10:00 one thing to note. Like you were saying before martial’s resource is essentially their HP, so by the time casters run out of resources martials are dead or dying
WOTC have tried to destroy martial caster synnegies in the name of bounded accuracy, but one remains. The fighter does not run out of HP until after the bard, cleric, and/or druid are all out of spells. Well, maybe not the bard in 5.5, but that's a bridge I'm not jumping off of.
@@nathanbrown8680 I could maybe understand if you said, barbarian, but certainly not the fighter. If in your experience casters are running out of slots before a fighter runs out of hp, that is likely due to bad spell slot management/choice, or the effects of good spells being cast paying off their dividends.
@@someusername9591 What is wrong with your healers that they just let the fighter die? 5e doesn't have slots like 1-3e did, everyone is spontaneous and cure is upcastable. There is no excuse to not heal the fighter after they run out of short rest dice short of being out of spell slots yourself.
@@nathanbrown8680 That's not helping your point if Fighter's have to rely on caster's to be alive. You could instead replace that fighter with a caster and they might do just as well in the majority of scenarios while also being able to support other allies. Martial's on niche is single target damage. Not utility, not control, not buffing, not aoe damage, and besides the bear totem barbarian even damage mitigation requires you to go caster.
For the strength (intimidation) use, in chapter 7 of the player's handbook, there is a sub-section called "Variant: Skills with Different Abilities" under the ability check section. It says that a DM may call for a different skill and ability combination, and one of the examples is strength (intimidation).
I love this one. Also, I'd allow an altogether different skill for a certain aim when appropriate - History (Intelligence) to persuade a gallery of scholars that a king was an impostor, for instance, assuming your character has proof.
@@BlazeMakesGamesI do understand why it's mainly charisma. I mean even if you're very strong, if you have no idea what to say and have terribly unimposing body language, then your very brawny barbarian might still just come off as laughable rather than scary.
@@FayeRantTheStrong intimidation can be about more than just brute force and violence, but even if we are going with the idea that intimidation is only about violence, a scrawny bard still has terrifying magic. But there are honestly a lot of things in D&D that are unrealistic and lack proper explanation anyway. Like the evasion class feature.
One thing that seems to get overlooked is the fundamental mismatch in the inspiration for the class archetypes: Martials are Low Fantasy Casters are High Fantasy Martials could compete just fine if they had off the wall anime protagonist powers or if casters magics had to be infrequent, subtle, and costly to use. Of course neither option would be received well at all, so actual solutions are difficult, but I'm fond of tweaking every option closer to hybrids.
yeah, it's a less tangible sort of problem so I didn't include it in my list, but it is absolutely a factor. It feels like they're designing 2 different games at times. On one hand they look at a Melee character and are like "Hmm hitting 2 people in one attack seems a bit too strong, you better only deal half damage for that." Meanwhile they look at the casters and go "Oh *another* AoE that does more damage than you have dice? Yeah sure whatever"
@Blaze Yeah, it didn't much need to be in this vid. It's more important to consider when doing new game design, at least to guide decisions beyond only balancing the mechanics.
I think this does not need to be a problem for balancing. In older versions of dnd and in some other systems they tried to balance it by giving casters significant disadvanteges in order to balance those powerful spells. I give you a example: I'm currently playing in a dnd 3.5 campain (I'm new to that system, but here are my experiences so far) - There are no real cantrips, they are more like lvl-0-spells (with spellslots) and for those apply the same rules like for other spells (so you can completly run out of spells) - Cantrips (or better lvl-0-spells) are not good for dealing damage. There are only a few and they are crap (e.g: Ray of Frost deals 1d3 cold damage and scales only in range, not in damage), so cantrips are utility-spells. - And most importantly: Most casters cannot assign their spellslots while casting, but instead have to assign them at the start of an adventuring day. So if you want to cast Fireball two times this day, you have to prepare it twice. so you dont have a number of prepared spells and a number of spellslots, you just have a number of spells. At first that last part really bothered me, but in the end this has a very unique kind of balancing: While casters have by far the highest potential (with power and versitility), they require carefull planing and in a lot of cases also need the martials to ceep them save cause martials are reliable. (this is of cause an oversimplification and most casters can still do something, if the don't have the needet spell (at least in combat), but this summs it up). In my personal view, the biggest problems of 5e are 3: 1) By making casters more easier to play and giving them good unlimeted combat cantrips, they removed every drawbag of casters, without lowering the power-potential, so now you end up with the senario u disribed. 2) While casters have quite good options to caunter martials, this doesn't really go the other way around. Give martials the abillity to disturb the casters spellcasting (e.g: If casters make a spell while beeing in close combat to you, you can use your atac of oppertunity and if the attac hits, the spell is negated) 3) If you don't want casters to have flaws, and if characters are meant to level up together, in order to not run in those balancing issues, Martials at high levels also need to become high fantasy like anime-protagonists: Have your barbarian strong enough to punch throu citty-walls.
@@_mine_creeper_7096 Hah, I'd say you have a lovely spin on finding solutions I don't like to issues I didn't have based on values I'm not concerned about. Its still valid! Your fun belongs to you and all that. And cantrips as level zero spell slots is a pretty good idea of done right (besides adding another number to track), and giving them a utility focus helps a lot with the "magic" feel in general. I feel you're overlooking some core design issues, however: 1.) Character actions and turns are also a resource, so it is important that the things you let players do in combat should be forth the time spent to do them instead of literally something else. If you cantrips aren't worth usong, then why even have them? Of course that's a vrry hard line solution, and I'm sure that "being useless" isn't the *point* here, so have some modifications: - Cantrips' attack damage staying miniscule but adding defuffs or combat utility. (Keeps them as "strong" vs mundane attacks but in different ways than weapons) - Keeping "level zero" spell slots for using cantrips, while also making sure that even after using every slot that casters still have thematic and effective options (so they can do *something* more fun than "uselessly flail with a stick" "bravely run away" or " I cast crossbow") - When a caster only has useless spells left, they can still use those slots in some (generic, useful, and roighly as valuable) way. (paladin smites are the bigges example of this) And I, uh.. i haven't covered all my thoughts on this but I can do this kind of thing for *hours* so I cutting it here. Hope you get something out of it.
I would love over-the-top anime powers for martials, but I grew up on anime. Everyone in the west who grew up on western fantasy seem to think martials can only be low fantasy.
Something that is worth remembering is that even in old school AD&D 2e, things weren't as imbalanced as it is now. Even when Mages get to their powerful spells, classes like Fighters have several things going for them to stay relevant in the party. Here are some things off the top of my head, comparing a Fighter and Mage/Wizard: - Both rely on gold / loot for their progression, since the FIghter needs equipment, and Mages need spell scrolls and casting materials. Mages do not get spells when levelling up. - Mages prepare individual spellslots. If you prepare 1 use of Shield, you can only cast Shield 1 time. - Mages are actually frail, unless they spend several turns and hundreds of gold worth of materials to cast defensive spells. Enemies will often just ignore Mage AC, since it is often on the low side, and Mages have insanly low HP. At lvl 15, you have a max HP of 65 (10d4 hit dice + 20 from constitution + 5 from lvl 11-15) and an average HP of way less (50 with max con. 30 with neutral con). This is a problem when enemies you fight at the levels a Mage is super strong can easily deal 20+ dmg per attack. A lot of enemies will literally take a max HP lvl 15 Mage from full to 0 HP in a single turn, if they're an enemy you're supposed to fight at that level. - Fighters can often more or less ignore enemy AC, since their hit hit value (THAC0) scale incredibly high at the levels Mages are supposed to be the best. This gives them a consistent damage output, unlike 5e. Fighters also have abilities (advanced weapon mastery) that give them a higher damage output relative to the HP of enemies than Fighters have in 5e. 50 DPR against an enemy with 300 HP is twice as strong as 50 DPR against an enemy with 600 HP. And back in AD&D 2e, enemies had a lot less HP than now, while the Fighters can easily match modern Fighters for damage output (again thanks to advanced weapon mastery and insanely high accuracy). - High-end martial equipment often come with spells and spell-like abilities, that lets the Fighter copy some of the abilities of the Mage. A fully geared Fighter at the same level as a Mage at a level a Mage is supposed to dominate, with as valuable equipment as all the spell scrolls the mage has gotten over their career, will probably have half a dozen spells they can use or more. Sunblade, Helm of Brilliance, Bracers of Blinding Speed etc. are examples of equipment considered roughly equal in value to high level spells (IIRC). - Enemy immunities. Sooooo many high lvl enemies come with long lists of damage types, status conditions and spell effects they are flat out immune to. And because Mages are less flexible thanks to preparing individual spellslots, this is actually very dangerous for them to deal with. A horde of Skeletal Warriors aren't going to care in the least that you tossed out Horrid Wilting, for example, because they are just completely unaffected. - Magic Resistance (MR). Related to the last post, but works slightly differently. MR is a % chance a creature has to just be immune to any spell that doesn't specifically get around MR. A lot of high tier creatures have this. You can use spells to reduce MR, but that takes turns and spellslots. For Clerics: - Cleric magic was a lot weaker than it is now, capping at 7th level spells and typically being a lot more restrictive with who it could be used on (lots of self-only, lots of alignment restricted spells). The main problem in AD&D, I think, isn't so much the Fighter vs Wizard thing. Instead, the main thing making Fighters less than ideal was the Fighter/Mage and Fighter/Cleric type hybrid characters (multi- and dual class) that brough enough of the Fighters martial abilities while also having spells. I think that sometimes things like material components for Mages in AD&D 2e are forgotten, since they weren't implemented in the old Bladur's Gate and Icewind Dale games, nor most of the Gold- and Silverbox RPGs. These games also couldn't really react to the player pre-buffing, which would be much harder to do with a DM controlled enemy who would probably notice if there was suddenly a lightshow at the entrance to their base. Fighters are also underperforming in those games, because most non-combat proficiencies weren't implemented in the game, apart from (some) Thief skills, Lore and Charisma. Fighters had, I believe, the second highest number of non-combat proficiencies, after the Thief.
@@nonenone-hv5iq By introducing much needed quality of life improvements to casters, because they were legitimately awful to play, but without doing the same for martials. But martials haven't just been stagnant the last 40 years; they've regressed. A 5e Fighter is less capable of scaling into higher levels, while also dealing with enemies with higher HP and has more competition from the "Fighter-variants" (Ranger, Paladin), who no longer requires meaningful tradeoffs compared to the Fighter. In fact, they're often just better.
@@nonenone-hv5iq because nobody wanted to play the classes that could straight up become useless if they didn't constantly rest and plan ahead. The way people talk about monks was the way people talked about every magic class. They didn't even have cantrips. They had level 0 spells that did like 1d3 damage, didn't scale, and could be run out of
@@TheTdroid As far as I recall, it also might be influenced by them in some ways pursuing shifting back to 3.5 design in many ways where martials in general were bottom tier. More broadly there are ways to boost martials but I wonder if some small part of the problem is class fantasy. The fantasy of a mage is to cast magical spells and in a game where you eventually fight demigods or even gods and with a legacy of powerful spells, those spells sort of are wedged in. You can tweak this, Pathfinder 2e nerfed casters to help bridge this gap, but it will lead to grousing about how casters can't do anything (regardless of how much merit that is to that although it does seem acknowledged that even for people pretty satisfied with 2e casters at the lowest levels are genuinely bad to play). Martials in many ways have the opposite. Sure, there are people all for heroic fighters able to hammer the earth to shatter it or opting for Book of Nine Swords style combat but there's also a ton of people that want fighters for example to be complete regular joes that are just good at hitting things and that significantly impedes their potential.
@@brycejordan8987Part of the problem is that the expectations from the fanbase and the design choices by the developers do not match the system they are making. You can't really have low fantasy classes in a system with high fantasy classes. I think a lot of video games do this so much better than dnd, like the Dragon Age series. Like the Warrrior class. Whatt are Warriors? Some are "just" Warriors, of course, those with proper training are so much more Templars and Reavers being explicitly supernatural and extremely powerful, both in lore and gameplay, as an example. What about Rogues? While a bit basic in Origins, since Dragon Age 2, they have been heavily flavored as using alchemy to bridge the gap between themselves and supernatural beings. Alchemy built on magical ingredients. Rogues are also exceptionally good at what they do. On top of this, playable characters with the Mage class are far below the magical potential for the Dragon Age universe. So while Mages like Corypheus are beyond the power of any single Warrior or Rogue, he is also just as far beyond any Mage you can play or add to your party.
DnD 3.5 Book of Nine swords had IMHO, best martial classes. Disciplines, stances, maneuvers. Also, there was some fun mechanics, like Crusader getting random maneuvers. It does go a bit wuxia route sometimes, but it gives martials more than just - i attack with weapon and in the same time it doesn't move them in the GISH territory like 5e gives all martial classes at least one gish subclass. Big problem is that vancian magic is high fantasy and it doesn't mesh well with low fantasy low power games. That's why sweet spot is levels 3-8, as in those levels pure martial characters still feel useful. After that, magic just becomes to good. After lv 10, martials are just lackluster and subpar and they just need magic to keep up, cause wizards slowly enter demigod power levels, while martials remain in good mortal levels. Imho, best option is to just cap games to lv 8, or for higher levels, every one plays caster of some kind.
Another alternative, of course, is to simply state at the fore-front that any character without spellcasting abilities will have more magic items than anyone else. Possibly even more 1 more attunement slot. Magic items do a lot for martials, and in old school D&D, they usually ended up with more because they were the only ones who could use many of the items that weren't scrolls and potions, such as magic weapons.
Even at level 3 in some games it’s rough for martials. Like in 5e, web kills melee enemies virtually automatically on a failed saving throw. Hypnotic pattern knocks out half a combat, animate dead can do more collective dpr than a fighter at equal levels for every level past 6, and so on.
Big problem is that all the maneuvers are basically just damage and debuff spells. The flavor is so supernatural that the classes can hardly be called martials anymore, and they still don't get any utility in the way mages do.
In the old game, martials got most of the magic items, and casters were severely limited in spells at low level. That didn’t make them equal at higher levels, but it helped. Of course, before 1e, spells only went to 6th level, so there has been a lot of caster bloat over the years.
yeah a big problem with casters is ironically a lot of QoL improvements made over the generations has lead to a huge amount of power creep. Like sure it was super annoying to have to manually prepare spells in each spell slot every day, but making all casters able to cast things more freely only further increases their versatility and such.
IMO, depending on the style of game I would argue that a well equipped Ranger is going to out preform a caster in damage, in Pathfinder 1e. Sounds like a modern game problem. The other half is that DM's probably play too nice, depending what level your characters are, freedom of movement, spell resistance, blind fight, this all exists. Modern gamers strike as me "too nice" which allows spellcasters to exploit the mechanics way more freely. Admittedly all from an outsider perspective, finding a group to play with is a lot harder than theory crafting, but I watched a few games here and there.
The other meta reason is that casters have more to read and thus more time (and money) invested in their build. Many tables and all publishing businesses are incentivized to reward that investment with greater power. Casters' power is gated behind a paywall of investment. Which would be nearly fine, if tables didn't need martials for party composition and as part of the fantasy.
Yeah that sorta ties into my comments about how casters just have a lot more content being them as well as a unified system that they’re able to more easily expand upon with every new book.
Sort of, but not really. I mean, so many of the top tier spells for all classes are either Basic Rules or Player's Handbook. With just those two lists, you'll outperform every non-caster. Martials, however, are arguably more dependent on newer releases, because that's where you get a lot of the subclasses you need to not feel *entirely* useless.
There's a lot of things that got left by the wayside that led to this. Sure, a handful of about 20-30 spells need to be nerfed. Big standouts like Fireball, Conjure Animals, Silvery Barbs, Shield, Pass Without Trace, Spirit Guardians, Goodberry, etc. Spellcasters need to not be able to cast spells or access spell slots from classes that don't provide proficiency for the armor they're wearing. Immediately, this cuts out most of the cheese, and makes things like cover make more sense to be exclusive to ranged players now that they're actually squishy like they should be as a tradeoff for their utility and burst power. Meanwhile, martials need "martial maneuvers" that work like Eldritch Invocations and give them a wide array of abilities to pick from with just as much flexibility as casters get. From teleporting around the battlefield with rogues, to slashing through a whole field at once with fighters, to punching an earthquake from the ground with monks, to leaping hundreds of feet onto enemies without suffering fall damage with barbarians. In a recent breakdown video on the Awakened Mind feature of the Scribes Wizard, my immediate thought about how powerful, unique and always-on it is, was "this is the kind of thing martials should be getting. Why is this on what's already the most powerful, flexible class in the game?" It extends beyond having more features to choose from, customization, burst damage, control, and late-game power. Even just at level one with cantrips, spellcasters are given features and are accomplishing things beyond the ordinary person. A fighter might be a head above the typical town guard, but a wizard is already unlocking the secrets of the weave. A warlock is communing with deities. A cleric has been recognized and gifted power by a literal god. Magic says "it's okay to bend reality. That's what's expected." Meanwhile, try reading the rules on a Barbarian performing a standing high or running jump. In a world where 13 Charisma will let you sing life into existence or bend the (...ear?) of a Great Old One, 20 Strength will let you jump 8 feet into the air.
yeah one of the big ways I'd like to limit casters somewhat is to actually make Spell Schools important again. If say an Abjuration Wizard actually had to focus almost entirely on just Abjuration spells, instead of still being able to take Fireball and Force Cage and various Summon spells like every caster does, then that would vastly limit their insane versatility. And then yeah in turn if Battlemaster was considered more of a baseline for what a Martial was capable of, and then you could stack other subclass abilities on top of things like Maneuvers, then maybe we could have something there
I think the major problem is not so much the raw numbers and options available on paper but rather how the DM acts during the preparing and running of the encounters. Most veteran DMs understands (or should atleast) that being a caster does not exclude a character from being targeted or being dogpiled if they seem like the easiest or the most dangerous target by the enemies in any given situation. This type of approach towards running encounters incentives the players to use reactionary spells (such as the shield and absorb element spells) and/or defensive buff spells (mirror image, haste, invisibility and aid are a few examples) more often rather than just blasting the enemy which kinda limits how many spells a caster has access to and spells slots available at any given moment. The same applies to utility spells, sure a fly spell can get you on top of the castle wall without making a sound but that also means that you have 1 less use of fireball if the guards 5 min later during a patrol.
a lot of it definitely comes down to the game is run. Probably the biggest factor that actually determines the balance of the game is the Resource Management aspect I brought up. If you actually run a game with 6-8 encounters before the casters can get a long rest, and in turn are forcing them to actually spend all their spell slots carefully so that they actually risk running out, and thus lose access to all their big flashy AoE and utility abilities. the problem is of course that that's only one way to run a game and D&D now appeals to a broad range of players now and the system isn't very good at adapting to different styles of campaigns. The real improvement that needs to be made is making the game more flexible so that people don't accidentally make the problem worse than it already is.
@@BlazeMakesGames The way adventuring days are constructed, you can't run any fewer than 3 Deadly encounters and still constitute a full day. And the difficulty of those encounters make it so that they normally require spending more resources than a typical encounter. If DMs are running 1-2 encounters per day that don't tax long rest resources, then they are basically running the system off the books. And for the DMs that do want to run 1 encounter per day narrative/overland games, there is a rest variant that lends itself to that style of gameplay, people just don't use it. Maybe it can be argued that the system should do a better job of making these options known or bridging the gap between 1 encounter days and multi-encounter dungeon crawls (maybe the adventuring day rules should span from 1-5 encounters per day instead of 3-8). However, a lot of imbalance just comes from people not running the game how it was written.
@@jeffreybond5796 I am sympathetic to players however. Encounters can easily eat up a lot of time planning things out and pacing can be miserable and awkward when you have to intentionally cramming in 3 deadly encounters (+2 short rests) into every day that's an actual adventuring day.
As a DM I address this by 1. Reduce a lot of the magic items that casters benefit from (e.g. metamagic rods - which are essentially buying a feat), 2. Actively target casters as a priority for intelligent enemies (so they must spend resources on defence), 3. Use non-combat challenges (so the casters must spend resources on utility) 4. Design encounters that involve attacks from multiple directions so that area control and caster defence are much harder. 5. Enemies also have access to magic. 6. Disallow casters that are over-powered (e.g. Summoners in Pathfinder 1). 7. Each encounter 'responds' to the pcs so that enemies may arrive in waves, pursue the pcs, activate defences, etc - so the battle will almost certainly be more than one battle and will be drawn out into a series of encounters,
Yeah there’s definitely a lot of good practices you can do and by all means all of those things are good for both making combat more engaging and interesting and also make sense. I just wish that these games weren’t in a state where if you don’t follow those kinds of steps, the scale just flies to one side as the casters dominate everything.
Also removing the requirement on items that inherently cast magic rather than augment spellcasting Helps to give martial characters more versatility. As I think nobody would mind the Monk using a wand of Acid Splash Or the rogue using a scroll of invisibility.
When it comes to 'area of effect': I mainly play Pathfinder, but I also do a little 'Starfinder' as well. The 'Soldier' class can do some decent 'area of effect' attacks thanks to firearm weapons with the 'automatic' feature, as well as lobbing grenades, so I guess that helps balance out him vs Casters.
yeah a number of more sci-fi settings tend to solve a lot of these problems by adding more kinds of weapons with unique effects so that casters aren't the only ones able to do things like elemental damage or like you said being able to use grenades for AoEs. Not to mention that in such settings Magic is usually de-emphasized. I believe in Starfinder there aren't any full casters by default which is a huge boon to everyone else.
Elemental resistances would be a caster disadvantage if they didn't have a number of other spells with other damage types, meanwhile martials have to pray their DM is not stingy with a low-level magic weapon, and god forbid the enemy resistance is not to non-magic weapons.
Yeah there are definitely other games that do a lot better job of solving these problems. I’m personally a fan of most of the Warhammer 40k RPGs for that regard, especially since magic in that game is extremely volatile and dangerous
You should take a look at PF2e. The 3-action system gives martials lots of options while casters retain their options from spell selection, but lose on relative flexibility since most spells cost at least 2 actions. There's a lot more to the system than just that, and I think it's the best attempt to tackle this problem yet.
Yeah I like a lot of what I’ve seen of PF2e, and I remember as far back as the playtest that the 3-action system was one of my favorite parts of it. But for whatever reason I’ve never felt motivated to get into it. I should at least try it but I have to admit I’m not a huge fan of the number bloat after years of games like 5e and Wrath and Glory and the like
@@BlazeMakesGames even if you don't want to play it regularly, which I totally understand, I think it's more than worth a few sessions to get a feel for the many ways they bridged the martial/caster gap. Also, first time players are intimidated by the big numbers, but the tight math and steady progression makes the whole experience more seamless than just reading through the book might suggest. I say that as someone that was completely burned out by 3.5 and never thought of going back to a crunchier system.
@@BlazeMakesGames The "number bloat" is mostly just adding your level to stuff you're proficient with. The game can barely be handled without digital tools more-so because of circumstantial modifiers and the more in-depth conditions, than because your roll might have a +25 to it. Something like Foundry for those with a wallet, or simply using Pathbuilder 2e for all your character sheets and creation on a regular tabletop (costs like only $4 if you want to toggle on certain optional rules like extra archetype feats), makes it way easier. Outside of adding your level, it's very similar to 5e. You have training ranks in your proficiencies and each one is +2, from trained to legendary (+8), and then ability scores. Not far off from 5e at all. Often times, you won't even see Legendary, as that rank is primarily for skills (anyone can get those), or specific classes whose main feature is being legendary (Monks and Champions getting Legendary armor training, Fighters getting Legendary weapon training).
Martials are also just more multi ability score dependent than casters. Casters more often than not require a single stat to rely upon meanwhile the barbarian requires at least three or four to be effective which puts a strain on the number of feats they can take and their ability to function overall.
Mhm some classes suffer more than others in this regard. Rogues are usually okay with just focusing on Dexterity, but even then that's only really because Dexterity is inherently the strongest stat in the game. But most any other Martial needs to invest in their main attack stat of either Strength or Dex, and then also needs to invest in Constitution a fair bit in order to survive better on the front lines. And then you have characters like Monks who need to invest in Dex, Con, *and* Wisdom in order to be competent at what they do. Meanwhile just about every caster can get all of their Offensive, Defensive, and Utility abilities from just their main casting stat. Not to mention that Mental stats generally come with more skills and tools that use them while stats like Con don't have any and Strength is pretty much just used for Athletics. I've thought previously about how I wish they brought back things like having a high Intelligence giving you bonus languages like it did in older games, but that would only make the problem worse lol.
I wouldn't necessarily say that's the case. There's kind of two rungs. (This is Ignoring subclasses that complicate this in both directions) SAD: Most classes need a 15+STR or 14+Dex for their AC, most classes need a good to decent Con (frontliners & casters in particular), & then they need their main stat. MAD: Sans multiclasses or niche builds: Paladins, Monks, Rangers, and Barbarians all fit this category although Paladins and Monks are likely the most MAD. It's honestly a weird jumble of martials & half casters here.
I think a big issue is just what the people designing these games consider each class's endstate to be. A max level wizard is a reality warping demigod, a max level Warlock is basically the avatar for their "god" in the mortal realm, and a max level druid is effectively all of nature's beauty and wrath incarnate. As a result when it comes to abilities not even the sky is the limit, reality is their plaything. Meanwhile a max level fighter is Aragon from The Lord Of The Rings. Stronger than any ordinary human, yes, lethal in physical combat indeed. However when looking at them from the eyes of even a half-caster in the lategame brings to mind a Darksied quote. "Super or otherwise you are merely a man, and I am a god." As for a solution, I'm sure its been suggested a bunch of times, but give them wacky fantasy/anime powers. Hercules split a mountain rather than bother to walk up it and created The Strait of Gibraltar. If they used strength like that as a baseline for endgame Martials, why can't a fighter at max level swing their sword hard enough to shoot shockwaves, an archer fire an arrow with such force it creates a pressure wave that damages anything near the target, or a monk leap into the air and chokeslam a dragon into the ground to hard it leaves a crater?
Yeah this philosophy is absolutely at the core of the problem. It feels like they're designing different games when they make Martial Characters vs Magical ones. Even in the new 5.5 update that's coming out, it feels like they at least tried a little with things like Epic Boons and some general all around buffs. But even still we're looking at a character who can do things like shoot a guy so hard that they get knocked back 40 feet, which is pretty impressive, vs someone who can summon Meteors lol. I think another big part of the problem is just the nature of how magic works in general. Wizards get only 1 9th level spell slot for example. So in their mind they're like "Well they can only cast this once per day right? That means we can make it as overpowered as we want!" and as a result even with just that one spell slot, the wizard will just dominate in the fight they use it. Combined with how most people play D&D these days with only a couple encounters per day, and suddenly it feels like wizards are getting free 9th level spells all the time while the fighter just knocks people around.
One of the things that would help martials is having more options that casters simply cannot use, Such as Lead Armor which requires a 17 in Strength and gives protection against Spell Attacks Or Heavy Weapons that allow you to choose an elemental damage type to inflict as an aoe. Or weapons that scale with a specfic class' levels, Much like how spells and spell casting foci are often exclusive to specific casters.
Here's a list of fixes for martials. 1. Add one more damage die to each weapon. 2. Bump up the monk's martial arts die by at least one. 3. Make a bunch of bonus actions for martials: jump, shove, the rogues canny actions, take the ki point costs off the monk's weaker version of canny action. 4. Make the Healer feat scale with level and act exactly like the cure wounds spell. 5. Give bonuses for spending hit dice during a rest. 6. When all else fails, give the enemy boss a charm that creates an anti magic field.
those things may help (especially the last one) but the core of the issue has never been about damage. Martials are already the best at dealing single-target damage even in the game's current state. What they need is more access to things like AoE abilities to hit multiple enemies at once. Things like Whirlwind attack or Volley from that one ranger subclass. The additional bonus actions would also be nice but that still leaves their main attacks as fairly boring "Run up and hit it with my sword" style options without much variety. Keep in mind the issue isn't just about balancing how much damage they do, it's about making the classes more varied and fun to play. So having more ways of attacking that are able to perform more effects is more of what I would focus on.
Great video. Very well said and very well presented. If you continue to do TTRPG videos I would not be upset. Not talking negative on your already produced content, but this that shit I do like lol
Well thought out video, but I think you do fall into some traps. 1) Damage output - I think it's ok for characters to have damage niches. Overall most of the time martials will out compete casters for damage in single boss encounters. I think the only change I'd really want to see in terms of damage balancing here, is a reduction or removal of cantrip scaling. 5e set a standard that spells don't scale with character level, with the exception of cantrips. Casters otherwise actually have a much harder time landing damage. Damage resistances, saving throws bonuses (Legendary Resistances), magical resistance. All of these can really hamper the damage output of high level casters. 2) I think it's a bit unfair to look at hit points. As stated they get more, and in actuality, it's quiet bit more when you compare HP from both max HP and from hit dice. Also, casters should be spending some of their resources to restore hit points to the party. We also need to consider the effects of AoE in the damage case and hit points. One of the game's core design targets is a big monster with a AoE breathe attack. A dragon or something, maybe they should put this in the title to make it more clear. Seriously, a big monster with an AoE hits both the single target and shared damage benchmarks which addresses both of the primary concerns of point #1 and #2 3 + 4) Yeah, hands down it's casters. But it kinda needs to be. I think martials can get more utility for sure but I don't think they will ever be able to compete here. Unless you want to add silly, immersion breaking abilities. At this point, I should say martials exist to fulfill specifics fantasy. If you want to play a guy with a sword, I don't think you'd also want to be summoning roots from the ground to hold enemies in place. That said, why can't a martial hit someone and do something like a slowing strike is beyond me. They did this in 4e and got negative feedback, called MMO design, and everyone just used twin-strikes anyways since damage is king. 7) I think this is the biggest issue with 5e design. There's no modular system for martial characters. I will say, you should give PF2e a shot. It pretty much improves all of these issues in their entirety. Addressing the utility issue, in Pf2e I really like skill actions that let you do things like feint, demoralize, etc with your skills.
Yeah there's a lot of nuance to the points. Martials do deal more single target damage if you optimize them right, but I just don't think it's enough to really stand out compared to the most basic spells. Either they need to deal a lot more damage without having to look up a build online, or they could use some slight AoE abilities. And even when it comes to taking AoE damage, it's often the caster that is better equipped to handle it. Part of the problem is that Casters have a lot more ways to actually negate damage. A Fighter can pretty much just hope they pass that Reflex save and take the damage, meanwhile the Caster can use Absorb Elements regardless of if they pass or fail. And if they pass on top of that, then they're only taking a quarter of the damage. So it's not like they're taking their fair share of the damage all the time either. But yeah overall I'm not saying that Martials need to be able to use some martial version of fireball or that they need to somehow be as insanely useful as spells are out of combat. But right now they have so painfully little to work with that it feels like playing a Fighter compared to a Wizard is like playing a completely different game with a different power scaling. They should be able to do at least *some* noteworthy feats by the time that Wizards are casting spells capable of decimating entire armies.
@@BlazeMakesGames Absorb elements is a perfect example as how expanded spell lists continue to fill in weaknesses in the caster tool kit, as it was added in Elemental Evil . WotC needed to be far more careful in adding reaction spells. Most every reaction spell is an A to S+ tier. I think shield is ok, and counterspell much has to be a reaction by necessity. But absorb elements and silvery barbs show that reaction spells have the ability to be entirely gameplay redefining.
I don’t think the gap in the number of options between the fighter and the wizard is necessarily a problem but I do think the power of a fighter’s options can afford to be bumped up to be more in line with the spellcasters. Ofc the problem with that is multi-classing, personally I’d like to avoid encouraging even more / level dips into fighters by spellcasters. The easiest solution is to make these bonuses scale with class level so martials are rewarded for sticking with their class. I’d make second wind just a regular regeneration effect that is equal to your fighter class level so at level 2 you get 2 hitpoints back at the end of your turn every turn and at level 20 you get back 20. And I’d have action surge improve so you can use it once per encounter at fighter level 7 or whatever and once per turn at end game. I’d also make it so the fighter gets a couple of battlefield control options, probably some kind of taunt This is a rough idea but I think it’d bring the fighter more in line with the casters without necessarily changing the idea of the class as a resource less one. I don’t have as clear a idea on what to do with a barbarian since they feel like a worse fighter but I think the subclasses that improve rage have the right idea and I’d just lean into that more I guess
The main reason I bring up the number of options and the way those options are designed, is that Spellcasters tend to experience a unique form of Power Creep due to the ease of expanding upon the spell system with nearly every single new book. Meanwhile most martial characters all use their own unique resource systems to the point where even their subclasses will have unique resources used nowhere else in the game, and as a result, it is unwieldy to print new content for those classes and subclasses. So they remain static as time goes on, while Casters keep getting new content and only continue to grow in power and versatility. Otherwise yeah those are some interesting ideas, though I would tweak them somewhat. For instance there is actually a new ability that the Champion Fighter gets that gives them passive Health Regen but is limited to only restoring them up to half Health. That way they still need proper healing beyond that point and don't just become Wolverine, but it still dramatically increases their ability to survive numerous long fights in a row.
@@BlazeMakesGames Fair. I think that's what WoTC is trying to solve through the weapon specialization effects, although those are too limited at the moment to really compete with spellcasting. If they opened up the design limitations more (for example allowing fighters to choose which specialization applies on a round by round basis) it might someday be a versatile and interesting system. I think maybe there should also be special actions only martials can do - stuff that gives more battlefield control or single target damage or whatever, and you can scale martials up by adding to that pool. I'm not a fan of just giving martials a universal resource like spellcasters but yeah martials would benefit alot from an inbuilt easily designed way for them to benefit from power creep and feature creep, as I doubt WotC would or could stop making spells for spellcasting going into the future
One way to close the gap is magic weapons. But those are few and far between. The Moon Touched Sword is the only common magic weapon in the game. Cheapest in the market at 100 gold. There are spellcasting variants to the martial characters. Eldritch Knight, Arcane Trickster, Four Elements Monk, Sun Soul Monk. Rangers can have and use Druid spells. Barbarians have Path of Wild Magic. And there are three feats that grant spellcasting abilities. Magic Initiate, Artificer Initiate, Aberrant Dragon Mark. Limited but can be used by marshals. Melee spells like Shocking Grasp can be used in place of weapons.
