D.  I think it can be a bit challenging, in part for the issues w/ feats described above, but I think it's doable.  I also think building a powerful caster is challenging, too, though -- the build is really easy (Wizard 20, Druid 20), but picking the right spells, wildshape forms, etc. is quite hard.  We just have awesome handbooks to that effect. 

So, I totally agree w/ Veekie, I guess, I just think there should be mundanely flavored options for those character resources.  I kind of don't really care what their mechanics are -- I played a character who was a master woodsman who was mostly so b/c he was a Binder and Divine Anima Mage w/ Ranger spells. 
Hence why the resources combined have to be of similar value.
Casting Resource is simply any expendable abilities, but overall when you combine all the resource types a character should be nominally equal. The problem is health is worth very little because even a lot of health only means tanking typically one additional attack or two before you go down anyway. Time is worth a lot, but Time + Casting Resources usually exceeds passive abilities because the passives are so itsy.

One thing with feats is that the goodusable stuff tends to be hard to find, indispensible or stuck up a troublesome feat chain. Once you finish a feat chain you start over from zero to go up another chain, gaining feats that were obsolete 6 levels ago.
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