Warriors Can't Win.

[Username17]

OK, you know it. I know it. A warrior character cannot beat a monster of their own CR even half the time by level 10. Not by a long shot if they are single classed, not even really if they are multiclassed - it just isn't going to happen.

There are some obscure builds which can beat one or more creatures of their CR which are essentially warriors, but in nine out of ten games if you bring anything that min/maxxed out to a game people will act all shocked at how cheezy you are being. Those character types include:

Flying Archers. Using the magic of getting a frickin flying mount, you can float around shooting creatures. Many enemies are incapable of fighting effectively (or at all) against an enemy more than 60' in the air, so this is pretty much the win even against many monsters of CR 10+. Note that this tactic makes you sort of more vulnerable to ranged attacks, since if your pegasus or griffon is killed your character is pretty much jacked.

Cavaliers. Similar to the Flying Archer, if you just get on a really fast steed and have Ride By Attack (and your DM has made house rules of some kind by which the feat actually works as intended), then you can inflict a damage multiple on your attacks and limit a non-spellcasting monster to only readied single attack actions - which will give you the edge on many bruiser monsters (although this tactic is again unlikely to triumph over a monstrous spellcaster such as an Immoth or Spell Weaver).

Frenzied Berserkers. This class (and a few like it) allow a character to hand out scores, even hundreds of points of damage in a round. This has a significant chance to beat back a vampire before it can make you fail a a will save and turn on the party. Not guaranteed by any means, but it's a chance.

The Polymorphic Fighter. If you layer on shapeshifting, and Lion's Pounce, and all the other magical bonuses, a Fighter can totally take a bruiser of its level to school. Of course, it's not really you beating the monster, it's the resident spellcasters...

---

If you are some character who has some investment in stabbing stuff who wanders around with a two-handed sword or something, you're just toast. A bruiser of your level is going to hammer you into the ground. And let's face it, you probably don't have the special abilities needed to compete against anything except a bruiser. What are you going to do, exactly, against a creature which levitates and fires mindblasts? What are you going to do against a monster which is incorporeal and drains levels?

Not a whole heck of a lot. A guy with a sword can only add to his party if the wizard feels the need to act as a "snare" caster to divert the monsters while the Fighter hits them with a brick every round. And if your opponent is a black pudding, your fighter can't even do that.

-Username17

[Desdan_Mervolam]

Alright, so how do you propose fixing this?

-Des

[The_Hanged_Man]

Maybe swordchucks?

[Username17]

1089758921[/unixtime]]Alright, so how do you propose fixing this?

-Des

This was originally in response to RC's off-hand claim that Warriors were in general OK as long as they took a Prestige Class. Needless to say, I disagree, hence this tirade.

As for solutions...

That's going to be difficult, isn't it? There's two main concepts of game balance, and it's largely to do with RPS. Either you want Fighters to be able to beat Fighting Monsters consistently, and leave special ability monsters to the Wizards, or you want to have Fighters to be able to beat special ability monsters consistently and leave brawlers to the Wizards.

If the first, then you basically just need to crank up Fighter output a whole crap load. Right now they get a BAB which is as much as 3 points behind a Druid by level 12, and that's just not noticable when he can turn into rhinoceros and you cannot. If a Fighter is supposed to shine when the party meets a giant scorpion or other bruiser monster, a Fighter's bonuses would have to be so big that they could numerically out-box a giant scorpion or other bruiser monster.

That would mean that the bulge of a martial weapon over a simple weapon should be bigger. Not one point of damage or a threat range, two points of damage and a threat range. And probably get additional bonuses from enhancements if the weapon is martial. That would mean that the benefit of wearing heavy armor should be more. Just for starters there shouldn't be a maximum dex bonus, and the jump from light armor to medium armor should be like 4 points of AC instead of one. The jump from medium armor to heavy should be another 4 points, for a grand total of Full Plate granting a substantive +12 AC (which still isn't much compared to the natural armor bonuses on some of the monsters he's fighting, but it's a start). That would mean that combat class features have to be bigger, and come more often. Feats should scale and grant cumulative and extremely large bonuses.

Or...

