For those who are interested in conjure animals, I've run some quick calculations summoning wolves and velociraptors. Level 5: +4 attack vs 15 AC 8 Wolves: 45.9 DPR (92% of an encounter) 8 Velociraptors: 64.7 DPR (126% of an encounter) Level 9: +4 attack vs 16 AC 16 wolves: 85.9 DPR (112% of an encounter) 16 velociraptors: 121.0 DPR (156% of an encounter) Level 13: +4 attack vs 18 AC 24 wolves: 108.7 DPR (100% of an encounter) 24 velociraptors: 152.6 DPR (138% of an encounter) Level 17: +4 attack vs 19 AC 32 wolves: 130 DPR (99% of an encounter) 32 velociraptors: 181.9 DPR (133% of an encounter) This is assuming pack tactics for advantage, which is hard to imagine them not having it considering the number of them. They don't do magical damage, but if you are a Shepherd Druid then they do. Even without magical damage, it is a force to be reckoned with and a massive clog on the battlefield unless the player is extremely skilled or the DM is. All in all I'd say it's a outlier spell and I didn't use it for calculations.
It is absolutely an outlier spell and game breaking when abused (I mean optimised 😉) however a player doesn’t have to conjure the 8CR 1/4 they can choose the 1 CR2 or 2 CR1s. Now when I use the spell, and it is a big favourite of mine because it is way more interesting in its effects than just a damage dealing spell, I always try and read the table and consider what impact the number of monsters I conjure will have on the fun of the other players. I’ve made the mistake of going for 8 wolves and it trivialised the encounter and was ultimately unsatisfying. A lesson learned. Now I almost always limit the conjure to 2 level 1s or 1 level 2 so I’d love to see the calculations for 2 giant spiders and 1 giant constrictor snake which are my favourite summons.
Asking for the hard stuff eh? Alright I'll take a peek into it just for you Gareth. Web is the best part of spider summon and that control element is extremely useful beyond straight damage. Let's say between all of our spiders, they get a restrained target 1/3 of the time. (Who knows if this is a valid guess, but it's something, and it doesn't even account for the extra damage we get by having all the other PCs attack at advantage too). Even though the target AC is going up, the number of spiders is going up too, so I'll leave it at 1/3. Note that the con saves increase too which reduces the poison effectiveness, but it's save for half so never useless. Level 5: 22.1 DPR (48.9%) Level 9: 41.0 DPR (56.9%) Level 13: 54.4 DPR (53.1%) Level 17: 60.8 DPR (46.2%) Definitely not as bad as wolves or velociraptors, and resistance to magical damage will reduce these numbers quite a bit (unless Shepherd Druid of course). For giant constrictor snake, it's a much higher escape DC, so let's go with restrained half the time (again giving adv). Level 5: 10.0 DPR (27.2%) Level 9: 18.8 DPR (29.5%) Level 13: 24.4 DPR (27.2%) Level 17: 29.7 DPR (25.8%) These numbers start to look a little poor actually especially when using a 9th level slot. I should say that these numbers, and the other calculations I've done all take into account cantrip casting on other turns. Also these are pretty quick calculations so don't hold me to them, but hopefully this give an idea!
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@tlemgr point buy stats, all builds starting with +3 in main stat then using ASIs to boost. If the build requires other feats we do those before stat boost. Ex. we do PAM first then GWM, then stat boost. Of course if I show all calculations the video would be super long. But I'm sure I could have shown more details to inspire trust. What kind of info would you like to see more clearly next time?
Another thing to mention is the casters can create more hit points/bodies with their summon spells. Although not easily quantified, casters creating something to take some of the hits makes them more tanky by comparison.
Definitely true! Casters can summon creatures that have significant amounts of HP to soak up damage. I'm sure if we had a specific summoner build we could find out the HP they place on the table, but hard to say it for casters in general.
@@DndUnoptimized We do have specific summoner builds! 3 in particular: Conjuration Wizard, Shepherd Druid, and a multiclass of both, typically at level 14 Wizard and level 6 Druid to get all the HPs.
@@supersmily5811 yea those would probably be the most common summoners. Depending on what spell you use, it could bring in a ridiculous amount of HP onto the field
I think an important thing to note with Shield spell is that it only gets broken once you have armor and a shield. Turning a 15 AC to a 20 is whatever. Meanwhile, turning a 19 AC to a 24 is insanely good
Right, I could somewhat agree with this. If casters weren't allowed to cast spells in armor then I see the shield spell being less of a problem or maybe not at all. Agreed, 15 to 20 is great, but 19 to 24 is just too good to ignore.
@@DndUnoptimized hell, even just barring the shield spell from being used in armor could do the trick! Add “while not wearing armor or using a shield” to the spell description.
You know, that could be a decent homebrew to tone it down! I feel like one DnD will make it for one attack only, and that will bring it down quite nicely as well.
what i think was ommited in the survivability comparison is that the exemplatory fighter is a melee combatant, which given just how more powerful 5e monsters tend to be in melee range than from distance actually means that way more damage will be coming the fighter's way whereas the caster can afford to use their movement to keep distance and stay relatively safe. Also a caster has a much easier time justifying taking the dodge action than a martial who really wants to be attacking every single turn. also a caster dip on a martial for access to shield spell is not even in the same ballpark as an armor dip on a caster. a fighter with one wizard level can only cast shield a total of three times per day, and since their reaction can be pretty reliably weaponised via pam using it can actually reduce dpr. also i find rogue's survivability chart to be a little dubious as the assumption of focus fire against the player would lead me to the assumption that uncanny dodge's impact would actually end up being not that great since it can only affect one attack per round.
True. It's hard to calculate for that, but the caster who stands back will definitely take a lot less hits and then when they do, they have the shield spell or silvery barbs if you are using it. Yea, the dips aren't equal, but I wanted to address that isn't just a one way street. For rogues survivability some guess work is required. Obviously the more hits you take the less helpful it is. I assumed 6 hits per round, so only halfing one of those. I will also say that evasion helps survivability more that I originally thought it would before running the numbers.