Yeah I’ve always preferred the way magic weapons worked in some older games, where you could add more abilities to them and really customize them. If weapons specifically were changed to work like that in 5e it could be a great way to give martials an interesting way to improve their abilities
I feel that a decent solution is for all martials to share a Martial Arts system that would be similar to the spell system but have major differences in rules. Then expansions could give out new spells and also new martial arts moves. Off the top of my head: *Your Kata, the moves available in combat, contains a number of Art Slots depending on Class, Attributes, Level and Skills. *Arts aren't consumed, unlike spells, so you can just keep using them indefinitely. (Some Arts might consume resources.) *Arts are available depending on prerequisites. Hybrid Martial Arts might consume resources like Sorcery Points, Ki, or Channel Divinity. *Arts would include some Utility moves. *Classes interact with Martial Arts in different ways; some are 'prepared martials', others are 'spontaneous martials', etc. Prepared martials can redesign their Kata over a long rest, replacing moves from their list of Learned Arts.
Yeah I wouldn’t want it to be too similar to spells, but something akin to the battle master’s maneuvers but with a more expansive and generalized system that’s available to more classes would be a fun idea.
Here some simple solutions I would give: 1. Give spellcasters less spells. Prepared casters can prep their casting mod + class level. I would changw this to cost mod + proficiency bonus. The casters end up having less options of spells makes each choice an important one. 2. Give the battle master manuevers to all martials across the board. This basically turns into the martials' version of spellcasting, makes it easier to release more stuff for martials in future supplements. 3. Take the mighty deeds die mechanic from DCC and give it to all martials. This way, only martials get to do "called shots" essentially. 4. Give every martial fighting styles. I jsut don't see why not? It can doesn't *not* fit, especially since 5e is a combat focused game. There's more I'd list for specific classes, but these are my own personal ideas for just martials overall. Good job on the well made video! 👍
Thanks! I personally think that the issue isn't even that spellcasters have too many spells or can cast too many spells. It's that they have access to too much variety of spells. For example if an Illusionist Wizard was actually limited to only casting Illusion spells, their niche in the party would be a lot more specific and they wouldn't be able to do things like blow up encounters with a fireball. And an Evocation wizard might be able to blow up things with fireballs, but they wouldn't have a ton of out-of-combat utility. If spell schools actually mattered and acted as a limiting factor for most casters, I think that would be one of the better ways to 'nerf' casters. Plus it would mean that 2 people in a party could play the same class like a wizard, and not feel like they're playing the same character. But yeah for your other points I definitely think Martials need universal Maneuvers. I actually kinda like where OD&D is going right now with Weapon Masteries, as they do sorta act like Maneuvers except that they cost no resources so they can be used on every attack, even when you action surge, but I do wish they were more like Maneuvers to make them less clunky
Main reason that casters are stronger is that they have access to: SUMMON MARTIAL Be it conjure animals, animate objects, summon lesser (or greater) demons, all of them can provide anywhere from 2-8 attacks a turn, and basically comprise an entire front line marital in just a single spell. The only requirement on the caster being that they need to try not take damage for a bit and can only have one of these (concentration) spells at a time. They can even follow it up with other spells on their next turn. And that is nothing compared to their ultimate ability: Simulacrum, a high level spell that literally allows for the cloning of a character at a steep gold cost. Want to prove the level 20 wizard is better than the level 20 fighter? The level 20 wizard can do fully functional wizard things while having a copy of the level 20 fighter as a minion under its control (except it can't heal, but the spell could be recast) Second important thing about damage output: In your example, the heavy weapon master feat gives a 25% increased chance to miss an attack, in addition, on a miss, the attack deals no damage. That is, while a meteor swarm still deals half damage, even if the enemy succeeds. (you mentioned this) In addition, a well build caster can exploit weak Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, while mostly relying on wisdom, while most martials only get to beat at AC. Finally, meteor swarm has a 1 mile range, however even lower level equivalents, like fireball still have a good 60-150 feet range. While a lot of fighter optimization happens in melee, making their damage inconsistent, as melee is not always achievable (for example against flying enemies) (this is mostly based on dnd 5e) I would like to add, that especially in dnd 5e, a big part of caster power is a few overturned spells. For example, casters should be really vunrable, a wizard starts off only with 6-8 HP compared to a Barbarians 12-14 or Paladins 10-12. In addition, wizards usually have worse defensive options. This however stops to hold outlier spells enter the equasion, The shield spell, while resource intensive, provides the benefit of 2 and a half shields at the same time. The absorb elements spell allows for halving elemental damage, and as you get to other still easily available options like phantom steed, a spell that allows you to get a horse with a 30 kilometer per hour speed with no turning radius or downsides at all, allowing for effortless kiting, or counterspell, being straight up able to deny enemy spellcasters, caster defenses are just great. However it is just these few outlier options, without counterspell being an automatic best answer to casters, martials might be able to compete with grapples and such. And if shield and silvery barbs got addressed, most frail old men can no longer wave their pinky toe and avoid an attack for minimal cost, requiring other, more unreliable or expensive options like blink. Same is true with attack, Fireball is the posterchild of caster damage, purely because it and lightning bolt (same damage, different type and line instead of sphere) straight up outdamage any comparable option, even up to 5th level spells are sometimes just a worse fireball with flavor text effects. Nerfing a few of these spells, like fireball, would basically make casters way more tame, and have them explore other options, that while still great are not as powerful.
thankfully they're reworking all the conjuration spells in the next update so we got that to look forwards to. Hopefully we see them address a lot of the other problem children too. Hell I honestly still feel like casters get access to certain spells way too fast. Like even if Fireball was reduced to like 6d6 damage or whatever, it's still an insanely good AoE that they get access to at the same level that Martials get the ability to swing a sword two times instead of one. But yeah I did oversimplify the martial damage comparison, but mostly in favor of the martial just to show how bad it is even before you take into account things like accuracy.
Another thing to consider is Magic Items. The best magic Items are limited to Caster classes. Staff of Power is the strongest weapon in the game, and Robes of the Archmagi are the strongest armor, and they are caster exclusive.
meanwhile a martial often needs basic magic items like a magic sword and whatnot to even be able to deal damage to lots of high level enemies. A naked caster with nothing but a wand and a dream can often still outperform a martial with a full loadout of gear and magic items.
@@BlazeMakesGames Also, most Caster items give them essentially free spells known and spell slots. Given that the small number of them is meant to be the limiting factor in Casters...
I think the biggest issue is that Magic has an automatic balance with components, but due to the bore it is to keep track of your spell components and track how many you are carrying. so most everyone just opts to ignore materail components except for the really powerful spells. Forcing your Druid to have to use the material components to cast moon beam say, balances it out easily but it spoils the fun of the players as they now have to book keep even more and the game slows to a grind as the magic users need to routinely go on downtime to gather more spell components.
I mean yeah the issue there is that balancing through inconvenience just makes the class less fun rather than any less powerful. It's not exactly hard to get your hands on most spell components since they're super cheap and a lot of them are basic things you'd find in nature like grass or bat guano or common materials like silver. And frankly it's only logical that in most settings where it is known how useful having a bunch of these materials on hand can be, that there would be fairly common shops and other institutions that would sell those materials just about everywhere, which is then simplified and abstracted into the spell component pouch. But even if you didn't make it trivial to get all those materials, it's still just more bookkeeping that would slow the table down dramatically, make the class more annoying to play, and not really address any of the core problems. Like yeah maybe the wizard wouldn't be able to cast fireball as easily as soon as they hit level 5. But you can bet that during every single downtime that they get they're going to be searching caves and shops for bat guano and sulfer. And then once they do find it they're going to gather/buy enough of it to never have to worry about it again and we're right back to square 1. Unless of course you plan on just making this be a world where bat shit and sulfer just is impossible to find. But then that raises other issues like A) then why would the spell work like that and B) then instead of wasting everyone's time just say that you're banning the spell from your game and skip all the extra pointless steps. But my overall point is that while it is true that GMs can modify the game and play different ways to try and mitigate these issues, they shouldn't be having to so much. The game should be better able to adapt to different play styles without having to make the GM have to do all this extra work.
Non-casters should have much stronger reactions than what's available, borderline supernatural stuff give the reactions like Shield & Counterspell available to casters. I'd also give non-pure casters a 2nd reaction starting at lvl 11. Martials should have limited access to reactions of similar power level to counterspell. They should be much more of a nuisance to enemies in combat, especially spellcaster enemies, otherwise they just wouldn't survive logistically. Spellcasters would take them out inevitably, given enough save or die type rolls or big burst dmg spells. By level 5 you'd absolutely require a method that can null, absorb, deflect, reflect, or greatly mitigate at least 1 spell per day to survive in such high magic settings as an adventurer. The threat of powerful reactions more than the actual use of the reactions should be something martials milk to prevent being blown out by casters. Even if in reality they have fairly limited ability to employ these, the caster doesn't necessarily know if they are able to perform it unless they've seen it used in the last day or try to bait it out with other spells before unleashing the big booms. I'm thinking stuff like: Paladin: Spell Mirror 1/day. As a reaction when a spell includes you as a target, you gain advantage on the save if there is a save. Whatever effects or damage you suffer from the spell after it resolves, the caster suffers too. Works with single target, multi-target, AoE, and spells without saves. Reaction declared after spell is declared, but before spell resolves (before saves, dmg rolls, & spell effect tables) Fighter: Interception 1/day. As a reaction move adjacent to an enemy within your move speed & intercept all of its attacks & spells, causing each attack/spell it tries to make against others to instead target you. For each attack or spell cast the enemy makes against you this round, you riposte & roll a weapon attack against the enemy afterward. You roll your riposte attack immediately after each attack or spell targeting you resolves (if you are able to attack). Yes, you can intercept enemy buffs & hit them in the face for it. Yes if you're within move range you can make an enemy AoE explode in their face, then hit them in the face. Yes you can take a full multi-attack instead of your wizard & riposte for each hit in the multi-attack. Monk: Null Body 1/day. As a reaction chose a damage type & gain immunity to it until you make a move, reaction, or action. All attacks against you continue as normal until the next character's turn. If you have immunity or resistance already for that type, in addition to full immunity gain temporary hitpoints equal to the amount of damage rolled against you up to an amount equal to your max HP. They cannot be restored by healing when depleted & last up to 24h. Barbarian: Mage Eater 1/day. When targeted by a spell, as a reaction choose to automatically fail the spell save or automatically be hit by a spell attack & suffer it's effects. In exchange you delay the spell effects & gain an additional turn which proceeds immediately, ending the spell caster's turn. Within that extra turn, you gain 1 temporary hp (up to your max hp, 24h dur) for every 1hp of dmg you deal to the spellcaster who targeted you with the spell. At the end of your extra turn the spell effects activate on you & you suffer any damage or disabling status effects immediately. Rogue: Spell Siphon 1/day. As a reaction to a spell with a spell save including you as a target, make a weapon attack against the spell DC. If you fail, the spell continues as normal & you roll a save as a normal. If you succeed, a copy of the spell is stored in your weapon & all of the original target(s) automatically succeed on their spell saves. If you land an attack (melee or ranged) with your weapon within 3 rounds, it unleashes the spell with the weapon attack target as the spell target & the spell DC you succeeded your attack against (including any modifiers at that time). Ranger: Deflector 1/day. As a reaction against a spell or ability with a save that targets a square or character within 60 feet of you (burst AoE like fireball, single or multi-target spell saves), make an attack against the spell DC with a ranged or throwable weapon (you can freely draw a thrown weapon if one is within reach). If you succeed, the spell activates on any square of your choosing on the shortest line between the caster & the target of the spell (not their squares). If you fail, the spell continues as normal. Yes, fireball can blow up in their face. No real effect on line, cone, or burst AoE.
I've said it once, and I'll say it again. Every martial class should have gotten Battle Maneuvers (or at least their equivalent to it). It just makes sense. Wanna know what doesn't make sense? The fact that only BMs have good enough aim to snipe an object out of someone's hands, or can swing their weapon wide enough to hit multiple creatures, or freakin' parry! That would give martials their own "standardized thing" and would allow WotC to actively buff martials as much as they do spellcasters.
yeah Weapon Masteries are some level of an attempt to implement something like that but i do feel like while it is nice, it still woefully falls short of what it could have been
This is why I'm glad my group is letting me DM Pathfinder 1e. Everyone can perform the combat maneuvers, but martials are far better. Sure they still aren't as good as higher casters for AoE control, but at least they can do so all day.
As a Pathfinder 1E player, casters are very much overwhelmingly more powerful then martials. However the one thing casters can't compete with martials at all is dealing damage. There are often unexperienced GMs asking for help on forums/reddit on how to handle martials who are full-round attacking their BBEG from full hit points to zero in one turn. Now don't get me wrong, in some ways, in PF1E, the gap between casters and martials is BIGGER than it is in DnD 5E, that's undisputable. But at least martials are good at ONE thing.
Yeah I personally consider the gap in “fun” to be far more important than the gap in power level or comparing single-target to AoE damage. Because even when a martial is stacking tons of abilities to maximize their output, the end result is usually just “so I run up and I hit it with my sword and it dies”
Or you could look beyond the rules and look at the problems inherent in D&D and it's compatriots. D&D originally was a hodge pot from several classic fantasy stories that were never meant to mix and no one ever went through the problems that brings with it. Look at the stories before D&D and you'll notice that spellcasters were always on the low end or not part of the adventuring group. The more powerful spellcasters were often corrupted by their power as they needed to sacrifice people to gain that power. Rarely were there powerful spellcasters that were nice or just helpful. The early Spellcasters were the Cleric that focused on healing spells with a few buff and combat spells. The Druid was in a similar situation. The Wizard had to see where they learned new spells, which was mostly limited to enemy spellbooks and scrolls they found. Which further prohibited their growth in power and utility. Something today's campaign settings circumvent is that in the past most places had a local sage/wizard and cleric just in case the group's spellcasters weren't up for it or didn't have the spells. Especially if the group did not have a Cleric a local one was important for healing. But that added problems that were never solved. These casters were still there when the group wasn't and that influenced the entire town. Having even a low-level Cleric NPC changes the setting by making the various temples more important. You could of course say that casters are more rare, but that means the groups casters stand out much more. A spellcasting Cleric of any faith worshipped locally would be the centre of attention of those believers. Arcane spellcasters would be in a similar situation. Any noble or rich person without a spellcaster of their own will have thing they want to talk to them about and spells cast. But that would also mean that settlements below a certain size should not exist, as some monsters would simply wipe them out single-handedly. Not to mention that it is likely that normal people will look at arcane casters with fear and distrust. After all, one fireball can reduce a house to cinders. Divine casters, at least those of good deities, will be trusted more as people will know what they stand for. I mean, even a Bard with one healing spell could dethrone the ruler of a village by being a nice guy. All that changes campaign settings as well as the flow of adventures and are part of the inherent problems that no one looks at. Which is one of the reasons I don't look at D&D 5E. All the talk is just Rules, Rules, Rules. And there it's mostly about balancing and combat. Practically nothing about making better settings, campaigns and adventures. BTW, all these discussions about rules, damage and so become meaningless if the group wakes up in their individual rooms of an inn when their doors are broken in and a group of orcs storms into each room. You know, basic tactics. I have no idea why current GM's seem to let the group decide when to initiate combat.
I mean most people I know play in custom homebrew settings anyways and even if you play in an official setting most people typically warp it to their own desires and needs for whatever kind of game they're running. And I mean the point of this video and these kinds of discussions is to address the issues inherent to the mechanics of the game so it's kinda natural that the discussion is about the mechanics and not the setting? Also basic tactics isn't really a solution and it kinda willfully ignores the core of the problem. Even if your example of orcs suddenly bursting into each party member's rooms. The Fighter is screwed because they rely on armor to defend themselves, the Barbarian is fucked because they need weapons to deal more than a d4 of damage. Meanwhile classes like the sorcerer are fine because even when they wake up naked with zero equipment or anything, they could still teleport out of the room to safety or at least defend themselves with cantrips and low level spells. The issue is a lot more complicated than just "don't let the party initiate combat," as if that would somehow magically solve the problem. When casters are better able to defend themselves than tanks in 95% of situations *and* can deal more damage, while also providing buffs and debuffs and other secondary effects, and the more martial people are relegated to just hitting things with swords, the issue goes a little bit more deep than "GMs should just use better tactics." Yeah a GM can use smarter and more powerful enemies to counter how powerful mages are, but then they end up steamrolling over the martials along the way who can't keep up.
@@BlazeMakesGames Look, I've been through several new editions in several different RPG's and the basic problems usually stayed. Around 35 years now I hear always the same things and everyone always hopes the next edition would solve the problems and yet they just change or remain the same. Like I said in my main point, no one has ever taken another look at the basic premise of D&D and that includes the 1 magic system for all casters. Everyone builds on the basics of the previous game. P.S. A level 15 group being surprised by 100 level 10 Barbarian Orcs in 3E is one of the best remembered encounters of my group for 2 decades now. They were really sweating there for a while. Until they got themselves somewhat organized with stuff like the sorcerer flying out of her window to reach the knight so he could cast mage armor on him and so on. And the group was so satisfied when they were finally able to wipe them out in the open with fireballs. You could see the relief and the satisfaction in their faces.
If we’re talking about damage, even if we take single target alone, spells like animate dead and other summons allow a caster to straight up deal more damage than a 20th level fighter at around level 10(whether you account for accuracy or not). And, accounting for accuracy(vs 19 AC), a spellcaster with meteor swarm(vs the average dex save chances across levels, 50% or so) is usually dealing 0.75*140 or 105 damage with a meteor swarm, whereas a greatsword is dealing with GWM, 0.4*22 or **8.8** damage per attack, even with 8 attacks you deal 70.4, not even single target is better. So in other words, along with area of effect, damage and effect stacking is something one must watch out for too. Worse, for the research management point, in a lot of games, especially dnd, alot of spells aren’t nova. If you cast a long lasting(usually still really strong) spell, like summons or control spells, you can consistently outperform a martial by the time they run out of HP consistently. So the problem is significantly worse than even you painted it here.
mhm, I purposefully didn't go too in depth with the calculations simply because what I was doing was giving the Martial a lot of favorable assumptions, and even in a favorable situation, the martials just fall behind. The more in-depth you go and more accurate you make the calculations, the worse it gets for them. Spells are balanced seemingly entirely around the idea that they're limited in use and thus you're meant to run out of them. Sure they're overpowered but if you only can cast it twice and then do nothing else, then in theory at least it's "balanced" in a way. But the inherent problem with that is of course that every game is going to be played differently. So maybe in some games where you do 10 fights per long rest yeah the casters are straining a lot more for their spell slots. But in most casual games casters just aren't drained of their resources, which means that these blatantly overpowered spells have their one downside eliminated. That's why I've grown to really like systems like Wrath and Glory, which has limitless casting. I was worried at first how it would be balanced when Psykers can cast spells infinitely, the game is actually balanced around that idea. So spells aren't insanely powerful, and there are downsides inherent to using magic at all. And there's a lot more tools for Martial characters in that game to do cool things. In general it's a form of balance that is better suited to more kinds of games.
ignoring that 5e is just badly designed in general but even in good games you cannot really have a simple martial fantasy alongside a powerful or complex magical fantasy. if you want to even that out magic needs to be very situational, deliberate, or weak. the real issue is trying to bring basic bitch knights into an adventure that _will_ be decided by magic in some sense even if there is no wizard in the party. you either need to give that guy with a sword magic of his own, make their gameplay style _much_ more complex (or potentially the entire focus of the game), or you need to give them technology to level the playing field. science-fantasy games often do both making magic rather weak/situational and giving mundane characters access to advanced tools to bring up their potential. a mage could electrocute you if they are close, but a guy with a rifle could take you down before you even see them from miles away, or that guy's power armor could protect him from magic while he gets close enough to use his plasma axe. the chronicles/world of darkness games do away with the idea of mundane characters entirely, if you are playing the same splat like the game is designed for you are all equally as magic. if you are a mage you can just as readily increase your muscle mass exponentially for a fight or generate a tiny timewarp in someone's body, all werewolves have to contend with claws _and_ rituals, changelings can make deals with starlight to harm someone or hate to drive themselves into a berserker rage with all the combat benefits. the entire splat about being mundane hunters involves lots of prep and careful teamwork to deal with even just one or two actual monsters.
I think there's room for heroic martial characters without necessarily needing to make them rely on magic. They could go for a classical style thing like how Achilles was depicted with him swinging his blade and knocking back whole groups of enemies and the like. Like most NPCs in a setting are level 5 or lower, so while yes it doesn't make sense to have a simple knight keep up with a master of the Arcane, by level 15-20, a fighter is leaps and bounds beyond a simple knight, and their abilities should reflect that. Though I do think that in general I would greatly support the idea of limiting casters a bit more based on spell schools. Like I said, the fact that a mage can specialize in Illusion magic but still cast fireball feels pretty wrong to me. But in games like Wrath and Glory, Psykers, their version of a mage, are only able to learn spells from a single type of magic, with only the equivalent of cantrips giving them any ability beyond those schools, and that makes it so that those casters fit into a very specific niche instead of being able to just do everything like they can in 5e. And that's before even getting into the fact that casting a spell incurs a chance of your face exploding. The spells they have are still powerful and they aren't even limited by spell slots, able to cast as many times as they want per day, but because they can only use a very specific kind of magic, they don't overshadow everyone else nearly as much.
Yur points about half-feats really show how limited the options are fur martial klass Especially, when ya explore how strick the martial klassez are & how Magika use a universal system-Monkisch stuff is locked off so a Konan-lyke fighter wuld always suk vs. a grappler Gud stuff tho, keep it up
Portion one, addressing the great weapon master fighter: The fighter is sacrificing -5 to hit, and having to hold their weapon in both hands The caster is not
@@BlazeMakesGames yeah, proper optimizers do a dpr calculation that takes into account hit chance, and chance of succeeding saves, so maybe look into that instead of just assuming hits in your damage per turn calc, because a fighter action surging def doesn't do meteor swarm damage without a magic weapon or comically low ac high hp enemies
Well the whole point was to show that the Fighter Doesn't do as much damage to begin with. I ignored to-hit chance to *raise* the fighter's numbers in their favor. Like even if you assume the Fighter hits every attack while every enemy also passes every saving throw against the Caster's spells, Fighters *still* don't even compare to the most basic actions a Caster can take. Taking into account hit-chance only makes my case that much more evident. Tho I will admit I probably should have made it more clear that that was what I was doing.
I was thinking of a weird solution which would be give martials funny anime powers also give them some better healing to sustain there health (as well yknow they are frontliners usually) and third, when they get a feat /asi, they get both, and also have higher capstones for stats. Spellcasters get cool spells, unlimited versatility. Why not give martials better stats? and give martials maybe slightly higher saving throws (that one might be a lil much though)
Funny Anime Powers is definitely in the right direction. I think that the designers are afraid of that because they're meant to be the "non magical" classes but the problem is that you can't have a game with a completely 100% mundane fighter and a hyper advanced 20th level Archmage and expect the game to be balanced. They should pull upon ancient epics like the feats of Heracles and Achilles and apply that to the fighter. A level 20 fighter should be the kind of warrior that can take on an entire army without breaking a sweat through sheer force of skill and strength. Swinging an Axe to sunder the earth in twain and create an earthquake, cleaving an entire mob of enemies in one strike, that kinda stuff. And yeah with the last one it's like they wanted to do that, but then they chickened out. They gave the fighter and the rogue more feats, but only like *barely* any more than normal, and the Barb and Monk got none. If every Martial got at least a couple more feats than average then that could do a surprisingly large amount to help close the gap.
11:07 one suggestion ive heard to deal with this is changing what counts as a "long rest". If you make it so that can only in happen in towns or takes several days of relaxation then the number of encounters per rest gets closer to that half dozen target
that's akin to the "Hardcore" rules in the DMG which I do feel like more people need to try. Those rules basically make it so that a "Short" Rest is now an 8 hour long overnight sleep, and a Long Rest is now a full week of downtime, which you can further restrict to only being available in towns on top of that. (though even without that explicit restriction, trying to find a place to rest in the wild for a full week without getting interrupted I imagine is pretty challenging.) But yeah those rules honestly I think fit how most people actually play D&D these days, with big sprawling adventures over land that take days or weeks to traverse with only 1 or 2 fights a day, if there even is a fight in a given day. Though I could also see just keeping short rests to an hour, (or even reducing them to like 10 minutes) and then keeping the Long Rests to be only available in downtime. That way if there is multiple fights in a day, Short Rest classes can still get a rest in like they would normally.
@@BlazeMakesGames yeah i think thats where i got the idea. Even the official campaign books often dont have more than 1 or 2 fights per day (on days where you fight at all). I ran storm kings thunder and the fights were days apart from each other. Though a full week might be overkill, even if it just took a few days proper rest it would usually fix this. And keeping short rests under an hour should be fine as those abilities are basically intended as X times per encounter
I just thought of a very simple idea for some Martial melee-based characters to get access to- some kind of Lightsaber/Kratos throw ability, where they can toss their weapon and have it return back to them. The throw range would depend on their Strength score, (maybe 5 feet for every +1 to STR), and it would deal damage upon returning too. Basically a boomerang ability. That way they get more range and can sometimes use their movement more tactically, while still possibly benefitting from a magical weapon's abilities.
One idea sorta building on that that I've always liked and might even make a video about at some point is the idea of expanding the Magic Weapon system to allow for adding more varied abilities like that to a weapon. Course while that ability would be a nice add, not everyone wants to play a thrown-weapon user so it only really works for a specific archetype of character, but with a whole system of weapon upgrades that grant abilities along those lines, then you could greatly expand the options to Martials in a dynamic and fun way.
Watched this video at double speed to quickly watch it before playing my Eldritch Knight in my campaign with a Cleric and Warlock/Druid. Time to play the "tank" again. Wish me luck
short of that, I'm very in favor of just reducing Short Rests to 10 minutes and allowing you to keep walking and doing stuff and still get the benefit as long as you don't like make attacks or anything. Even if you're in a dungeon chances are in-game you spend at least 10 minutes wandering around searching for traps and such before you get into a fight again. So you'd get the same practical benefit without having to define them based on like "Every time you roll initiative" which is always kind of a weird way for abilities to work.
Rewatching the video and I think I'd like to add one thing for 5e D&D: Half-casters, AKA the Paladins and Rangers. I know, I know, the "Ranger bad"-meme is funny and widespread, but it isn't actually true. At least, Rangers are not weak compared to Fighters and Rogues. They're only weak compared to Wizards and Clerics, which is true twice over for a Fighter or Rogue. No matter how much a DM takes care to design encounters and campaigns where classes without spellcasting can shine, they can still never get around the martial-caster gap because the non-casters (Fighter, Rogue, Barbarian, Monk) are not meaningfully stronger than Paladins and Rangers who don't use spells. The unfortunate fact is that the half-casters are often just as strong or even stronger even when they're not using their spells, because Wizard of the Coast have blatantly been playing favorites since the release of 5e. Even something as simple as the Hunter subclass for Ranger can easily keep up (and sometimes exceed) with a Fighter and Rogue for dex based damage dealing all the way to lvl 10. At lvl 11, they still deal some 80-85% of the damage a Fighter does before they start to use resources. That's Hunter, which is definitely not on the stronger side of Rangers. Gloom Stalkers are ahead of Fighters until at least lvl 17, when they finally have 2 Action Surges. All Paladins can do the same as the Gloom Stalker, though likely all the way to lvl 20 since Paladins are just fundamentally better designed than Rangers. This is, again, *without* using spells. Half-casters provide most of the benefits of being a martial character, while also bringing spellcasting and other supernatural features to the group. Non-spell supernatural features that themselves tend to be stronger than the supernatural features of non-caster classes. Wizards of the Coast and the D&D community during feedback, seem to labor under the assumption that having access to spells means the class is supposed to be more powerful, so what gets accepted as a "legitimate" class feature for a Ranger or Paladin can reach much higher power levels than features for non-casters. Are there any non-caster features that are as strong and versatile as Umbral Sight for the Gloom Stalker? Do we have legitimate non-caster alternatives to Aura of Protection, or any of the Paladin subclass Auras? Does the Fighter's Second Wind really matter when Lay on Hands exist? And so on. I don't even think the Gloom Stalker or Paladins are overpowered. If anything, they're just martial characters that are at a reasonable power level compared to spellcasters, because they have things they excells at that casters can't effortlessly replicate, while also bringing a wide variety of options to let them be versatile in combat and maintain usefulness outside of combat. When half-casters are just "martials, but better and with spells", there isn't much you can do to fix the system through tweaking some numbers around. OneD&D seems to build itself around fixing some problematic spells and increasing martial DPR. This is good. They also seem to include Ranger and Paladin in the DPR increase given to martials. That's unfortunate, because that means the caster+half-caster meta will continue. There needs to be real tradeoffs for half-casting, or the problem isn't actually fixed.
to be fair, the main reason why Ranger Bad was a meme is less to do with their higher level abilities, and more to do with how situational their lower level ones are. By default a ranger is supposed to pick a favored enemy and a favored terrain. And the issue is that when you're in those situations, the Ranger can shine early on really well! But when you're not... you functionally just don't have those abilities anymore. And some of the other abilities you get like Primeval Awareness are significantly weaker if you're not in your favored terrain. The meme mostly became irrelevant when Tasha's came out and finally gave them new lower level abilities that were more generally useful so that you didn't have to worry about not being able to leave the forest of whatever. But yeah to speak generally, I really feel like WotC doesn't seem to view Spells as Class Features for some reason, especially on those Half Caster Half Martial Classes. So they think that they need to give them just as many features as the normal Martials get, while also still getting spellcasting on top of that. Additionally, it also feels like WotC are afraid of giving non-magical characters anything too supernatural unless they explicitly have some access to magic. So when designing the fighter they're like "well he's a mundane class so he's gotta just run up and hit things with a sword" but then when designing the paladin they're like "Well he's magic, so of course he can just grant passive Auras that boost everyone around him and also heal people and cure status ailments and magically enhance their weapon for bonus damage and..." and so on and so on. The one fortunate thing tho especially as of the latest playtest, is that the Full Martials are finally starting to get some more interesting options that set themselves more apart from the Half-Martials. Barbarian's Brutal Strike gives them a big damage boost while also letting them do things like root enemies in place or throw them across the battlefield, and Rogues being able to add Riders to their sneak attack dice to do things like disarm enemies is I think great additions that are far more important that simple DPR increases. So hopefully by the end we can at least get some level of equality in at least the variety of abilities and tactical options between the two styles of classes.
@@BlazeMakesGames I would argue that having bad features don't stop the good ones from being good. They get the martial basics (d10 hit dice, Extra Attack, Fighting Style), an excellent spell list and martial subclasses. Even Hunter is generally speaking pretty good at most levels you're likely to actually see in a campaign (3-10). Colossus Slayer is 1 free suepriority dice every turn, which means that any campaign that requires resource management will favor the Hunter over the Battlemaster, save the occasional burst dmg turn. I think the main thing with the Ranger getting it's reputation for being bad, while easily being a better character overall than 3 or 4 others if you can grasp the spell list, is because it had a few useless flavor features people could point to and immediately understand why they sucked. Favored Enemy, Natural Explorer and Primal Awareness are awful, but they don't impact much in the grand scheme of things. Primal Awareness is just a freebie at the same level you get your subclass (which almost no other martial gets). FE and NE are worse, since they give you a couple of dead levels, but they either got excellent levels right after or before them to compensate (2 and 5). It's a lot harder to quantify why a Barbarian, Fighter or Rogue is bad, especially since they are the easiest classes to play and a lot of players probably had more success with them than stronger classes (which is almost everything, except Monk), because the stronger options need you to understand the basics of spellcasting. I generally agree with the rest though. The latest playtest looks a little better, but I don't know if it is enough. Rangers and Paladins are still looking just as strong as the non-casters while also providing a metric ton of support or utility that isn't easy to match without spells. It's not just Paladin auras either. "Of course Gloom Stalkers can become invisible in the dark! Rangers are spellcasters!" "Of course Rogues can't become invisible in the dark! They're not spellcasters!" Of course, we don't know what the final spell list will look like yet, but I suspect that there are going to be plenty of "outlier" spells (new or returning ones) that will heavily favor the half-casters. It's hard to quantify how strong something like Pass WIthout Trace is, but if we assume a combat is on avg 3 turns, it can easily negate 1/3 of the enemy's total action economy, since most enemies have terrible perception and are therefor succeptible to PWT Surprice Rounds. That level of mitigation is unheard of from a Barbarian, for example, the "tank" class. On top of being an amazing utility spell outside of combat.
The problem with this whole concept is everyone is required to be balanced. WHY?? The original idea of d&d was every character had strengths AND weaknesses. Hence making up a party of characters where the physically tough fighters are supposed to prevent the enemy from reaching the physically vulnerable magic users on the other hand as the magic users gain their higher spells they potentially will cause much more damage BUT the higher level spells take time to cast also many require a combination of a physical component, hand gesture (s) or spoken words. If any of these are prevented by lack of the needed object, inability to move arms due to being bound or paralysed or in gagged physically or magically then it doesn't matter how powerful the Spell Caster may be. Also if the Spell Caster is struck by any successful attack the spell he/she was preparing is automatically lost and must spend the required time to rememorize the particular spell. This is another reason why the party was expected to include henchmen/hirelings to aid in preventing the Spell Casters being prevented from casting. I started with 1st Ed and Basic through to 3rd Ed but I have not continued with the later versions as the original premise of D&D seems to have been lost that being the players are forming a group of adventurers/ explorers that need one another to provide skills or abilities that the party will require to be successful. If every class can do everything why bother putting a party together? Just put the gane down and go play Skyrim or other similar video games.