You could go the other way, in which case Fighters need to be vast tool boxes capable of countering all the bullshit of every weird specialty monster. Fighting classes would have to gain immunities and ability nullifying powers every level. Every feat would have to be a long list of funky (possibly mutually exclusive) powers. Fighters would have to be adaptable in the extreme.

In such a set-up, Paladins should become immune to energy drain and/or ability damage at first or second level. Barbarians should just be immune to fear and compulsions all the time, and a Ranger should be able to see invisible and ethereal foes.

Warrior characters should be assigned a role in high level combats and they should be good at it, whatever it is.

-Username17

[User3]

No character should be able to single handily kill something at his CR. The CRs are the threat level of a balanced 4 person party vs the monster.

However, point taken.

I vote for:

1. Adding called shots that mean something like the old "and now I stab the beholder's eyes" or "and now I stab the vampire in the heart with a stake" or "and now i cut off the hydras heads."

2. Reducing druid and cleric BABs to mage level.

3. Removing True Strike and Divine Favor and change Polymorph to a character replacement(at a penalty) instead of ginormous character buffing.

4. Add more feats that allow for strategy in combat(more strategy than the standard "maximized toward a big hit number, more attacks, and more damage."

5. Less reward for by fighters to maximize their +X stat equipment and more focus on useful equipment like Cloaks of Spell Resistance or other stuff that makes you a better adventurer rather than a better damage/tank monkey.

[Username17]

No character should be able to single handily kill something at his CR. The CRs are the threat level of a balanced 4 person party vs the monster.

That's a common misconception. Actually the CR is defined as the threat level to slightly challenge a four person of that level. A CR of your level plus four is considered capable of crushing your party half the time, and is thus the threat level of your whole four person party.

Since double the monsters is +/-2 CR, it can easily be seen, therefore, that facing a four person monstrous party equal in power to your party as a whole would be 4 CR higher than your level if each of the monsters was of a CR equal to your level. An NPC is a monster with a CR equal to its character level - so this holds out (a PC party facing itself would have a 50% chance of victory and would be facing CR of its level +4).

So a single character is a monster equal to his own CR. By the way, halving the number of players works the same way, so ideally any character on his own should have a 50% chance of beating a monster of his CR.

This doesn't mean that every monster should be an even match for you, certainly there's going to be some monsters that you can't beat (I don't know how a Frenzied Berserker is supposed to beat an Erinyes, for example), but for every monster you can't beat there should be another monster that can't beat you to keep things at the 50% ideal.

If we accept that a Fighter is going to be tooled by some monsters (and I submit that that conclusion is unavoidable), we have to provide the Fighter with monsters he can tool. And as things currently stand, that can only be done by jacking the fighter up in a number of ways.

-Username17

[User3]

1089760235[/unixtime]] Fighting classes would have to gain immunities and ability nullifying powers every level. Every feat would have to be a long list of funky (possibly mutually exclusive) powers. Fighters would have to be adaptable in the extreme.

In such a set-up, Paladins should become immune to energy drain and/or ability damage at first or second level. Barbarians should just be immune to fear and compulsions all the time, and a Ranger should be able to see invisible and ethereal foes.

This seems like an credibly good idea. In fact, constant passive abilities seem like the only thing that can really separate a Fighter from the archtypical roles of spellcasters.

Wizards and Sorcerers are supposed to be really good at dealing out damage and special (mostly negative) conditions. Clerics are supposed to be especially good at healing damage and getting rid of (mostly negative) special conditions.
They are also both limited in day-to-day usage of their abilities.

The Fighter on the other hand is supposed to be able to shrug off everything, charging into combat without (much) fear.

If Fighter-types start gaining permenent resistances and immunities (and other passive abilities), it might actually become worthwile for spellcasters to multiclass!
At the same time, it won't unbalance the damage system by making fighters walking SoDs.

And because immunities aren't a huge deal at very low levels, the power gap won't be signifigantly increased.

[canamrock]

Sounds good. I'd only suggest not granting raw immunities right away, specifically so that at lower levels, they've got powers slightly less intense as a few spells that always work, and then their powers rise up to keep matched with spellcaster overall capability.

Also, unless you use something like VCL or PrC's to allow spellcasters to keep improving their spellcasting outside of raw caster class types, holding off the super goodies for later makes it more enticing to stick with the fighter class.