Just rewatched the video and one thing you said makes me want to rant a bit about design and community expectations. "This is a level 9 spell; it is supposed to feel amazingly powerful" is a perfectly reasonable explanation/justification for a dedicated spellcaster being powerful at lvl 17. However, I think it is weird that a lot of people in the community won't apply the same logic to martials. "This is a level 17 Fighter; they're supposed to be amazing, practically superhuman" isn't a justification you see generally accepted in the case of a Fighter outperforming a Wizard in some way, for example with a homebrewed subclass. The only martial classes that seems to be "allowed" to have truly epic abilities fitting the high fantasy nature of the 5e system are the half-casters (Paladin and Ranger), whether it is by WotC design choices or community feedback during testing. Let's use Ranger and Rogue as examples, since they fulfill a very similar niche; a martial providing utility while being geared towards stealth. Gloom Stalker Rangers are essentially high fantasy Rogues. Umbral Sight lets them blend into the shadows, they have access to magical stealth options like Pass Without Trace and Dread Ambusher even lets them be better assassins than the actual Assassin Rogue. They're also a lot more independent than Rogues (because no Sneak Attack mechanics), which both frees them up to use more types of weapons and makes them better at being a scout. All Rangers can to a large extent do this, but Gloom Stalkers are the most blatant example in how much Rangers just do everything the Rogue does, but better. Contrarily, almost all Rogues (except Arcane Tricksters) are limited to being pretty mundane in their abilities and, by extention, limitations. Even the "supernatural" Rogues, like Soul Blade and Phantom, are't capable of pushing much beyond their mundane limitations. Does Expertise (often just a +2 or +3 bonus in most campaigns) to a few skills matter when compared to Ranger spellcasting, combat capabilities, greater independence and outright supernatural subclasses? Not in my experience as a player or as a DM. Unless the DM takes steps to even the playing field, a Rogue just can't keep up. And by the time Reliable Talent comes into play (lvl 11), skill-utility has long since stopped being relevant (unless you're a Grappler strength Rogue, which is extremely niche). It's all about spell-utility at that stage in the game, which Rangers (and every spellcaster) do better. Why is the game like this? I'm guessing it is because Rangers are an inherently magical class and Rogues aren't, so what WotC and the community accepts as "legitimate" features and acceptable levels of power will vary wildly between them. Being a magical class is more or less synonomous with being a stronger class in D&D. Or more accurately, being a *spellcasting* class is synonomous with being a stronger class, because supernatural features on characters without spellcasting are not given the same favoritism. For example, Rune Knights are cool, but they are balanced to be a fair alternative to Battlemasters rather than a clear improvement. Which is a problem when Battlemasters are underpowered not only compared to dedicated casters, but also compared to most Rangers and all Paladins. "Of course Gloom Stalkers should be allowed to become invisible in the dark with no cost at level 3 (no action, no resource, no concentration); they're Rangers! Rangers have spellcasting!" "Of course Rogues can't become invisible in the dark; they're Rogues! Rogues don't have spellcasting!"
@@DndUnoptimized D&D is in need of a Tome of Battle more than ever. We need properly supernatural alternatives or subclasses for the non-caster classes to even the field.
Yea, that would be sweet! I think the problem ends up less severe for most people because of two points, most play is under level 10 where martials are still very strong, and most casters are not optimized. Picking the bad spells or not using their spells in good ways can pretty easily turn the caster into something lack luster. I've seen my share of casters that end up making a pretty small impact damage wise. And I'm fine with this. Hopefully we get balanced spells where the worst wizard is still useful and the optimized wizard is not dominating.
@@DndUnoptimized The benefit of introducing, say, a powerful supernatural subclass is that you don't need to put all the super powerful stuff at lvl 3 like the Gloom Stalker did. Using Fighters as an example, you can start with a Battlemaster-esque level of power for lvl 3 (which is mostly fine for that level), then start to give out the good stuff at lvl 7 and the really, really good stuff at lvl 10+. Add in a few utility features on the side that aren't just skill checks so the Fighter feels less useless outside of combat and BAM, you're good to go. Adding Fighter-exclusve feats would also be a good idea. Let's say when a Fighter gains an ASI/feat you can pick a bonus feat OR select a feature from a class feature list (so that other classes can't just multiclass to get them).
Yea, pretty much every fighter subclass is very front loaded and the features at later levels are small boosts. Echo knight, battle master, psi warrior, rune knight (though this does get access to great runes at lvl 7) are pretty front loaded. But scaling such as the rune knight damage increase at 10 and 18 is laughable. Non-combat abilities would be fantastic too, or area of effect, or control. I'm not certain about fighter exclusive feats, but definitely have to make sure there are a slew of good options for the fighters to take.
even aside from the insane damage that casters can put out, a lot of damage spells also have control elements built into them. Ice storm deals decent, but not crazy damage compared to other damage spells of that level but it creates difficult terrain for a round. Synaptic static does below average damage for a 5th level spell but any creatures that fail the save are subjected to a stronger form of bane, taking a bunch away from attack rolls and saving throws. These are the first two that come to my mind but there are more I'm sure. Just another advantage that casters have innately over martial classes without multiclassing or subclasses
Adding to the list off the top of my head: - Dissonant Whispers (fear) - Heat Metal (disadvantage/disarm) - Thunderwave (knockback) - Ray of Frost (reduced movement speed) - Vicious Mockery (disadvantage) - Chill Touch (prevent healing & regeneration) - Eldritch Blast (knockback / pull with invocations) - Booming Blade (dmg on movement) - Arms of Hadar (prevents reactions) And so many more, if one looked it up. Even cantrips often have useful control effects.
@@FarremShamist It's overpowered is what it is, and it due for a nerf. Seeing as it is forced disarm or disadvantage + damage over time with no save, the damage needs to be lowered. 2d4 would be more reasonable than 2d8.
Good video. I think it was very nice to see a breakdown of how casters do even when they're not expending much in the way of resources, because that is an oft used counter argument to the martial-caster gap. Edit: I think there is a fundamental design problem at the core of D&D that will make it so that this remains a problem. Fighter and Rogue are treated as beginner classes, while stuff like Rangers and Paladins are more advanced versions of those classes. And dedicated spellcasters are the most advanced overall. That complexity translates to more resources to manage, which tend to translate to both more power and more versatility.
Thanks for the feedback! Agreed, there is definitely increased complexity and difficulty as spells are introduced. But surely just adding more damage (like +1d8 to all attacks, or increasing sneak attack) won't make it more complex. It's so sad to see the martials get progressively weaker. Even a basic class with not many choices should still feel like it delivers, and hopefully there are options for more complexities in subclasses.
WotC actually intentionally set it up this way. 5e is legitimately one of the post poorly designed RPGs I've ever seen, outside of intentionally obnoxious stuff like FATAL.
Some homebrews that helped on my tables: Martials = Fighters, Monks, Rogues and Barbarians 1) Martials gain the extra attack feature at levels 5, 9, 13 and 17. It is beyond me why casters proceed to gain higher leveled spells, adding more damage dice to their spells, but martials only gain damage improvement one time at level 5. Fighters also gain extra attacks at levels 11 and 20. 2) Martials get a feat every even level (aka levels 2, 4, 6...) It just seems lame how casters can have infinite versatility and customization via spells, and martials get nothing. This kind of fixes that. Fighters also get features at levels 3, 9 and 15. 3) At levels 7, 13 and 19, martials gain and epic boon. These levels are when casters spike in power with spells like polymorph, forbiddance, force cage, etc. As such, martials need something to spike them as well. I made a table with epic boons that are ok to be available at level 7, strong to be available begging at level 13, and the OP/broken ones only at level 19. Now comparing old level 10 Paladin and Fighter: -Paladin: Has 3rd, 2nd and 1st spell slots available, higher AC (shield) -Fighter: ... Damage-wise, fighter has action surge, but paladin has smites. They both attack the same amount of times. They both have same AC, but paladin can cast shield. Besides, paladin can heal and provide utility, while fighter can only bonk. The homebrewed: -Paladin: Has 3rd, 2nd and 1st spell slots available, higher AC (shield) -Fighter: Has 5 more feats, attacks 1 more time, has an epic boon. Now there's some reason to pick fighter over paladin.
Wow, that definitely swings things away from the casters. Yea it is weird that martials only get one extra attack but casters get boosts to cantrips way more.
This seems like a cool interpretation. But Fighters getting 7 attacks every turn for no cost/sacrifice is just insane. Even with a mediocre weapon, they'll be downing most enemies, including bosses, in a couple of turns. By themselves. I think a better amount would be 3/4 attacks for most martials and 4/5 for fighters. I like the idea of feats every even level, to make it more interesting, there could be more feats added, especially some class and subclass exclusive ones, both mechanically and thematically tied to its class/subclass, to make each class/subclass further able to distinguish themselves from others.