Looking back, I have mostly played casters, half casters or caster/martial multi classes in the past. Maybe I subconsciously picked up on the divide. I’m currently playing a Rune Knight Fighter. But I am considering taking either a couple levels in Wizard or the Magic Initiate feat at some point though. Giving Green Flame Blade to my frontline fighter would be useful to up her damage output. Rune Knights are pretty good for Fighters since you deal damage as a Fighter, you can rank as a fighter. You can control the field by growing big and acting as a physical wall to block an enemies path. If you have good enough strength like my character you can uproot trees and block characters paths with them. And your runes give you extra abilities outside of combat. And I personally think it’s the best Fighter Subclass. Also to help with the AOE problem is to give Martials “Cleave”. Where if they kill with the damage, the extra damage can be extended to another creature in range. Or if they don’t think they’ll kill, they choose to take a d4 penalty to damage and hit every target in range.
My only issue with playing martials is it feels like I have less tools to contribute to a game than a caster does. If martials had the ability to use their prowess in situations outside of combat more often, I'd have no isse
Also, as a btw, if you are a DM who is using several days between each encounter, use the varient rules, 8 hours for a short rest, 1 week for a long rest, Make sure players are experiencing half a dozen encounters per *long rest* not per *day*, those can be very different numbers, the game is not designed for 1 encounter per long rest Also, I have absolutely played in a grind in 5e, and in multiple consecutive fights? Casters at high level have a ton of resources because they are all long rest dependent, until 2024 5e, classes which depend on a short rest will simply be weaker, as you can never count on getting a short rest when you need one, except for exceptions
the variant resting rules are definitely rad and I wish more people knew about them. They definitely help, but there are still lots of underlying problems that I think they can't solve on their own.
I run rests a bit differently: The players get to rest (be it long or short) when I say they can. No more, no less. Which means that the adventure days tend to be pretty long in terms of encounters and it makes it impossible to do stuff like "Goodberry juggling". Still can't find a balance that lets martials be good that also doesn't let half-casters dominate non-casters. It's very unfortunate that Rangers and Paladins are at worst about as strong as Fighters even without their spells, and at best outclass Fighter even without spells by using the good subclasses.
Wouldn't the easiest way to fix the first problem be to Make it so that if a martial overkills a Target they can continue to attack and transfer that remaining damage to a creature closest to the first creature maybe even giving them some movement to get there
I mean that would help but the problem is more complicated than simply giving Martials buffs. You could make it so that Martials deal 100 damage per attack but imo the more important aspect of the disparity is the lack of interesting tactical options between the types of classes. Even if a barbarian did enough damage to be considered "balanced" against a wizard at 20th level, if all I was doing on my turn still just boiled down to "I run up and hit it with my sword" then I would still be bored of playing such a class very quickly, I would just be also killing things faster while I was being bored.
@@BlazeMakesGames that is very true but my suggestion was to fix the hole AOE problem between the two but what you're saying is right giving Marshalls more ways to fight More things to do would be nice it's one of the reasons I do like the battle master although and I do understand why this is I always found it stupid that there's a limit to how many times they can do certain things as if You have enough energy to swing your silver but not that way was always kind of dumb. But I would love to see more ways to attack more ways to move around that only someone of immense physical capabilities could do but I guess the problem is there's always a spell that can probably do it better
The caster defenders in this comment section make me depressed. Whatever dude, just use Laserllama's classes to tide you over, and jump ship to a better system when the chance presents itself. These problems are so fundamental to the system it'd take a ground up rework to fix most of them. Check out the likes of Pathfinder 2e, 13th Age, Shadow of the Demon Lord/Weird Wizard. See if anything doesn't catch your fancy and try and convince your group to jump ship. There's just better games.
D&D players, especially old grognards, have gotten so used to non-casters being borderline trash tier in the system that anything else feels wrong to them. This is despite the fact that most of them would probably object heavily if the same problems existed anywhere other than tabletop. Can you imagine how intense the backlash to a cooperative multiplayer RPG would be if 4 out of 12 classes were borderline unplayable with how weak and one-dimensional they are? The players would be out for blood until the developers fixed the problem.
@TheTdroid Yup. 5e is even weird in the fact the majority of the playerbase started with 5e, so you'd think more of them to be less tolerant of mediocrity since they have no past edition to compare the current to. What seems to instead happen is that they fall in love with 5e and refuse to tolerate any kind of deviance from what they think is perfection. And so a new generation of players are raised on the expectation that martials are just shit by design, and thats a good thing. There's just no winning. Between the players who actively want the martial-caster divide to exist, to the other portion of the playerbase who die on the hill that the martial fantasy is to be just a guy with a stick, nothing will change. Even if 6e becomes a thing I doubt the divide will ever be fixed.
@@GuyFawkes051 I also think that for a lot of people, they are just completely incapable of looking at anything other than the single highest number that shows up. A Rogue can crit for like 50 dmg, so they're awesome, but the Ranger dealing 20x3 dmg without crits is overlooked because 20 dmg didn't look as impressive. Add on that a lot of people have no clue how much of their martial dmg is determined by control effects, and it makes sense why a lot of players who haven't spent a minute thinking about optimization just don't get it.
A 18th level Wizard or Bard or Arcana Cleric casts Simulacrum with a Wish. This requires no material component. The Simulacrum is a 20th level Barbarian, Fighter, Paladin or Ranger. If you somehow make Martials more powerful, then you just make the Simulacrum more powerful.
lol I mean to be frank that just shows how bad the problem is on the caster side. By all means I'm all for just buffing Martials, but high level spells 100% should be nerfed too. Hell even low level spells like fireball should be toned down a bit while we're at it.
There is indeed a problem between caster and martial but i feel its more a problem of choice than a problem of power... Ressource attrition existe and usually a mage will run out of spell quite fast and thus need to cooperate witht he group to know where and when to cast spell. some spell are battle defining indeed but its a probleme limited to a few overtunned spells, that are very predictable and easy to counter. their DD being on a stats that is usually quite high or on a damage type often resisted Giving martial some kind of ressource to use for speicals move like monks and battle master usually make them more activ and enjoyable to play... After all, many like paladin and they dont really use them as an half caster and more like a warrior with nice tricks.
The problem originates with original D&D. Old D&D was a game of kicking down doors, rolling dice, and killing monsters. Character's lifecycle power curve goes up. That's okay because the character isn't much more than a token in old D&D. But lifecycles don't work that way. Power and ability goes up and then they go down. Fifty year old Tiger Woods isn't 25 years old Tiger Woods. If the mechanics of aging, injury, and experience were changed to reflect that loss is real in any lifecycle, then the problem is fixed. Wizards go up like a rocket, but come down just as fast because they forget spells even as they learn spells. Eventually, they forget all their spells. Age works that way. Fighters and thieves can figure out ways to stay relevant through better skill and technique. To use a sports metaphor, they can develop a breaking ball when their fast ball loses velocity.
Well in my game the classes are kinda equal. My friend and I just allow to use range weapons with str so a fighter or barb could use bows, If you kill something and heve another person in reach the extra damage will go to the other if he has same ac or less, and if you are renger3/barb2 you get extra attack because you are a level 5 martial class. It doesn’t work with hexblade because it’s an invocation and not the same extra attack. Also primal knowledge from one end is good.
those are some pretty solid changes. I've seen the idea of making Extra Attack more accessible as a pretty popular suggestion especially when combined with just generally giving Martials more attacks overall. And yeah the damage overflow is a great way to make Martials better at handling hoards. I still think there's an issue with just the Martial classes often not getting as many interesting options to play with, especially compared to casters, but yeah I can see how those changes are definitely a massive improvement.
@@BlazeMakesGames you see my friend and I tested it and the level 5 wizard or sorcerer loos on every fight to the 3barb/2 fighter multi class with the rules we created, and on level 9 also but it was very close, hideous laughter was effective and silvery barbs also but like the great weapon master and battle master with reckless attacks it was more then overkill, even with animate object and conjecture animals the Barb fighter won. If the game designers were smarter there wouldn’t be no problem with the martials it’s sucks that the damage dealers can’t attack from range and don’t deliver more damage than a spell caster.
yeah ideally you wouldn't have to do a bunch of homebrew on top of multiclassing in order to keep pace with a vanilla caster. So there's definitely still work to do.
ive been in 3 different 5e campaigns and ive never really noticed the martial/caster divide (especially in the casters favour. yh casters are more versitile but in my experience martials still tend to do better in combat than casters. in our 1st campaign out barbarian/fighter character was never reduced to 0hp and was dealing 100+hp damage regulary by the end were the casters went down quite often and the aoe spells wernt all that great due to potentially hitting party members (our casters were mainly druids or clerics)
I have played or DM'd in 6 campaigns since 2014 and I agree with you. There are very good spells that turn a battle like Web but the martials are the ones that down the enemies while the casters do some damage but are mostly control. I think the problem is only glaring when there are very few fights and casters can go ham. I've also DM'd for a group that had to go into a dungeon where they would not be able to long rest until they left. There were 8 encounters in the dungeon. One of the casters was very conservative in spell usage and one was not. They came out victorious but it was a lot harder because the cleric used too many high level spells early on. Based on my anecdotal experience, I think the problem is not the design of the game but the decisions of the DM.
Yeah your Web is great if you throw it at 4 enemies 1 of which couldn't make their save, however if you throw it to a single boss they are more likely to make their saving throw then not, so a good chance we accomplish nothing with our turn. Martials can miss their attacks, but getting advantage on attacks is easier, and they have 2 attacks at 5th level, as well as the part where math of the system works out in a way that martials are more likely to hit an enemy than the enemy is to fail their saving throws. I've also never been in a table where the person who made a character specifically to do 100 damage, do their 100 damage and turn and get upset that I was restraining 2 enemies from afar. I've been in more situations where my spells got in the way of martials and ended up feeling like I didn't add anything to the fight
the issue there is that imo Martials *Need* high level magic items just to have any hope of keeping up at higher levels and to gain more interesting attacks than "I run up and hit it with my sword." Whereas a bare-naked wizard is exactly as powerful as they need to be without needing any kind of items to buff them. By all means a great way to help reduce the gap at your tables is to offer a lot more magic items to your martials to help them stay afloat, but I think that that only shows that the problem is very much real and should be addressed so that you don't *have* to keep doing that to re-balance the game.
Going to go over the points roughly as they are introduced in the video. 4:40 Yes, AoE vs single target damage is an important consideration. Casters are way better at dealing damage to groups than martials. But that damage depends on having multiple target-able enemies. A Fireball hitting 4 enemies will do about 80 damage in total. But if there is only one enemy or allies are in the blast radius, then you are dealing less damage than a 5th level Fighter would do to that single enemy. But excelling in situational damage, doesn't mean that casters absolutely deal more damage than martials. And in the situation where there is one enemy, or a very dangerous enemy, then dealing higher single target damage is more valuable than theoretically being able to do more damage if there were a bunch of goblins standing around the dangerous enemy. But another point that gets brought up about damage is outlier spells like Conjure Animals. In theory, a caster casting Conjure Animals can deal a boatload of single target damage with that spell. However, several generous assumptions are made when calculating the damage output of powerful spells. Let's use Conjure Animals as an example. The first is ignoring long rest resource attrition, which is tied to your second point starting at 7:26. A 5th level Druid, for example, won't have the resources to be able to use Conjure Animals in every fight. They can do it 2-3 times. If the adventuring day has 4-8 encounters, then the Druid will have to use weaker spells and eventually cantrips to deal damage. So using the damage output from Conjure Animals as a Druid's damage output for the comparison vs martials is grossly misleading. It should be the average damage ouput across the adventuring day, factoring in combats where the Druid only has access to 2nd and 1st level spells, since damage significantly drops off a cliff once 3rd level spells are depleted. The second generous assumption is assuming 100% uptime. Conjure Animals is concentration, so the spell has a chance to drop each turn depending on the damage enemies deal and whether or not the Druid has an investment to protect their concentration. Concentrating on a dangerous spell also makes the caster a prime target for enemies, since breaking concentration or dropping the caster severely decreases the party's damage output. The chance of a spell dropping also increases cumulatively as rounds progress, so Conjure Animals is less likely to make it intact to round 4 as it is to make it to round 2. Conjure Animals can even be dropped in round 1, before the animals even get to take a turn. The animals can also be killed as rounds progress, even incidentally killed by AoE damage from enemies (like a Fireball or dragon's breath weapon). Conjure Animals can also be Counterspelled, like all other spells. Martials' expected damage output isn't reduced by any of these factors. And these factors are never accounted for when determining caster damage. So in practice, a caster's output is more fragile than a martials and more heavily impacted by resource attrition. The one seeming exception is HP, as you mention at 8:07. Martials are assumed to run out of HP before casters run out of spells. There are several things wrong with this assumption though. One is that it relies on the assumption that martials get targeted more than casters, but the presence of concentration spells incentivizing targeting doesn't mean this is necessarily the case. Second, and more importantly, it ignores the interaction between HP and resources. If martials and casters are both expending non-HP resources, it preserves the party's HP. If a caster drops a Hypnotic Pattern or Conjure Animals on an encounter, martials lose less or no HP from the encounter. It isn't the case that martials lose HP linearly as casters spend more resources. The complete opposite is true. 9:28 Encounters in 5e are designed around the adventuring day. If someone is running less than the minimum number and difficulties of an encounter to constitute a full adventuring day, then that is just on people running the system not as intended. And if you run the minimum 3 encounters, all of those encounters being Deadly means that more resources will need to be spent. If someone runs 8 short rests in between each long rest, it heavily favors short rest classes, but that doesn't mean the system is balanced in favor of martials. Gritty realism exists for overland travel campaigns. 12:00 Heavily overstating caster versatility and understating martial versatility. Casters investing into a certain field comes at the cost of being locked out of others. They aren't as supremely versatile as you are making them out to be. Fulfilling any specific function entails spending a spell preparation/known and spending a spell slot on it. All of those are limited. So a caster can prepare Fly and cast it to fly over an obstacle, but that comes at the cost of preparing and casting another 3rd level spell. So one less Fireball for instance, which means the caster is sacrificing damage and other output to cover a specific niche with a spell. Martials, especially Rogues, can also easily contribute out of combat using skills and ability scores, without having to use any resources at all. Why would a caster ever cast Knock when a Rogue can pick something for free. Why cast Levitate when the Fighter or Barbarian can lift something for free. Why cast Jump when the martials can jump the gap for free, etc, etc. Rogues and martials picking up Expertise in persuasion (Rogue or Skill Expert) can contribute in social situations that spells like Charm Person and Suggestion would be way to risky or conspicuous to use. Even Strength is useful outside of combat due to Athletics being 3 skills in once (jumping, swimming, and climbing). Athletics and acrobatics are also used to evade/escape grapples (instead of needing to use lockout resources like Misty Step). 18:03 Martials have plenty of ways to impact action economy with various attack rider control effects like Stunning Strike, Battle Master maneuvers., Crusher/Piercer/Slasher, etc. And notably they can do this without giving up any attacks. You also mentioned Action Surge. This is just underselling the ways martials can affect action economy. Good points about the number of options the classes have to choose from though. 24:10 There are 39 half feats that let you boost physical stats and 32 that let you boost mental stats. The assertion in this part of the video just isn't correct. Monks and Paladins being MAD is the only thing that holds them back from grabbing feats like casters can. 25:35 Very good point overall. They have gone back and printed updates for Rangers and Monks, and have even reprinted / added features to some subclasses too. However, they haven't hit a lot of the most lacking subclasses with new content. 4 Elements still hasn't gotten access to the spells that came out in Xanathar's Guide to Everything. 29:50 This also works in reverse though. Enemies can easily take cover from ranged PCs, with melee PCs being in a much better position to close in and take away partial/full cover. Martials can also close in and impose disadvantage on enemy ranged units as well. 30:03 Notably, maxing Dex and getting Dex saves doesn't actually benefit casters at all. Martials are the ones that max Dex. Strength also governs jump distance, Athletics also covers jump/swim/climbing checks, very common adventuring activities. 32:13 Acrobatics subbing in for Athletics checks is completely homebrew. You aren't supposed to be able to use Acrobatics for jumping, swimming, or climbing checks. But coming back around, the primary reason, I think, that people believe there is a big gap between martials and casters is ignoring resource attrition. This is both in the form of ignoring full adventuring days when running games and gauging overall class strength, AND ignoring small scale resource attrition in the form of concentration and spell failure. tldr; The gap is small or non-existant in practice if you run the game as it was intended to be run.
@@TannerLindberg I have been playing/DMing for 10 years (since 5e came out). But you are right, [insert current popular meta] is objectively true and will never change with further knowledge or if the DM changes.
I recommend "gritty realism" rest variant if you run one encounter per day. Short rest takes day, long rest takes week. I run around 4 encounters per day, so I use regular long rest times, but I make short rest can take as little as 5 minutes to encourage party to short rest more often, to make warlock regain spell slots more often (I have fiend warlock, battlemaster, eldritch knight, ranger, wizard, all on lvl 7). I believe "Tal Dorei Campaign Setting Reborn" have "Accelerated Rests" variant rule that works like that.
Yeah my preferred rules are currently to either reduce Short Rests to 10 minutes (That way it lines up with Ritual casting which I think is interesting synergy), or to use those gritty realism rules, which tend to fit the style of more kinds of campaigns. I've seen some people say that 5 or even 10 minute short rests is simply too short to be a meaningful rest. But I think a solid counterpoint is to remember just how short most fights are. A very "Long" fight in D&D can last like 5-10 rounds, but that is literally only 30 seconds to a minute of in-universe time. Adventurers are typically only exerting themselves for very short bursts, so resting for 10 or even just 5 minutes after basically sprinting for just 1 feels more reasonable when you put it in that context. But yeah while it definitely helps a lot to rest that way to give short-rest classes more resources and encourage casters to spend more spell slots, there's still a lot of other problems that need to be addressed.
4e didn't have a martial caster divide, amusingly, it is also pretty cool that in AD&D casters were super weak early on, since alot of players didn't reach high levels The martial/caster divide is only really a problem past level 11 in 5e D&D, and used to be alot worse in older editions, and in 2024 5e, the absolutely busted spells are being addressed, The remaining ones are casters in armour with a shield, and animate objects, most of the other caster issues like conjure animals have already been addressed Edit, to clarify, the video is 7 months old, back when many people were still calling it "5.5" or whatever, before alot of people even knew the spells would be addressed, or even the martials class features would be redesigned like they have, but ye
The problem is that even if casters only invalidate martials at lvl 11+, we're still left with the martial/half-caster divide below that level (and all the way up to 20, to be fair). There's no reason to play Fighters, Rogues, Barbarians and Monks when Paladin and Ranger provide all the necessary benefits of martial characters, while also having access to support & damage mitigation (Paladin) or control & utility (Ranger). And if we're looking to the stronger subclasses for the half-casters, like Gloom Stalker and Oath of Ancients, they often provide *more* as martial characters on top of their aditional features. And while the half-casters usually stay ahead of the non-casters, they eventually fall behind dedicated spellcasters as well. Calling it a martial/caster divide is a bit misleading. It's more of a martial / half-caster / caster divide.
DnD Unoptimized does a lot of great math on this topic. I think he proves some of your points wrong, you might want to look at his work in detail. Even when attacking a single enemy, not taking into account the AoE potential of casters. Your delivery and explanation are really good though.
I am curious as to what they say but ultimately the vast majority of the problems don't even come down to numbers. Even if Melee Fighters objectively did the most damage out of any class in the game, that wouldn't change the fact that you can't hit a dragon that's flying 50 feet up with a sword, or that a sword usually doesn't help you solve a puzzle. The biggest contributing factor to what makes Casters so broken is that magic provides so much more utility and application in virtually all scenarios in addition to also being powerful in combat on top of everything else.
I understand the point you were trying to make but presenting average damage without taking in account accuracy is a bit reductive, and I think a severe mistake when including options such as GWM which only adds that extra damage at the cost of accuracy.
well my point was that even in a best case scenario where you land all of your attacks with all those buffs, a caster can usually outpace a martial with ease. Taking into account accuracy only makes things worse for the Martial which I feel is pretty well stated to be in a bad spot already, since casters don't really have any kind of accuracy-for-damage tradeoff. So in general a Caster will usually have the same or better accuracy than a martial. And that's before even considering circumstantial things like how if an enemy is 40 feet away, a caster can usually still deal full damage while a Greatsword specialist may have to spend their whole turn dashing to get in range. The more detailed you get about the analysis, the worse and worse it is for the martial
Other subtle things I find wild is looking at progression. At odd numbered levels they get higher level spells AND more slots on top of the progression they would get from Class and Subclass. Plus, with weaknesses and resistances, there is more they can exploit or avoid. Martials are kinda just screwed in many of those cases. For even more of the importance of versatility is being able to target *saving throws* instead of AC. Most foes are bound to have a soft spot there, but Shield, shields, and armors can do so much. And yeah for exploration and problem solving wow the Skills you can focus on using the mental Abilities just go hard.
yeah the sheer difference in the amount of features different classes get is a huge part of it too. If you think of getting new spells and getting new spell levels as features, and you probably should, then casters are getting multiple class features every single level. Meanwhile martials like the barbarian have levels where all they get is like "oh you deal slightly more crit damage" so the only get a single feature, and it only works some of the time. Ideally, every class should be getting like one meaty feature every single level and there shouldn't be any 'dead levels' as they were called in older editions where you get no new abilities and at most only a number or 2 goes up.
Oh wow. I like casters way more than martials. That is because the flavor is so much cooler. Magic is awesome in its flavor. It is flashy. It is interesting. It leads to profound ideas. I go hard core and get into New Age. That has amazing magic. Martial characters can't compete with that. Fighting with weapons and shields seems boring by comparison. This video goes into the more mechanical advantages of magic. Wow. That is a lot. The list sure gets long. I think a good solution is the give martial classes spell-like abilities. That happens in World of Warcraft, DND 4E and DC 20. I don't know if it fixes all the problems in this video. It will definitly help help though. The biggest differenve is that casters can use spells and martials can't. Spells are powerful and versitile. Casters use a different reasource, but they don't wear out more quickly as martials. Giving martials spell- like abilities would help with these problems. World of Warcraft and DC 20 also have a mana reasource for the casters and a sinilar reasource for martials. In both cases, the martial resource recovers more easily. This video talked about reasource differences. Health in martials drains more quickly due to being deep into the fray. I got to wonder. Maybe the mana-like reasource in martials recovers more easily as a way to make up for the extra drain on health. I didn't know there was an imbalance between melee and range. Maybe the ranger is the most powerful martial class even if it had no magic at all. Ranger in DND 5E is underpowered. I wonder if the weaknesses was an overcorrection on the potential overpowering nature of the ranger. When doing my own game designing. I did figure out a way to balance them. I enjoy magicians so much that I made a class system with just them. So there is a case where all coasses have access to mana and all have access to the spells. Spells can be used at any distance. That helps a lot with balencing. All classes have acess to a damaging magic called sparkle. It is a nice reliable damage source. Sparkle doesn't cost mana. However it has the downside of only being usable up close. It is fair for this attack to have both an upside and a downside. There is a a distincition of range and melee magician. Ranged magicians have spells with direct effects. So they are usefull at a distance. Mages do ranged damage. Priests do healing. Melee magicians have spells that power up thier ability to fight with sparkle. A spell only provides a power up once. Shamans use blade spells. This spell adds damage to the shaman's next sparkle attack. Warlocks use shield spells. This spell subtracts damage from the next sparkle attack the warlock recieves. I did have an action economy where everybody got a set of several specific things. There is prepare spell, move one space, cast spell and sparkle. Prepare spells are done by drawing a card from a spell deck. In this situation, fighting in melee becomes a double edged sword. All fighters can use the spell step. However only melee fighters can use the sparkle step. They are close enough to use sparkle. Range fighters can't use thier sparkle at range, so they are forced to skip the step. Melee fighters get to do more on thier turn. The downside is that they also recieve sparkle attacks from thier opponents. They take more damage. Ranged fighters are protected from this damage simply from being at range. Melee fighters deal more damage and recieve more damage. This is a kind of tradeoff that makes melee more offensive. It makes range more defensive. So that tradeoff makes both sides seem more fair. I am glad I watched this video when I did. I decided to switch over to using action points. It is an action economy similar to Pathfinder. This gives a lot more streamling and flexibility. I am still working out the details of what actions can be done and how many action points they should cost. This video draws balance of melee and range to my attention. I am so glad it did. Hmm.... Maybe there is a way to maintain balence. I can have it so sparkle is the only action that doesn't require action points. Everyone can do sparkle one at the end of their turn. In this way, melee fighters still get a little something extra. They can still have thier double edged sword to keep them balanced.
I did realize something. The adventuring day mechanic sucks. That may be why it isn't used in video games. There are other methods to recover. Pokemon has Pokemon Centers. These are special places to go and heal. World of Warcraft has health and mana restored gradually over time. A player can recover just by staying out of battle for a minute or so. Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild has the player gather food and use the food to cook meals. The meals are used to recover health. All three methods is highly controlled by the player. DND is different in that the times of resting is set by the DM. It can get really unbalanced when the DMs don't plan adventuring days like the game developers plan them. The video explained that casters can get overpowered when adventuring days are too short. There is another problem. As casters go, warlocks are underpowered. They get criticism an ridicule for it. Warlocks are reliant on short rests to make the most of their class abilities. They become underpowered when an adventuring day doesn't have enough short rests. I guess fighters and monks are doubly screwed. They are martials that rely on short rests. Whoops. Maybe it is better to go for a flexible recovery mechanic like video games. Then maybe it is better to balance everything around that.
yeah the adventuring day is a huge problem with how D&D is balanced imo and tends to be one of the core reasons why the game has so many balance issues
This divide you discuss, does it manifest in the players you know? TTRPG is my jam. Most of my friends are TTRPG-ers of one flavour or another. Most are in their 50's, like me. I've never heard a player complain that a wizard is more powerful than a fighter. I have heard players say a certain class is not fun and so they play another class. This divide you speak of, is it manifesting in the fun the players are feeling? As a DM I have a lot of ideas on how a fighter might have more fun at my table. But your content seems to be about detailing mechanics that cause some sort of divide. Game design is fun. Playing is fun. If you're not having fun, have a think about why that might be and maybe, possibly consider making a change.
Here's a quick one for fighters at my table. If the foe is a lower CR than the fighter's level, the fighter gets as many attacks on that foe as are foe around the fighter. This includes movement. One attack per foe. Think of Sir Lancelot from Holy Grail hacking and slashing his way through the crowd of peasants. He has 30' of movement and attacks everyone, once, as he passes them buy. The fighter is now doing fireball damage and is it breaking the game? Nope. Is my fighter having a ball? Yep. This is a boon I can give to my fighter after achieving a certain level or advancement. When attacked by a swarm of gobo's the spell chucker went down and the fighter slaughtered every little goblin he got close to. Oh, I use MCDM's Minion rules. So a pack of gobo's can be deadly.
I don't know about Blaze, but I do know that the mechanical weakness of some classes has been a major problem in games I've played and DMed, despite efforts to try to balance it out. This has come up in both narrative and combat focused campaigns, though for different reasons. This is usually less of a problem if every player is clueless about how to use spellcasting, but a lot of the people I've played with are anything but. I ran a short lvl 13 campaign during a holiday a couple of years back. Just a fun dungeon crawl. My players were a Battlemaster Fighter, a Vengeance Paladin, a Soulknife Rogue, a Draconic blaster Sorcerer... and an Abjuration Wizard that just solved 70+% (and almost every non-combat problem) of the campaign on their own because they were hyperfocused on utility and control. Everyone else were allowed to do the big numbers, but I could see that everything they did hinged on the Wizard. Worst part about it was that this Wizard was a fellow DM who was intentionally limiting themselves by not branching into more than just utility and control and a smidge of defense (mostly just Shield and Absorb Element to proc his Abjurer feature). Luckily, as a fellow DM, he knew how to give the other players the illusion of contributing by letting them have the big numbers on their turns, so we avoided bad feelings at the table, but several players have realized what happened afterwards. The Wizard player had assumed the others would bring more optimized characters than they did when he made his own. That holiday campaign was a case where it didn't end up being a "real" problem in that we avoided any schism at the table, but that did come down to the fact that the player knew how to help avoid that. Not everyone playing Wizards or spellcasters have that degree of social awareness. For example, I had a veteran player show up with a Hexblade+Devil Sight+Darkness+Polearm Master+Sentinel build at a lvl 4-5 campaign meant for new players learning the game. Still learning basic features like what the difference between an Action, Bonus Action and Movement Action type of new players. Just a veteran player with complete disregard for the others as long as he was allowed to play his minmaxed character. And the fact that Hexblades are generally speaking much stronger than non-caster classes was a real issue there, because there was no amount of good play the others could do to make up the difference, even if they had played optimally. Another campaign, I've had a Rogue and a Ranger butt heads because the Ranger was able to use their magic to make the Rogue kinda pointless, between Fog Cloud, Pass Without Trace and dealing more damage more consistently. Wasn't even a Gloom Stalker, just a Hunter. The Rogue player asked to change class into a Gloom Stalker Ranger just to get to play the character he wanted (stealthy assassin) without being completely overshadowed by a basic Ranger. None of this is touching on all the non-combat nonsense I've had to deal with, since most non-casters rely almsot entirely on skill checks. At some tables with some types of players, the imbalance isn't necessarily going to be a problem. But it is also going to be a problem at other tables with other players. Having a degree of balance as a foundation for the game system is likely to improve the overall experience for everyone, since whether it ends up being a problem isn't completely dependent on what type of players and DMs you end up dealing with.
In the damage example, you are looking at idealized situations. Spellcasters have a limited resource, in the form of spellslot, and can only use a lot of the AOE spells in particular situations. A fighter can dish out the damage in fight after fight, without risking friendly fire. I think that in 5e, the martials will tend to out damage most wizards. The real power difference is in debuffing, utility and control. Which is where the wizard gets to control the fight. But that is also what makes them interesting to play.
Well I do address those other issues later on in the video in regards to daily resource expenditure and debuff/utility and whatnot. The problem is that a lot of those subsequent issues feed into each other. In theory and a truly idealized a Fighter should deal more damage throughout an adventuring day than a wizard. But when you take into account all the debuffing and utility that even allows a the party to deal damage in the first place, a lot of that damage can be attributed to the wizard. And it seems like most tables aren't running enough encounters in an adventuring day to actually drain a wizard's resources. Which means that they are more freely able to cast their most powerful spells and in turn the Fighters have a lot less time to try and catch up throughout the day. And I'm not even saying those tables are playing the game wrong. The issue is more that the game just simply doesn't adapt to many different styles of play very well. Not to mention that a lot of people underestimate just how much of a damage multiplier AoE effects are, which is my main point of my damage comparison. I think it's fairly realistic to have a fight where there's 3 enemies in it, and pretty common to have fights with a lot more than that. And any time you get a fight like that, the wizard is going to deal an insane amount of damage every time they're able to get something big like a fireball off, which they can do at as low as level 5 when martials are able to just hit 2 enemies in a turn. It could take a Fighter an entire adventuring day of combat just to catch up to those damage values from a single spell, before even taking into account the damage the wizard will deal while the fighter is trying to catch up.
@@BlazeMakesGames You did yes. But my experience is that the enemy often gets mixed in with friends, so AOE becomes very situationally useful. Also that spellcasters end up using a lot of resources on saving the martials with healing, feather fall or similar. The best solution would probably be to give the martials some options in debuffing and control. Basing it on the barbarian intimidating the enemy or similar, to give them more interesting things to do. Oh and give the monk more ki points to use.
@HappyCatholicDane I think the ultimate balance should be that martials are sustainable, and casters aren't. Their control options aren't as strong, but they get near infinite uses. I think an attempt to grapple as a bonus action should be an innate ability of attacking with melee weapon. And that being grappled should make spellcasting more difficult. Especially with somatic components. Hell, those could be canceled outright through grappling. That alone would make pure martials pretty damn good. Plus, that makes polearm master not quite as necessary, since you would still have a bonus action without it. Also, martials should be able to stun enemies with normal attacks. Maybe make it some kind of conditional thing or something, but if it's got a brain, it can get a concussion.
@@Tmanowns I like those ideas, or at least some similar, for the PC characters. I wouldn’t want the grappling thing in general, as that would turn every fight into a grappling contest. Which would make low strength characters unplayable. But yes, giving martials some more low impact but free control/debuffing options, would make them a great deal better.
@HappyCatholicDane maybe instead of an innate feature, it could be a fighting style for versatile weapons? Since the grappling rules means you can't grapple and attack with a two handed weapon, a versatile weapon with no shield is perfect for this playstyle. Or even just changing the grappled condition so it affects spellcasters more.
Noting i am late in the party, I have given this some thought I think spell casters should not recover all their spells per long rest, perhaps they can recover their level per long rest For example a level 7 Wizard can recover 7 levels per long rest, so a level 4 spell and 3 x level 1 spells.
yeah this is kinda similar to the 'hardcore' resting rules, where it takes a full week of downtime to do a single long rest, and a short rest is sleeping overnight. It technically nerfs both but most martials are short rest classes and most casters are long rest classes. And since most people only play 1 or 2 major encounters per day, it can do a lot to help rebalance the game in favor of those short rest classes. Especially if the week of downtime to do a long rest has to happen in a safe area like a town.