[RandomCasualty]

Combat wise, I don't think warrior types need that much help. I created the following character to illustrate the point.

8th level half orc fighter/ 2nd level barbarian
Str 22 (24) (+7)
Dex 12
Con 16
Int 6
Wis 10
Cha 6

HP: 2d12 + 8d10 + 40 (97 hp, 117 while raging)
AC 26 (+11 armor, +1 dex, +2 deflect, +2 natural enhancement), 24 while raging

Greatsword +3
Full Plate +3
Ring Pro +2
Nat armor +2
Strength +2

Attack (while raging): +24/+19 greatsword (2d6+18 19-20/x2)
Power Attack (4 points): +20/+15 greatsword (2d6+26 19-20/x2)

Saves (while raging): Fort +14, Reflex +3, Will +6
Feats (4 + 5): Power attack, Weapon focus (greatsw), weapon spec, greater weapon focus, Close quarters fighting, Combat Reflexes, Extra Rage, Improved Toughness, Iron Will

Now this guy isn't all that exceptional for a 10th level character. No PrCs, normal equipment, 32 point buy, what most would say is a substandard core race... but he's still pretty competetive.

Compare him to a fire giant. A CR 10 melee tough. This guy is dishing out 2d6+26 damage at +20 to hit, which is more damage than the giant is going to be doing per hit and he's got 1 more AC than the giant. The giant does have him on hit points, admittedly, but the difference between the two is rather close. The giant could likely kill him, as it should, but the fighter could win too with a bit of luck.

Now, against other CR 10 creatures, like a rakshhasa or a clay golem, there is a clear advantage to the fighter. He also holds his own against a bebilith or a noble salamander.

So, I really don't think the fighter is that bad off here, considering my built was a suboptimal one with no PrCs used, and built with a half orc. Using stuff like half-ogres and PrCs, it's real easy to make a better warrior than the one I've just created, but I don't think you really have to. This guy is going to hold up pretty well for the most part, and proves that a warrior character can hold up to creatures of equal CR.

While it's true the core fighter class could use some help, the warrior archetype isn't in as much trouble as is commonly believed.

[Username17]

Combat wise, I don't think warrior types need that much help. I created the following character to illustrate the point.

That build is hillarious.

Now, against other CR 10 creatures, like a rakshhasa or a clay golem, there is a clear advantage to the fighter.

Are you on drugs? He's got a will save of +6, and apparently - no ranged weapons. How the hell is he supposed to even hurt a Rakshasa?

So, I really don't think the fighter is that bad off here, considering my built was a suboptimal one with no PrCs used, and built with a half orc. Using stuff like half-ogres and PrCs, it's real easy to make a better warrior than the one I've just created, but I don't think you really have to. This guy is going to hold up pretty well for the most part, and proves that a warrior character can hold up to creatures of equal CR.

If your proof is that "All monsters stand there like an idiot while you full attack, and it counts as holding your own when the monster has a significant bulge on you even in your own chosen arena" - then yes. For the real world, not a chance in hell.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

I'm curious. How good exactly do you expect a fighter to be? He should have a 50/50 chance at beating something like a fire giant, based on what the CR actually means. My build more or less had an even fight with a fire giant. Granted, it'd be a lot better if the fighter had his 11th level, because that would grant him the 3rd iterative attack, but even without it, it isn't like he had no chance at all. And I can definitely see a party of 4 fighters of that build dispatching a fire giant while using 20% of their resources.

What kind of attack bonuses and ACs do you think a fighter should have? Throw out a number. I see lots of threads where you're tossing out big bonuses, but what do you want those bonuses adding up to in the end?

[User3]

I'm surprised that anyone would think that the feats on the suggested fighter were any good.

Close quarters fighting, Combat Reflexes, Extra Rage, Improved Toughness, Iron Will

I mean, you're getting a few pluses and a few extra uses per day of abilities, and an extra AoO if a second one presents itself in one round. The other Feats you chose are pretty standard fare for a fighter-guy and can almost be forgiven for their crap "lets trade feats to get a few +1 and +2s."