You would have to massively increase the health of everything in dnd to make this work. Also if you're gonna double the others martials attacks and only give the fighter two more, you're kinda just stepping on the toes of what fighter is supposed to be. Fighter is the "attacks a lot" class, paladin and rogue are the burst classes, and the barbarian is the consistent meaty hits class. Monk, well, there's an argument to be made for more attacks, but that's just a bandaid for the greater issues of the monk.
One minor thing I can point out for the premise of the video (haven't watched all of it yet) is that I typically don't see people saying that "lower case m" martials are worthless, but rather that "upper case M" Martials are pointless. Martials being synonmous with non-casters (Fighter, Barbarian, Rogue and Monk), while martials include characters who are primarily weapon users while also having spells (Ranger, Paladin, Bladelock etc). It's a result of people being inconsistent or disagreeing about the language used. Weapon based damage dealing is valuable, because as long as you have a magical weapon you can hurt whatever you're fighting. However, Gish* type characters (usually multiclass, but also Bladesingers, Swords/Valors Bards, Bladelocks and optimized Rangers) often provide all the damage you need from a Martial (sometimes even more), while also giving you extensive options for utility, control or other features you want. If both a Ranger and a Fighter can kill X creature in the same number of turns, you're better off with the Ranger because they can provide powerful spells like Fog Cloud, Absorb Elements, Pass Without Trace, Silence and Spike Growth (even ignoring Conjure Animals as an extreme outlier). Abilities the Fighter just don't have an answer to. That the Fighter technically has a bit more DPR doesn't really matter unless you can leverage that to creating additional actions for the Fighter over the course of a combat. Actions that has to be more worthwhile than everything non-damage a Ranger brings to the table. And this is just comparing to Ranger, which is a mid tier class. How large the gap is between a Gish and a caster, that's a lot harder to determine. *I'm using "Gish" in the broad sense here, not exclusively as martial/arcane caster hybrids. Fore example, I consider the 5e Ranger a Gish, because despite using Divine spells, their core combat loop is very fitting of a Gish: Martial combat combined with control and utility magic.
@@DndUnoptimized Indeed, though my ultimate point was that even in encounter and campaign design that favor non-casters over fullcasters, half-casters and hybrids will always be good enough to fulfill that role while also bringing spells to the table. The shadow cast by spells in 5e is inescapable, because they're made to be consistent independent of stat/feat investment. I don't think I've ever seen an optimized martial focused character without spellcasting features in 5e, if they're meant to be played next to spellcasters who know what they are doing.
The sad part is even if martials were able to match casters damage at higher level they would still be miles behind in... well... everything else. So for the divide to not shrink they would need to not only match casters, but actually be substantially better than casters at damage.
Yea that's true. I do think that a magical damage dealer is a great concept, but I think there needs to be some serious commitment to it, just like martials need to commit feats and class features to gaining good damage.
A DM *can* build campaigns and encounters where martial characters shine, for example by using creatures with good saving throws, condition immunities, anti-magic fields around treasure rooms etc. Requiring a spellcaster to adapt to the enemy is reasonable enough, as long as you don't go overboard and invalidate spellcasting because we still want spellcasters to have fun. And by introducing powerful weapon artifacts etc. The problem is that Ranger and Paladin exists. They provide a lot of the benefits of spellcasting (versatility, utility, control, support) classes while still being martial characters. And they're not just martials; they're usually the *best* martials, even when they're not using their spells. WotC (and community feedback in the case of the Ranger) has shown a great deal of favoritism to the half-casters, so these classes have excellent class and subclass features. Especially the releases for Ranger after the PHB, but even a PHB Ranger is more than a match for the non-casters as soon as you start figuring out their spellcasting feature. The way 5e and OneD&D are designed, there is basically no chance non-casters will ever be worthwhile because Paladins and Rangers are still treated as if they are pure martials. Looking at the buffed martial characters in OneD&D is cause for some hope, until you notice that Rangers and Paladins were also buffed as much, if not more. If non-casters and half-casters deal roughly the same amount of damage, non-casters are just not worthwhile even in campaigns where martials can shine.
@@TheTdroid true, it's kind of frustrating that the feature martials were supposed to get to make them cooler was weapon mastery, and half casters get it at level 1 like the rest of them (minus monk now, but they do pretty well without in the latest play test)
Thanks! I appreciate the support. I am coming out with a video soon doing this exact thing for the new monk play test. Hope it'll be interesting to watch!
Onednd that makes the warlock a better martial than the fighter 😢 how are u going to give them two extra Attack You don't see the fighter getting 5th and 6th level spells 😭
@ullebrammerloo74 I think we have to believe that was overtuned and will not exist as it was in onednd. That was bonkers. It was the best martial in the game as well as being a full caster
Thanks for watching! For AC I'm following the DMG pg 274. This usually ends up giving a 60-65% hit chance depending on when main ability score is boosted. For HP I calculate a deadly encounter HP pool using the method outlined in this video ua-cam.com/video/h-h7fKcnVCI/v-deo.html It isn't perfect, but it gets a good idea of what it might look like. No magic items, of course this would surely boost the martials, but it can easily boost the casters too. It's hard to guess what items a player may have since it varies so widely table to table.
@@DndUnoptimized how much do you think this all is in relation to the choices made in design of 5e modules for the vastly bigger part staying sub 13, and if not 11 often sub 9.
Really Solid general breakdown of the issues. One thing I will say in response to the early part of the video, while it is true that it makes sense for AoE and Control effects to be something casters specialize in, I honestly think that AoE is too powerful of a concept to lock away from other classes. The thing about AoE is that it automatically passively scales with the size of an encounter. For instance obviously if you're fighting 1 big bad, a fireball will only do at most 8d6 to them. But if you're fighting 20 goblins, a fireball can hit every single one of them for the same amount of damage as if it were hitting just one. This is the problem especially when comparing it to a martial with multiple attacks. They have to effectively divide up their damage between each enemy they wanna hit in order to fight a large number of enemies. But a caster can just yawn and toss out a fireball and it's equally as effective at hitting 3 people as it is at hitting 20 people. Martials imo should get *some* access to real AoE attacks, things like the Hunter Ranger's Whirlwind Attack or Volley options should just be things that Martials can do by like level 5 or so. Casters can still have the biggest AoEs, but Martials should get at least something in that category as well to help them deal with large numbers of enemies. And similar with control effects, martials really need more support in this category. Even if you tweaked the martials so that they were objectively tankier and did way more damage than a caster, a huge problem with them is that they just aren't that fun to play. So many martial classes have their entire gameplay boil down to "I run up and hit it with my sword" and that's pretty much it. Meanwhile a caster is getting to choose from dozens of possible spells to cast all kinds of fun stuff that can completely warp and change the flow of battle. Martials need more options if only for the sake of helping keep the game more varied and interesting for them. Thankfully this is something that seems to be getting realized in 5.5e based on the playtest so far. The barbarian just recently got a really solid ability to effectively apply debuffs on enemies for free by sacrificing the advantage they get from Reckless attack. And the monk can finally use their Dexterity in place of Strength to do things like Grapple and Shove people. And while I do have some problems with the weapon mastery system, it is still a system that makes it so that Martail Weapon attacks are at least now akin to Cantrips by letting them apply various debuffs and whatnot to their attacks passively. So we'll see how this plays out.
This is a great analysis and I agree whole heartedly. Martials need some AOE, and some control. I'm fine if casters are the kings of it, but martials need to be able to do something. Giving options to martials would definitely help. I think that's why people like the Rune Knight so much, because it has so many options to do cool and different things.