Stunning Strike is such an interesting bad ability for monks that I feel it almost warrants an entire video on its own. It's incredibly powerful of course, but it's also insanely more powerful than basically anything else that a Monk can do, and it's incredibly Ki efficient since it only costs 1 and you can use it after every hit, even hitting the same target multiple times to try and force them to fail the save if only due to RNG. And as a result, especially with how Ki Hungry Monks are, it basically means that Stunning Strike is the only thing you should be doing like 90% of the time whenever you attack. And that in turn makes monks into this sort of really simplistic one-trick-pony where they focus on trying to stun-lock enemies as much as possible until they run out of ki. And like even then, we're also talking about an ability that lets them stun only a single target, and they have to be within Melee Range to do it. For comparison Most casters get access to things like Hold Person, which lets them do functionally the same thing, but with a 60 foot range on it. And on top of that Hold Person can be upgraded to hit multiple targets at once and last for up to a whole minute from a single casting. I mean hell not only do casters get Hold Person at level 3 when Monks get stunning strike at level 5, but by level 5 Hold Person can already hit 2 people at once. So this one relatively minor spell is basically a better version than an entire other class's best option. And there's still other ways that Casters can way more effectively impact the battlefield with things like the aforementioned Web spell which can affect a whole group without even needing to be upcast and sticks around so that other characters can try to push people into said webs. But yeah, the issue isn't that Martials don't have any options whatsoever beyond damage. It's just that Single Target Damage is the only thing that they are specifically better at than a caster. And for nearly every other thing in the game a Caster can vastly outpace any martial trying to do anything other than that.
@@BlazeMakesGames Iffy comparison between Stunning Strike and Hold Person. Hold Person only works on humanoids. Wide swathes of creatures that Hold Person will be useless on. Stunning Strike works on just about everything. Casters don't get Hold Monster until level 9 and it costs a 5th level slot. Web is also overrated. Casting it means doing no damage, unlike using Stunning Strike which lets you do a full round of attacks. With Web, you are giving up your entire turn to maybe take one turn from an enemy. You get the possibility to affect multiple enemies at the expense of doing 0 damage. For Web to be good you either need conveniently grouped enemies, a linear path so that Web can't be easily circumnavigated, or a party composition tailored to push things back into Web. You also have concentration and Counterspell affecting both Web and Hold Person/Monster, which Stunning Strike is not subject to. The closest equivalent to a level 5 Monk who attacks and tries one Stunning Strike each round is a caster who can cast Raulothim's Psychic Lance 15 times per day (damage + a chance to stun). Also, a Monk isn't incentivized to use all of their Ki on Stunning Strike. That is a gross oversimplification. From a tactical perspective, you don't want to stun weak enemies, enemies that can be killed before they take a turn, enemies that are already controlled/stunned, or enemies that are going to be controlled by another party member. You only want to stun threatening enemies who are going to have a chance to put out damage if you don't stun them. Flurry of Blows to finish off enemies or push damage is just as ubiquitous as well as using Step of the Wind for movement and various subclass uses for Ki. Plus, you usually want to Flurry an enemy that you stunned on the previous turn instead of trying to stun them again.
D&D should implement the spell slots system to martial caracters. Transform the fighter, rogue, paladin, barbarian and ranger special habilities (maneuvers, sneak attack, smite, rage, spells etc) into a slot based system, just like they do it with the spell slots for casters. As you martial character progress, so progresses the number of habilities (spells) known, the number of habilities slots you can use per day, and also increases the maximum damage output that you can deal in each hability. So for instance, you could have a 3rd level maneuver called "headstrike", if you strike a hit, you deal 8d6 damage to the target, half as much if the target saves against a DEX svt (DC could be the damage taken). By the way, 8d6 is the same damage as a 3rd level fireball. You could have a maneuver that imitates, in game mechanics, the slow, blind, silence spells effects. You could even have maneuvers that you can concentrate on, so its effects last longer than 1 round (like a samurai last stand, a viking berserk), so you can apply concentration checks to ALL players, not only to the casters. Martial characters should also have the equivalent of cantrips, minor habilities that could be useful during combat AND roleplaying, exploring, etc.
Well what you're suggesting essentially becomes 4th edition, and a common complaint is that it made the classes feel too samey. Like yeah what you're suggesting *is* balanced, but it's only balanced by destroying all the uniqueness that different classes have. I don't think that we need to resort to that necessarily, as there are ways to write classes with different mechanics and still have them be fun. After all there are Half Casters and Warlocks already in the game that, while they use spell mechanics, they do so in very different ways that are still fun and relatively balanced against each other. So I don't think there's a need to shoehorn Martials into becoming reflavored Wizards.
@@BlazeMakesGameswell you can’t have your cake and eat it too. 4th edition classes are still very much different from each other, and don’t play the same.
This is what LaserLlama's Alternate Fighter did and I think it's great at giving Martials more things to do. Low level maneuvers are more realistic feats of athleticism, and high level maneuvers feel more mythical heroic deeds and I think it's great. I think that's how WotC should officially scale the martials.
Lol I am far from the only person to identify these issues, I’m sure that there are far more more qualified people to do that. But I won’t deny that I would like to speak directly about these issues with some people on the design team.
@@BlazeMakesGames Honestly, I'd prefer it if you lectured the people at Kobold Press, and any other companies creating their own take on DnD, as I feel WotC and 5.5e is a lost cause.
Well I'll admit that everyone is inherently capable of tanking to some degree, but clearly some classes like barbarians are meant to be better at mitigating damage than others. The problem of course is that casters tend to be way too good at mitigating damage as well.
@@BlazeMakesGames i mean that’s kind of my point. Most of the time you can’t really build mitigation too much. And like u said casters can do it so easily with dips for either medium armor or the shield spell
well I think that right there is the issue. Martials are meant to be the front liners but there's not a ton they can do to actually make themselves more durable once they get their AC as high as it'll go with heavy armor and a shield. Meanwhile a caster can take spells and such that directly enhance their Mitigation. The point is that I think it should be emphasized more as a proper role, Martials should be way better at it than they are now, and casters need to be made worse at it.
If a caster has no resources it is their own fault! I repeatedly see even the "best" so called players making the same huge mistake. They write no scrolls! You can make scrolls, correct the problem!
It is high time for a "magic corrupts" approach. The more powerful the spell, the higher the the chance to have a price to pay - permanent hit point loss, Constitution loss etc.
That’s one of the reasons I like Wrath and Glory. As a 40k game their mage equivalent has no real limit on how much they can use their magic, but the issue is that every time they do, they risk causing some kind of twisted corruption to occur like a wild magic sorcerer, but way more dangerous.
The premise of a martial-caster divide is based on the idea that all options should be equally viable, that they should do comparable damage, they should have the same number of options that every other class has and that's just poppy-cock. I submit that each class is a different playstyle and comparing them is meaningless because of that. Its like comparing apples to carrots. People who think casters are better should just play casters. Obviously that is more your style. But sometimes you just want to smack things with a big ass sword. That's a different playstyle. So why ARE we comparing these different playstyles? Optimizers. Optimizers, in their neverending pursuit of squeezing the most damage or the most utility or the highest AC mix-and-match various classes to create a sum greater than the combination of their parts. They use made-up statistics like DPR to argue their case, knowing full well that metric is so heavily reliant on assumptions to make it meaningless. But they keep on, telling all the new players that certain subclasses and certain classes are great and others are terrible. All in pursuit of the most damage or the most powerful characters. It is the elevation of mechanics at the expense of story. A character who is multiclassed into four different classes for this feature and that feature doesn't have a reason for those switches because its not about story, its about mechanics. They treat the game as if character creation has an alacarte menu. This is not me saying they are playing the game wrong. That's not for me or anyone else to say. But when you attempt to alter the game to fix an imbalance that you created in pursuit of that optimizing playstyle, you've gone too far. That's why I can't stand it when people compare martial characters with spell casters. They are not supposed to be equal or the same. That was 4e and it just felt weird. That's why we dropped it.
Okay but I think you're missing the point tho when a wizard with just 3 basic spells that nearly everyone takes: Mage Armor, Shield, and Absorb Elements, can be tankier than the tankiest possible Barbarian or Fighter past like level 4. Thus removing basically the one main downside that is supposed to balance out a caster. (And this only gets worse if you play with Silvery Barbs) Or when the Martial characters are given almost zero out of combat utility options while Casters not only have good mental stats to better navigate social encounters, but also have access to spells to just negate most challenges like fly or stone to mud. But then you get into combat where the Martial characters shine! And the Mage just casts Fireball and does 10 times more damage than a fighter could hope to ever achieve in their lifetime... By all means I agree to your point that optimizers are missing the point sometimes. But to go so far in the other direction as to ignore any and all possible comparisons is I think equally foolish. I barely even bothered bringing up statistics in my video. And in fact my biggest complaint is nothing to do with DPR or whatever, it's to do with the fact that Martial characters have so much less agency compared to casters who get so many more cool features and options and ability to apply themselves to most situations even outside of their niche. Like regardless of how you wanna try and frame the problem, that doesn't change the fact that most Martial characters have really boring turns most of the time where all they do is run up to someone and hit them with their sword. Meanwhile the caster gets to use fun flavorful abilities that let them call down lightning or summon walls of energy or manipulate the world around them.
"The premise of a martial-caster divide is based on the idea that all options should be equally viable..." Yes, they absolutely should. All 12 player classes should be equally viable. They don't need to do the same thing and it would be better if they had more clearly defined roles. That way we could avoid Wizards being the masters control, utility and defense at the same time as they put out competitive amounts of damage and support with a modicum of game knowledge. But optimizers aren't the only ones suffering from poor game balance. I've played with veterans and newbies alike and I've seen what happens when, for example, a Ranger and a Rogue try to exist in the same role. Even without optimization, the Rogue just can't keep up with the Ranger because of how independently strong spells are. The Ranger wanted to be an assassin type, so they picked Hunter's Mark and Pass Without Trace because they looked cool for that character, and just like that the Rogue class was completely invalid. Expertise doesn't matter when PWT is a +10 bonus to everyone. Sneak Attack doesn't scale fast enough to be relevant. You get the same story if a Paladin and Fighter exist in the same party as melee characters. And Tempus forbid that a Bladesinger shows up to try their fancy new attack actions. Spellcasters can accident their way to decent builds becauseyou can pick spells that look cool or fitting for your character and probably get a decent selection, because spellcasting is designed to be independently strong in a way martials just aren't in 5e. Martials can't really do that, because picking what you think is "cool" is a good way to miss the options that are "good", since only heavy polearms and hand crossbows scale halfway decently thanks to feat support. You want a longbow, a greatsword or dual wielding? Whelp, too bad. You just hit lvl 8 and those weapons aren't viable anymore. You want to tank with a shield? Too bad tanking doesn't work for martials in 5e, unless you're specifically playing a very niche Eldritch Knight variant that doesn't use a shield anyway. You want to be a tanky Barbarian? Too bad you'll run out of Rage uses realy quick and that dmg resistance doesn't protect you against most of the real dangerous stuff anyway. On top of all of this, martials without spellcasting are boring and repetitive and barely distinguished from one another. Fighter, Rogue and Barbarian aren't 3 unqiue classes; they're 3 classes that have slightly different special features centered around the Attack Action as your core gameplay loop. At least Paladins and Rangers provide more than that through their spells, letting them mix up their gameplay from time to time. Monks are only unique because in a system of god awful warrior classes, they still stand out as the worst of the lot.
the thing is that it doesn't even have to hit that many. Just hitting 2 or 3 enemies already means you're effectively multiplying your damage by 2-3x. And a lot of casters will either set up ambushes or otherwise try to have high imitative to cast a spell like fireball before the enemies can split apart. And fireball has enough AoE to easily fit at least 3 enemies within its range in most encounters. Not to mention that casters are the only ones with effective battlefield control and manipulation abilities. So they can also often push creatures around or block them into spaces to set up future AoEs on top of that
@@BlazeMakesGames Two considerations here, first, a cleave focused martial can often hit 3 or more enemies in a round unless facing exclusively ranged enemies, in which case you are looking at a many shot focused martial, which can shoot many times. Second, every round and spell cast setting a big aoe hit is a round not spent hitting enemies, that the martial is spending hitting enemies. Third, there is no such thing as "go first to get them before they move apart" because these are not video games spawning in enemies in clumps right in front of the player. In fact, combat is supposed to start hundreds of feet away when one side first notices the other side, which never happens at less than 60 feet except under very special circumstances, such as being found by enemies in the middle of a city or something. Just a couple considerations here.
I think when you're comparing the damage output of characters, you're putting your finger on the scale by comparing Meteor Swarm to a greatsword fighter. For one thing, Meteor Swarm is about 3.5 times as damaging as Sunburst, the most damaging 8th level spell, a spell which is in a practical tie with a number of other spells for 2nd most damaging damage spell in the game. Assuming 1 short rest every 2 encounters, you're talking about a Fighter able to deal that 140 damage in the opening round of combat for the entire day, potentially dropping multiple enemies from full HP, and beginning the action economy tilt. Second, you compare the act of lobbing fireballs at hordes of goblins in a way of also putting your finger on the scale. A fireball deals 8d6 damage, which averages to 28 damage. This may kill basically any CR 1/4 creature like a goblin even on a successful save, but most CR 1 enemies have around 32 HP. If you're talking about fighting even just Human Thugs, rather than Goblins, you're already needing to roll kinda well to be taking them out with that spell. Fighters meanwhile, get to continue making attacks until their target drops before moving on to the next, practically ensuring tilt every time they get to act. I guess it comes down to the question, how many enemies do you have to deal with? If it's about two, fighter is better, since they're going to chew through more of the HP in a single round, even potentially allowing the wizard to finish it off before it acts, and virtually guaranteeing a successful, and potentially even bloodless combat. If you're talking about 4-5, you're still talking about a fighter probably dropping one and potentially starting well in on a second, while a wizard's damage is technically slightly higher, it denies no actions, meaning you use more resources every battle. If you're talking about like, 20 we start to see wizard potentially pulling ahead in a narrow band of levels, 5-9ish, but after that, those 20 monsters are going to start having 40ish HP each, and even Cones of Cold and Firestorms are going to barely drop them past half HP, while the fighter will still be merrily chewing up about 3 every action. Spellcasters very much do pull ahead in terms of survivability in comparison to a pure fighter, because of spells like shield and absorb elements, but a melee fighter ought to dip barbarian anyway for Bear Totem rage so they can take half damage. Crossbow fighters can benefit from being 100 feet back if they need to be and parry with distance better even than spellcasters, whose spells can sometimes be ranged only 60, or even sometimes 30. They may have 5 points less AC, but AC doesn't really protect you in 5e. Monsters quickly have +10 to +13 or more to hit, and unless you're skirting the very highest AC possible for your level, enemies will be hitting on rolls of 9+ in the middle range of levels. Healing is basically impossible as a strategy, so if you want to stay up between your actions, you need mitigation, and that's Wild Shape or Barbarian rage and few other options that can work at the edges, like stacking blur on top of wearing plate, or summoning monsters to fight for you and taking the dodge action. I do think it's a massive, massive problem that this relative point of equilibrium only exists for Crossbow Experts and Polearm Masters. If you're a rogue, you basically NEED to be hasted 100% of the time for the 'ready action double sneak attack' trick, if you're a monk, the one trick you have is spamming stun, which isn't bad, but isn't good, and you may actually just be better off using a glaive with polearm master anyway. If your fighter uses a sword and shield, or if you're not using feats, or if you're at extreme low levels before martials can acquire their feats and their second attacks (I maintain that the level where the caster-martial divide is unquestioningly the widest is 1st level) then yeah, there's nothing you can do. There ought to be ways for other melee options to generate the kinds of bonus action attacks that GWM and Polearm Master gives, more Reaction attacks like Polearm master gives, the kind of synergy that Polearm master gives when taken along with Sentinel, and ranged builds need better defenses, or better mobility powers. If you're talking about solving non-combat problems, I have no arguments against a caster-martial divide, but when you specifically cite AOE damage as a reason for spellcasters to be pulling ahead, I have to call out the ways your assumptions used to identify the facts don't track with typical play conditions.
BTW, one question. Be it Martial or Caster, where are they learning all that stuff anyway? Looks like the Mentor/Teacher concept has been completely abandoned as well as letters of recommendation from one teacher to the next. Not to mention to work to gain access to organizations that teach that stuff. Which brings me to a question everyone should ask themselves. What do you want? A Role-Playing Game or a Tactical Wargame? Right now you let yourselves being pushed into Tactical Wargames by the publishers. And no, there is no clear line between the two. But the question of what you prefer remains.
The great weapon fighter Vs meteorite comparison is pretty much completely useless. First of all, you didn't consider the chances to hit or to save which would have put the caster ahead since meteorite deals half damage on saves while attacks don't. Secondly, you can't cast more than one 9th-level spell a day while the fighter can do four attacks every round. And then why are we even looking at 17th-20th level when almost no campaigns even get that far?
The point was just a quick comparison. I didn’t include the to hit chance because I was giving the fighter the most benefit of the doubt to show how bad it is even in a best case scenario. But yeah in reality if you go into the deeper math, a high level fighter still has trouble keeping up with spells like fireball that can be cast at 5th level
Sorry I have to disagree that rogues can't be good at damage, control, mitigation, and utility all that the same time. Rogues are far more unbalanced than any other class
Rogues have by far the best utility out of any of the martial classes while still having combat potential I'll give you that, but even with Sneak Attack their damage output is fairly comparable to a Fighter, except that it's even more single-target focused. At least a fighter can spread out their damage across numerous targets with multiple attacks and especially an action surge. While a Rogue pretty much focuses all of their damage on one target with Sneak Attack, and even then they need to make sure they maintain the conditions needed to do a sneak attack. And focusing super hard on single-target damage means that you'll always lag behind AoE effects like fireball. Really, the Rogue's main strength is simply that it's a Dex based class, and Dexterity is what is overpowered, not the Rogue. As it's Dexterity that allows Rogues to be good at both Melee and Ranged Combat, have high initiative and AC, and be good at a variety of useful skills like Acrobatics and Stealth. The entire Rogue class is basically just riding on the coat-tails of the Dexterity Stat. Which I would argue is more akin to a "Two Wrongs make a Right" kind of solution. It technically works and Rogues are decently good because of it, but I'd hardly call it good design.
@@BlazeMakesGames sure they will lag behind AOE damage because the damage is multiplicative but let's look at the rogue class as a whole. They get the most skills out of any class, they get evasion, they get uncanny dodgez they get 3 different save proficiencies they get to treat their skill rolls as a 10. They get the disengage action as a bonus action. They can also use the user item action as a bonus action. This allows them to use caltrops to create difficult terrain. Note all of this is every round or every turn and with appropriate feats the rogue can do even more. Then once per long rest they just get a 20, divination wizard can't stop it. This hasn't even touched any of their subclasses. In a single round a rogue could cover each of the four categories you listed whereas a caster could at most cover two. Now I freely admit a caster is going to be able in most cases have a larger effect in said category on any given turn but like you said action economy is massive and adds up over time given this i think rogues that consistently use their actions to effect multiple categories over a given encounter can be more influencal than a caster. As far as the other martial classes I agree they get left behind casters and need some serious help
I think some Disparity is deserved. I mean, usually spellcasters need tu build their character and then choose from a number of spells, which makes playing a spellcaster more exhausting in and out of the game. That said, most intelligent creaures should know that they have to focus on the spellcasters beacause they are usally glasscanons, and then the game turn around the idea of melee classes taking the offensive to protect their allies, which is usually the fantasy of that type of characters. Also, magic items should provide some utility to melee classes and give them some extra abilities out of combat. This is my insight about this topic.
the issue is that the idea of casters being glass cannons in 5e is pretty much a myth from 5th level and onwards. Spells like Mage Armor, Shield, Absorb elements, and Silvery Barbs make Spellcasters have more powerful defensive options than most Martial characters, and the ability to do things like teleport as a bonus action and put up barriers between themselves and enemies can make them neigh untouchable at higher levels. Martial characters have no real answer to this and so ironically it should really be the Casters defending the Martial if we're talking about who is the squishiest. But yeah I will acknowledge that the balance doesn't need to be perfect. Casters being a bit more powerful is fine. But it's at the point where it feels like some casters can just completely outshine Martials in almost every regard.
@@BlazeMakesGames ey thanks for the reply. I agree with you a lot, don't get me wrong... DMig is hard because you have the power to instigate spellcasters but most of the time it would be in detriment of the fun... It's hard to balance. Shield should be less powerfull and have an upcast option
yeah it can be hard, tho your general sentiment about giving martials more magic items definitely helps. After all buffs are more fun than nerfs and bringing martials up to the level of casters, or at least closing the gap a bit, by giving them more magic items tailored to their use can help a lot, as long as your other players don't feel too left out of course.
It is well understood by most people who look into optimization in 5e that the "frail caster" only applies to casters being played by people who aren't optimizing even a little bit. 14 dex+14 con+mage armor+shield is usually all you need to have a perfectly adequate survivability on a Wizard, since they're ranged characters anyway. You can push it much higher than this, of course, but this is typically all you need for basic encounters lvl 1-5 as long as you don't try to melee. Clerics come standard with 16-18 AC anyway through shields and medium (or heavy) armor. Bards and Warlocks can easily get the same through subclasses. The only spellcasters who are likely to be somewhat frail early on are Sorcerers (except Draconic) and Druids (except Moon). As you level up, casters also have a lot more freedom to invest in defensive traits, since they don't have many required feats (mostly just Warcaster and maybe Constitution proficiency). Any (non-Hexblade) Warlock can pick up medium armor and shield proficiency with a single feat, which is going to be a very good investment for the class. Clerics can happily invest in Toughness (+2 HP per lvl) or a Magic/Strixhaven Innitiate feat for additional defensive options (like the Shield spell). Meanwhile, martials *need* to either invest in the ranged package (Archery+SS+CBE) or melee package (GWM+PAM+Sentinel) to keep up their damage above lvl 5, so they have no wiggle room for defensive features. As you level up, martials just become more and more frail as AC and saving throw values fall behind the scaling on enemy attacks and DCs, while your HP to monster dmg balance start to favor the monster dmg. Casters have more freedom to invest in defensive features, have access to more defensive features and have the action economy freedom to take defensive actions (like Dodge) without crippling their contribution to the party. As an example, a Cleric casting Spirit Guardians then dodging the rest of the combat is actually a decent strategy that will do repeated AoE dmg, provide defnsive utility and some control through slowing enemies.
I don't see how this is a problem. In fact, I think they've broke the game more trying to even out the classes. Giving Wizards more power early on? Sounds good but makes picking a martial class seem pointless. Toning down casters later in the game? Why? The entire point of wanting to play a caster in these games is to be able to bend reality and break normal boundaries. Things that martial classes should never be able to do.
I mean part of the issue is that they do keep buffing the casters for some reason while leaving Martials in the dust. But more importantly I'm not saying that Martial characters need to have insane magical powers or to be able to warp reality. I just want them to be more fun to play and have more interesting abilities at higher levels. If a normal experienced and grizzled knight is only like level 5, then a level 20 martial should be like Captain America, casually cutting through swaths of enemies and performing great feats of martial prowess like suplexing a dragon or knocking down a building with a strike of their hammer. There's tons of room to design more fun martial abilities so that they don't get totally left behind in the dust, without having to resort to giving them spells and such.
In my opinion non competitive ttrpgs shouldnt be balanced. They should focus on making each class feel unique and have a logical reason for its features. Balancing for combat should be limited to just making each class useful.
I mean that's fair, I'm not really arguing that everything need to be perfectly balanced. But even with that consideration, Martial classes lag severely behind magical classes when it comes to their ability to do interesting things both in and out of combat. And even among other Martials in combat, they tend to not really feel very unique. When a Barbarian does 30 Damage cause they got bonuses from raging, a Fighter does 30 damage because they have 3 attacks, and a Rogue does 30 damage cause they did a sneak attack, is that really a meaningful difference when they all have the same practical upshot? Meanwhile a caster is able to do things like create walls of fire that completely change the layout of the fight, use spells like Eldritch Blast and Thunderwave to knock enemies around, or use spells like fly to just completely bypass entire challenges.
@@BlazeMakesGames Certainly, it seems quite natural that a class labeled as a "Fighter" would primarily focus on combat skills. Additionally, it's important to consider that if Fighters were granted area-of-effect abilities or what might be considered "magical" powers, it could dilute the distinctive appeal that draws people to such classes. This could potentially transform the essence of a Fighter into something akin to a beefy Wizard capable of performing backflips As pointed out by others in the comments, Fighters are often associated with a low-fantasy aesthetic, in contrast to the high-fantasy nature often attributed to magic users. This affects "class fantasy. A "might" character, it would be logically coherent to incorporate more mundane skills related to survival, leadership, and weapon skills. Keep in mind that especially in DND the inclusion of weapon-specific abilities also remains a distinctive trait of this class. Also fighters are pretty strong in DND, unless your campaign goes for years i highly doubt you will get to a point that your wizard can take down a fighter on their own. Regarding the division their damage output through multiple attacks, it's comparable to the way area-of-effect spells tend to distribute damage across targets. Both scenarios involve a trade-off between concentrated and distributed damage. As for the argument about limited resources, just no. Fighters can capitalize on dedicated supports...a magic user that wastes their own resources and suffers opportunity costs for supporting them. Potions are also an option and your AC (or ac equivalent) is typically higher than that of a magic user. So a "Might" character has multiple attacks, dedicated supporters, effectivelly infinate HP, weapon specific abilities and is difficult to hit. How can you say this class is lacking? The above are true for almost all major roleplaying systems. Nevertheless, the genre is "Role Playing". Your character is a fictional creature that lives, breaths, interracts and evolves with the "Story-telling" game's world. You are not a fighter that can do the Weapon Art: Kirito style no jutsu but a character with flaws, backstory, personal goals etc and you just happen to wield a sword as your weapon. Is it wrong to add magic to th "Might" Character? No absolutely not but keep in mind they will no longer be a "Might" Character but a "Hybrid". You are suppose to flavor your attacks btw and i think you dont have enough experience as a player with the game (you might be a dm for life) and this is the reason you dont get it. Or maybe you are just a power-gamer. Eitherway, this is not a problem for many people and if it is for you, you can always make a hybrid character. By the way, it's interesting to note that Barbarians could also be interpreted as magic users due to their utilization of Rage, which imparts them with super-powers. I also hate 5e with a passion but i strongly disagree with your opinion in so many levels
I mean there's a lot of misconceptions about spellcasters that you're falling into there. For one your point about distributed damage. The core issue is that when a Fighter distributes their damage, they are literally dividing their damage between multiple targets. If a fighter has 2 attacks that deal 2d6+5 damage, then they can either deal 4d6+10 damage to one target, or they can split it up to deal 2d6+5 damage to two targets. So in effect a Fighter has a fixed amount of damage they can deal every round and has to spend it on each target. Meanwhile a spellcaster at level 5 has access to fireball, a spell that does 8d6 damage to everyone in the blast. This means that they actually get *more* effective damage the more people they hit. The fireball doesn't get weaker if you hit 10 people with it instead of 1 person. So if we put a wizard in the same scenario, a Wizard can either use a fireball to hit one person for 8d6 damage, or can use the fireball on a group of people to deal 8d6 damage to every single one of them. So if they hit 3 people with fireball, their total damage for the round actually goes up to 24d6 damage. And I'm not sure how you got to the conclusion that "More AC" somehow equals "Functionally infinite health." it's just slightly more health at best, but even then the misconception is that spellcasters have less AC and health than Martials. On paper that's what it looks like at first. But the issue is that there are a handful of low level spells that really mess with the balance of the game: Shield, Absorb Elements, and Silvery Barbs. These are all 1st level defensive options, which means that the more a caster levels the more easily they can afford to spend spell slots to cast these spells, which offer massive defensive boons I won't bother getting into the weeds on here, but the practical upshot is that they massively increase the effective health of the caster to the point where a Fighter can't hope to keep up. But yeah ultimately the problem is complex and a lot more significant than most people realize. But I will admit it's not in every game. It's true that many games resolve these issues better than most. Also I have no problem with adding magic to martials, but I also don't think you have to to make them balanced. Regardless that aspect of the discussion is irrelevant. Either way while it's true that many are content to play a very imbalanced game and have fun doing so, I don't see why we can't strive to have a more balanced version of the game as well. I mean the biggest issue with Martials is still their lack of interesting options. Even if a fighter out-damaged a wizard by a ton and had a ton more AC and health, I would argue that they're still weaker than the Magical classes due to their lack of options. If every time my turn comes up in combat I just say "I run up and hit it with my sword" and roll damage and that's it, then the game just isn't very fun for me. And like you said usually combat-classes sacrifice out of combat utility for such prowess, so I'm not having fun in-combat and I'm not good at doing anything out of combat. Even if we throw out all the numbers and pretend everything is somehow balanced, I don't think that's balanced in terms of "Fun" distribution. And that seems to be what your original comment is about, and is imo still the biggest issue with D&D's combat specifically.
The problem is that Fighters, Rogues, Barbarians and Monks aren't really useful. Normally, they're completely overshadowed by spellcasters, but a DM can take steps to try to balance that out. And if the DM does take those steps, the classes without spellcasting are completely overshadowed by Ranger (at least from Xanathar and onwards) and Paladin instead, because the half-casters contribute roughly as much (and often more if we pick good subclasses) as martials while also providing powerful spells. Paladins have great spells like Heroism, Bless, Aid and Find Steed. Rangers have Fog Cloud, Goodberry, Silence, Spike Growth, Pass Without Trace and more. You can ban Conjure Animals and Rangers will still outperform the non-casters.
just ban all casters from your table and be done with it. i am getting so freaking sick and tired of the fighter types are so far behind casters. utter bullcrap. limited uses of the dam spells that you dismiss so quickly because hit points guess who as far fewer hit points and the crapiest ac casters! and ranged attacks exist. martial classes have damage midigation built in its called armor.
Your first point of limited spells was answered early on in the video and is only a problem for the spellcaster if there fighting 6-8 encounters a day, which is not always the case. If they only have 1 or 2 encounter a day, then they can go full ham ith spells without their spell slots running out. As far as their hp and ac is concerned, spell casters have more ways to replenish their hp and have spells to boost their ac to just as high as the martials, and ways to stop the enemies from ever getting to the spell casters. So the spell casters are nowhere near as soft and squishy as you are implying.
Honestly the martial caster divide is totally fine and thats how it should be. There is no reason why in a world with reality shaping magic a guy with a big sword should be as powerful as a wizard who can bring down a meteor.
I mean that might be true from a logic standpoint but it is still a game that needs to be balanced. I doubt that the creators of an MMO or like a pvp shooter would be able to get away with just saying "What are you complaining about? Obviously this class is supposed to be overpowered, for lore reasons!"
Problem is - anyone can pick a class. So you don't have any reason to pick inferior class. Older editions (before Monte Cook decided that magic should be overpowered) casters have downsides. They were still super strong, but at least martials have something to their advantage.
Here's the thing: That sort of imbalance can exist in *monster statblocks* just fine. No one would bat an eye at the strongest monster in the game being a spellcasting monster that is just better than every non-spellcasting monster. But *player classes* need to be balanced, because they exist to work alongside one another and to have comlimentary strengths and weaknesses. But WotC eliminated all the weaknesses of the casters and most of the strengths of the martials over the years. Characters without spellcasting just do not bring anything to the group that is worth the loss of spellcasting, because half-casters (Ranger, Paladin) can easily match (or surpass if you pick the best subclasses) the non-casters as martials while also bringing spells. Gloom Stalker Ranger is a perfect example of this. There is no Fighter or Rogue build that the Gloom Stalker isn't better at, while also providing lots of additional utility and battlefield control.
I mean the GM can always help but it shouldn't be the GM's job to rebalance the game for the designers. And the GM can only do so much when an unoptimized Wizard can have better defenses than an optimized Fighter while also having more of an ability to manipulate the battlefield and stop enemies from getting to them. Like it's always possible for a caster to hold themselves back and for a GM to play favorites to support the martials, but like I said the game could also just be better balanced to support more playstyles more fairly. And I mean to their credit the 5.5e update is doing some good things to help.
And yet they don't. The 5e meta party is like wizard wizard cleric wizard lmao. There is literally no none home brew fight or campaign that doesn't get reduced to 1 out of 10 difficulty with that comp. If you disagree you are just really bad at dnd
10:00 one thing to note. Like you were saying before martial’s resource is essentially their HP, so by the time casters run out of resources martials are dead or dying
Mhm, and naturally it's primarily casters that have means of recovering HP for themselves and the party.
WOTC have tried to destroy martial caster synnegies in the name of bounded accuracy, but one remains. The fighter does not run out of HP until after the bard, cleric, and/or druid are all out of spells. Well, maybe not the bard in 5.5, but that's a bridge I'm not jumping off of.
@@nathanbrown8680 I could maybe understand if you said, barbarian, but certainly not the fighter.
If in your experience casters are running out of slots before a fighter runs out of hp, that is likely due to bad spell slot management/choice, or the effects of good spells being cast paying off their dividends.
@@someusername9591 What is wrong with your healers that they just let the fighter die? 5e doesn't have slots like 1-3e did, everyone is spontaneous and cure is upcastable. There is no excuse to not heal the fighter after they run out of short rest dice short of being out of spell slots yourself.
@@nathanbrown8680 That's not helping your point if Fighter's have to rely on caster's to be alive. You could instead replace that fighter with a caster and they might do just as well in the majority of scenarios while also being able to support other allies.
Martial's on niche is single target damage. Not utility, not control, not buffing, not aoe damage, and besides the bear totem barbarian even damage mitigation requires you to go caster.
For the strength (intimidation) use, in chapter 7 of the player's handbook, there is a sub-section called "Variant: Skills with Different Abilities" under the ability check section. It says that a DM may call for a different skill and ability combination, and one of the examples is strength (intimidation).
yeah I mean, most tables I think rule that anyways just through common sense.