I mean, you really are going to have a present a halfway decent build before we can even consider it vs a CR10 monster. Even the standard Rakshasa with the terrible suggested spell list and feats can cast Charm Person with a DC of 14 and a Suggestion with a DC of 16. Your +6 is not going to help you there.

[Username17]

I'm curious. How good exactly do you expect a fighter to be? He should have a 50/50 chance at beating something like a fire giant, based on what the CR actually means.

No. Based on what CR actually means he should have a net 50% win ratio against all CR 10 opposition. That means that if you present a build which has absolutely no chance at all of beating a Rakshasa or even an Erinyes, then it should have a compensatorily higher than 50% chance of beating a Fire Giant.

You presented a build capable of beating a Fire Giant just under half the time (recall the Giant's reach and ranged combat advantage). Considering all the creatures which this build has a zero percent win ratio against, that's a woeful underperformer. If the only two creatures in the entire game were the Rakshasa and the Fire Giant, the fact that it can't beat the Rakshasa should mean that it beats the Fire Giant 100% of the time to make things come out evenly. Granted, there are actually a lot of CR monsters out there, and your proposed build fares modestly OK against a Roper, for example. But the point is that if you can't beat the thing you are designed to fight half the time you aren't worth anything.

---

But regardless, your build is ass, so presenting it as proof that warriors are good or bad is just plain invalid argument. Before we could even get down to a debate, you'd need to come up with something that didn't suck.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

1090259276[/unixtime]]But the point is that if you can't beat the thing you are designed to fight half the time you aren't worth anything.

Well, I didn't design it specifically to beat a fire giant. I tried to create a rather generic fighter type. Granted, he was more or less built to combat straight out combat stuff, if you were going against a spellcaster with that guy, he should probably lower the bonus on his sword by +1 or so and get a cloak of resistance.

And sure, if anyone wants to improve on my build, go ahead. I didnt' spend an extensive time min/maxing him purposely.

And you still didn't answer my question Frank. What kind of attack bonuses and AC would you consider acceptable? I mean what exactly *should* he have?

[Username17]

What kind of attack bonuses and AC would you consider acceptable? I mean what exactly *should* he have?

Actually, there seemed to be more support for the idea that Fighters should have shit hot piles of immunities and special manuvers that allow them to school gimmick monsters - in which case they don't really need bonuses which are particularly impressive.

Spellcasting Harrier and the ability to do jumping grapples, for example, would go a long way to bending a Rakshasa over a chair with extremely modest combat bonuses.

If, on the other hand, you were going for the balance point in which Mind Flayers were expected to school Fighters and Fighters were expected to school Giants - the Fighter would therefore need bonuses which basically better across the board to that of Giants of their level - and your guy manifestly doesn't have that.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty]

1090273680[/unixtime]]
Spellcasting Harrier and the ability to do jumping grapples, for example, would go a long way to bending a Rakshasa over a chair with extremely modest combat bonuses.

Well yeah, fighters could definitely use some more useful feats against casters. As for the jumping grapple, can't you already do that? It'd be a jump to move and a grapple as your standard action, or a charge action. I don't even think you need a special feat to do that.

As for immunities, I don't think that's the way to go. Immunities as a whole are bad for the game, because the more you hand out the more you risk screwing with someone's primary thing, the main one being critical hit immunity and sneak attack. It also creates stupid crap like allowing protection from evil to protect you from a 9th level domination spell cast by an archmage. I'd say abolish immunities from the game for all but the most extreme cases, like a fire elemental having fire immunity. For the rest of the stuff we should just have bonuses.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

Well, the problem you have there is the whole situation where magic trumps all yet again. If there's no way but a hypothetical saving thrown (That is, no certain way) to protect fighter-types from mind-control magics, then every wizard will be enchanters and enchantresses who will immediatly start slinging charms and dominates at the people with the biggests swords. At that point, why play a fighter or barbarian if there's even a fifty percent chance that you will become a danger to your friends in any given combat?

-Desdan

[RandomCasualty]

1090284818[/unixtime]]Well, the problem you have there is the whole situation where magic trumps all yet again.

Well, yeah this needs to be handled by straight nerfs to various spells.

But I was hoping to avoid that whole fighter versus caster argument, and deal with fighter versus monster, because as soon as you bring up fighter versus caster, it becomes totally opinionated. You're now saying "who would I rather keep the same, fighters or casters?"