I'm playing a 9th level Ruin Knight in a campaign where we have no magic items. Most of the monsters we face have resistance to non-magical attacks. My character cannot even compete with the caster classes. Even if my damage wasn't being halved, the casters still out perform my damage significantly. Once I use Action Surge, I'm done.
That's really rough... DMs have to consider magic items essential for martial PCs. It can be a change of pace to have an enemy that is resistant to your attacks every now and again, but if it happens regularly and it's only you then that really sucks. I guess you have to go the tank route, grapple and prone them for your caster buddies to take out?
I mean you *could* blame the designers for assuming you got a magic weapon at around level 6... but I think talking to your DM would be more sensible - and the latter could actually solve the issue as well.
@@Yeldibus The designers of D&D 5e always told us that magical weapons or items of any kind are not necessary or assumed in the math they use and used to design the game. The game should be balanced according to their design without magical items.
This was some amazing analysis and thorough work! Martials have more going for them than I thought. But even within the gracious boundary of 1 sloted spell per combat it pretty clear casters are just head and sholders above. Have you ever come up with some homebrew solutions to bridge this gap?
Thanks, I really appreciate it! I'm terms of single target damage, (once outlier spells are off the table) martials aren't as behind as I originally thought they would be honestly. Minus the monk, but I'm coming out with a video on them next to talk about the play test 8. Personally I haven't dabbled in home-brew but I'm sure it would be an interesting experience. Maybe once I get a really good grasp at all of the underlying reasons for the gaps I'll think about it, but I don't believe I can rightfully make a good solution at this time. My initial impression for damage is that we need to cut all outlier spells and give martials damage boosts at 11 and 17. Hopefully the lines will get flatter which is what I want to see. Definitely want to see more control options, area damage, and utility for martials.
Only one Edition of D&D mastered (for the most part) the martial-caster divide - 4th edition. All the others without exception had this issue. Though original D&D and AD&D made caster survivability to moderate things slightly it was always known that this existed. AD&D added the strength % to help marital with power and other options were attempted to help with non-spell casting power in the first Unearthed Arcana book. I say all that to say, yeah this is well known and is more feature then bug at this point.
Agreed this is a well discussed and known part of DnD. It was interesting for me to look at how bad it is for single target, when it occurs, and how most martials scale poorly after lvl 10.
@@DndUnoptimized Until Tasha, one thing that partially mitigated this in 5e was the magic items system. The assumption of the designers is that weapon choices will keep up with tier and thus help mitigate. one negative in Tasha is that it gave DC boost items. This (imho) primarily because of small groups and as a reaction to lesser numbers of encounters (with a helping of power creep). This made things worst for the divide however.
@leodouskyron5671 Yes I agree that magic items have a role to play here. But it's hard to know what to give, and every table is so different. Do martials get items to boost their damage and casters don't? How do you run it?
@@DndUnoptimized I wish I had a perfect answer for you there. The issue is indeed table dependent and you can’t calculate a simple fix. Most DMs in this era seem to have a goal of trying to focus more on Role Play and tactical combat a lot less. Even the concept of optimizing is seen by many in terms akin to “cheating” or trying to “win”. I think personally think you have to toss the DMG for weapons for martials. Give them +1 by lvl 5 (weapon and armor), +2 from level 9 to 12, +3 (weapon only) from 13 on. Again this does not fix the issue - the least popular edition did fix it so it is not really a beloved feature.
So, for me the very first dnd version did it best. They didn't try to balance the classes, instead each had their own niche and were needed as a party. Trying to balance each class just doesn't work in a ttrpg like it does in video games.
22:15 Note: The above analysis seems to intentionally ignore higher tier survival spells that inhibit dpr or alter how the encounter would need to work. This makes sense for the purposes of his encounter % damage he was calculating, so just also keep in mind that Sorcerers have Twin Spell Polymorph and Wizards have Resilient Sphere and Wall of Force, and all full casters have many other options for skyrocketing their defense or completely taking targets out of the fight temporarily, essentially reducing the workload for the whole party in the process or allowing them to pick their fights. The survivability numbers only look close because of how he calculated it, at one spell per encounter focused on sheer offense, then assuming maybe 1 extra spell for defense. But Full Spellcasters (The ones that get 9th level spells) tend to get over 20 spell slots, and the game recommends up to ~8 encounters in a day. Meaning you can nearly spend 3 spellslots every encounter, converting Sorcery Points for more and using Arcane Recovery notwithstanding.
Correct. It is just sitting there getting smacked and trying to protect yourself. I think durability would probably be a better word for it, and I'm using that moving forward. Of course casters have amazing ways to prevent themselves from taking damage, like all of the ways you listed.
Cantrips scale pretty well against extra attack. They tend to get an additonal damage die or beam at the same time that martials get theor extra attacks.
Yes, very true! They don't scale super well, but the fact that they scale at all especially after level 5 is just cruel since several martials plateau in damage, but casters get more powerful spells, more spells in total, and their at will spells get boosts more often than the martials basic attacks.
I also think that spellcasters shouldn't be able to wear armor and cast spells. If a class or subclass gives armor proficiency, then you can cast those specific class spells while wearing armor. Fighter/artificer/hexblade dips are so common in optimisation, and it would add a lot of value to martials protecting the more vulnerable spell casters
I think the front-loading is good, it just needs better scaling and options in combat. That being said, it feels like a lot of ability feats are things that martial classes should just be able to do and the feats should be enhancements of those abilities rather than simply granting them
Front loading is ok, as long as good features continue so that players feel rewarded for staying in a class instead of punished for it. And yea, it would be nice if there were more cool feats that enhanced martials abilities. We have some, but they are usually a little lack luster.
That's so true. One example of that would be the "parry stance" from Blade Mastery that gives +1 AC for a reaction. Are they telling me that a martial class needs a feat to know how to fucking stand with their melee weapon in a defensive position? That's literally one of the most basic techniques they would learn upon starting their martial training.
Would love to see a breakdown of a damage per dmg taken metric. Experience and a glance through monster stat blocks has shown that being out of range of melee is a fantastic defense. In addition, a spell like web can effectively make dmg income =0 since nothing can get to the party while before range atks kill them.
Yea I'd love a clean way to represent that without me having a ton of arbitrary numbers thrown in, making it not very useful. Do you know of anything like that? I've heard Pack Tactics talk about that before but I've never seen anyone do calculations.
Haha yes well they do have a lot like that which would definitely help. I was just going for the stand there and get pummelled tactic to see how long we would last.
@@DndUnoptimized It's insane that they have that level of survivability when they're forcing themselves to put themselves in as much danger as martials have to deal with. I wonder how spellcaster survivability changes if we account for them being free to stay at range and can use the dodge action instead of a cantrip without compromising their damage that much. I mean, a Cleric casting Spirit Guardians and then dodging while occasionally tossing out a healing word is a pretty good core gameplay loop when you want to turn off your brain and still be an effective character.
realistically cantrip damage should definitely be lowered. imo they shouldnt scale past 2 dice, with the exception of warlocks eldritch blast, which should gain extra blasts at warlock levels(to avoid 2 warlock level dips for the best cantrip bar none). id probably say eldritch blast gets 2nd blast at player level 5 like other cantrips, and bake into warllock that they get extra cantrip damage at 11 and 17 , since they are far more reliant on cantrips. id also give each class a thematic damage aoe and cc aoe they can use, the is proficiency/long rest and damage is twice per short rest. when exactly to unlock them would depend when they are balanced for, but giving a barbarian a roar to fear enemies within 30 ft if they fail a wis save against an 8+prof+con would be great, or maybe even a taunt for the iconic damage takers. rogue could get poison or smoke bombs, making enemies pass a con against their dex based dc, and give them disadvantage if the rogue does it from stealth.