I love this one. Also, I'd allow an altogether different skill for a certain aim when appropriate - History (Intelligence) to persuade a gallery of scholars that a king was an impostor, for instance, assuming your character has proof.
@@BlazeMakesGamesI do understand why it's mainly charisma. I mean even if you're very strong, if you have no idea what to say and have terribly unimposing body language, then your very brawny barbarian might still just come off as laughable rather than scary.
@@ArvelDreth it goes both ways though. What words can possibly make huge orc barbarian scared of scrawny bard? That is also unrealistic
@@FayeRantTheStrong intimidation can be about more than just brute force and violence, but even if we are going with the idea that intimidation is only about violence, a scrawny bard still has terrifying magic. But there are honestly a lot of things in D&D that are unrealistic and lack proper explanation anyway. Like the evasion class feature.
One thing that seems to get overlooked is the fundamental mismatch in the inspiration for the class archetypes:
Martials are Low Fantasy
Casters are High Fantasy
Martials could compete just fine if they had off the wall anime protagonist powers or if casters magics had to be infrequent, subtle, and costly to use. Of course neither option would be received well at all, so actual solutions are difficult, but I'm fond of tweaking every option closer to hybrids.
yeah, it's a less tangible sort of problem so I didn't include it in my list, but it is absolutely a factor. It feels like they're designing 2 different games at times. On one hand they look at a Melee character and are like "Hmm hitting 2 people in one attack seems a bit too strong, you better only deal half damage for that." Meanwhile they look at the casters and go "Oh *another* AoE that does more damage than you have dice? Yeah sure whatever"
@Blaze Yeah, it didn't much need to be in this vid. It's more important to consider when doing new game design, at least to guide decisions beyond only balancing the mechanics.
I think this does not need to be a problem for balancing. In older versions of dnd and in some other systems they tried to balance it by giving casters significant disadvanteges in order to balance those powerful spells. I give you a example:
I'm currently playing in a dnd 3.5 campain (I'm new to that system, but here are my experiences so far)
- There are no real cantrips, they are more like lvl-0-spells (with spellslots) and for those apply the same rules like for other spells (so you can completly run out of spells)
- Cantrips (or better lvl-0-spells) are not good for dealing damage. There are only a few and they are crap (e.g: Ray of Frost deals 1d3 cold damage and scales only in range, not in damage), so cantrips are utility-spells.
- And most importantly: Most casters cannot assign their spellslots while casting, but instead have to assign them at the start of an adventuring day. So if you want to cast Fireball two times this day, you have to prepare it twice. so you dont have a number of prepared spells and a number of spellslots, you just have a number of spells.
At first that last part really bothered me, but in the end this has a very unique kind of balancing: While casters have by far the highest potential (with power and versitility), they require carefull planing and in a lot of cases also need the martials to ceep them save cause martials are reliable. (this is of cause an oversimplification and most casters can still do something, if the don't have the needet spell (at least in combat), but this summs it up).
In my personal view, the biggest problems of 5e are 3:
1)
By making casters more easier to play and giving them good unlimeted combat cantrips, they removed every drawbag of casters, without lowering the power-potential, so now you end up with the senario u disribed.
2)
While casters have quite good options to caunter martials, this doesn't really go the other way around. Give martials the abillity to disturb the casters spellcasting (e.g: If casters make a spell while beeing in close combat to you, you can use your atac of oppertunity and if the attac hits, the spell is negated)
3)
If you don't want casters to have flaws, and if characters are meant to level up together, in order to not run in those balancing issues, Martials at high levels also need to become high fantasy like anime-protagonists: Have your barbarian strong enough to punch throu citty-walls.
@@_mine_creeper_7096 Hah, I'd say you have a lovely spin on finding solutions I don't like to issues I didn't have based on values I'm not concerned about. Its still valid! Your fun belongs to you and all that. And cantrips as level zero spell slots is a pretty good idea of done right (besides adding another number to track), and giving them a utility focus helps a lot with the "magic" feel in general. I feel you're overlooking some core design issues, however:
1.) Character actions and turns are also a resource, so it is important that the things you let players do in combat should be forth the time spent to do them instead of literally something else. If you cantrips aren't worth usong, then why even have them? Of course that's a vrry hard line solution, and I'm sure that "being useless" isn't the *point* here, so have some modifications:
- Cantrips' attack damage staying miniscule but adding defuffs or combat utility. (Keeps them as "strong" vs mundane attacks but in different ways than weapons)
- Keeping "level zero" spell slots for using cantrips, while also making sure that even after using every slot that casters still have thematic and effective options (so they can do *something* more fun than "uselessly flail with a stick" "bravely run away" or " I cast crossbow")
- When a caster only has useless spells left, they can still use those slots in some (generic, useful, and roighly as valuable) way. (paladin smites are the bigges example of this)
And I, uh.. i haven't covered all my thoughts on this but I can do this kind of thing for *hours* so I cutting it here. Hope you get something out of it.
I would love over-the-top anime powers for martials, but I grew up on anime. Everyone in the west who grew up on western fantasy seem to think martials can only be low fantasy.
Something that is worth remembering is that even in old school AD&D 2e, things weren't as imbalanced as it is now. Even when Mages get to their powerful spells, classes like Fighters have several things going for them to stay relevant in the party. Here are some things off the top of my head, comparing a Fighter and Mage/Wizard:
- Both rely on gold / loot for their progression, since the FIghter needs equipment, and Mages need spell scrolls and casting materials. Mages do not get spells when levelling up.
- Mages prepare individual spellslots. If you prepare 1 use of Shield, you can only cast Shield 1 time.
- Mages are actually frail, unless they spend several turns and hundreds of gold worth of materials to cast defensive spells. Enemies will often just ignore Mage AC, since it is often on the low side, and Mages have insanly low HP. At lvl 15, you have a max HP of 65 (10d4 hit dice + 20 from constitution + 5 from lvl 11-15) and an average HP of way less (50 with max con. 30 with neutral con). This is a problem when enemies you fight at the levels a Mage is super strong can easily deal 20+ dmg per attack. A lot of enemies will literally take a max HP lvl 15 Mage from full to 0 HP in a single turn, if they're an enemy you're supposed to fight at that level.
- Fighters can often more or less ignore enemy AC, since their hit hit value (THAC0) scale incredibly high at the levels Mages are supposed to be the best. This gives them a consistent damage output, unlike 5e. Fighters also have abilities (advanced weapon mastery) that give them a higher damage output relative to the HP of enemies than Fighters have in 5e. 50 DPR against an enemy with 300 HP is twice as strong as 50 DPR against an enemy with 600 HP. And back in AD&D 2e, enemies had a lot less HP than now, while the Fighters can easily match modern Fighters for damage output (again thanks to advanced weapon mastery and insanely high accuracy).
- High-end martial equipment often come with spells and spell-like abilities, that lets the Fighter copy some of the abilities of the Mage. A fully geared Fighter at the same level as a Mage at a level a Mage is supposed to dominate, with as valuable equipment as all the spell scrolls the mage has gotten over their career, will probably have half a dozen spells they can use or more. Sunblade, Helm of Brilliance, Bracers of Blinding Speed etc. are examples of equipment considered roughly equal in value to high level spells (IIRC).
- Enemy immunities. Sooooo many high lvl enemies come with long lists of damage types, status conditions and spell effects they are flat out immune to. And because Mages are less flexible thanks to preparing individual spellslots, this is actually very dangerous for them to deal with. A horde of Skeletal Warriors aren't going to care in the least that you tossed out Horrid Wilting, for example, because they are just completely unaffected.
- Magic Resistance (MR). Related to the last post, but works slightly differently. MR is a % chance a creature has to just be immune to any spell that doesn't specifically get around MR. A lot of high tier creatures have this. You can use spells to reduce MR, but that takes turns and spellslots.
For Clerics:
- Cleric magic was a lot weaker than it is now, capping at 7th level spells and typically being a lot more restrictive with who it could be used on (lots of self-only, lots of alignment restricted spells).
The main problem in AD&D, I think, isn't so much the Fighter vs Wizard thing. Instead, the main thing making Fighters less than ideal was the Fighter/Mage and Fighter/Cleric type hybrid characters (multi- and dual class) that brough enough of the Fighters martial abilities while also having spells.
I think that sometimes things like material components for Mages in AD&D 2e are forgotten, since they weren't implemented in the old Bladur's Gate and Icewind Dale games, nor most of the Gold- and Silverbox RPGs. These games also couldn't really react to the player pre-buffing, which would be much harder to do with a DM controlled enemy who would probably notice if there was suddenly a lightshow at the entrance to their base.
Fighters are also underperforming in those games, because most non-combat proficiencies weren't implemented in the game, apart from (some) Thief skills, Lore and Charisma. Fighters had, I believe, the second highest number of non-combat proficiencies, after the Thief.
Honestly looking back at AD&D 2e makes me sad, how did they mess up this badly with balancing martials later on?
@@nonenone-hv5iq By introducing much needed quality of life improvements to casters, because they were legitimately awful to play, but without doing the same for martials. But martials haven't just been stagnant the last 40 years; they've regressed. A 5e Fighter is less capable of scaling into higher levels, while also dealing with enemies with higher HP and has more competition from the "Fighter-variants" (Ranger, Paladin), who no longer requires meaningful tradeoffs compared to the Fighter. In fact, they're often just better.
@@nonenone-hv5iq because nobody wanted to play the classes that could straight up become useless if they didn't constantly rest and plan ahead. The way people talk about monks was the way people talked about every magic class. They didn't even have cantrips. They had level 0 spells that did like 1d3 damage, didn't scale, and could be run out of
@@TheTdroid As far as I recall, it also might be influenced by them in some ways pursuing shifting back to 3.5 design in many ways where martials in general were bottom tier.
More broadly there are ways to boost martials but I wonder if some small part of the problem is class fantasy. The fantasy of a mage is to cast magical spells and in a game where you eventually fight demigods or even gods and with a legacy of powerful spells, those spells sort of are wedged in. You can tweak this, Pathfinder 2e nerfed casters to help bridge this gap, but it will lead to grousing about how casters can't do anything (regardless of how much merit that is to that although it does seem acknowledged that even for people pretty satisfied with 2e casters at the lowest levels are genuinely bad to play). Martials in many ways have the opposite. Sure, there are people all for heroic fighters able to hammer the earth to shatter it or opting for Book of Nine Swords style combat but there's also a ton of people that want fighters for example to be complete regular joes that are just good at hitting things and that significantly impedes their potential.
@@brycejordan8987Part of the problem is that the expectations from the fanbase and the design choices by the developers do not match the system they are making.
You can't really have low fantasy classes in a system with high fantasy classes.
I think a lot of video games do this so much better than dnd, like the Dragon Age series. Like the Warrrior class. Whatt are Warriors? Some are "just" Warriors, of course, those with proper training are so much more Templars and Reavers being explicitly supernatural and extremely powerful, both in lore and gameplay, as an example.
What about Rogues? While a bit basic in Origins, since Dragon Age 2, they have been heavily flavored as using alchemy to bridge the gap between themselves and supernatural beings. Alchemy built on magical ingredients. Rogues are also exceptionally good at what they do.
On top of this, playable characters with the Mage class are far below the magical potential for the Dragon Age universe. So while Mages like Corypheus are beyond the power of any single Warrior or Rogue, he is also just as far beyond any Mage you can play or add to your party.
DnD 3.5 Book of Nine swords had IMHO, best martial classes. Disciplines, stances, maneuvers. Also, there was some fun mechanics, like Crusader getting random maneuvers. It does go a bit wuxia route sometimes, but it gives martials more than just - i attack with weapon and in the same time it doesn't move them in the GISH territory like 5e gives all martial classes at least one gish subclass. Big problem is that vancian magic is high fantasy and it doesn't mesh well with low fantasy low power games. That's why sweet spot is levels 3-8, as in those levels pure martial characters still feel useful. After that, magic just becomes to good. After lv 10, martials are just lackluster and subpar and they just need magic to keep up, cause wizards slowly enter demigod power levels, while martials remain in good mortal levels. Imho, best option is to just cap games to lv 8, or for higher levels, every one plays caster of some kind.
Another alternative, of course, is to simply state at the fore-front that any character without spellcasting abilities will have more magic items than anyone else. Possibly even more 1 more attunement slot. Magic items do a lot for martials, and in old school D&D, they usually ended up with more because they were the only ones who could use many of the items that weren't scrolls and potions, such as magic weapons.
I think tome of battle was best book sadly it was last one in 3.5 line and when they tried to put it for all classes like in 4e it backfired a bit
Even at level 3 in some games it’s rough for martials.
Like in 5e, web kills melee enemies virtually automatically on a failed saving throw. Hypnotic pattern knocks out half a combat, animate dead can do more collective dpr than a fighter at equal levels for every level past 6, and so on.
D&D needs Wuxia, especially the Monk.
Big problem is that all the maneuvers are basically just damage and debuff spells. The flavor is so supernatural that the classes can hardly be called martials anymore, and they still don't get any utility in the way mages do.
In the old game, martials got most of the magic items, and casters were severely limited in spells at low level. That didn’t make them equal at higher levels, but it helped. Of course, before 1e, spells only went to 6th level, so there has been a lot of caster bloat over the years.
yeah a big problem with casters is ironically a lot of QoL improvements made over the generations has lead to a huge amount of power creep. Like sure it was super annoying to have to manually prepare spells in each spell slot every day, but making all casters able to cast things more freely only further increases their versatility and such.
IMO, depending on the style of game I would argue that a well equipped Ranger is going to out preform a caster in damage, in Pathfinder 1e. Sounds like a modern game problem.
The other half is that DM's probably play too nice, depending what level your characters are, freedom of movement, spell resistance, blind fight, this all exists. Modern gamers strike as me "too nice" which allows spellcasters to exploit the mechanics way more freely.
Admittedly all from an outsider perspective, finding a group to play with is a lot harder than theory crafting, but I watched a few games here and there.
The other meta reason is that casters have more to read and thus more time (and money) invested in their build. Many tables and all publishing businesses are incentivized to reward that investment with greater power. Casters' power is gated behind a paywall of investment. Which would be nearly fine, if tables didn't need martials for party composition and as part of the fantasy.
Yeah that sorta ties into my comments about how casters just have a lot more content being them as well as a unified system that they’re able to more easily expand upon with every new book.
Sort of, but not really. I mean, so many of the top tier spells for all classes are either Basic Rules or Player's Handbook. With just those two lists, you'll outperform every non-caster. Martials, however, are arguably more dependent on newer releases, because that's where you get a lot of the subclasses you need to not feel *entirely* useless.
There's a lot of things that got left by the wayside that led to this. Sure, a handful of about 20-30 spells need to be nerfed. Big standouts like Fireball, Conjure Animals, Silvery Barbs, Shield, Pass Without Trace, Spirit Guardians, Goodberry, etc. Spellcasters need to not be able to cast spells or access spell slots from classes that don't provide proficiency for the armor they're wearing. Immediately, this cuts out most of the cheese, and makes things like cover make more sense to be exclusive to ranged players now that they're actually squishy like they should be as a tradeoff for their utility and burst power. Meanwhile, martials need "martial maneuvers" that work like Eldritch Invocations and give them a wide array of abilities to pick from with just as much flexibility as casters get. From teleporting around the battlefield with rogues, to slashing through a whole field at once with fighters, to punching an earthquake from the ground with monks, to leaping hundreds of feet onto enemies without suffering fall damage with barbarians. In a recent breakdown video on the Awakened Mind feature of the Scribes Wizard, my immediate thought about how powerful, unique and always-on it is, was "this is the kind of thing martials should be getting. Why is this on what's already the most powerful, flexible class in the game?"
It extends beyond having more features to choose from, customization, burst damage, control, and late-game power. Even just at level one with cantrips, spellcasters are given features and are accomplishing things beyond the ordinary person. A fighter might be a head above the typical town guard, but a wizard is already unlocking the secrets of the weave. A warlock is communing with deities. A cleric has been recognized and gifted power by a literal god. Magic says "it's okay to bend reality. That's what's expected." Meanwhile, try reading the rules on a Barbarian performing a standing high or running jump. In a world where 13 Charisma will let you sing life into existence or bend the (...ear?) of a Great Old One, 20 Strength will let you jump 8 feet into the air.
yeah one of the big ways I'd like to limit casters somewhat is to actually make Spell Schools important again. If say an Abjuration Wizard actually had to focus almost entirely on just Abjuration spells, instead of still being able to take Fireball and Force Cage and various Summon spells like every caster does, then that would vastly limit their insane versatility.
And then yeah in turn if Battlemaster was considered more of a baseline for what a Martial was capable of, and then you could stack other subclass abilities on top of things like Maneuvers, then maybe we could have something there
I think the major problem is not so much the raw numbers and options available on paper but rather how the DM acts during the preparing and running of the encounters. Most veteran DMs understands (or should atleast) that being a caster does not exclude a character from being targeted or being dogpiled if they seem like the easiest or the most dangerous target by the enemies in any given situation.
This type of approach towards running encounters incentives the players to use reactionary spells (such as the shield and absorb element spells) and/or defensive buff spells (mirror image, haste, invisibility and aid are a few examples) more often rather than just blasting the enemy which kinda limits how many spells a caster has access to and spells slots available at any given moment.
The same applies to utility spells, sure a fly spell can get you on top of the castle wall without making a sound but that also means that you have 1 less use of fireball if the guards 5 min later during a patrol.
a lot of it definitely comes down to the game is run. Probably the biggest factor that actually determines the balance of the game is the Resource Management aspect I brought up. If you actually run a game with 6-8 encounters before the casters can get a long rest, and in turn are forcing them to actually spend all their spell slots carefully so that they actually risk running out, and thus lose access to all their big flashy AoE and utility abilities.
the problem is of course that that's only one way to run a game and D&D now appeals to a broad range of players now and the system isn't very good at adapting to different styles of campaigns. The real improvement that needs to be made is making the game more flexible so that people don't accidentally make the problem worse than it already is.
Raw numbers/options are what shapes how the DM acts during & prepares their sessions/encounters.
@@BlazeMakesGames The way adventuring days are constructed, you can't run any fewer than 3 Deadly encounters and still constitute a full day. And the difficulty of those encounters make it so that they normally require spending more resources than a typical encounter. If DMs are running 1-2 encounters per day that don't tax long rest resources, then they are basically running the system off the books.
And for the DMs that do want to run 1 encounter per day narrative/overland games, there is a rest variant that lends itself to that style of gameplay, people just don't use it.
Maybe it can be argued that the system should do a better job of making these options known or bridging the gap between 1 encounter days and multi-encounter dungeon crawls (maybe the adventuring day rules should span from 1-5 encounters per day instead of 3-8). However, a lot of imbalance just comes from people not running the game how it was written.
@@jeffreybond5796 I am sympathetic to players however. Encounters can easily eat up a lot of time planning things out and pacing can be miserable and awkward when you have to intentionally cramming in 3 deadly encounters (+2 short rests) into every day that's an actual adventuring day.
As a DM I address this by 1. Reduce a lot of the magic items that casters benefit from (e.g. metamagic rods - which are essentially buying a feat), 2. Actively target casters as a priority for intelligent enemies (so they must spend resources on defence), 3. Use non-combat challenges (so the casters must spend resources on utility) 4. Design encounters that involve attacks from multiple directions so that area control and caster defence are much harder. 5. Enemies also have access to magic. 6. Disallow casters that are over-powered (e.g. Summoners in Pathfinder 1). 7. Each encounter 'responds' to the pcs so that enemies may arrive in waves, pursue the pcs, activate defences, etc - so the battle will almost certainly be more than one battle and will be drawn out into a series of encounters,
Yeah there’s definitely a lot of good practices you can do and by all means all of those things are good for both making combat more engaging and interesting and also make sense. I just wish that these games weren’t in a state where if you don’t follow those kinds of steps, the scale just flies to one side as the casters dominate everything.
Also removing the requirement on items that inherently cast magic rather than augment spellcasting
Helps to give martial characters more versatility.
As I think nobody would mind the Monk using a wand of Acid Splash
Or the rogue using a scroll of invisibility.
When it comes to 'area of effect': I mainly play Pathfinder, but I also do a little 'Starfinder' as well.
The 'Soldier' class can do some decent 'area of effect' attacks thanks to firearm weapons with the 'automatic' feature, as well as lobbing grenades, so I guess that helps balance out him vs Casters.
yeah a number of more sci-fi settings tend to solve a lot of these problems by adding more kinds of weapons with unique effects so that casters aren't the only ones able to do things like elemental damage or like you said being able to use grenades for AoEs. Not to mention that in such settings Magic is usually de-emphasized. I believe in Starfinder there aren't any full casters by default which is a huge boon to everyone else.
Elemental resistances would be a caster disadvantage if they didn't have a number of other spells with other damage types, meanwhile martials have to pray their DM is not stingy with a low-level magic weapon, and god forbid the enemy resistance is not to non-magic weapons.
Most, if not all issues you've described, have been solved long ago in a game called 13th Age.
Highly recommended.
Yeah there are definitely other games that do a lot better job of solving these problems. I’m personally a fan of most of the Warhammer 40k RPGs for that regard, especially since magic in that game is extremely volatile and dangerous
You should take a look at PF2e. The 3-action system gives martials lots of options while casters retain their options from spell selection, but lose on relative flexibility since most spells cost at least 2 actions. There's a lot more to the system than just that, and I think it's the best attempt to tackle this problem yet.
Yeah I like a lot of what I’ve seen of PF2e, and I remember as far back as the playtest that the 3-action system was one of my favorite parts of it. But for whatever reason I’ve never felt motivated to get into it. I should at least try it but I have to admit I’m not a huge fan of the number bloat after years of games like 5e and Wrath and Glory and the like
@@BlazeMakesGames even if you don't want to play it regularly, which I totally understand, I think it's more than worth a few sessions to get a feel for the many ways they bridged the martial/caster gap.
Also, first time players are intimidated by the big numbers, but the tight math and steady progression makes the whole experience more seamless than just reading through the book might suggest. I say that as someone that was completely burned out by 3.5 and never thought of going back to a crunchier system.
@@BlazeMakesGames The "number bloat" is mostly just adding your level to stuff you're proficient with. The game can barely be handled without digital tools more-so because of circumstantial modifiers and the more in-depth conditions, than because your roll might have a +25 to it. Something like Foundry for those with a wallet, or simply using Pathbuilder 2e for all your character sheets and creation on a regular tabletop (costs like only $4 if you want to toggle on certain optional rules like extra archetype feats), makes it way easier.
Outside of adding your level, it's very similar to 5e. You have training ranks in your proficiencies and each one is +2, from trained to legendary (+8), and then ability scores. Not far off from 5e at all. Often times, you won't even see Legendary, as that rank is primarily for skills (anyone can get those), or specific classes whose main feature is being legendary (Monks and Champions getting Legendary armor training, Fighters getting Legendary weapon training).
Martials are also just more multi ability score dependent than casters. Casters more often than not require a single stat to rely upon meanwhile the barbarian requires at least three or four to be effective which puts a strain on the number of feats they can take and their ability to function overall.
Mhm some classes suffer more than others in this regard. Rogues are usually okay with just focusing on Dexterity, but even then that's only really because Dexterity is inherently the strongest stat in the game. But most any other Martial needs to invest in their main attack stat of either Strength or Dex, and then also needs to invest in Constitution a fair bit in order to survive better on the front lines. And then you have characters like Monks who need to invest in Dex, Con, *and* Wisdom in order to be competent at what they do.
Meanwhile just about every caster can get all of their Offensive, Defensive, and Utility abilities from just their main casting stat. Not to mention that Mental stats generally come with more skills and tools that use them while stats like Con don't have any and Strength is pretty much just used for Athletics. I've thought previously about how I wish they brought back things like having a high Intelligence giving you bonus languages like it did in older games, but that would only make the problem worse lol.
I wouldn't necessarily say that's the case. There's kind of two rungs. (This is Ignoring subclasses that complicate this in both directions)
SAD: Most classes need a 15+STR or 14+Dex for their AC, most classes need a good to decent Con (frontliners & casters in particular), & then they need their main stat.
MAD: Sans multiclasses or niche builds: Paladins, Monks, Rangers, and Barbarians all fit this category although Paladins and Monks are likely the most MAD. It's honestly a weird jumble of martials & half casters here.
I think a big issue is just what the people designing these games consider each class's endstate to be.
A max level wizard is a reality warping demigod, a max level Warlock is basically the avatar for their "god" in the mortal realm, and a max level druid is effectively all of nature's beauty and wrath incarnate. As a result when it comes to abilities not even the sky is the limit, reality is their plaything.
Meanwhile a max level fighter is Aragon from The Lord Of The Rings. Stronger than any ordinary human, yes, lethal in physical combat indeed. However when looking at them from the eyes of even a half-caster in the lategame brings to mind a Darksied quote. "Super or otherwise you are merely a man, and I am a god."
As for a solution, I'm sure its been suggested a bunch of times, but give them wacky fantasy/anime powers. Hercules split a mountain rather than bother to walk up it and created The Strait of Gibraltar. If they used strength like that as a baseline for endgame Martials, why can't a fighter at max level swing their sword hard enough to shoot shockwaves, an archer fire an arrow with such force it creates a pressure wave that damages anything near the target, or a monk leap into the air and chokeslam a dragon into the ground to hard it leaves a crater?
Yeah this philosophy is absolutely at the core of the problem. It feels like they're designing different games when they make Martial Characters vs Magical ones. Even in the new 5.5 update that's coming out, it feels like they at least tried a little with things like Epic Boons and some general all around buffs. But even still we're looking at a character who can do things like shoot a guy so hard that they get knocked back 40 feet, which is pretty impressive, vs someone who can summon Meteors lol.
I think another big part of the problem is just the nature of how magic works in general. Wizards get only 1 9th level spell slot for example. So in their mind they're like "Well they can only cast this once per day right? That means we can make it as overpowered as we want!" and as a result even with just that one spell slot, the wizard will just dominate in the fight they use it. Combined with how most people play D&D these days with only a couple encounters per day, and suddenly it feels like wizards are getting free 9th level spells all the time while the fighter just knocks people around.
One of the things that would help martials is having more options that casters simply cannot use,
Such as Lead Armor which requires a 17 in Strength and gives protection against Spell Attacks
Or Heavy Weapons that allow you to choose an elemental damage type to inflict as an aoe.
Or weapons that scale with a specfic class' levels,
Much like how spells and spell casting foci are often exclusive to specific casters.
Here's a list of fixes for martials.
1. Add one more damage die to each weapon.
2. Bump up the monk's martial arts die by at least one.
3. Make a bunch of bonus actions for martials: jump, shove, the rogues canny actions, take the ki point costs off the monk's weaker version of canny action.
4. Make the Healer feat scale with level and act exactly like the cure wounds spell.
5. Give bonuses for spending hit dice during a rest.
6. When all else fails, give the enemy boss a charm that creates an anti magic field.
those things may help (especially the last one) but the core of the issue has never been about damage. Martials are already the best at dealing single-target damage even in the game's current state. What they need is more access to things like AoE abilities to hit multiple enemies at once. Things like Whirlwind attack or Volley from that one ranger subclass.
The additional bonus actions would also be nice but that still leaves their main attacks as fairly boring "Run up and hit it with my sword" style options without much variety. Keep in mind the issue isn't just about balancing how much damage they do, it's about making the classes more varied and fun to play. So having more ways of attacking that are able to perform more effects is more of what I would focus on.
using str for intimidation isnt really a homebrew but an official variant to the rules
but it originally started as a homebrew in earlier editions
Great video. Very well said and very well presented. If you continue to do TTRPG videos I would not be upset. Not talking negative on your already produced content, but this that shit I do like lol
Well thought out video, but I think you do fall into some traps.
1) Damage output - I think it's ok for characters to have damage niches. Overall most of the time martials will out compete casters for damage in single boss encounters. I think the only change I'd really want to see in terms of damage balancing here, is a reduction or removal of cantrip scaling. 5e set a standard that spells don't scale with character level, with the exception of cantrips. Casters otherwise actually have a much harder time landing damage. Damage resistances, saving throws bonuses (Legendary Resistances), magical resistance. All of these can really hamper the damage output of high level casters.
2) I think it's a bit unfair to look at hit points. As stated they get more, and in actuality, it's quiet bit more when you compare HP from both max HP and from hit dice. Also, casters should be spending some of their resources to restore hit points to the party. We also need to consider the effects of AoE in the damage case and hit points. One of the game's core design targets is a big monster with a AoE breathe attack. A dragon or something, maybe they should put this in the title to make it more clear. Seriously, a big monster with an AoE hits both the single target and shared damage benchmarks which addresses both of the primary concerns of point #1 and #2
3 + 4) Yeah, hands down it's casters. But it kinda needs to be. I think martials can get more utility for sure but I don't think they will ever be able to compete here. Unless you want to add silly, immersion breaking abilities. At this point, I should say martials exist to fulfill specifics fantasy. If you want to play a guy with a sword, I don't think you'd also want to be summoning roots from the ground to hold enemies in place. That said, why can't a martial hit someone and do something like a slowing strike is beyond me. They did this in 4e and got negative feedback, called MMO design, and everyone just used twin-strikes anyways since damage is king.
7) I think this is the biggest issue with 5e design. There's no modular system for martial characters.
I will say, you should give PF2e a shot. It pretty much improves all of these issues in their entirety. Addressing the utility issue, in Pf2e I really like skill actions that let you do things like feint, demoralize, etc with your skills.
Yeah there's a lot of nuance to the points. Martials do deal more single target damage if you optimize them right, but I just don't think it's enough to really stand out compared to the most basic spells. Either they need to deal a lot more damage without having to look up a build online, or they could use some slight AoE abilities.
And even when it comes to taking AoE damage, it's often the caster that is better equipped to handle it. Part of the problem is that Casters have a lot more ways to actually negate damage. A Fighter can pretty much just hope they pass that Reflex save and take the damage, meanwhile the Caster can use Absorb Elements regardless of if they pass or fail. And if they pass on top of that, then they're only taking a quarter of the damage. So it's not like they're taking their fair share of the damage all the time either.
But yeah overall I'm not saying that Martials need to be able to use some martial version of fireball or that they need to somehow be as insanely useful as spells are out of combat. But right now they have so painfully little to work with that it feels like playing a Fighter compared to a Wizard is like playing a completely different game with a different power scaling. They should be able to do at least *some* noteworthy feats by the time that Wizards are casting spells capable of decimating entire armies.
@@BlazeMakesGames Absorb elements is a perfect example as how expanded spell lists continue to fill in weaknesses in the caster tool kit, as it was added in Elemental Evil .
WotC needed to be far more careful in adding reaction spells. Most every reaction spell is an A to S+ tier. I think shield is ok, and counterspell much has to be a reaction by necessity.
But absorb elements and silvery barbs show that reaction spells have the ability to be entirely gameplay redefining.
Best comment
>can cast a magical translucent hand.
>silly immersion breaking abilities.
Pick one.
I don’t think the gap in the number of options between the fighter and the wizard is necessarily a problem but I do think the power of a fighter’s options can afford to be bumped up to be more in line with the spellcasters. Ofc the problem with that is multi-classing, personally I’d like to avoid encouraging even more / level dips into fighters by spellcasters. The easiest solution is to make these bonuses scale with class level so martials are rewarded for sticking with their class. I’d make second wind just a regular regeneration effect that is equal to your fighter class level so at level 2 you get 2 hitpoints back at the end of your turn every turn and at level 20 you get back 20.
And I’d have action surge improve so you can use it once per encounter at fighter level 7 or whatever and once per turn at end game.
I’d also make it so the fighter gets a couple of battlefield control options, probably some kind of taunt
This is a rough idea but I think it’d bring the fighter more in line with the casters without necessarily changing the idea of the class as a resource less one. I don’t have as clear a idea on what to do with a barbarian since they feel like a worse fighter but I think the subclasses that improve rage have the right idea and I’d just lean into that more I guess
The main reason I bring up the number of options and the way those options are designed, is that Spellcasters tend to experience a unique form of Power Creep due to the ease of expanding upon the spell system with nearly every single new book. Meanwhile most martial characters all use their own unique resource systems to the point where even their subclasses will have unique resources used nowhere else in the game, and as a result, it is unwieldy to print new content for those classes and subclasses. So they remain static as time goes on, while Casters keep getting new content and only continue to grow in power and versatility.
Otherwise yeah those are some interesting ideas, though I would tweak them somewhat. For instance there is actually a new ability that the Champion Fighter gets that gives them passive Health Regen but is limited to only restoring them up to half Health. That way they still need proper healing beyond that point and don't just become Wolverine, but it still dramatically increases their ability to survive numerous long fights in a row.
@@BlazeMakesGames Fair. I think that's what WoTC is trying to solve through the weapon specialization effects, although those are too limited at the moment to really compete with spellcasting. If they opened up the design limitations more (for example allowing fighters to choose which specialization applies on a round by round basis) it might someday be a versatile and interesting system. I think maybe there should also be special actions only martials can do - stuff that gives more battlefield control or single target damage or whatever, and you can scale martials up by adding to that pool. I'm not a fan of just giving martials a universal resource like spellcasters but yeah martials would benefit alot from an inbuilt easily designed way for them to benefit from power creep and feature creep, as I doubt WotC would or could stop making spells for spellcasting going into the future
One way to close the gap is magic weapons. But those are few and far between. The Moon Touched Sword is the only common magic weapon in the game. Cheapest in the market at 100 gold. There are spellcasting variants to the martial characters. Eldritch Knight, Arcane Trickster, Four Elements Monk, Sun Soul Monk. Rangers can have and use Druid spells.
Barbarians have Path of Wild Magic. And there are three feats that grant spellcasting abilities. Magic Initiate, Artificer Initiate, Aberrant Dragon Mark. Limited but can be used by marshals. Melee spells like Shocking Grasp can be used in place of weapons.