When you're dealing with caster versus monster and fighter versus monster, you've at least got a centralized balance point on which to base the power level of your classes, and you can nerf/boost stuff from there.

Really, I think the first thing we should deal with is some kind of counter system.

Before we can really say one class is weak we have to determine what kinds of things beat each type. Until we can fill in the X and Ys in the following, we really can't and won't get anywhere beyond broad speculation:

X > warrior > Y
X > divine caster > Y
X > arcane caster > Y
X > rogue > Y

You raelly have to know the answers to all of these. Right now, we have no Y for warrior and we are missing the X for divine and arcane casters. And after we are done there, we have to create a similar chart for creatures. That's the only way we can ever achieve any sort of true balance.

Right now nobody is sure as to what beats a caster. Until we have a definitive answer there, I don't see how we can ever give the fighter his niche. Magic is just too powerful right now, and that mucks everything else up.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

You have to deal with Fighter vs. Caster though, because between 25% and 75% and possibly more of each campaign's encounters are going to be with Hero-Classed NPCs, and that doesn't even deal with monsters like beholders, dragons, rakshasa and succubi, who can cast spells that normal PCs can cast and will often use those powers to gain control of party members to create or inflate a buffer between the party and them. There is no way to get around it.

-Desdan

[RandomCasualty]

1090286830[/unixtime]]You have to deal with Fighter vs. Caster though, because between 25% and 75% and possibly more of each campaign's encounters are going to be with Hero-Classed NPCs, and that doesn't even deal with monsters like beholders, dragons, rakshasa and succubi, who can cast spells that normal PCs can cast and will often use those powers to gain control of party members to create or inflate a buffer between the party and them. There is no way to get around it.

Well, something like a beholder you can deal with or a succubi with fixed powers. What you don't want to deal with is stuff that behaves and casts exactly like PCs with a variable spell list, becuase there's too many variables there, and the power of that hinges directly on the power of the parent class, and a degree of min/maxing of the spell list. If a dragon casts as an 11th level sorcerer, you really can't balance it unless you assume that the 11th level sorcerer is balanced. And by doing that, you're running into a circular assumption problem.

You have to somehow reach a neutral ground where you can adequately compare casters and fighters, without inevitably treating casters as the basis point of balance. Because by including stuff that casts like a PC class, like a solar or something, you are starting off your analysis by assuming that existing caster classes and spells are balanced, and that's going to get you flawed results.

Inevitably it's the lack of any reasonable paradigm that screws things up. Because nobody has yet answered the basic question "what type of creature do we want a fighter to be good against, and what types of creatures do we want a fighter to be weak against?"

Thus far, nobody is really willing to commit on that question, and taht question really could be a thread topic in and of itself, because it's that important towards fixing warrior types. Nobody even knows what direction they want them to go in, and that's really counterproductive and dangerous from a design point of view.

[Username17]

For the most part, Random Casualty is right on that. Once you adjust the Fighter to a point where you get a good baseline on monsters that Fighters can beat, you can worry about Fighters vs. Wizards afterwards. It's not that it isn't important, because it is.

But it's actually perfectly viable for an NPC Wizard to be one of the monsters that nearly always hands a Fighter his ass. Or for an NPC Fighter to be one of the monsters that nearly always hands a Wizard his ass. Or maybe an NPC Rogue could whack both, or whatever.

So it's not that Fighter vs. Wizard is not a data point, it's that it's just one data point. As such, the fact that a Wizard with Improved Invisibility and Silent Charm Person can beat an entire party of Fighters all by himself is not actually a more salient data point than the fact that the Monster Manual Rakshasa can essentially do the same thing.

Once we decide which monsters a Fighter should be able to beat, and which monsters should be able to beat the Fighter, we can start monkeying. Of course, since "NPC Wizard" is one of the possible monsters, it will almost certainly end up being in one category or the other - in short, even in an ideally balanced universe the Fighter and the Wizard are probably not going to be balanced against each other, only against the aggregate total of encounterable monsters of their level (of which the NPC Adventurer is simply one of many).