For encounters in terms of damage output, I take one creature of equal CR to character level, and another one to fill in the remaining XP gap for a deadly encounter. I can list the caster spells here. It's mostly summon spells since the action economy for them is really good especially for single target. For Wizard spells: 3rd: summon fey 5th: animate objects 7th: summon fiend 9th: blade of disaster Sorcerer: 3rd: Melf's minute meteors 5th: animate objects 7th: Draconic Transformation 9th: blade of disaster Warlock 3rd: summon fey 5th: summon aberration 7th: summon fiend 9th: blade of disaster Cleric 3rd: spirit guardians 5th: summon celestial 7th: summon celestial 9th: summon celestial (These are the only upcast spells on the list because cleric high level options for concentration damage spells are basically non existent) Bard 3rd: heat metal 5th: animate objects 7th: summon fiend 9th: true polymorph (gold dragon) Druid: 3rd: summon fey 5th: summon Draconic spirit 7th: whirlwind 9th: shape change (gold dragon)
I think part of the problem is that the fictional characters different classes are inspired by exist at different d&d levels. Fighters and rangers in works of fantasy, such as Aragorn and Conan, are really about 5th level (iirc there was an Alexandrian article showing this mathematically), while a proper wizard is something like 15th. Rogues are done dirty by level scaling in part because thieves in sword and sorcery fiction are not much more than ordinary people with quick wits and lust for property that is not theirs. The only class that doesn't really fit this model is monk, which going by the model of shonen anime and wuxia movies should peak at around 10th.
That is a really great point and I mostly agree. When people think fighter they think of someone really low level, when they think of wizard they think of someone very high level.
Honestly I don't know what the right call is for magic weapons, but adding progressively stronger magic items to make the martial's damage output scale with enemy HP could make up for this disparity. That kind of ends up being a lot of work on the DM unfortunately.
@@DndUnoptimized For fighters and barbarians this should be quite easy. It's quite hard when it comes to monks. I like to allow them to equip non physical items like memories, souls and even spirits.
Meanwhile wizard wants to give wizards and sorcerers permanent resistance to weapon damage with new Blade Ward. You have ZERO reason to be hopeful sadly
They have definitely gone back and forth a bit, giving wizards a massive boost then taking it away, but spell redesign for the most part has been a pretty good balance, boosting some underperformers (jump, healing spells) and nerfing overpowered ones (guidance, conjure spells). What do you mean by permanent resistance? The new blade ward is a reaction that provides disadvantage on one incoming attack, it doesn't seem crazy powerful to me especially comparing it to the current shield spell. Maybe I'm missing something.
Shhh, don't let them hear you. Yes 4e was incredibly balanced and they did many things in there that I thought was good. Unfortunately, it really did feel like everything was samey. I enjoy class distinction where they feel like they have a unique way of doing things, and that isn't going to strike a perfect balance. What I'm hoping for here isn't perfect balance, but movement to a game where each class can contribute meaningfully and uniquely in the game, and contributing in different aspects is perfectly acceptable and encouraged.
@@DndUnoptimized I mean, personally this is why I like classless games (particularly Mythras). Everyone can get magic so long as they study hard and actually learn spells (which you actually need to learn rather than them just _appearing in your brain_ when you level up. Instead of trying to nerf magical ability into the ground, now it gets to just be like yeah, magic is scary. Heck the one Sorcery spell that directly deals damage, Wrack, will easily kill the vast majority of enemies you can fight _at range_ when cast for 2 MP, the Mythras equivalent of a first-level spell practically. Solution, don't give your players Wrack. Maybe there's a local cult they can dedicate themselves to and start asking the local deity to lightning bolt people to death for them. Meanwhile everyone can get folk magic that supplements their characters rather than defining them. (It helps that Mythras casters can regain MP slow as hell, so even if you do have a terrifying wizard PC they're just gonna shoot their stuff once every couple days and probably get very powerful people wanting them dead...)
I wish at some point as they were working on the 2014 or 2024 PHB someone at WotC would have gone back and looked at the martial classes in the Tome of Battle 3.5 book. I contend that these are the best martial classes that have ever been created from the stand point of damage scaling and the use of the action economy built right into the classes. The stances and maneuverers they receive have good flavor and utility as well as scaling as your character levels.
I've heard good things about it but never actually used them. Martials definitely need better options all around. Seems like the 2024 ruleset will have more options. I hope they are enough
Very nice to see it quantified at all, very interesting video. Given the amount of variables and potential situations, it seems impossible to even start calculating, but it seems like you took a good crack at it. I'm interested to see some of your math if at all possible? Like how you came to the conclusion of the numbers you did and what specific choices certain build you selected made. It would be amazing to be able to have a way to plug in subclasses and homebrew/3rd party content for such a graph, and to see what its like at other levels too. Certainly way beyond my capabilities but one can always hope!
Yes it is definitely not a complete evaluation, it's more of a data point, but I found it interesting to see. I can try to share some of it but what parts do you want to see? Usually it's attack bonus vs target AC, plus crit chance and extra crit damage. Then see how many rounds of a combat we can do X and how many rounds we do Y and calculate a total DPR for the encounter based on that. Wish I could just plug a subclass in and check haha. It'll take some work
@@DndUnoptimized Yes, definitely interesting, and probably the most work I've ever seen someone put into such a thing. I guess I'm just curious to see what one of the data points looks like. How about fighter 17 as an example? What are the build choices and the assumptions made at that point? I figured a spreadsheet, or a graph or chart or something along those lines were used and a screenshot of that, if you did use one would be interesting to see too.
Sure, I can try to give a bit of a breakdown. Let's take the xbow fighter that I included in the summary graph but never actually talked about. Variant human, xbow expert at level 1 Starting with 18 Dex, 14 con. (Maybe 14 was a little too low here since they are pretty SAD) Level 4 we go sharpshooter, level 6 we max Dex. Now... I don't actually choose feats beyond Maxing the primary stat and getting all major damage feats. So we end up with a lot of unspent feats. Same for all classes, but feels the worst for fighters. Unfortunately there aren't too many feats we can take that will boost damage significantly. Definitely some that can boost damage small amount like martial adept, the new strike of giant, etc. We don't get many choices after this point.i I assume one action surge per combat, using all 3 attacks for shooting them again as a bonus action. Dunno if this helps at all. I have a monk video coming out very soon which will give a more detailed breakdown hopefully that will help clarify things too.