Yeah I’ve always preferred the way magic weapons worked in some older games, where you could add more abilities to them and really customize them. If weapons specifically were changed to work like that in 5e it could be a great way to give martials an interesting way to improve their abilities
I feel that a decent solution is for all martials to share a Martial Arts system that would be similar to the spell system but have major differences in rules. Then expansions could give out new spells and also new martial arts moves.
Off the top of my head:
*Your Kata, the moves available in combat, contains a number of Art Slots depending on Class, Attributes, Level and Skills.
*Arts aren't consumed, unlike spells, so you can just keep using them indefinitely. (Some Arts might consume resources.)
*Arts are available depending on prerequisites. Hybrid Martial Arts might consume resources like Sorcery Points, Ki, or Channel Divinity.
*Arts would include some Utility moves.
*Classes interact with Martial Arts in different ways; some are 'prepared martials', others are 'spontaneous martials', etc. Prepared martials can redesign their Kata over a long rest, replacing moves from their list of Learned Arts.
Yeah I wouldn’t want it to be too similar to spells, but something akin to the battle master’s maneuvers but with a more expansive and generalized system that’s available to more classes would be a fun idea.
That's what D&D 4e was; giving martials and casters the same resource system for their abilities.
Here some simple solutions I would give:
1. Give spellcasters less spells. Prepared casters can prep their casting mod + class level. I would changw this to cost mod + proficiency bonus. The casters end up having less options of spells makes each choice an important one.
2. Give the battle master manuevers to all martials across the board. This basically turns into the martials' version of spellcasting, makes it easier to release more stuff for martials in future supplements.
3. Take the mighty deeds die mechanic from DCC and give it to all martials. This way, only martials get to do "called shots" essentially.
4. Give every martial fighting styles. I jsut don't see why not? It can doesn't *not* fit, especially since 5e is a combat focused game.
There's more I'd list for specific classes, but these are my own personal ideas for just martials overall.
Good job on the well made video! 👍
Thanks!
I personally think that the issue isn't even that spellcasters have too many spells or can cast too many spells. It's that they have access to too much variety of spells. For example if an Illusionist Wizard was actually limited to only casting Illusion spells, their niche in the party would be a lot more specific and they wouldn't be able to do things like blow up encounters with a fireball. And an Evocation wizard might be able to blow up things with fireballs, but they wouldn't have a ton of out-of-combat utility. If spell schools actually mattered and acted as a limiting factor for most casters, I think that would be one of the better ways to 'nerf' casters. Plus it would mean that 2 people in a party could play the same class like a wizard, and not feel like they're playing the same character.
But yeah for your other points I definitely think Martials need universal Maneuvers. I actually kinda like where OD&D is going right now with Weapon Masteries, as they do sorta act like Maneuvers except that they cost no resources so they can be used on every attack, even when you action surge, but I do wish they were more like Maneuvers to make them less clunky
Main reason that casters are stronger is that they have access to: SUMMON MARTIAL
Be it conjure animals, animate objects, summon lesser (or greater) demons, all of them can provide anywhere from 2-8 attacks a turn, and basically comprise an entire front line marital in just a single spell. The only requirement on the caster being that they need to try not take damage for a bit and can only have one of these (concentration) spells at a time. They can even follow it up with other spells on their next turn.
And that is nothing compared to their ultimate ability: Simulacrum, a high level spell that literally allows for the cloning of a character at a steep gold cost. Want to prove the level 20 wizard is better than the level 20 fighter? The level 20 wizard can do fully functional wizard things while having a copy of the level 20 fighter as a minion under its control (except it can't heal, but the spell could be recast)
Second important thing about damage output:
In your example, the heavy weapon master feat gives a 25% increased chance to miss an attack, in addition, on a miss, the attack deals no damage.
That is, while a meteor swarm still deals half damage, even if the enemy succeeds. (you mentioned this)
In addition, a well build caster can exploit weak Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, while mostly relying on wisdom, while most martials only get to beat at AC.
Finally, meteor swarm has a 1 mile range, however even lower level equivalents, like fireball still have a good 60-150 feet range. While a lot of fighter optimization happens in melee, making their damage inconsistent, as melee is not always achievable (for example against flying enemies) (this is mostly based on dnd 5e)
I would like to add, that especially in dnd 5e, a big part of caster power is a few overturned spells. For example, casters should be really vunrable, a wizard starts off only with 6-8 HP compared to a Barbarians 12-14 or Paladins 10-12. In addition, wizards usually have worse defensive options. This however stops to hold outlier spells enter the equasion, The shield spell, while resource intensive, provides the benefit of 2 and a half shields at the same time. The absorb elements spell allows for halving elemental damage, and as you get to other still easily available options like phantom steed, a spell that allows you to get a horse with a 30 kilometer per hour speed with no turning radius or downsides at all, allowing for effortless kiting, or counterspell, being straight up able to deny enemy spellcasters, caster defenses are just great.
However it is just these few outlier options, without counterspell being an automatic best answer to casters, martials might be able to compete with grapples and such. And if shield and silvery barbs got addressed, most frail old men can no longer wave their pinky toe and avoid an attack for minimal cost, requiring other, more unreliable or expensive options like blink.
Same is true with attack, Fireball is the posterchild of caster damage, purely because it and lightning bolt (same damage, different type and line instead of sphere) straight up outdamage any comparable option, even up to 5th level spells are sometimes just a worse fireball with flavor text effects.
Nerfing a few of these spells, like fireball, would basically make casters way more tame, and have them explore other options, that while still great are not as powerful.
thankfully they're reworking all the conjuration spells in the next update so we got that to look forwards to. Hopefully we see them address a lot of the other problem children too. Hell I honestly still feel like casters get access to certain spells way too fast. Like even if Fireball was reduced to like 6d6 damage or whatever, it's still an insanely good AoE that they get access to at the same level that Martials get the ability to swing a sword two times instead of one.
But yeah I did oversimplify the martial damage comparison, but mostly in favor of the martial just to show how bad it is even before you take into account things like accuracy.
Another thing to consider is Magic Items. The best magic Items are limited to Caster classes. Staff of Power is the strongest weapon in the game, and Robes of the Archmagi are the strongest armor, and they are caster exclusive.
meanwhile a martial often needs basic magic items like a magic sword and whatnot to even be able to deal damage to lots of high level enemies. A naked caster with nothing but a wand and a dream can often still outperform a martial with a full loadout of gear and magic items.
@@BlazeMakesGames Also, most Caster items give them essentially free spells known and spell slots. Given that the small number of them is meant to be the limiting factor in Casters...
I think the biggest issue is that Magic has an automatic balance with components, but due to the bore it is to keep track of your spell components and track how many you are carrying. so most everyone just opts to ignore materail components except for the really powerful spells.
Forcing your Druid to have to use the material components to cast moon beam say, balances it out easily but it spoils the fun of the players as they now have to book keep even more and the game slows to a grind as the magic users need to routinely go on downtime to gather more spell components.
I mean yeah the issue there is that balancing through inconvenience just makes the class less fun rather than any less powerful. It's not exactly hard to get your hands on most spell components since they're super cheap and a lot of them are basic things you'd find in nature like grass or bat guano or common materials like silver.
And frankly it's only logical that in most settings where it is known how useful having a bunch of these materials on hand can be, that there would be fairly common shops and other institutions that would sell those materials just about everywhere, which is then simplified and abstracted into the spell component pouch.
But even if you didn't make it trivial to get all those materials, it's still just more bookkeeping that would slow the table down dramatically, make the class more annoying to play, and not really address any of the core problems. Like yeah maybe the wizard wouldn't be able to cast fireball as easily as soon as they hit level 5. But you can bet that during every single downtime that they get they're going to be searching caves and shops for bat guano and sulfer. And then once they do find it they're going to gather/buy enough of it to never have to worry about it again and we're right back to square 1.
Unless of course you plan on just making this be a world where bat shit and sulfer just is impossible to find. But then that raises other issues like A) then why would the spell work like that and B) then instead of wasting everyone's time just say that you're banning the spell from your game and skip all the extra pointless steps.
But my overall point is that while it is true that GMs can modify the game and play different ways to try and mitigate these issues, they shouldn't be having to so much. The game should be better able to adapt to different play styles without having to make the GM have to do all this extra work.
A components pouch outright replaces all components so long as they don't have a cost.
Arcane focus and component pouch just negate all components without a gold cost, but okay
Non-casters should have much stronger reactions than what's available, borderline supernatural stuff give the reactions like Shield & Counterspell available to casters. I'd also give non-pure casters a 2nd reaction starting at lvl 11.
Martials should have limited access to reactions of similar power level to counterspell. They should be much more of a nuisance to enemies in combat, especially spellcaster enemies, otherwise they just wouldn't survive logistically. Spellcasters would take them out inevitably, given enough save or die type rolls or big burst dmg spells. By level 5 you'd absolutely require a method that can null, absorb, deflect, reflect, or greatly mitigate at least 1 spell per day to survive in such high magic settings as an adventurer.
The threat of powerful reactions more than the actual use of the reactions should be something martials milk to prevent being blown out by casters. Even if in reality they have fairly limited ability to employ these, the caster doesn't necessarily know if they are able to perform it unless they've seen it used in the last day or try to bait it out with other spells before unleashing the big booms.
I'm thinking stuff like:
Paladin: Spell Mirror 1/day. As a reaction when a spell includes you as a target, you gain advantage on the save if there is a save. Whatever effects or damage you suffer from the spell after it resolves, the caster suffers too. Works with single target, multi-target, AoE, and spells without saves. Reaction declared after spell is declared, but before spell resolves (before saves, dmg rolls, & spell effect tables)
Fighter: Interception 1/day. As a reaction move adjacent to an enemy within your move speed & intercept all of its attacks & spells, causing each attack/spell it tries to make against others to instead target you. For each attack or spell cast the enemy makes against you this round, you riposte & roll a weapon attack against the enemy afterward. You roll your riposte attack immediately after each attack or spell targeting you resolves (if you are able to attack). Yes, you can intercept enemy buffs & hit them in the face for it. Yes if you're within move range you can make an enemy AoE explode in their face, then hit them in the face. Yes you can take a full multi-attack instead of your wizard & riposte for each hit in the multi-attack.
Monk: Null Body 1/day. As a reaction chose a damage type & gain immunity to it until you make a move, reaction, or action. All attacks against you continue as normal until the next character's turn. If you have immunity or resistance already for that type, in addition to full immunity gain temporary hitpoints equal to the amount of damage rolled against you up to an amount equal to your max HP. They cannot be restored by healing when depleted & last up to 24h.
Barbarian: Mage Eater 1/day. When targeted by a spell, as a reaction choose to automatically fail the spell save or automatically be hit by a spell attack & suffer it's effects. In exchange you delay the spell effects & gain an additional turn which proceeds immediately, ending the spell caster's turn. Within that extra turn, you gain 1 temporary hp (up to your max hp, 24h dur) for every 1hp of dmg you deal to the spellcaster who targeted you with the spell. At the end of your extra turn the spell effects activate on you & you suffer any damage or disabling status effects immediately.
Rogue: Spell Siphon 1/day. As a reaction to a spell with a spell save including you as a target, make a weapon attack against the spell DC. If you fail, the spell continues as normal & you roll a save as a normal. If you succeed, a copy of the spell is stored in your weapon & all of the original target(s) automatically succeed on their spell saves. If you land an attack (melee or ranged) with your weapon within 3 rounds, it unleashes the spell with the weapon attack target as the spell target & the spell DC you succeeded your attack against (including any modifiers at that time).
Ranger: Deflector 1/day. As a reaction against a spell or ability with a save that targets a square or character within 60 feet of you (burst AoE like fireball, single or multi-target spell saves), make an attack against the spell DC with a ranged or throwable weapon (you can freely draw a thrown weapon if one is within reach). If you succeed, the spell activates on any square of your choosing on the shortest line between the caster & the target of the spell (not their squares). If you fail, the spell continues as normal. Yes, fireball can blow up in their face. No real effect on line, cone, or burst AoE.
I've said it once, and I'll say it again. Every martial class should have gotten Battle Maneuvers (or at least their equivalent to it). It just makes sense. Wanna know what doesn't make sense? The fact that only BMs have good enough aim to snipe an object out of someone's hands, or can swing their weapon wide enough to hit multiple creatures, or freakin' parry! That would give martials their own "standardized thing" and would allow WotC to actively buff martials as much as they do spellcasters.
yeah Weapon Masteries are some level of an attempt to implement something like that but i do feel like while it is nice, it still woefully falls short of what it could have been
@@BlazeMakesGames Yeah, while it is nice, it doesn't scale in any meaningful way.
This is why I'm glad my group is letting me DM Pathfinder 1e. Everyone can perform the combat maneuvers, but martials are far better. Sure they still aren't as good as higher casters for AoE control, but at least they can do so all day.
As a Pathfinder 1E player, casters are very much overwhelmingly more powerful then martials. However the one thing casters can't compete with martials at all is dealing damage. There are often unexperienced GMs asking for help on forums/reddit on how to handle martials who are full-round attacking their BBEG from full hit points to zero in one turn. Now don't get me wrong, in some ways, in PF1E, the gap between casters and martials is BIGGER than it is in DnD 5E, that's undisputable. But at least martials are good at ONE thing.
Yeah I personally consider the gap in “fun” to be far more important than the gap in power level or comparing single-target to AoE damage. Because even when a martial is stacking tons of abilities to maximize their output, the end result is usually just “so I run up and I hit it with my sword and it dies”
@@BlazeMakesGames 100% agree
Or you could look beyond the rules and look at the problems inherent in D&D and it's compatriots.
D&D originally was a hodge pot from several classic fantasy stories that were never meant to mix and no one ever went through the problems that brings with it.
Look at the stories before D&D and you'll notice that spellcasters were always on the low end or not part of the adventuring group. The more powerful spellcasters were often corrupted by their power as they needed to sacrifice people to gain that power. Rarely were there powerful spellcasters that were nice or just helpful.
The early Spellcasters were the Cleric that focused on healing spells with a few buff and combat spells. The Druid was in a similar situation. The Wizard had to see where they learned new spells, which was mostly limited to enemy spellbooks and scrolls they found. Which further prohibited their growth in power and utility.
Something today's campaign settings circumvent is that in the past most places had a local sage/wizard and cleric just in case the group's spellcasters weren't up for it or didn't have the spells. Especially if the group did not have a Cleric a local one was important for healing. But that added problems that were never solved. These casters were still there when the group wasn't and that influenced the entire town. Having even a low-level Cleric NPC changes the setting by making the various temples more important.
You could of course say that casters are more rare, but that means the groups casters stand out much more. A spellcasting Cleric of any faith worshipped locally would be the centre of attention of those believers. Arcane spellcasters would be in a similar situation. Any noble or rich person without a spellcaster of their own will have thing they want to talk to them about and spells cast. But that would also mean that settlements below a certain size should not exist, as some monsters would simply wipe them out single-handedly.
Not to mention that it is likely that normal people will look at arcane casters with fear and distrust. After all, one fireball can reduce a house to cinders. Divine casters, at least those of good deities, will be trusted more as people will know what they stand for.
I mean, even a Bard with one healing spell could dethrone the ruler of a village by being a nice guy.
All that changes campaign settings as well as the flow of adventures and are part of the inherent problems that no one looks at.
Which is one of the reasons I don't look at D&D 5E. All the talk is just Rules, Rules, Rules. And there it's mostly about balancing and combat. Practically nothing about making better settings, campaigns and adventures.
BTW, all these discussions about rules, damage and so become meaningless if the group wakes up in their individual rooms of an inn when their doors are broken in and a group of orcs storms into each room. You know, basic tactics. I have no idea why current GM's seem to let the group decide when to initiate combat.
I mean most people I know play in custom homebrew settings anyways and even if you play in an official setting most people typically warp it to their own desires and needs for whatever kind of game they're running. And I mean the point of this video and these kinds of discussions is to address the issues inherent to the mechanics of the game so it's kinda natural that the discussion is about the mechanics and not the setting?
Also basic tactics isn't really a solution and it kinda willfully ignores the core of the problem. Even if your example of orcs suddenly bursting into each party member's rooms. The Fighter is screwed because they rely on armor to defend themselves, the Barbarian is fucked because they need weapons to deal more than a d4 of damage. Meanwhile classes like the sorcerer are fine because even when they wake up naked with zero equipment or anything, they could still teleport out of the room to safety or at least defend themselves with cantrips and low level spells.
The issue is a lot more complicated than just "don't let the party initiate combat," as if that would somehow magically solve the problem. When casters are better able to defend themselves than tanks in 95% of situations *and* can deal more damage, while also providing buffs and debuffs and other secondary effects, and the more martial people are relegated to just hitting things with swords, the issue goes a little bit more deep than "GMs should just use better tactics." Yeah a GM can use smarter and more powerful enemies to counter how powerful mages are, but then they end up steamrolling over the martials along the way who can't keep up.
@@BlazeMakesGames Look, I've been through several new editions in several different RPG's and the basic problems usually stayed. Around 35 years now I hear always the same things and everyone always hopes the next edition would solve the problems and yet they just change or remain the same.
Like I said in my main point, no one has ever taken another look at the basic premise of D&D and that includes the 1 magic system for all casters.
Everyone builds on the basics of the previous game.
P.S. A level 15 group being surprised by 100 level 10 Barbarian Orcs in 3E is one of the best remembered encounters of my group for 2 decades now. They were really sweating there for a while. Until they got themselves somewhat organized with stuff like the sorcerer flying out of her window to reach the knight so he could cast mage armor on him and so on.
And the group was so satisfied when they were finally able to wipe them out in the open with fireballs. You could see the relief and the satisfaction in their faces.
If we’re talking about damage, even if we take single target alone, spells like animate dead and other summons allow a caster to straight up deal more damage than a 20th level fighter at around level 10(whether you account for accuracy or not). And, accounting for accuracy(vs 19 AC), a spellcaster with meteor swarm(vs the average dex save chances across levels, 50% or so) is usually dealing 0.75*140 or 105 damage with a meteor swarm, whereas a greatsword is dealing with GWM, 0.4*22 or **8.8** damage per attack, even with 8 attacks you deal 70.4, not even single target is better.
So in other words, along with area of effect, damage and effect stacking is something one must watch out for too.
Worse, for the research management point, in a lot of games, especially dnd, alot of spells aren’t nova. If you cast a long lasting(usually still really strong) spell, like summons or control spells, you can consistently outperform a martial by the time they run out of HP consistently.
So the problem is significantly worse than even you painted it here.
mhm, I purposefully didn't go too in depth with the calculations simply because what I was doing was giving the Martial a lot of favorable assumptions, and even in a favorable situation, the martials just fall behind. The more in-depth you go and more accurate you make the calculations, the worse it gets for them.
Spells are balanced seemingly entirely around the idea that they're limited in use and thus you're meant to run out of them. Sure they're overpowered but if you only can cast it twice and then do nothing else, then in theory at least it's "balanced" in a way. But the inherent problem with that is of course that every game is going to be played differently. So maybe in some games where you do 10 fights per long rest yeah the casters are straining a lot more for their spell slots. But in most casual games casters just aren't drained of their resources, which means that these blatantly overpowered spells have their one downside eliminated.
That's why I've grown to really like systems like Wrath and Glory, which has limitless casting. I was worried at first how it would be balanced when Psykers can cast spells infinitely, the game is actually balanced around that idea. So spells aren't insanely powerful, and there are downsides inherent to using magic at all. And there's a lot more tools for Martial characters in that game to do cool things. In general it's a form of balance that is better suited to more kinds of games.
ignoring that 5e is just badly designed in general but even in good games you cannot really have a simple martial fantasy alongside a powerful or complex magical fantasy. if you want to even that out magic needs to be very situational, deliberate, or weak. the real issue is trying to bring basic bitch knights into an adventure that _will_ be decided by magic in some sense even if there is no wizard in the party. you either need to give that guy with a sword magic of his own, make their gameplay style _much_ more complex (or potentially the entire focus of the game), or you need to give them technology to level the playing field.
science-fantasy games often do both making magic rather weak/situational and giving mundane characters access to advanced tools to bring up their potential. a mage could electrocute you if they are close, but a guy with a rifle could take you down before you even see them from miles away, or that guy's power armor could protect him from magic while he gets close enough to use his plasma axe.
the chronicles/world of darkness games do away with the idea of mundane characters entirely, if you are playing the same splat like the game is designed for you are all equally as magic. if you are a mage you can just as readily increase your muscle mass exponentially for a fight or generate a tiny timewarp in someone's body, all werewolves have to contend with claws _and_ rituals, changelings can make deals with starlight to harm someone or hate to drive themselves into a berserker rage with all the combat benefits. the entire splat about being mundane hunters involves lots of prep and careful teamwork to deal with even just one or two actual monsters.
I think there's room for heroic martial characters without necessarily needing to make them rely on magic. They could go for a classical style thing like how Achilles was depicted with him swinging his blade and knocking back whole groups of enemies and the like. Like most NPCs in a setting are level 5 or lower, so while yes it doesn't make sense to have a simple knight keep up with a master of the Arcane, by level 15-20, a fighter is leaps and bounds beyond a simple knight, and their abilities should reflect that.
Though I do think that in general I would greatly support the idea of limiting casters a bit more based on spell schools. Like I said, the fact that a mage can specialize in Illusion magic but still cast fireball feels pretty wrong to me. But in games like Wrath and Glory, Psykers, their version of a mage, are only able to learn spells from a single type of magic, with only the equivalent of cantrips giving them any ability beyond those schools, and that makes it so that those casters fit into a very specific niche instead of being able to just do everything like they can in 5e. And that's before even getting into the fact that casting a spell incurs a chance of your face exploding. The spells they have are still powerful and they aren't even limited by spell slots, able to cast as many times as they want per day, but because they can only use a very specific kind of magic, they don't overshadow everyone else nearly as much.
Yur points about half-feats really show how limited the options are fur martial klass
Especially, when ya explore how strick the martial klassez are & how Magika use a universal system-Monkisch stuff is locked off so a Konan-lyke fighter wuld always suk vs. a grappler
Gud stuff tho, keep it up
Portion one, addressing the great weapon master fighter:
The fighter is sacrificing -5 to hit, and having to hold their weapon in both hands
The caster is not
lol, yeah sometimes when you single out simple things like that, it really makes the problems stand out that much more
@@BlazeMakesGames yeah, proper optimizers do a dpr calculation that takes into account hit chance, and chance of succeeding saves, so maybe look into that instead of just assuming hits in your damage per turn calc, because a fighter action surging def doesn't do meteor swarm damage without a magic weapon or comically low ac high hp enemies
Well the whole point was to show that the Fighter Doesn't do as much damage to begin with. I ignored to-hit chance to *raise* the fighter's numbers in their favor. Like even if you assume the Fighter hits every attack while every enemy also passes every saving throw against the Caster's spells, Fighters *still* don't even compare to the most basic actions a Caster can take. Taking into account hit-chance only makes my case that much more evident. Tho I will admit I probably should have made it more clear that that was what I was doing.
I was thinking of a weird solution which would be
give martials funny anime powers
also give them some better healing to sustain there health (as well yknow they are frontliners usually)
and third, when they get a feat /asi, they get both, and also have higher capstones for stats. Spellcasters get cool spells, unlimited versatility. Why not give martials better stats? and give martials maybe slightly higher saving throws (that one might be a lil much though)
Funny Anime Powers is definitely in the right direction. I think that the designers are afraid of that because they're meant to be the "non magical" classes but the problem is that you can't have a game with a completely 100% mundane fighter and a hyper advanced 20th level Archmage and expect the game to be balanced. They should pull upon ancient epics like the feats of Heracles and Achilles and apply that to the fighter. A level 20 fighter should be the kind of warrior that can take on an entire army without breaking a sweat through sheer force of skill and strength. Swinging an Axe to sunder the earth in twain and create an earthquake, cleaving an entire mob of enemies in one strike, that kinda stuff.
And yeah with the last one it's like they wanted to do that, but then they chickened out. They gave the fighter and the rogue more feats, but only like *barely* any more than normal, and the Barb and Monk got none. If every Martial got at least a couple more feats than average then that could do a surprisingly large amount to help close the gap.
11:07 one suggestion ive heard to deal with this is changing what counts as a "long rest". If you make it so that can only in happen in towns or takes several days of relaxation then the number of encounters per rest gets closer to that half dozen target
that's akin to the "Hardcore" rules in the DMG which I do feel like more people need to try. Those rules basically make it so that a "Short" Rest is now an 8 hour long overnight sleep, and a Long Rest is now a full week of downtime, which you can further restrict to only being available in towns on top of that. (though even without that explicit restriction, trying to find a place to rest in the wild for a full week without getting interrupted I imagine is pretty challenging.)
But yeah those rules honestly I think fit how most people actually play D&D these days, with big sprawling adventures over land that take days or weeks to traverse with only 1 or 2 fights a day, if there even is a fight in a given day. Though I could also see just keeping short rests to an hour, (or even reducing them to like 10 minutes) and then keeping the Long Rests to be only available in downtime. That way if there is multiple fights in a day, Short Rest classes can still get a rest in like they would normally.
@@BlazeMakesGames yeah i think thats where i got the idea. Even the official campaign books often dont have more than 1 or 2 fights per day (on days where you fight at all). I ran storm kings thunder and the fights were days apart from each other. Though a full week might be overkill, even if it just took a few days proper rest it would usually fix this. And keeping short rests under an hour should be fine as those abilities are basically intended as X times per encounter
I just thought of a very simple idea for some Martial melee-based characters to get access to- some kind of Lightsaber/Kratos throw ability, where they can toss their weapon and have it return back to them. The throw range would depend on their Strength score, (maybe 5 feet for every +1 to STR), and it would deal damage upon returning too. Basically a boomerang ability. That way they get more range and can sometimes use their movement more tactically, while still possibly benefitting from a magical weapon's abilities.
One idea sorta building on that that I've always liked and might even make a video about at some point is the idea of expanding the Magic Weapon system to allow for adding more varied abilities like that to a weapon. Course while that ability would be a nice add, not everyone wants to play a thrown-weapon user so it only really works for a specific archetype of character, but with a whole system of weapon upgrades that grant abilities along those lines, then you could greatly expand the options to Martials in a dynamic and fun way.
Watched this video at double speed to quickly watch it before playing my Eldritch Knight in my campaign with a Cleric and Warlock/Druid.
Time to play the "tank" again. Wish me luck
Martials should have all resources refilled at the start of combat. Period.
short of that, I'm very in favor of just reducing Short Rests to 10 minutes and allowing you to keep walking and doing stuff and still get the benefit as long as you don't like make attacks or anything. Even if you're in a dungeon chances are in-game you spend at least 10 minutes wandering around searching for traps and such before you get into a fight again. So you'd get the same practical benefit without having to define them based on like "Every time you roll initiative" which is always kind of a weird way for abilities to work.
Rewatching the video and I think I'd like to add one thing for 5e D&D: Half-casters, AKA the Paladins and Rangers.
I know, I know, the "Ranger bad"-meme is funny and widespread, but it isn't actually true. At least, Rangers are not weak compared to Fighters and Rogues. They're only weak compared to Wizards and Clerics, which is true twice over for a Fighter or Rogue.
No matter how much a DM takes care to design encounters and campaigns where classes without spellcasting can shine, they can still never get around the martial-caster gap because the non-casters (Fighter, Rogue, Barbarian, Monk) are not meaningfully stronger than Paladins and Rangers who don't use spells.
The unfortunate fact is that the half-casters are often just as strong or even stronger even when they're not using their spells, because Wizard of the Coast have blatantly been playing favorites since the release of 5e. Even something as simple as the Hunter subclass for Ranger can easily keep up (and sometimes exceed) with a Fighter and Rogue for dex based damage dealing all the way to lvl 10. At lvl 11, they still deal some 80-85% of the damage a Fighter does before they start to use resources. That's Hunter, which is definitely not on the stronger side of Rangers. Gloom Stalkers are ahead of Fighters until at least lvl 17, when they finally have 2 Action Surges. All Paladins can do the same as the Gloom Stalker, though likely all the way to lvl 20 since Paladins are just fundamentally better designed than Rangers.
This is, again, *without* using spells. Half-casters provide most of the benefits of being a martial character, while also bringing spellcasting and other supernatural features to the group. Non-spell supernatural features that themselves tend to be stronger than the supernatural features of non-caster classes.
Wizards of the Coast and the D&D community during feedback, seem to labor under the assumption that having access to spells means the class is supposed to be more powerful, so what gets accepted as a "legitimate" class feature for a Ranger or Paladin can reach much higher power levels than features for non-casters. Are there any non-caster features that are as strong and versatile as Umbral Sight for the Gloom Stalker? Do we have legitimate non-caster alternatives to Aura of Protection, or any of the Paladin subclass Auras? Does the Fighter's Second Wind really matter when Lay on Hands exist? And so on.
I don't even think the Gloom Stalker or Paladins are overpowered. If anything, they're just martial characters that are at a reasonable power level compared to spellcasters, because they have things they excells at that casters can't effortlessly replicate, while also bringing a wide variety of options to let them be versatile in combat and maintain usefulness outside of combat.
When half-casters are just "martials, but better and with spells", there isn't much you can do to fix the system through tweaking some numbers around. OneD&D seems to build itself around fixing some problematic spells and increasing martial DPR. This is good. They also seem to include Ranger and Paladin in the DPR increase given to martials. That's unfortunate, because that means the caster+half-caster meta will continue. There needs to be real tradeoffs for half-casting, or the problem isn't actually fixed.
to be fair, the main reason why Ranger Bad was a meme is less to do with their higher level abilities, and more to do with how situational their lower level ones are. By default a ranger is supposed to pick a favored enemy and a favored terrain. And the issue is that when you're in those situations, the Ranger can shine early on really well! But when you're not... you functionally just don't have those abilities anymore. And some of the other abilities you get like Primeval Awareness are significantly weaker if you're not in your favored terrain. The meme mostly became irrelevant when Tasha's came out and finally gave them new lower level abilities that were more generally useful so that you didn't have to worry about not being able to leave the forest of whatever.
But yeah to speak generally, I really feel like WotC doesn't seem to view Spells as Class Features for some reason, especially on those Half Caster Half Martial Classes. So they think that they need to give them just as many features as the normal Martials get, while also still getting spellcasting on top of that. Additionally, it also feels like WotC are afraid of giving non-magical characters anything too supernatural unless they explicitly have some access to magic. So when designing the fighter they're like "well he's a mundane class so he's gotta just run up and hit things with a sword" but then when designing the paladin they're like "Well he's magic, so of course he can just grant passive Auras that boost everyone around him and also heal people and cure status ailments and magically enhance their weapon for bonus damage and..." and so on and so on.
The one fortunate thing tho especially as of the latest playtest, is that the Full Martials are finally starting to get some more interesting options that set themselves more apart from the Half-Martials. Barbarian's Brutal Strike gives them a big damage boost while also letting them do things like root enemies in place or throw them across the battlefield, and Rogues being able to add Riders to their sneak attack dice to do things like disarm enemies is I think great additions that are far more important that simple DPR increases.
So hopefully by the end we can at least get some level of equality in at least the variety of abilities and tactical options between the two styles of classes.
@@BlazeMakesGames I would argue that having bad features don't stop the good ones from being good. They get the martial basics (d10 hit dice, Extra Attack, Fighting Style), an excellent spell list and martial subclasses.
Even Hunter is generally speaking pretty good at most levels you're likely to actually see in a campaign (3-10). Colossus Slayer is 1 free suepriority dice every turn, which means that any campaign that requires resource management will favor the Hunter over the Battlemaster, save the occasional burst dmg turn.
I think the main thing with the Ranger getting it's reputation for being bad, while easily being a better character overall than 3 or 4 others if you can grasp the spell list, is because it had a few useless flavor features people could point to and immediately understand why they sucked. Favored Enemy, Natural Explorer and Primal Awareness are awful, but they don't impact much in the grand scheme of things. Primal Awareness is just a freebie at the same level you get your subclass (which almost no other martial gets). FE and NE are worse, since they give you a couple of dead levels, but they either got excellent levels right after or before them to compensate (2 and 5).
It's a lot harder to quantify why a Barbarian, Fighter or Rogue is bad, especially since they are the easiest classes to play and a lot of players probably had more success with them than stronger classes (which is almost everything, except Monk), because the stronger options need you to understand the basics of spellcasting.
I generally agree with the rest though. The latest playtest looks a little better, but I don't know if it is enough. Rangers and Paladins are still looking just as strong as the non-casters while also providing a metric ton of support or utility that isn't easy to match without spells.
It's not just Paladin auras either. "Of course Gloom Stalkers can become invisible in the dark! Rangers are spellcasters!"
"Of course Rogues can't become invisible in the dark! They're not spellcasters!"
Of course, we don't know what the final spell list will look like yet, but I suspect that there are going to be plenty of "outlier" spells (new or returning ones) that will heavily favor the half-casters. It's hard to quantify how strong something like Pass WIthout Trace is, but if we assume a combat is on avg 3 turns, it can easily negate 1/3 of the enemy's total action economy, since most enemies have terrible perception and are therefor succeptible to PWT Surprice Rounds. That level of mitigation is unheard of from a Barbarian, for example, the "tank" class. On top of being an amazing utility spell outside of combat.
The problem with this whole concept is everyone is required to be balanced. WHY??
The original idea of d&d was every character had strengths AND weaknesses. Hence making up a party of characters where the physically tough fighters are supposed to prevent the enemy from reaching the physically vulnerable magic users on the other hand as the magic users gain their higher spells they potentially will cause much more damage BUT the higher level spells take time to cast also many require a combination of a physical component, hand gesture (s) or spoken words. If any of these are prevented by lack of the needed object, inability to move arms due to being bound or paralysed or in gagged physically or magically then it doesn't matter how powerful the Spell Caster may be. Also if the Spell Caster is struck by any successful attack the spell he/she was preparing is automatically lost and must spend the required time to rememorize the particular spell. This is another reason why the party was expected to include henchmen/hirelings to aid in preventing the Spell Casters being prevented from casting.