-Username17

[canamrock]

Something to consider is that, ignoring for the moment the fact that many warrior classes are weak in all areas, within a single class, there should be the potential to differeniate one's style sufficiently so that some Fighters, for example, are very solid against magic-users and weak against brutes, while others are the opposite. When this is accomplished, you can then decide how to balance the options so that mixing into two or more styles instead of focusing in one so that the proficiencies in those styles is roughly equivalent to the specialization in one style.

In practical terms, one of the reasons the pure Fighter tends to suck so much is that it cannot fill any fighting niche a great deal better than some other equivalent class or pairing. One of the common comments on the Fighter is that its bonus feat ability grants diminishing returns. One low-tier feat is not equal in effect-for-cost to a high-tier feat; if the Fighter is supposed to be capable of being a jack-of-all-styles, this will be an issue to address.

Additionally, one thought I have when it comes to spellcasting in combat is that it seems that there is often little recourse against spellcasters and their spells. Counterspelling is a very tricky prospect, even if you build for it. Casting on the Defensive all but negates the concern of an AoO if casting in close quarters (which is usually not going to happen anyhow), and some spell types such as SoD's can drop foes far more efficiently than any damaging effect.

Now, I know there are people that don't like to think that warrior types should have anything to do with spellcasting, but it would make sense to me that in a high-magic, high-fantasy realm, there would be a fair range of solid anti-magic defenses, of which improved saving throws and spell resistance are only two.

[Lago_AM3P]

For simplicity's sake, I think that the fighter should beat the wizard.

Only because a lot of people judge a character's worth to be if he can beat up the guy who's running the plots. I mean, if the druid was kept the exact same way that they are but the fighters were tooled up so they would beat the complete spoon out of any druid, anywhere, no one would complain about fighters being second-fiddle to divine casters even if fighters couldn't do anything else.

[RandomCasualty]

1090370648[/unixtime]]For simplicity's sake, I think that the fighter should beat the wizard.

Well, the thing is: that's the most difficult paradigm to implement mechanically, because beating the wizard has nothing to do with damage output or attack bonuses. The toughest thing is actually getting your attack rolls. Even beating something as simple as fly or improved invisibility is really tough under the current system.

Right now, the spellcaster is also synomyous with the trickster monster, such as succubi. And that's the toughest thing for the fighter to beat because he has no innate detection abilities, and while he will destroy one up close, getting there is a problem.

Obviously fighters need awesome saves, for the paladin, this isn't so much of a problem, but for the straight fighter, perhaps he could gain some benefit (or a feat) which adds his con bonus to will saves. Perhaps even upgrade his will saves to the good progression. He can afford to have crap for reflex saves though, because taking full damage isnt' so bad when you've got tons of hp.

But I'm not really sure what you do for magical effects like illusions, flying and invisibility. Cleave can beat mirror image, but I have no clue what exactly is supposed to beat flying. It almost seems like you're forced to remove flying spells from the game entirely, or at least raise them to a reasonable level where the warrior is definitely going to have winged boots. For invisibility, you can simply just raise the level of improved invisibility or get rid of it outright. Normal invisbility really isn't that bad because attacking causes the wizard to appear.

It really would be a lot of work though, and a drastic retooling of spell power.

I too am inclided to think the fighter should beat the wizard, but I have no idea how you'd really implement that, without making the fighter into some weird superman wannabe.

[Lago_AM3P]

Flying already has its own host of problems, being that it makes about 85% of challenges in standard fantasy obsolete and that pretty much every melee character (including buffed-up clerics and druids) has to either fly or go home.

But for stuff like improved invisibility, we could do things like make invisibility a straight-up will save (because it's an illusion) and then give warrior types an ability to make them see through illusions just by looking at them and making the save.

That hardly requires any bookkeeping at all, as the spell already needs fixing, and makes warrior-types awesome in a way that isn't overtly blatant.


The warrior, even the crappy 3.5E one, already beats the shit out of the wizard when you discount stupid spells like polymorph as-written, the problem is getting TO the wizard. Making the warrior immune or highly resistant to standard wizard tactics and defenses goes a long way towards making the wizard the bitch of an angry warrior, which is what we all want.

Except for Ed Greenwood and his aging penis god, Elminster. Fuck him. He gets nothing.