I had the fighter repeat its first 10 levels in its next 10 levels, granting a second fighting style and a third wind at 11, a second subclass at 13(all features and progression migrated to levels 13, 17, and 20 accordingly), a third attack at 15, and feats at 14, 16, and 18, and I snagged eloquence's silver tongue feature for their capstone and made it apply to physical attacks, and I shuffled the first 10 levels to give the player a choice every level until 9(and 19) where they get their action surges instead of indomitable(they get a combat feat at 2(and 12) so they're still an attractive dip for other martials and half casters) I replaced rage damage with rage dice so all criticals are brutal criticals(getting another one at levels 9, 13, and 17 and going from d4s to d6s at 20), spread the primal champion to do +1/+1 at levels 5, 10, 15, and 20 so it's a consistent boon, at level 17 they can choose once per day to just not take damage from something, their capstone is a little messy so I won't go over it here flurry of blows is not a special bonus action that adds attacks it just adds an attack per ki point, martial arts just gives a bonus action unarmed strike, deflect works on effectively everything, subclasses have ways of boosting your ki back up, most things strength related are finesse, and you get weaker versions of kensei or open hand if you choose neither, so you can still be decent with or without weapons while picking the subclass you actually want rogues get another sneak attack dice at levels 1 and 20, the odnd cunning strikes and devious strikes because mathematically speaking wizards have to have given them something even if by accident, scout has in addition been integrated into the base class and they get extra attack at level 16 and can sneak attack with it, they can pick their saves at level 1(with limits) and what they get out of slippery mind all four of them get a fighting style and a feature I made called sign of war(paladin and ranger get this one too) where they effectively get military sign, tracking stuff, group movement stuff, special reactions, etc. I removed much of the casters' armor and swords bards and blade wizards get combat feats instead of extra attack I also split feats and combat feats into two lists and casters only get access to combat feats by going swords bard 6, blade wizard 6, or multiclassing this is a loose rundown of what I did to the base martial classes there's a bit more ofc
Wow that's a big list of changes. I like the fighter repeating the first 10 levels again, that's an interesting way of doing it and probably pretty useful too. Sounds like a big list of changes, but will definitely help the divide! Thanks for sharing these ideas
i honestly think that a good solution for this devide is making the outliar spells more reasonable.(like when you cast shield you cant cast other leveled spells untill the end of your next turn or smth)
Sorry for being a bit late to this but something probably worth considering is that from what I can see constant single target damage spells all have weaknesses and more of them the greater the damage. Animate objects and summon spells for example, when optimising for damage the minions have low hp so aoe effects like a dragon's breath could wipe them all out. They're also concentration so if the enemies can get damage on the caster it may end the spell short, although to be fair the tankiness aspect does kind of mitigate this. There are spells that don't have the squishy minion issue but with their own limitations. Assuming enemies are able to move out of harmful effects or the possibility of the spell ending after one passed save it seems like as a bonus action you can only really expect as a bonus action about 1d6 damage per spell level. Which isn't bad and when paired with toll the dead gets pretty close to fighter damage I think(idk how you calculate for passed saves or missed hits I just assumed they hit/fail) it can be more if you use booming blade but that requires melee range which runs greater risk of losing concentration. Clerics do get 1d8 per spell level without bonus action tho, they kinda seem like the favourite child So there probably is a point of critical mass where a say wizard has enough slots and summon spells that even if one is dealt with it properly did enough work that a weaker spell can finish the job while they still have plenty of slots to spam shield or throw an occasional fireball. And even if the fighter has a magic weapon to exceed this single target damage, the fact that every other aspect of the game is caster dominated properly doesn't feel too great
Regarding the weaknesses, yes summoning many small creatures (animate small objects) will have less HP, and concentration is always a risk. Securing concentration is definitely a priority for optimizers, and it can be pretty well protected. Non summoning spells are usually better area damage, which is fine too, things like spirit guardians or whatever. I agree that it is very unfortunate that often the only mechanical way a martial character can contribute is through damage, and then casters can meet or exceed that too.
Summoning spells are usually not a one size fits all solution, which would've helped balanced them, if it wasn't for the sheer amount of spells casters get, can prepare and how spellcasting works with their resources. If you're fighting an enemy with strong AoE, then you can usually just use your spellslots for something else and still reliably get value. And if the enemy can't AoE, the summons usually just win you the encounter, either through sheer damage output (if the DM tries to ignore them) or through wasting so much of the enemy's action economy (if the DM tries to deal with them).
Great video! Now if everyone could just stop letting the party sleep whenever and throw more than one or two encounters at them per day, as is suggested in the books, this tired argument could be put to bed.
I strictly manage my players resting vs encounters and I can tell you that this "fix" doesn't have the outcome a lot of people expect. It does make the martial/caster gap less prominent, but it just creates another major issue: the martial/half-caster gap. The strongest martial characters are generally Paladins, Rangers (especially Gloom Stalkers), Hexblade Warlocks or multiclasses building on Paladins or Rangers. The problem is that Paladin, Ranger and Hexblades are also generally better at resource management than Fighters, Barbarians, Rogues and Monks. They have their high impact long rest resources (spellslots, Mystic Arcanum), solid short rest resources (Pact slots+Hexblade Curse, Channel Divinity) and free resources (Ranger subclasses, Paladin Aura). So in any campaign where you long rest a lot, dedicated fullcasters are unbeatable. In any campaign where you long rest rarely, but short rest a lot, half-casters and Warlocks are roughly on par with fullcasters, and beat out pure martials. In campaigns where you have few long and short rests, half-casters are the most reliable unit because they typically have the best infinite use features. But lets look at a heavily multiclassed martial character that is typically good enough to play alongside most spellcasters lvl 1-12: The Gloom Stalker 5/Assassin 3/Battlemaster 3. This martial character is great at most levels of play. It has burst, sustainability, utility, the works. It doesn't have the super duper mega giga ultra resources of a fullcaster, but to achieve that it needs to have a lot of features across all 3 replenishment rates. Longrest: Spellslots. Short rest: Superiority dice, Action Surge, Second Wind. Infinite use: Umbral Sight, Dread Ambusher, Sneak Attack, Cunning Action, Assassinate. This is about the closest you'll get to a "pure" martial build that is actually good, and not only do you require features from 3 different classes, but you still rely on spellslots. I'm pretty sure that between the 6 martial and half-caster classes in 5e, there are enough worthwhile martial features for maybe 2 classes. It's insane how badly martials are designed.
@@TheTdroid Hoo-boy! That's alot of text! :p If I understand you correctly your point is that martial classes short rest abilities don't compare to half-casters. You mention Paladin, ranger and hexblade warlock as superior choices. None of these can compare with pure martials for combat prowess but yes they do get back some small amount of sometimes high impact resources however as soon as those are spent they are back to square one as a worse fighter. And fighting classes also get impactfull (thouhg sometimes not as flashy) resources back in the form of action surges, battlemaster moves and more while losing very little in way of combat effectiveness. As martials there is no contest between a fighter or barbarian and any of the three for example. The halfcasters have traded that fighting prowess for some magical aptitude and does in the end become only OK at both. Multiclassing is a balance issue, that's a fact, and that is the reason it is an optional rule. The complete freedom it gives you comes at the cost of completely destroying game balance, and that's fine as i don't understand the need to balance, ban and nerf when it comes to a cooperative boardgame. But using an optional ruling as the motivation for the tired martial/caster divide seems weak to me.