I started with 1st Ed and Basic through to 3rd Ed but I have not continued with the later versions as the original premise of D&D seems to have been lost that being the players are forming a group of adventurers/ explorers that need one another to provide skills or abilities that the party will require to be successful.
If every class can do everything why bother putting a party together? Just put the gane down and go play Skyrim or other similar video games.
Looking back, I have mostly played casters, half casters or caster/martial multi classes in the past. Maybe I subconsciously picked up on the divide. I’m currently playing a Rune Knight Fighter. But I am considering taking either a couple levels in Wizard or the Magic Initiate feat at some point though. Giving Green Flame Blade to my frontline fighter would be useful to up her damage output.
Rune Knights are pretty good for Fighters since you deal damage as a Fighter, you can rank as a fighter. You can control the field by growing big and acting as a physical wall to block an enemies path. If you have good enough strength like my character you can uproot trees and block characters paths with them. And your runes give you extra abilities outside of combat. And I personally think it’s the best Fighter Subclass.
Also to help with the AOE problem is to give Martials “Cleave”. Where if they kill with the damage, the extra damage can be extended to another creature in range. Or if they don’t think they’ll kill, they choose to take a d4 penalty to damage and hit every target in range.
My only issue with playing martials is it feels like I have less tools to contribute to a game than a caster does. If martials had the ability to use their prowess in situations outside of combat more often, I'd have no isse
Also, as a btw, if you are a DM who is using several days between each encounter, use the varient rules, 8 hours for a short rest, 1 week for a long rest,
Make sure players are experiencing half a dozen encounters per *long rest* not per *day*, those can be very different numbers, the game is not designed for 1 encounter per long rest
Also, I have absolutely played in a grind in 5e, and in multiple consecutive fights? Casters at high level have a ton of resources because they are all long rest dependent, until 2024 5e, classes which depend on a short rest will simply be weaker, as you can never count on getting a short rest when you need one, except for exceptions
the variant resting rules are definitely rad and I wish more people knew about them. They definitely help, but there are still lots of underlying problems that I think they can't solve on their own.
I run rests a bit differently: The players get to rest (be it long or short) when I say they can. No more, no less. Which means that the adventure days tend to be pretty long in terms of encounters and it makes it impossible to do stuff like "Goodberry juggling". Still can't find a balance that lets martials be good that also doesn't let half-casters dominate non-casters. It's very unfortunate that Rangers and Paladins are at worst about as strong as Fighters even without their spells, and at best outclass Fighter even without spells by using the good subclasses.
Wouldn't the easiest way to fix the first problem be to Make it so that if a martial overkills a Target they can continue to attack and transfer that remaining damage to a creature closest to the first creature maybe even giving them some movement to get there
I mean that would help but the problem is more complicated than simply giving Martials buffs. You could make it so that Martials deal 100 damage per attack but imo the more important aspect of the disparity is the lack of interesting tactical options between the types of classes. Even if a barbarian did enough damage to be considered "balanced" against a wizard at 20th level, if all I was doing on my turn still just boiled down to "I run up and hit it with my sword" then I would still be bored of playing such a class very quickly, I would just be also killing things faster while I was being bored.
@@BlazeMakesGames that is very true but my suggestion was to fix the hole AOE problem between the two but what you're saying is right giving Marshalls more ways to fight More things to do would be nice it's one of the reasons I do like the battle master although and I do understand why this is I always found it stupid that there's a limit to how many times they can do certain things as if You have enough energy to swing your silver but not that way was always kind of dumb. But I would love to see more ways to attack more ways to move around that only someone of immense physical capabilities could do but I guess the problem is there's always a spell that can probably do it better
The caster defenders in this comment section make me depressed. Whatever dude, just use Laserllama's classes to tide you over, and jump ship to a better system when the chance presents itself. These problems are so fundamental to the system it'd take a ground up rework to fix most of them. Check out the likes of Pathfinder 2e, 13th Age, Shadow of the Demon Lord/Weird Wizard. See if anything doesn't catch your fancy and try and convince your group to jump ship. There's just better games.
D&D players, especially old grognards, have gotten so used to non-casters being borderline trash tier in the system that anything else feels wrong to them. This is despite the fact that most of them would probably object heavily if the same problems existed anywhere other than tabletop. Can you imagine how intense the backlash to a cooperative multiplayer RPG would be if 4 out of 12 classes were borderline unplayable with how weak and one-dimensional they are? The players would be out for blood until the developers fixed the problem.
@TheTdroid Yup. 5e is even weird in the fact the majority of the playerbase started with 5e, so you'd think more of them to be less tolerant of mediocrity since they have no past edition to compare the current to. What seems to instead happen is that they fall in love with 5e and refuse to tolerate any kind of deviance from what they think is perfection. And so a new generation of players are raised on the expectation that martials are just shit by design, and thats a good thing. There's just no winning. Between the players who actively want the martial-caster divide to exist, to the other portion of the playerbase who die on the hill that the martial fantasy is to be just a guy with a stick, nothing will change. Even if 6e becomes a thing I doubt the divide will ever be fixed.
@@GuyFawkes051 I also think that for a lot of people, they are just completely incapable of looking at anything other than the single highest number that shows up. A Rogue can crit for like 50 dmg, so they're awesome, but the Ranger dealing 20x3 dmg without crits is overlooked because 20 dmg didn't look as impressive.
Add on that a lot of people have no clue how much of their martial dmg is determined by control effects, and it makes sense why a lot of players who haven't spent a minute thinking about optimization just don't get it.
A 18th level Wizard or Bard or Arcana Cleric casts Simulacrum with a Wish. This requires no material component. The Simulacrum is a 20th level Barbarian, Fighter, Paladin or Ranger. If you somehow make Martials more powerful, then you just make the Simulacrum more powerful.
lol I mean to be frank that just shows how bad the problem is on the caster side. By all means I'm all for just buffing Martials, but high level spells 100% should be nerfed too. Hell even low level spells like fireball should be toned down a bit while we're at it.
There is indeed a problem between caster and martial but i feel its more a problem of choice than a problem of power...
Ressource attrition existe and usually a mage will run out of spell quite fast and thus need to cooperate witht he group to know where and when to cast spell.
some spell are battle defining indeed but its a probleme limited to a few overtunned spells, that are very predictable and easy to counter. their DD being on a stats that is usually quite high or on a damage type often resisted
Giving martial some kind of ressource to use for speicals move like monks and battle master usually make them more activ and enjoyable to play...
After all, many like paladin and they dont really use them as an half caster and more like a warrior with nice tricks.
The problem originates with original D&D. Old D&D was a game of kicking down doors, rolling dice, and killing monsters. Character's lifecycle power curve goes up. That's okay because the character isn't much more than a token in old D&D. But lifecycles don't work that way. Power and ability goes up and then they go down. Fifty year old Tiger Woods isn't 25 years old Tiger Woods. If the mechanics of aging, injury, and experience were changed to reflect that loss is real in any lifecycle, then the problem is fixed. Wizards go up like a rocket, but come down just as fast because they forget spells even as they learn spells. Eventually, they forget all their spells. Age works that way. Fighters and thieves can figure out ways to stay relevant through better skill and technique. To use a sports metaphor, they can develop a breaking ball when their fast ball loses velocity.
Identify the problems is done. Any solutions?
Well I’m planning on making other videos discussion potential solutions, including what 5.5e is working on
Well in my game the classes are kinda equal. My friend and I just allow to use range weapons with str so a fighter or barb could use bows, If you kill something and heve another person in reach the extra damage will go to the other if he has same ac or less, and if you are renger3/barb2 you get extra attack because you are a level 5 martial class. It doesn’t work with hexblade because it’s an invocation and not the same extra attack. Also primal knowledge from one end is good.
those are some pretty solid changes. I've seen the idea of making Extra Attack more accessible as a pretty popular suggestion especially when combined with just generally giving Martials more attacks overall. And yeah the damage overflow is a great way to make Martials better at handling hoards.
I still think there's an issue with just the Martial classes often not getting as many interesting options to play with, especially compared to casters, but yeah I can see how those changes are definitely a massive improvement.
@@BlazeMakesGames you see my friend and I tested it and the level 5 wizard or sorcerer loos on every fight to the 3barb/2 fighter multi class with the rules we created, and on level 9 also but it was very close, hideous laughter was effective and silvery barbs also but like the great weapon master and battle master with reckless attacks it was more then overkill, even with animate object and conjecture animals the Barb fighter won. If the game designers were smarter there wouldn’t be no problem with the martials it’s sucks that the damage dealers can’t attack from range and don’t deliver more damage than a spell caster.
yeah ideally you wouldn't have to do a bunch of homebrew on top of multiclassing in order to keep pace with a vanilla caster. So there's definitely still work to do.
ive been in 3 different 5e campaigns and ive never really noticed the martial/caster divide (especially in the casters favour. yh casters are more versitile but in my experience martials still tend to do better in combat than casters. in our 1st campaign out barbarian/fighter character was never reduced to 0hp and was dealing 100+hp damage regulary by the end were the casters went down quite often and the aoe spells wernt all that great due to potentially hitting party members (our casters were mainly druids or clerics)
I have played or DM'd in 6 campaigns since 2014 and I agree with you. There are very good spells that turn a battle like Web but the martials are the ones that down the enemies while the casters do some damage but are mostly control. I think the problem is only glaring when there are very few fights and casters can go ham. I've also DM'd for a group that had to go into a dungeon where they would not be able to long rest until they left. There were 8 encounters in the dungeon. One of the casters was very conservative in spell usage and one was not. They came out victorious but it was a lot harder because the cleric used too many high level spells early on. Based on my anecdotal experience, I think the problem is not the design of the game but the decisions of the DM.
Yeah your Web is great if you throw it at 4 enemies 1 of which couldn't make their save, however if you throw it to a single boss they are more likely to make their saving throw then not, so a good chance we accomplish nothing with our turn. Martials can miss their attacks, but getting advantage on attacks is easier, and they have 2 attacks at 5th level, as well as the part where math of the system works out in a way that martials are more likely to hit an enemy than the enemy is to fail their saving throws.
I've also never been in a table where the person who made a character specifically to do 100 damage, do their 100 damage and turn and get upset that I was restraining 2 enemies from afar. I've been in more situations where my spells got in the way of martials and ended up feeling like I didn't add anything to the fight
High level martials typically have powerful magical weapons and amour
the issue there is that imo Martials *Need* high level magic items just to have any hope of keeping up at higher levels and to gain more interesting attacks than "I run up and hit it with my sword." Whereas a bare-naked wizard is exactly as powerful as they need to be without needing any kind of items to buff them.
By all means a great way to help reduce the gap at your tables is to offer a lot more magic items to your martials to help them stay afloat, but I think that that only shows that the problem is very much real and should be addressed so that you don't *have* to keep doing that to re-balance the game.
Strength is used for high jumps and long jumps.
Going to go over the points roughly as they are introduced in the video.
4:40 Yes, AoE vs single target damage is an important consideration. Casters are way better at dealing damage to groups than martials. But that damage depends on having multiple target-able enemies. A Fireball hitting 4 enemies will do about 80 damage in total. But if there is only one enemy or allies are in the blast radius, then you are dealing less damage than a 5th level Fighter would do to that single enemy. But excelling in situational damage, doesn't mean that casters absolutely deal more damage than martials. And in the situation where there is one enemy, or a very dangerous enemy, then dealing higher single target damage is more valuable than theoretically being able to do more damage if there were a bunch of goblins standing around the dangerous enemy.
But another point that gets brought up about damage is outlier spells like Conjure Animals. In theory, a caster casting Conjure Animals can deal a boatload of single target damage with that spell. However, several generous assumptions are made when calculating the damage output of powerful spells. Let's use Conjure Animals as an example. The first is ignoring long rest resource attrition, which is tied to your second point starting at 7:26. A 5th level Druid, for example, won't have the resources to be able to use Conjure Animals in every fight. They can do it 2-3 times. If the adventuring day has 4-8 encounters, then the Druid will have to use weaker spells and eventually cantrips to deal damage. So using the damage output from Conjure Animals as a Druid's damage output for the comparison vs martials is grossly misleading. It should be the average damage ouput across the adventuring day, factoring in combats where the Druid only has access to 2nd and 1st level spells, since damage significantly drops off a cliff once 3rd level spells are depleted.
The second generous assumption is assuming 100% uptime. Conjure Animals is concentration, so the spell has a chance to drop each turn depending on the damage enemies deal and whether or not the Druid has an investment to protect their concentration. Concentrating on a dangerous spell also makes the caster a prime target for enemies, since breaking concentration or dropping the caster severely decreases the party's damage output. The chance of a spell dropping also increases cumulatively as rounds progress, so Conjure Animals is less likely to make it intact to round 4 as it is to make it to round 2. Conjure Animals can even be dropped in round 1, before the animals even get to take a turn. The animals can also be killed as rounds progress, even incidentally killed by AoE damage from enemies (like a Fireball or dragon's breath weapon). Conjure Animals can also be Counterspelled, like all other spells. Martials' expected damage output isn't reduced by any of these factors. And these factors are never accounted for when determining caster damage.
So in practice, a caster's output is more fragile than a martials and more heavily impacted by resource attrition. The one seeming exception is HP, as you mention at 8:07. Martials are assumed to run out of HP before casters run out of spells. There are several things wrong with this assumption though. One is that it relies on the assumption that martials get targeted more than casters, but the presence of concentration spells incentivizing targeting doesn't mean this is necessarily the case. Second, and more importantly, it ignores the interaction between HP and resources. If martials and casters are both expending non-HP resources, it preserves the party's HP. If a caster drops a Hypnotic Pattern or Conjure Animals on an encounter, martials lose less or no HP from the encounter. It isn't the case that martials lose HP linearly as casters spend more resources. The complete opposite is true.
9:28 Encounters in 5e are designed around the adventuring day. If someone is running less than the minimum number and difficulties of an encounter to constitute a full adventuring day, then that is just on people running the system not as intended. And if you run the minimum 3 encounters, all of those encounters being Deadly means that more resources will need to be spent. If someone runs 8 short rests in between each long rest, it heavily favors short rest classes, but that doesn't mean the system is balanced in favor of martials. Gritty realism exists for overland travel campaigns.
12:00 Heavily overstating caster versatility and understating martial versatility. Casters investing into a certain field comes at the cost of being locked out of others. They aren't as supremely versatile as you are making them out to be. Fulfilling any specific function entails spending a spell preparation/known and spending a spell slot on it. All of those are limited. So a caster can prepare Fly and cast it to fly over an obstacle, but that comes at the cost of preparing and casting another 3rd level spell. So one less Fireball for instance, which means the caster is sacrificing damage and other output to cover a specific niche with a spell. Martials, especially Rogues, can also easily contribute out of combat using skills and ability scores, without having to use any resources at all. Why would a caster ever cast Knock when a Rogue can pick something for free. Why cast Levitate when the Fighter or Barbarian can lift something for free. Why cast Jump when the martials can jump the gap for free, etc, etc. Rogues and martials picking up Expertise in persuasion (Rogue or Skill Expert) can contribute in social situations that spells like Charm Person and Suggestion would be way to risky or conspicuous to use. Even Strength is useful outside of combat due to Athletics being 3 skills in once (jumping, swimming, and climbing). Athletics and acrobatics are also used to evade/escape grapples (instead of needing to use lockout resources like Misty Step).
18:03 Martials have plenty of ways to impact action economy with various attack rider control effects like Stunning Strike, Battle Master maneuvers., Crusher/Piercer/Slasher, etc. And notably they can do this without giving up any attacks. You also mentioned Action Surge. This is just underselling the ways martials can affect action economy. Good points about the number of options the classes have to choose from though.
24:10 There are 39 half feats that let you boost physical stats and 32 that let you boost mental stats. The assertion in this part of the video just isn't correct. Monks and Paladins being MAD is the only thing that holds them back from grabbing feats like casters can.
25:35 Very good point overall. They have gone back and printed updates for Rangers and Monks, and have even reprinted / added features to some subclasses too. However, they haven't hit a lot of the most lacking subclasses with new content. 4 Elements still hasn't gotten access to the spells that came out in Xanathar's Guide to Everything.
29:50 This also works in reverse though. Enemies can easily take cover from ranged PCs, with melee PCs being in a much better position to close in and take away partial/full cover. Martials can also close in and impose disadvantage on enemy ranged units as well.
30:03 Notably, maxing Dex and getting Dex saves doesn't actually benefit casters at all. Martials are the ones that max Dex. Strength also governs jump distance, Athletics also covers jump/swim/climbing checks, very common adventuring activities. 32:13 Acrobatics subbing in for Athletics checks is completely homebrew. You aren't supposed to be able to use Acrobatics for jumping, swimming, or climbing checks.
But coming back around, the primary reason, I think, that people believe there is a big gap between martials and casters is ignoring resource attrition. This is both in the form of ignoring full adventuring days when running games and gauging overall class strength, AND ignoring small scale resource attrition in the form of concentration and spell failure.
tldr; The gap is small or non-existant in practice if you run the game as it was intended to be run.
You are very clearly inexperienced. And know practically nothing about 5es meta lmao
@@TannerLindberg I have been playing/DMing for 10 years (since 5e came out). But you are right, [insert current popular meta] is objectively true and will never change with further knowledge or if the DM changes.
I recommend "gritty realism" rest variant if you run one encounter per day. Short rest takes day, long rest takes week.
I run around 4 encounters per day, so I use regular long rest times, but I make short rest can take as little as 5 minutes to encourage party to short rest more often, to make warlock regain spell slots more often (I have fiend warlock, battlemaster, eldritch knight, ranger, wizard, all on lvl 7). I believe "Tal Dorei Campaign Setting Reborn" have "Accelerated Rests" variant rule that works like that.
Yeah my preferred rules are currently to either reduce Short Rests to 10 minutes (That way it lines up with Ritual casting which I think is interesting synergy), or to use those gritty realism rules, which tend to fit the style of more kinds of campaigns. I've seen some people say that 5 or even 10 minute short rests is simply too short to be a meaningful rest. But I think a solid counterpoint is to remember just how short most fights are. A very "Long" fight in D&D can last like 5-10 rounds, but that is literally only 30 seconds to a minute of in-universe time. Adventurers are typically only exerting themselves for very short bursts, so resting for 10 or even just 5 minutes after basically sprinting for just 1 feels more reasonable when you put it in that context.
But yeah while it definitely helps a lot to rest that way to give short-rest classes more resources and encourage casters to spend more spell slots, there's still a lot of other problems that need to be addressed.
4e didn't have a martial caster divide, amusingly, it is also pretty cool that in AD&D casters were super weak early on, since alot of players didn't reach high levels
The martial/caster divide is only really a problem past level 11 in 5e D&D, and used to be alot worse in older editions, and in 2024 5e, the absolutely busted spells are being addressed,
The remaining ones are casters in armour with a shield, and animate objects, most of the other caster issues like conjure animals have already been addressed
Edit, to clarify, the video is 7 months old, back when many people were still calling it "5.5" or whatever, before alot of people even knew the spells would be addressed, or even the martials class features would be redesigned like they have, but ye
The problem is that even if casters only invalidate martials at lvl 11+, we're still left with the martial/half-caster divide below that level (and all the way up to 20, to be fair). There's no reason to play Fighters, Rogues, Barbarians and Monks when Paladin and Ranger provide all the necessary benefits of martial characters, while also having access to support & damage mitigation (Paladin) or control & utility (Ranger). And if we're looking to the stronger subclasses for the half-casters, like Gloom Stalker and Oath of Ancients, they often provide *more* as martial characters on top of their aditional features. And while the half-casters usually stay ahead of the non-casters, they eventually fall behind dedicated spellcasters as well.
Calling it a martial/caster divide is a bit misleading. It's more of a martial / half-caster / caster divide.
DnD Unoptimized does a lot of great math on this topic.
I think he proves some of your points wrong, you might want to look at his work in detail.
Even when attacking a single enemy, not taking into account the AoE potential of casters.
Your delivery and explanation are really good though.
I am curious as to what they say but ultimately the vast majority of the problems don't even come down to numbers. Even if Melee Fighters objectively did the most damage out of any class in the game, that wouldn't change the fact that you can't hit a dragon that's flying 50 feet up with a sword, or that a sword usually doesn't help you solve a puzzle. The biggest contributing factor to what makes Casters so broken is that magic provides so much more utility and application in virtually all scenarios in addition to also being powerful in combat on top of everything else.
I understand the point you were trying to make but presenting average damage without taking in account accuracy is a bit reductive, and I think a severe mistake when including options such as GWM which only adds that extra damage at the cost of accuracy.
well my point was that even in a best case scenario where you land all of your attacks with all those buffs, a caster can usually outpace a martial with ease. Taking into account accuracy only makes things worse for the Martial which I feel is pretty well stated to be in a bad spot already, since casters don't really have any kind of accuracy-for-damage tradeoff. So in general a Caster will usually have the same or better accuracy than a martial.
And that's before even considering circumstantial things like how if an enemy is 40 feet away, a caster can usually still deal full damage while a Greatsword specialist may have to spend their whole turn dashing to get in range.
The more detailed you get about the analysis, the worse and worse it is for the martial
@@BlazeMakesGames yeah, that’s kind of it. This could’ve helped drive the point home even further
Other subtle things I find wild is looking at progression. At odd numbered levels they get higher level spells AND more slots on top of the progression they would get from Class and Subclass.
Plus, with weaknesses and resistances, there is more they can exploit or avoid. Martials are kinda just screwed in many of those cases.
For even more of the importance of versatility is being able to target *saving throws* instead of AC. Most foes are bound to have a soft spot there, but Shield, shields, and armors can do so much.
And yeah for exploration and problem solving wow the Skills you can focus on using the mental Abilities just go hard.
yeah the sheer difference in the amount of features different classes get is a huge part of it too. If you think of getting new spells and getting new spell levels as features, and you probably should, then casters are getting multiple class features every single level. Meanwhile martials like the barbarian have levels where all they get is like "oh you deal slightly more crit damage" so the only get a single feature, and it only works some of the time. Ideally, every class should be getting like one meaty feature every single level and there shouldn't be any 'dead levels' as they were called in older editions where you get no new abilities and at most only a number or 2 goes up.
Oh wow. I like casters way more than martials. That is because the flavor is so much cooler. Magic is awesome in its flavor. It is flashy. It is interesting. It leads to profound ideas. I go hard core and get into New Age. That has amazing magic. Martial characters can't compete with that. Fighting with weapons and shields seems boring by comparison. This video goes into the more mechanical advantages of magic. Wow. That is a lot. The list sure gets long. I think a good solution is the give martial classes spell-like abilities. That happens in World of Warcraft, DND 4E and DC 20. I don't know if it fixes all the problems in this video. It will definitly help help though. The biggest differenve is that casters can use spells and martials can't. Spells are powerful and versitile. Casters use a different reasource, but they don't wear out more quickly as martials. Giving martials spell- like abilities would help with these problems. World of Warcraft and DC 20 also have a mana reasource for the casters and a sinilar reasource for martials. In both cases, the martial resource recovers more easily. This video talked about reasource differences. Health in martials drains more quickly due to being deep into the fray. I got to wonder. Maybe the mana-like reasource in martials recovers more easily as a way to make up for the extra drain on health.
I didn't know there was an imbalance between melee and range. Maybe the ranger is the most powerful martial class even if it had no magic at all. Ranger in DND 5E is underpowered. I wonder if the weaknesses was an overcorrection on the potential overpowering nature of the ranger. When doing my own game designing. I did figure out a way to balance them. I enjoy magicians so much that I made a class system with just them. So there is a case where all coasses have access to mana and all have access to the spells. Spells can be used at any distance. That helps a lot with balencing. All classes have acess to a damaging magic called sparkle. It is a nice reliable damage source. Sparkle doesn't cost mana. However it has the downside of only being usable up close. It is fair for this attack to have both an upside and a downside. There is a a distincition of range and melee magician. Ranged magicians have spells with direct effects. So they are usefull at a distance. Mages do ranged damage. Priests do healing. Melee magicians have spells that power up thier ability to fight with sparkle. A spell only provides a power up once. Shamans use blade spells. This spell adds damage to the shaman's next sparkle attack. Warlocks use shield spells. This spell subtracts damage from the next sparkle attack the warlock recieves. I did have an action economy where everybody got a set of several specific things. There is prepare spell, move one space, cast spell and sparkle. Prepare spells are done by drawing a card from a spell deck. In this situation, fighting in melee becomes a double edged sword. All fighters can use the spell step. However only melee fighters can use the sparkle step. They are close enough to use sparkle. Range fighters can't use thier sparkle at range, so they are forced to skip the step. Melee fighters get to do more on thier turn. The downside is that they also recieve sparkle attacks from thier opponents. They take more damage. Ranged fighters are protected from this damage simply from being at range. Melee fighters deal more damage and recieve more damage. This is a kind of tradeoff that makes melee more offensive. It makes range more defensive. So that tradeoff makes both sides seem more fair. I am glad I watched this video when I did. I decided to switch over to using action points. It is an action economy similar to Pathfinder. This gives a lot more streamling and flexibility. I am still working out the details of what actions can be done and how many action points they should cost. This video draws balance of melee and range to my attention. I am so glad it did. Hmm.... Maybe there is a way to maintain balence. I can have it so sparkle is the only action that doesn't require action points. Everyone can do sparkle one at the end of their turn. In this way, melee fighters still get a little something extra. They can still have thier double edged sword to keep them balanced.
I did realize something. The adventuring day mechanic sucks. That may be why it isn't used in video games. There are other methods to recover. Pokemon has Pokemon Centers. These are special places to go and heal. World of Warcraft has health and mana restored gradually over time. A player can recover just by staying out of battle for a minute or so. Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild has the player gather food and use the food to cook meals. The meals are used to recover health. All three methods is highly controlled by the player. DND is different in that the times of resting is set by the DM. It can get really unbalanced when the DMs don't plan adventuring days like the game developers plan them. The video explained that casters can get overpowered when adventuring days are too short. There is another problem. As casters go, warlocks are underpowered. They get criticism an ridicule for it. Warlocks are reliant on short rests to make the most of their class abilities. They become underpowered when an adventuring day doesn't have enough short rests. I guess fighters and monks are doubly screwed. They are martials that rely on short rests. Whoops. Maybe it is better to go for a flexible recovery mechanic like video games. Then maybe it is better to balance everything around that.
yeah the adventuring day is a huge problem with how D&D is balanced imo and tends to be one of the core reasons why the game has so many balance issues
This divide you discuss, does it manifest in the players you know? TTRPG is my jam. Most of my friends are TTRPG-ers of one flavour or another. Most are in their 50's, like me. I've never heard a player complain that a wizard is more powerful than a fighter. I have heard players say a certain class is not fun and so they play another class. This divide you speak of, is it manifesting in the fun the players are feeling? As a DM I have a lot of ideas on how a fighter might have more fun at my table. But your content seems to be about detailing mechanics that cause some sort of divide. Game design is fun. Playing is fun. If you're not having fun, have a think about why that might be and maybe, possibly consider making a change.
Here's a quick one for fighters at my table. If the foe is a lower CR than the fighter's level, the fighter gets as many attacks on that foe as are foe around the fighter. This includes movement. One attack per foe. Think of Sir Lancelot from Holy Grail hacking and slashing his way through the crowd of peasants. He has 30' of movement and attacks everyone, once, as he passes them buy. The fighter is now doing fireball damage and is it breaking the game? Nope. Is my fighter having a ball? Yep. This is a boon I can give to my fighter after achieving a certain level or advancement. When attacked by a swarm of gobo's the spell chucker went down and the fighter slaughtered every little goblin he got close to. Oh, I use MCDM's Minion rules. So a pack of gobo's can be deadly.
I don't know about Blaze, but I do know that the mechanical weakness of some classes has been a major problem in games I've played and DMed, despite efforts to try to balance it out. This has come up in both narrative and combat focused campaigns, though for different reasons. This is usually less of a problem if every player is clueless about how to use spellcasting, but a lot of the people I've played with are anything but.
I ran a short lvl 13 campaign during a holiday a couple of years back. Just a fun dungeon crawl. My players were a Battlemaster Fighter, a Vengeance Paladin, a Soulknife Rogue, a Draconic blaster Sorcerer... and an Abjuration Wizard that just solved 70+% (and almost every non-combat problem) of the campaign on their own because they were hyperfocused on utility and control. Everyone else were allowed to do the big numbers, but I could see that everything they did hinged on the Wizard. Worst part about it was that this Wizard was a fellow DM who was intentionally limiting themselves by not branching into more than just utility and control and a smidge of defense (mostly just Shield and Absorb Element to proc his Abjurer feature). Luckily, as a fellow DM, he knew how to give the other players the illusion of contributing by letting them have the big numbers on their turns, so we avoided bad feelings at the table, but several players have realized what happened afterwards. The Wizard player had assumed the others would bring more optimized characters than they did when he made his own.
That holiday campaign was a case where it didn't end up being a "real" problem in that we avoided any schism at the table, but that did come down to the fact that the player knew how to help avoid that. Not everyone playing Wizards or spellcasters have that degree of social awareness. For example, I had a veteran player show up with a Hexblade+Devil Sight+Darkness+Polearm Master+Sentinel build at a lvl 4-5 campaign meant for new players learning the game. Still learning basic features like what the difference between an Action, Bonus Action and Movement Action type of new players. Just a veteran player with complete disregard for the others as long as he was allowed to play his minmaxed character. And the fact that Hexblades are generally speaking much stronger than non-caster classes was a real issue there, because there was no amount of good play the others could do to make up the difference, even if they had played optimally.
Another campaign, I've had a Rogue and a Ranger butt heads because the Ranger was able to use their magic to make the Rogue kinda pointless, between Fog Cloud, Pass Without Trace and dealing more damage more consistently. Wasn't even a Gloom Stalker, just a Hunter. The Rogue player asked to change class into a Gloom Stalker Ranger just to get to play the character he wanted (stealthy assassin) without being completely overshadowed by a basic Ranger.
None of this is touching on all the non-combat nonsense I've had to deal with, since most non-casters rely almsot entirely on skill checks.
At some tables with some types of players, the imbalance isn't necessarily going to be a problem. But it is also going to be a problem at other tables with other players. Having a degree of balance as a foundation for the game system is likely to improve the overall experience for everyone, since whether it ends up being a problem isn't completely dependent on what type of players and DMs you end up dealing with.
In the damage example, you are looking at idealized situations. Spellcasters have a limited resource, in the form of spellslot, and can only use a lot of the AOE spells in particular situations. A fighter can dish out the damage in fight after fight, without risking friendly fire.
I think that in 5e, the martials will tend to out damage most wizards. The real power difference is in debuffing, utility and control. Which is where the wizard gets to control the fight. But that is also what makes them interesting to play.
Well I do address those other issues later on in the video in regards to daily resource expenditure and debuff/utility and whatnot. The problem is that a lot of those subsequent issues feed into each other.
In theory and a truly idealized a Fighter should deal more damage throughout an adventuring day than a wizard. But when you take into account all the debuffing and utility that even allows a the party to deal damage in the first place, a lot of that damage can be attributed to the wizard. And it seems like most tables aren't running enough encounters in an adventuring day to actually drain a wizard's resources. Which means that they are more freely able to cast their most powerful spells and in turn the Fighters have a lot less time to try and catch up throughout the day. And I'm not even saying those tables are playing the game wrong. The issue is more that the game just simply doesn't adapt to many different styles of play very well.
Not to mention that a lot of people underestimate just how much of a damage multiplier AoE effects are, which is my main point of my damage comparison. I think it's fairly realistic to have a fight where there's 3 enemies in it, and pretty common to have fights with a lot more than that. And any time you get a fight like that, the wizard is going to deal an insane amount of damage every time they're able to get something big like a fireball off, which they can do at as low as level 5 when martials are able to just hit 2 enemies in a turn. It could take a Fighter an entire adventuring day of combat just to catch up to those damage values from a single spell, before even taking into account the damage the wizard will deal while the fighter is trying to catch up.
@@BlazeMakesGames You did yes. But my experience is that the enemy often gets mixed in with friends, so AOE becomes very situationally useful. Also that spellcasters end up using a lot of resources on saving the martials with healing, feather fall or similar.
The best solution would probably be to give the martials some options in debuffing and control. Basing it on the barbarian intimidating the enemy or similar, to give them more interesting things to do. Oh and give the monk more ki points to use.
@HappyCatholicDane I think the ultimate balance should be that martials are sustainable, and casters aren't. Their control options aren't as strong, but they get near infinite uses. I think an attempt to grapple as a bonus action should be an innate ability of attacking with melee weapon. And that being grappled should make spellcasting more difficult. Especially with somatic components. Hell, those could be canceled outright through grappling.
That alone would make pure martials pretty damn good. Plus, that makes polearm master not quite as necessary, since you would still have a bonus action without it.
Also, martials should be able to stun enemies with normal attacks. Maybe make it some kind of conditional thing or something, but if it's got a brain, it can get a concussion.
@@Tmanowns I like those ideas, or at least some similar, for the PC characters. I wouldn’t want the grappling thing in general, as that would turn every fight into a grappling contest. Which would make low strength characters unplayable.
But yes, giving martials some more low impact but free control/debuffing options, would make them a great deal better.
@HappyCatholicDane maybe instead of an innate feature, it could be a fighting style for versatile weapons? Since the grappling rules means you can't grapple and attack with a two handed weapon, a versatile weapon with no shield is perfect for this playstyle. Or even just changing the grappled condition so it affects spellcasters more.