@@tobiaslundqvist3209 The point I make is that the short rest and infinite use resources for half-casters are good enough, not that they are outright better. Not always, anyway. Some of them certainly are though, like Vow of Emnity, Aura of Protection and Umbral Sight. Reading a list of Paladin, Ranger and Hexblade feature would probably add more. Because they are good enough, the high impact resources from spellslots ultimately makes the half-casters the superior choice. And unlike the non-casters, you can't actually run a Paladin or Ranger out of resources because they get infinite use features. A Battlemaster Fighter has enough resources for 1 alright combat turn (not combat, combat-TURN) per short rest. There are nummerous reasons for this. 1) Fighters are nothing special before lvl 11 anyway, but by then you're competing with half-casters with so many resources that it doesn't matter anymore. 2) Rogues are just underpowered in general. 3) Barbarians have too few Rage uses at low levels, but don't scale properly at high lvls. 4) Monk, lol. As for Warlocks... well, up to 5th lvl spells on short rest vs Fighter resources? Yeah, no. Hexblade Warlock wins every time on spells alone, let alone their subclass features (Curse+curse upgrades), because spells are just stronger than what Fighters get. Then there is this supposed "trade-off" half-casters make. Where is this? Because Fighters don't have any special martial advantages before lvl 11, as I mentioned, and the half-casters have much better scaling (spells) and subclasses. The favoritism shown to half-casters over pure martials is obvious, if you look at how Rangers were given Gloom Stalker, which is generally stronger and more versatile than both Fighters and Rogues for just about any dex build.
@@tobiaslundqvist3209 My original response seems to have gone missing, so I'll try to repeat most of my points briefly. 1) Half-caster features are good enough to warrant usage instead of non-caster classes when combined with their access to spells, even in cases where they are not outright better. 2) Some infinte use and short rest half-caster features are obviously better than anything non-casters can provide. Umbral Sight and Aura of Protection being undisputable examples, many Channel Divinity options, Warlock spells and so on. 3) Automatically scaling spells on short rest means Hexblade always wins out compared to non-casters. There is no way Action Surge and Superiority Dice can compete with up to 5th lvl spells recharging on short rest. 4) There are no meaningful trade offs for being a half-caster. They typically deal as much or more damage with similar amounts of optimization, but they scale better into higher levels (spells) and have generally better class features, because they are often explicitly supernatural (Lay on Hands, Aura, Ranger optional features, etc.). 5) By the time you have 3 attacks on a Fighter, you're competing with 3rd lvl spells for half-casters and 6th lvl spells for fullcasters. That extra attack stopped mattering several levels before you even got it. 6) Fighter is the best non-martial and that says a lot of how awful of a place the rest of them are in. Barbarians have a niche, but they have too few uses of Rage at low levels (because long rest recharge) and don't scale properly into higher levels, more or less stagnating at lvl 5-6. Rogues and Monks are just kinda bad overall.
3:30 easy fix: Use strength for intimidation if applicable. That's even RAW. You could even use constitution for intimidation if you are creative enough.
What do you think about the new 2024 martials? Instead of giving more for them in combat, it seems that they were given more control in the battlefield and utility outside the battlefield. Does this help with bringing martials closer to wizards at later levels, in ways besides just damage?
@@mrinfinity5557 For sure! You made have seen my latest video about weapon masteries, but they bring a lot of good control options to martials. Of course, it'll never compare to the big control spells like Wall of Force, but it offers enough to feel interesting and they are pretty strong. In terms of utility out of battle, it mostly comes in the form of skill checks, which is not the BEST kind of utility, but their skills, like Barbarians and Fighters can be really solid out of combat skill users now. Casters will have much better utility options still like Languages, Teleportation, Scouting, Spying, Illusions, etc. but at least martials can do some useful things out of combat now.
Yes, once I finish going over the base classes in 2024 then I'll do this analysis again. I'll probably have to address CME in that video as well. Might get to it before then inside one of the base classes
Theoretically if the Monk uses Empty Body for advantage on every attack (gives the Invisible condition), it should be much better (not as good as casters), but it's such a late feature that it's honestly not worth the investment. Nerfed in the latest OneDND playtest, so it's not even an option anymore with the upcoming PHB. I also personally wouldn't even consider Paladins and Rangers as martials because they still get more options via spells 🤣
I've done those calculations a monk play test 8 vs PHB video. You can find them in the description. Advantage on every hit is great, but costing an action to set up is painful, especially because you can't flurry of blows after that action either. Yea, most people wouldn't call them martials either, but interesting to see their damage.
Are we accounting for resource attrition over the course of the battle/adventuring day? I see we're assuming 3 fights per day. Are 9th level casters assumed to be casting the same level 5 spell 3 times in a day, for instance? Do 5th level casters have to fall back on a 2nd level spell for the 3rd encounter of the day? But 3 fights is the absolute minimum you can run and still constitute a full adventuring day. You can face anywhere from 3 to 8 encounters in a day given 5e's system. Do casters maintain the same level of output as # of encounters per day scales up? And are we also assuming that concentration spells stay up for the full 4 rounds? Or are we depreciating the per round output for each round that concentration had to be maintained in order to get that round's output? Concentration can be broken on spells in the round they are cast, sometimes before the spell has had a chance to do anything. And to get the 4th round of output from something like Animate Objects, concentration had to be maintained for 3-4 rounds in a row. This isn't just whiterooming either. I have seen Conjure Animals get dropped on the first turn before it even got to the wolves' turn. I have also seen casters get focused by enemies BECAUSE they were concentrating on a spell.
Good questions. I'm assuming 3 encounter per day, meaning I divide the number of spells in 3, but we use the highest level spell slot here. Once we get to 6th level spells, that ends up being a decent drop in damage if we can't use our highest slot. For concentration, yes, assumed we never drop. Obviously that's not going to always be the case, but it's usually rare for casters to lose concentration if they are built with that in mind. Definitely can change table to table though. So yes, these numbers aren't seeing the whole picture, and you've pointed to the appropriate places.
If a setup was implemented. Where when a magic-user cast a 5th level, or higher spell. The magic-user suffers 1 level of exhaustion for each spell level above 4. Clerics could have prayer and offerings required for spell levels 4 through 6. These spells are granted based on the DM discretion based on the what the deity determines is necessary. These granted spells may be used situations determined by a cleric. However, violation to that deity's tenets shall impact future requests. Cleric spell levels 7 or higher are handled like commandments. The cleric is told specific instructions in regards for casting those spells. If the cleric deviates from those instructions. The spell automatically fails, and the cleric loses it from their spell slot.
I've played a lot of high level 5e at this point, and it never actually ends up feeling like this in practice, to me. What ends up happening is always we're waiting for the fighter/barbarian to take their turn, at which point between a magic weapon, reckless attack, precise strike, a strength replacement belt, and whatever else they have going on, they basically never miss, and rack up hundreds of damage per turn. Often, battles are decided when the barbarian/fighter takes their first turn in the first round and burst damages one to three enemies to full dead in one turn, at which point the battle has already begun to tilt. When it's not the Barbarian/Fighter trivializing encounters, it's virtually always the monk, surprisingly. We'll regularly have boss monsters burn all three legendary resistances in the same turn against the monk, trying not to get stunned, and get stunned anyway. People talk about how Stunning Strike isn't that good, because Con saves are on average better than wisdom saves, but when you're talking about 4 or more consecutive attempts every single turn, and combining that with like, 60ish damage, versus a spellcaster forcing a single wisdom roll with a 5th level slot, if they succeed the save, that's your whole action with no damage to back it up, and you only have 2 per day, and often you're just burning one of their legendary resistances, and even if they fail and you actually impose the condition, it takes your concentration, so you can't do it to anyone else. I am playing a Druid, and have had Maelstrom memorized in every single fight so far, and have not once had the opportunity to cast it, because the actual conditions of the battlefields we find ourselves in have always prevented it from being useful. While on paper it's a gobsmackingly horrendous spell, using it in actual play has ended up being kind of tricky. I'm using Shapechange to turn into dragons now, and still the martials are outperforming me.