Noting i am late in the party, I have given this some thought
I think spell casters should not recover all their spells per long rest, perhaps they can recover their level per long rest
For example a level 7 Wizard can recover 7 levels per long rest, so a level 4 spell and 3 x level 1 spells.
yeah this is kinda similar to the 'hardcore' resting rules, where it takes a full week of downtime to do a single long rest, and a short rest is sleeping overnight. It technically nerfs both but most martials are short rest classes and most casters are long rest classes. And since most people only play 1 or 2 major encounters per day, it can do a lot to help rebalance the game in favor of those short rest classes. Especially if the week of downtime to do a long rest has to happen in a safe area like a town.
*laughs in 4E*
exactly!
18:26 Stunning Strike.
Stunning Strike is such an interesting bad ability for monks that I feel it almost warrants an entire video on its own. It's incredibly powerful of course, but it's also insanely more powerful than basically anything else that a Monk can do, and it's incredibly Ki efficient since it only costs 1 and you can use it after every hit, even hitting the same target multiple times to try and force them to fail the save if only due to RNG.
And as a result, especially with how Ki Hungry Monks are, it basically means that Stunning Strike is the only thing you should be doing like 90% of the time whenever you attack. And that in turn makes monks into this sort of really simplistic one-trick-pony where they focus on trying to stun-lock enemies as much as possible until they run out of ki.
And like even then, we're also talking about an ability that lets them stun only a single target, and they have to be within Melee Range to do it. For comparison Most casters get access to things like Hold Person, which lets them do functionally the same thing, but with a 60 foot range on it. And on top of that Hold Person can be upgraded to hit multiple targets at once and last for up to a whole minute from a single casting. I mean hell not only do casters get Hold Person at level 3 when Monks get stunning strike at level 5, but by level 5 Hold Person can already hit 2 people at once. So this one relatively minor spell is basically a better version than an entire other class's best option.
And there's still other ways that Casters can way more effectively impact the battlefield with things like the aforementioned Web spell which can affect a whole group without even needing to be upcast and sticks around so that other characters can try to push people into said webs.
But yeah, the issue isn't that Martials don't have any options whatsoever beyond damage. It's just that Single Target Damage is the only thing that they are specifically better at than a caster. And for nearly every other thing in the game a Caster can vastly outpace any martial trying to do anything other than that.
@@BlazeMakesGames Thanks for replying! I definitely see your point, I was just pointing out that there are martials that have similar abilities.
@@BlazeMakesGames Iffy comparison between Stunning Strike and Hold Person. Hold Person only works on humanoids. Wide swathes of creatures that Hold Person will be useless on. Stunning Strike works on just about everything. Casters don't get Hold Monster until level 9 and it costs a 5th level slot.
Web is also overrated. Casting it means doing no damage, unlike using Stunning Strike which lets you do a full round of attacks. With Web, you are giving up your entire turn to maybe take one turn from an enemy. You get the possibility to affect multiple enemies at the expense of doing 0 damage. For Web to be good you either need conveniently grouped enemies, a linear path so that Web can't be easily circumnavigated, or a party composition tailored to push things back into Web.
You also have concentration and Counterspell affecting both Web and Hold Person/Monster, which Stunning Strike is not subject to.
The closest equivalent to a level 5 Monk who attacks and tries one Stunning Strike each round is a caster who can cast Raulothim's Psychic Lance 15 times per day (damage + a chance to stun).
Also, a Monk isn't incentivized to use all of their Ki on Stunning Strike. That is a gross oversimplification. From a tactical perspective, you don't want to stun weak enemies, enemies that can be killed before they take a turn, enemies that are already controlled/stunned, or enemies that are going to be controlled by another party member. You only want to stun threatening enemies who are going to have a chance to put out damage if you don't stun them. Flurry of Blows to finish off enemies or push damage is just as ubiquitous as well as using Step of the Wind for movement and various subclass uses for Ki. Plus, you usually want to Flurry an enemy that you stunned on the previous turn instead of trying to stun them again.
D&D should implement the spell slots system to martial caracters. Transform the fighter, rogue, paladin, barbarian and ranger special habilities (maneuvers, sneak attack, smite, rage, spells etc) into a slot based system, just like they do it with the spell slots for casters. As you martial character progress, so progresses the number of habilities (spells) known, the number of habilities slots you can use per day, and also increases the maximum damage output that you can deal in each hability. So for instance, you could have a 3rd level maneuver called "headstrike", if you strike a hit, you deal 8d6 damage to the target, half as much if the target saves against a DEX svt (DC could be the damage taken). By the way, 8d6 is the same damage as a 3rd level fireball. You could have a maneuver that imitates, in game mechanics, the slow, blind, silence spells effects. You could even have maneuvers that you can concentrate on, so its effects last longer than 1 round (like a samurai last stand, a viking berserk), so you can apply concentration checks to ALL players, not only to the casters. Martial characters should also have the equivalent of cantrips, minor habilities that could be useful during combat AND roleplaying, exploring, etc.
Well what you're suggesting essentially becomes 4th edition, and a common complaint is that it made the classes feel too samey. Like yeah what you're suggesting *is* balanced, but it's only balanced by destroying all the uniqueness that different classes have. I don't think that we need to resort to that necessarily, as there are ways to write classes with different mechanics and still have them be fun. After all there are Half Casters and Warlocks already in the game that, while they use spell mechanics, they do so in very different ways that are still fun and relatively balanced against each other. So I don't think there's a need to shoehorn Martials into becoming reflavored Wizards.
@@BlazeMakesGameswell you can’t have your cake and eat it too. 4th edition classes are still very much different from each other, and don’t play the same.
This is what LaserLlama's Alternate Fighter did and I think it's great at giving Martials more things to do. Low level maneuvers are more realistic feats of athleticism, and high level maneuvers feel more mythical heroic deeds and I think it's great. I think that's how WotC should officially scale the martials.
You should guest lecture at WotC
Lol I am far from the only person to identify these issues, I’m sure that there are far more more qualified people to do that. But I won’t deny that I would like to speak directly about these issues with some people on the design team.
@@BlazeMakesGames Honestly, I'd prefer it if you lectured the people at Kobold Press, and any other companies creating their own take on DnD, as I feel WotC and 5.5e is a lost cause.
12:45 I’d hardly say mitigation should be a designated role.
Well I'll admit that everyone is inherently capable of tanking to some degree, but clearly some classes like barbarians are meant to be better at mitigating damage than others. The problem of course is that casters tend to be way too good at mitigating damage as well.
@@BlazeMakesGames i mean that’s kind of my point. Most of the time you can’t really build mitigation too much. And like u said casters can do it so easily with dips for either medium armor or the shield spell
well I think that right there is the issue. Martials are meant to be the front liners but there's not a ton they can do to actually make themselves more durable once they get their AC as high as it'll go with heavy armor and a shield. Meanwhile a caster can take spells and such that directly enhance their Mitigation.
The point is that I think it should be emphasized more as a proper role, Martials should be way better at it than they are now, and casters need to be made worse at it.
If a caster has no resources it is their own fault! I repeatedly see even the "best" so called players making the same huge mistake. They write no scrolls! You can make scrolls, correct the problem!
Just bring back bap at this point. Also as a sweaty try hard meta power gamer. Im a little sick of cleric wiz wiz wiz being the meta
It is high time for a "magic corrupts" approach. The more powerful the spell, the higher the the chance to have a price to pay - permanent hit point loss, Constitution loss etc.
That’s one of the reasons I like Wrath and Glory. As a 40k game their mage equivalent has no real limit on how much they can use their magic, but the issue is that every time they do, they risk causing some kind of twisted corruption to occur like a wild magic sorcerer, but way more dangerous.
The premise of a martial-caster divide is based on the idea that all options should be equally viable, that they should do comparable damage, they should have the same number of options that every other class has and that's just poppy-cock. I submit that each class is a different playstyle and comparing them is meaningless because of that. Its like comparing apples to carrots. People who think casters are better should just play casters. Obviously that is more your style. But sometimes you just want to smack things with a big ass sword. That's a different playstyle. So why ARE we comparing these different playstyles? Optimizers. Optimizers, in their neverending pursuit of squeezing the most damage or the most utility or the highest AC mix-and-match various classes to create a sum greater than the combination of their parts. They use made-up statistics like DPR to argue their case, knowing full well that metric is so heavily reliant on assumptions to make it meaningless. But they keep on, telling all the new players that certain subclasses and certain classes are great and others are terrible. All in pursuit of the most damage or the most powerful characters. It is the elevation of mechanics at the expense of story. A character who is multiclassed into four different classes for this feature and that feature doesn't have a reason for those switches because its not about story, its about mechanics. They treat the game as if character creation has an alacarte menu. This is not me saying they are playing the game wrong. That's not for me or anyone else to say. But when you attempt to alter the game to fix an imbalance that you created in pursuit of that optimizing playstyle, you've gone too far. That's why I can't stand it when people compare martial characters with spell casters. They are not supposed to be equal or the same. That was 4e and it just felt weird. That's why we dropped it.
Okay but I think you're missing the point tho when a wizard with just 3 basic spells that nearly everyone takes: Mage Armor, Shield, and Absorb Elements, can be tankier than the tankiest possible Barbarian or Fighter past like level 4. Thus removing basically the one main downside that is supposed to balance out a caster. (And this only gets worse if you play with Silvery Barbs)
Or when the Martial characters are given almost zero out of combat utility options while Casters not only have good mental stats to better navigate social encounters, but also have access to spells to just negate most challenges like fly or stone to mud.
But then you get into combat where the Martial characters shine! And the Mage just casts Fireball and does 10 times more damage than a fighter could hope to ever achieve in their lifetime...
By all means I agree to your point that optimizers are missing the point sometimes. But to go so far in the other direction as to ignore any and all possible comparisons is I think equally foolish. I barely even bothered bringing up statistics in my video. And in fact my biggest complaint is nothing to do with DPR or whatever, it's to do with the fact that Martial characters have so much less agency compared to casters who get so many more cool features and options and ability to apply themselves to most situations even outside of their niche.
Like regardless of how you wanna try and frame the problem, that doesn't change the fact that most Martial characters have really boring turns most of the time where all they do is run up to someone and hit them with their sword. Meanwhile the caster gets to use fun flavorful abilities that let them call down lightning or summon walls of energy or manipulate the world around them.
"The premise of a martial-caster divide is based on the idea that all options should be equally viable..."
Yes, they absolutely should. All 12 player classes should be equally viable. They don't need to do the same thing and it would be better if they had more clearly defined roles. That way we could avoid Wizards being the masters control, utility and defense at the same time as they put out competitive amounts of damage and support with a modicum of game knowledge. But optimizers aren't the only ones suffering from poor game balance.
I've played with veterans and newbies alike and I've seen what happens when, for example, a Ranger and a Rogue try to exist in the same role. Even without optimization, the Rogue just can't keep up with the Ranger because of how independently strong spells are. The Ranger wanted to be an assassin type, so they picked Hunter's Mark and Pass Without Trace because they looked cool for that character, and just like that the Rogue class was completely invalid. Expertise doesn't matter when PWT is a +10 bonus to everyone. Sneak Attack doesn't scale fast enough to be relevant. You get the same story if a Paladin and Fighter exist in the same party as melee characters. And Tempus forbid that a Bladesinger shows up to try their fancy new attack actions.
Spellcasters can accident their way to decent builds becauseyou can pick spells that look cool or fitting for your character and probably get a decent selection, because spellcasting is designed to be independently strong in a way martials just aren't in 5e. Martials can't really do that, because picking what you think is "cool" is a good way to miss the options that are "good", since only heavy polearms and hand crossbows scale halfway decently thanks to feat support. You want a longbow, a greatsword or dual wielding? Whelp, too bad. You just hit lvl 8 and those weapons aren't viable anymore. You want to tank with a shield? Too bad tanking doesn't work for martials in 5e, unless you're specifically playing a very niche Eldritch Knight variant that doesn't use a shield anyway. You want to be a tanky Barbarian? Too bad you'll run out of Rage uses realy quick and that dmg resistance doesn't protect you against most of the real dangerous stuff anyway.
On top of all of this, martials without spellcasting are boring and repetitive and barely distinguished from one another. Fighter, Rogue and Barbarian aren't 3 unqiue classes; they're 3 classes that have slightly different special features centered around the Attack Action as your core gameplay loop. At least Paladins and Rangers provide more than that through their spells, letting them mix up their gameplay from time to time. Monks are only unique because in a system of god awful warrior classes, they still stand out as the worst of the lot.
Why does everyone assume an aoe will hit a ton of enemies? Enemies aren't stupid, they will absolutely spread out so a single aoe won't hit very many.
the thing is that it doesn't even have to hit that many. Just hitting 2 or 3 enemies already means you're effectively multiplying your damage by 2-3x. And a lot of casters will either set up ambushes or otherwise try to have high imitative to cast a spell like fireball before the enemies can split apart. And fireball has enough AoE to easily fit at least 3 enemies within its range in most encounters.
Not to mention that casters are the only ones with effective battlefield control and manipulation abilities. So they can also often push creatures around or block them into spaces to set up future AoEs on top of that
@@BlazeMakesGames Two considerations here,
first, a cleave focused martial can often hit 3 or more enemies in a round unless facing exclusively ranged enemies, in which case you are looking at a many shot focused martial, which can shoot many times.
Second, every round and spell cast setting a big aoe hit is a round not spent hitting enemies, that the martial is spending hitting enemies.
Third, there is no such thing as "go first to get them before they move apart" because these are not video games spawning in enemies in clumps right in front of the player. In fact, combat is supposed to start hundreds of feet away when one side first notices the other side, which never happens at less than 60 feet except under very special circumstances, such as being found by enemies in the middle of a city or something.
Just a couple considerations here.
I think when you're comparing the damage output of characters, you're putting your finger on the scale by comparing Meteor Swarm to a greatsword fighter. For one thing, Meteor Swarm is about 3.5 times as damaging as Sunburst, the most damaging 8th level spell, a spell which is in a practical tie with a number of other spells for 2nd most damaging damage spell in the game. Assuming 1 short rest every 2 encounters, you're talking about a Fighter able to deal that 140 damage in the opening round of combat for the entire day, potentially dropping multiple enemies from full HP, and beginning the action economy tilt. Second, you compare the act of lobbing fireballs at hordes of goblins in a way of also putting your finger on the scale. A fireball deals 8d6 damage, which averages to 28 damage. This may kill basically any CR 1/4 creature like a goblin even on a successful save, but most CR 1 enemies have around 32 HP. If you're talking about fighting even just Human Thugs, rather than Goblins, you're already needing to roll kinda well to be taking them out with that spell. Fighters meanwhile, get to continue making attacks until their target drops before moving on to the next, practically ensuring tilt every time they get to act.
I guess it comes down to the question, how many enemies do you have to deal with? If it's about two, fighter is better, since they're going to chew through more of the HP in a single round, even potentially allowing the wizard to finish it off before it acts, and virtually guaranteeing a successful, and potentially even bloodless combat. If you're talking about 4-5, you're still talking about a fighter probably dropping one and potentially starting well in on a second, while a wizard's damage is technically slightly higher, it denies no actions, meaning you use more resources every battle. If you're talking about like, 20 we start to see wizard potentially pulling ahead in a narrow band of levels, 5-9ish, but after that, those 20 monsters are going to start having 40ish HP each, and even Cones of Cold and Firestorms are going to barely drop them past half HP, while the fighter will still be merrily chewing up about 3 every action.
Spellcasters very much do pull ahead in terms of survivability in comparison to a pure fighter, because of spells like shield and absorb elements, but a melee fighter ought to dip barbarian anyway for Bear Totem rage so they can take half damage. Crossbow fighters can benefit from being 100 feet back if they need to be and parry with distance better even than spellcasters, whose spells can sometimes be ranged only 60, or even sometimes 30. They may have 5 points less AC, but AC doesn't really protect you in 5e. Monsters quickly have +10 to +13 or more to hit, and unless you're skirting the very highest AC possible for your level, enemies will be hitting on rolls of 9+ in the middle range of levels. Healing is basically impossible as a strategy, so if you want to stay up between your actions, you need mitigation, and that's Wild Shape or Barbarian rage and few other options that can work at the edges, like stacking blur on top of wearing plate, or summoning monsters to fight for you and taking the dodge action.
I do think it's a massive, massive problem that this relative point of equilibrium only exists for Crossbow Experts and Polearm Masters. If you're a rogue, you basically NEED to be hasted 100% of the time for the 'ready action double sneak attack' trick, if you're a monk, the one trick you have is spamming stun, which isn't bad, but isn't good, and you may actually just be better off using a glaive with polearm master anyway. If your fighter uses a sword and shield, or if you're not using feats, or if you're at extreme low levels before martials can acquire their feats and their second attacks (I maintain that the level where the caster-martial divide is unquestioningly the widest is 1st level) then yeah, there's nothing you can do. There ought to be ways for other melee options to generate the kinds of bonus action attacks that GWM and Polearm Master gives, more Reaction attacks like Polearm master gives, the kind of synergy that Polearm master gives when taken along with Sentinel, and ranged builds need better defenses, or better mobility powers.
If you're talking about solving non-combat problems, I have no arguments against a caster-martial divide, but when you specifically cite AOE damage as a reason for spellcasters to be pulling ahead, I have to call out the ways your assumptions used to identify the facts don't track with typical play conditions.
BTW, one question. Be it Martial or Caster, where are they learning all that stuff anyway?
Looks like the Mentor/Teacher concept has been completely abandoned as well as letters of recommendation from one teacher to the next. Not to mention to work to gain access to organizations that teach that stuff.
Which brings me to a question everyone should ask themselves. What do you want? A Role-Playing Game or a Tactical Wargame?
Right now you let yourselves being pushed into Tactical Wargames by the publishers.
And no, there is no clear line between the two. But the question of what you prefer remains.
The great weapon fighter Vs meteorite comparison is pretty much completely useless. First of all, you didn't consider the chances to hit or to save which would have put the caster ahead since meteorite deals half damage on saves while attacks don't. Secondly, you can't cast more than one 9th-level spell a day while the fighter can do four attacks every round. And then why are we even looking at 17th-20th level when almost no campaigns even get that far?
The point was just a quick comparison. I didn’t include the to hit chance because I was giving the fighter the most benefit of the doubt to show how bad it is even in a best case scenario.
But yeah in reality if you go into the deeper math, a high level fighter still has trouble keeping up with spells like fireball that can be cast at 5th level
Pathfinder 2e. It’s much more balanced.
Sorry I have to disagree that rogues can't be good at damage, control, mitigation, and utility all that the same time. Rogues are far more unbalanced than any other class
Rogues have by far the best utility out of any of the martial classes while still having combat potential I'll give you that, but even with Sneak Attack their damage output is fairly comparable to a Fighter, except that it's even more single-target focused. At least a fighter can spread out their damage across numerous targets with multiple attacks and especially an action surge. While a Rogue pretty much focuses all of their damage on one target with Sneak Attack, and even then they need to make sure they maintain the conditions needed to do a sneak attack. And focusing super hard on single-target damage means that you'll always lag behind AoE effects like fireball.
Really, the Rogue's main strength is simply that it's a Dex based class, and Dexterity is what is overpowered, not the Rogue. As it's Dexterity that allows Rogues to be good at both Melee and Ranged Combat, have high initiative and AC, and be good at a variety of useful skills like Acrobatics and Stealth. The entire Rogue class is basically just riding on the coat-tails of the Dexterity Stat. Which I would argue is more akin to a "Two Wrongs make a Right" kind of solution. It technically works and Rogues are decently good because of it, but I'd hardly call it good design.
@@BlazeMakesGames sure they will lag behind AOE damage because the damage is multiplicative but let's look at the rogue class as a whole. They get the most skills out of any class, they get evasion, they get uncanny dodgez they get 3 different save proficiencies they get to treat their skill rolls as a 10. They get the disengage action as a bonus action. They can also use the user item action as a bonus action. This allows them to use caltrops to create difficult terrain. Note all of this is every round or every turn and with appropriate feats the rogue can do even more. Then once per long rest they just get a 20, divination wizard can't stop it. This hasn't even touched any of their subclasses. In a single round a rogue could cover each of the four categories you listed whereas a caster could at most cover two. Now I freely admit a caster is going to be able in most cases have a larger effect in said category on any given turn but like you said action economy is massive and adds up over time given this i think rogues that consistently use their actions to effect multiple categories over a given encounter can be more influencal than a caster. As far as the other martial classes I agree they get left behind casters and need some serious help
I think some Disparity is deserved. I mean, usually spellcasters need tu build their character and then choose from a number of spells, which makes playing a spellcaster more exhausting in and out of the game. That said, most intelligent creaures should know that they have to focus on the spellcasters beacause they are usally glasscanons, and then the game turn around the idea of melee classes taking the offensive to protect their allies, which is usually the fantasy of that type of characters. Also, magic items should provide some utility to melee classes and give them some extra abilities out of combat. This is my insight about this topic.
the issue is that the idea of casters being glass cannons in 5e is pretty much a myth from 5th level and onwards. Spells like Mage Armor, Shield, Absorb elements, and Silvery Barbs make Spellcasters have more powerful defensive options than most Martial characters, and the ability to do things like teleport as a bonus action and put up barriers between themselves and enemies can make them neigh untouchable at higher levels. Martial characters have no real answer to this and so ironically it should really be the Casters defending the Martial if we're talking about who is the squishiest.
But yeah I will acknowledge that the balance doesn't need to be perfect. Casters being a bit more powerful is fine. But it's at the point where it feels like some casters can just completely outshine Martials in almost every regard.
@@BlazeMakesGames ey thanks for the reply. I agree with you a lot, don't get me wrong... DMig is hard because you have the power to instigate spellcasters but most of the time it would be in detriment of the fun... It's hard to balance. Shield should be less powerfull and have an upcast option
yeah it can be hard, tho your general sentiment about giving martials more magic items definitely helps. After all buffs are more fun than nerfs and bringing martials up to the level of casters, or at least closing the gap a bit, by giving them more magic items tailored to their use can help a lot, as long as your other players don't feel too left out of course.
It is well understood by most people who look into optimization in 5e that the "frail caster" only applies to casters being played by people who aren't optimizing even a little bit. 14 dex+14 con+mage armor+shield is usually all you need to have a perfectly adequate survivability on a Wizard, since they're ranged characters anyway. You can push it much higher than this, of course, but this is typically all you need for basic encounters lvl 1-5 as long as you don't try to melee. Clerics come standard with 16-18 AC anyway through shields and medium (or heavy) armor. Bards and Warlocks can easily get the same through subclasses. The only spellcasters who are likely to be somewhat frail early on are Sorcerers (except Draconic) and Druids (except Moon).
As you level up, casters also have a lot more freedom to invest in defensive traits, since they don't have many required feats (mostly just Warcaster and maybe Constitution proficiency). Any (non-Hexblade) Warlock can pick up medium armor and shield proficiency with a single feat, which is going to be a very good investment for the class. Clerics can happily invest in Toughness (+2 HP per lvl) or a Magic/Strixhaven Innitiate feat for additional defensive options (like the Shield spell). Meanwhile, martials *need* to either invest in the ranged package (Archery+SS+CBE) or melee package (GWM+PAM+Sentinel) to keep up their damage above lvl 5, so they have no wiggle room for defensive features.
As you level up, martials just become more and more frail as AC and saving throw values fall behind the scaling on enemy attacks and DCs, while your HP to monster dmg balance start to favor the monster dmg. Casters have more freedom to invest in defensive features, have access to more defensive features and have the action economy freedom to take defensive actions (like Dodge) without crippling their contribution to the party. As an example, a Cleric casting Spirit Guardians then dodging the rest of the combat is actually a decent strategy that will do repeated AoE dmg, provide defnsive utility and some control through slowing enemies.
@@TheTdroid yeah, that's what Blaze said and I agreed. You are totally on point about optimization.
I don't see how this is a problem. In fact, I think they've broke the game more trying to even out the classes. Giving Wizards more power early on? Sounds good but makes picking a martial class seem pointless. Toning down casters later in the game? Why? The entire point of wanting to play a caster in these games is to be able to bend reality and break normal boundaries. Things that martial classes should never be able to do.
I mean part of the issue is that they do keep buffing the casters for some reason while leaving Martials in the dust.
But more importantly I'm not saying that Martial characters need to have insane magical powers or to be able to warp reality. I just want them to be more fun to play and have more interesting abilities at higher levels. If a normal experienced and grizzled knight is only like level 5, then a level 20 martial should be like Captain America, casually cutting through swaths of enemies and performing great feats of martial prowess like suplexing a dragon or knocking down a building with a strike of their hammer.
There's tons of room to design more fun martial abilities so that they don't get totally left behind in the dust, without having to resort to giving them spells and such.
they did it is called 4e
In my opinion non competitive ttrpgs shouldnt be balanced. They should focus on making each class feel unique and have a logical reason for its features. Balancing for combat should be limited to just making each class useful.
I mean that's fair, I'm not really arguing that everything need to be perfectly balanced. But even with that consideration, Martial classes lag severely behind magical classes when it comes to their ability to do interesting things both in and out of combat.
And even among other Martials in combat, they tend to not really feel very unique. When a Barbarian does 30 Damage cause they got bonuses from raging, a Fighter does 30 damage because they have 3 attacks, and a Rogue does 30 damage cause they did a sneak attack, is that really a meaningful difference when they all have the same practical upshot?
Meanwhile a caster is able to do things like create walls of fire that completely change the layout of the fight, use spells like Eldritch Blast and Thunderwave to knock enemies around, or use spells like fly to just completely bypass entire challenges.
@@BlazeMakesGames Certainly, it seems quite natural that a class labeled as a "Fighter" would primarily focus on combat skills. Additionally, it's important to consider that if Fighters were granted area-of-effect abilities or what might be considered "magical" powers, it could dilute the distinctive appeal that draws people to such classes. This could potentially transform the essence of a Fighter into something akin to a beefy Wizard capable of performing backflips
As pointed out by others in the comments, Fighters are often associated with a low-fantasy aesthetic, in contrast to the high-fantasy nature often attributed to magic users. This affects "class fantasy. A "might" character, it would be logically coherent to incorporate more mundane skills related to survival, leadership, and weapon skills. Keep in mind that especially in DND the inclusion of weapon-specific abilities also remains a distinctive trait of this class.
Also fighters are pretty strong in DND, unless your campaign goes for years i highly doubt you will get to a point that your wizard can take down a fighter on their own. Regarding the division their damage output through multiple attacks, it's comparable to the way area-of-effect spells tend to distribute damage across targets. Both scenarios involve a trade-off between concentrated and distributed damage. As for the argument about limited resources, just no. Fighters can capitalize on dedicated supports...a magic user that wastes their own resources and suffers opportunity costs for supporting them. Potions are also an option and your AC (or ac equivalent) is typically higher than that of a magic user. So a "Might" character has multiple attacks, dedicated supporters, effectivelly infinate HP, weapon specific abilities and is difficult to hit. How can you say this class is lacking?
The above are true for almost all major roleplaying systems. Nevertheless, the genre is "Role Playing". Your character is a fictional creature that lives, breaths, interracts and evolves with the "Story-telling" game's world. You are not a fighter that can do the Weapon Art: Kirito style no jutsu but a character with flaws, backstory, personal goals etc and you just happen to wield a sword as your weapon. Is it wrong to add magic to th "Might" Character? No absolutely not but keep in mind they will no longer be a "Might" Character but a "Hybrid". You are suppose to flavor your attacks btw and i think you dont have enough experience as a player with the game (you might be a dm for life) and this is the reason you dont get it. Or maybe you are just a power-gamer. Eitherway, this is not a problem for many people and if it is for you, you can always make a hybrid character.
By the way, it's interesting to note that Barbarians could also be interpreted as magic users due to their utilization of Rage, which imparts them with super-powers. I also hate 5e with a passion but i strongly disagree with your opinion in so many levels
I mean there's a lot of misconceptions about spellcasters that you're falling into there.
For one your point about distributed damage. The core issue is that when a Fighter distributes their damage, they are literally dividing their damage between multiple targets. If a fighter has 2 attacks that deal 2d6+5 damage, then they can either deal 4d6+10 damage to one target, or they can split it up to deal 2d6+5 damage to two targets. So in effect a Fighter has a fixed amount of damage they can deal every round and has to spend it on each target. Meanwhile a spellcaster at level 5 has access to fireball, a spell that does 8d6 damage to everyone in the blast. This means that they actually get *more* effective damage the more people they hit. The fireball doesn't get weaker if you hit 10 people with it instead of 1 person. So if we put a wizard in the same scenario, a Wizard can either use a fireball to hit one person for 8d6 damage, or can use the fireball on a group of people to deal 8d6 damage to every single one of them. So if they hit 3 people with fireball, their total damage for the round actually goes up to 24d6 damage.
And I'm not sure how you got to the conclusion that "More AC" somehow equals "Functionally infinite health." it's just slightly more health at best, but even then the misconception is that spellcasters have less AC and health than Martials. On paper that's what it looks like at first. But the issue is that there are a handful of low level spells that really mess with the balance of the game: Shield, Absorb Elements, and Silvery Barbs. These are all 1st level defensive options, which means that the more a caster levels the more easily they can afford to spend spell slots to cast these spells, which offer massive defensive boons I won't bother getting into the weeds on here, but the practical upshot is that they massively increase the effective health of the caster to the point where a Fighter can't hope to keep up.
But yeah ultimately the problem is complex and a lot more significant than most people realize. But I will admit it's not in every game. It's true that many games resolve these issues better than most. Also I have no problem with adding magic to martials, but I also don't think you have to to make them balanced. Regardless that aspect of the discussion is irrelevant. Either way while it's true that many are content to play a very imbalanced game and have fun doing so, I don't see why we can't strive to have a more balanced version of the game as well.
I mean the biggest issue with Martials is still their lack of interesting options. Even if a fighter out-damaged a wizard by a ton and had a ton more AC and health, I would argue that they're still weaker than the Magical classes due to their lack of options. If every time my turn comes up in combat I just say "I run up and hit it with my sword" and roll damage and that's it, then the game just isn't very fun for me. And like you said usually combat-classes sacrifice out of combat utility for such prowess, so I'm not having fun in-combat and I'm not good at doing anything out of combat. Even if we throw out all the numbers and pretend everything is somehow balanced, I don't think that's balanced in terms of "Fun" distribution. And that seems to be what your original comment is about, and is imo still the biggest issue with D&D's combat specifically.
The problem is that Fighters, Rogues, Barbarians and Monks aren't really useful. Normally, they're completely overshadowed by spellcasters, but a DM can take steps to try to balance that out. And if the DM does take those steps, the classes without spellcasting are completely overshadowed by Ranger (at least from Xanathar and onwards) and Paladin instead, because the half-casters contribute roughly as much (and often more if we pick good subclasses) as martials while also providing powerful spells. Paladins have great spells like Heroism, Bless, Aid and Find Steed. Rangers have Fog Cloud, Goodberry, Silence, Spike Growth, Pass Without Trace and more. You can ban Conjure Animals and Rangers will still outperform the non-casters.
just ban all casters from your table and be done with it. i am getting so freaking sick and tired of the fighter types are so far behind casters. utter bullcrap. limited uses of the dam spells that you dismiss so quickly because hit points guess who as far fewer hit points and the crapiest ac casters! and ranged attacks exist. martial classes have damage midigation built in its called armor.
Your first point of limited spells was answered early on in the video and is only a problem for the spellcaster if there fighting 6-8 encounters a day, which is not always the case. If they only have 1 or 2 encounter a day, then they can go full ham ith spells without their spell slots running out.
As far as their hp and ac is concerned, spell casters have more ways to replenish their hp and have spells to boost their ac to just as high as the martials, and ways to stop the enemies from ever getting to the spell casters. So the spell casters are nowhere near as soft and squishy as you are implying.
Honestly the martial caster divide is totally fine and thats how it should be. There is no reason why in a world with reality shaping magic a guy with a big sword should be as powerful as a wizard who can bring down a meteor.
I mean that might be true from a logic standpoint but it is still a game that needs to be balanced. I doubt that the creators of an MMO or like a pvp shooter would be able to get away with just saying "What are you complaining about? Obviously this class is supposed to be overpowered, for lore reasons!"
Problem is - anyone can pick a class. So you don't have any reason to pick inferior class. Older editions (before Monte Cook decided that magic should be overpowered) casters have downsides. They were still super strong, but at least martials have something to their advantage.
If I could downvote you more, I would.
Here's the thing: That sort of imbalance can exist in *monster statblocks* just fine. No one would bat an eye at the strongest monster in the game being a spellcasting monster that is just better than every non-spellcasting monster. But *player classes* need to be balanced, because they exist to work alongside one another and to have comlimentary strengths and weaknesses. But WotC eliminated all the weaknesses of the casters and most of the strengths of the martials over the years.
Characters without spellcasting just do not bring anything to the group that is worth the loss of spellcasting, because half-casters (Ranger, Paladin) can easily match (or surpass if you pick the best subclasses) the non-casters as martials while also bringing spells. Gloom Stalker Ranger is a perfect example of this. There is no Fighter or Rogue build that the Gloom Stalker isn't better at, while also providing lots of additional utility and battlefield control.
The whole point is for the DM to make sure every class becomes Important
I mean the GM can always help but it shouldn't be the GM's job to rebalance the game for the designers. And the GM can only do so much when an unoptimized Wizard can have better defenses than an optimized Fighter while also having more of an ability to manipulate the battlefield and stop enemies from getting to them. Like it's always possible for a caster to hold themselves back and for a GM to play favorites to support the martials, but like I said the game could also just be better balanced to support more playstyles more fairly. And I mean to their credit the 5.5e update is doing some good things to help.
Gee - maybe it's because they're supposed to complement each other.
And yet they don't. The 5e meta party is like wizard wizard cleric wizard lmao. There is literally no none home brew fight or campaign that doesn't get reduced to 1 out of 10 difficulty with that comp. If you disagree you are just really bad at dnd