Thanks for that data point! Sounds like your DM does a great job of bringing balance to it. I don't think DnD is unplayable at high levels. I think it's still great but especially for arcane casters (wizards most of all) they end up having game breaking options that they must avoid otherwise things become trivial. Ie, wish and simulacrum, and so many others. Hopefully if DMs watch this they will realize that martials need magic items, especially strong ones at high levels. I see a lot about stunning strike either hating or loving it. I do think it is powerful, and stunning the enemy for a legendary resistance pop is definitely worthwhile. Even with a +13 con save there is a 25% chance of getting it off, so it's not wildly impossible to land. I do think damage wise, monks underperform, but they turn into stun monkeys at later levels which is still useful. I like this new monk where you stun less often but do more damage. Hopefully you don't feel useless in combat, I'm not vouching for martials to make casters feel terrible in combat. I hope everyone can contribute meaningfully.
@@DndUnoptimized Yeah, the ways I contribute tend to be in weird and esoteric things, like using Gust of Wind to push enemies out of or into allied threatened areas, or using Stone Shape to make a door in a stone wall, so we can pursue fleeing ethereal or gaseous form enemies. For me, Pass Without Trace is also really good because my DM is a weirdly big stickler for the exact conditions of triggering surprise, which he interprets as basically "every NPC gets to active roll perception against every PC's active stealth roll, if any NPC detects any PC, no NPC gets the surprised condition." which means our fighter/ assassin rogue would essentially never get his bonus damage, considering the Paladin with his +0 stealth roll, if I didn't add +10 to it for him. I honestly think this is mostly the DM ruling unfairly in a way the spell allows us to circumvent to allow his awesome class feature to function. I'm having FUN turning into a dragon, it's just my average DPR is like, 30? 40, maybe? And that's basically just one hit for any of the martials. I end up choosing Brass dragon for the sleep breath, mostly. I could summon wolves, but a lot of the enemies can fly, or have damage auras or fear auras or petrification gazes that would damage or disable the wolves automatically if they approach or attack them, or we start combat on raised platforms and have to jump or fly over a gap to get to our enemies, or the enemies use sleet storm to break our spellcasters' concentrations, or they have blur and a 19 AC making a wolf miss like, 70% of the time even with pack tactics, but a fighter type with +16 to hit will still hit on almost anything but a natural 1, considering precise strike. I just see a lot of discourse surrounding 5e D&D be like, "Considering a fight lasts 4 rounds, and 32 wolves' DPR adds up to 130, martials are useless." when like, yeah, I've almost never seen my action on round 3, because the Fighters have all killed everything by their 3rd action, and they usually beat me on initiative. Let me put it this way. One time, we had the opportunity to press on to another combat immediately, or take a short rest, after I had cast Shapechange during the previous battle, but the monk only had 6 ki points left. We unanimously voted to take the short rest. Even though he would have been able to stun spam his first round of the next combat, we STILL thought restoring him to full working order would be better in the long run for our resource management and chances of success than my continuing use of a 9th level spell.
Yea, it seems like the martials in your game really bring the beatdown and that's awesome. I've never seen conjure animals at high levels, so I'll have to take your word for it. Something like a damage aura or flying would totally destroy them. And flying is pretty common at high levels. Do you feel like druid 9th level spells are powerful? Apparently not too bad. I should note that the druid at 17 in my graph was shape shifting into a dragon as well and it did decent damage but not crazy by any means.
@@DndUnoptimized I definitely credit my DM giving access to a broad and deep list of magic items for the PCs as why the martial types are doing so well. The way we see it, if there are 20 levels, and there are a range of strength belts from 21 to 29, even if the 29 belts are meant only for level 20 characters, when else would you be using the ones at 25 and 27 other than at levels 14-18? People also have +3 weapons, +2 armors, and rings and cloaks of protection and luckstones if they have the attunement slots for them from the same line of thinking. Our highly mobile and complicated battlefields have led to PCs prioritizing getting loot like winged boots or capes of the montebank into the hands of the melee fighters. We also do use feats, and of course the fighter/barbarian is shoehorned into the PAM/GWM/Sentinel build, which seems to be the only way to go for melee, which is unfortunate. Druids don't have a lot of 9th level spells, and since very few of their spells have attack rolls, and my AC isn't very good (limited to Hide and Leather means I'm in dead last relative to the rest of the party's AC), so I'm not confident Foresight would stop me from getting hit by a person targeting my AC even with it on, so Shapechange kind of feels like the only real option. I could cast Foresight on another party member, but we have issues with player attendance because we're all in our late 30s and have sponsibileries, so if I did that, it could be wasted in important combats. So I selfishly want to use Shapechange on myself. I have been struggling to find a place to cast Maelstrom, as I mentioned, but also Reverse Gravity. In my head, I leave a whole encounter floating helplessly as we pick them off one by one, but somehow I only end up able to center it over like, half or less the total number of enemies on the battlefield, and of those enemies, often at least one can fly, and the spell description doesn't seem to suggest any ongoing disadvantage or slowing effect for the targets who succeed their save, so sometimes they just grab onto something to avoid falling up and just move out of the area on their turn. So it ends up being a level 7 spell that often disables 1-2 targets. I would be better off using Plane Shift offensively. I stopped memorizing it after a while. The only spell that feels legitimately OP on my whole list is Sunburst, and it's extremely hard not to catch allies in the area, which can make it hard to utilize to its fullest, but when it pops off, oh man, that's so cool.
@@Jerthaniswhoa, I've never seen magic items get given out so freely. Kudos to your DM on making encounters challenging still. I've never played a druid and part of the reason is because the spells just don't appear to have as big a bang for buck as other casters. What you are saying here seems to confirm that, but druid utility does seem quite useful. Play test 8 has already introduced new spells and ways of playing druid that makes me much more interested. And yea, scheduling is a nightmare sometimes, especially as you get older and have kids... Good luck to us all.
With a wizard, I actually prefer a one level dip in Cleric (I usually keep WIs at 13-14 for wizards) which helps a bit more than a one level dip in fighter, since you don’t lose spell slot progression, get more cantrips, and get access to some pretty nice early spells (Bless on a Wizard early before any other concentration spells go brrrrrr) That and several cleric subclasses give heavy armor proficiency means that you could have an insanely tanky Wizard, but of course the medium armor and shield route is always option and still good. Combine that with the Level 18 feature wizards get which could allow them to spam Shield and Misty Step for no Slot cost, and you have a rather tanky caster.
Yea, that's definitely a good option too. I think a lot of wizards would do fighter or artificer for the Con saves, but if you have other ways to secure concentration or are more worried about Wis saves then cleric is definitely a solid choice!
@@DndUnoptimized also fair. I prefer to almost always pick at least one of War Caster or Resilient Con for any caster (because some DMs are really annoying about what blocks somatic components with some ruling that *held Foci* do it, and Resilient Con speaks for itself) so that tends to cover me for Concentration checks lol.
Interestingly enough youve made optimised martials to reflect their dpr. Have you done the same for casters? Are the clerics going vhuman with telekinetic and doing double apriti guardians every turn?
Everyone is custom lineage here, but casters are relatively unoptimized, no spirit guardians multi hit build here, but that definitely is a good one. It's kind of a "martials try their hardest, and casters don't really try that hard" comparison.
that makes it even worse. I really enjoy your channel, you have a unique perspective on things and I look forward to viewing more of your stuff@@DndUnoptimized
soo when you talk about Monk DPR, especially Gunk, you need to take into account that more ki directly turns into more damage, thanks to focused aim turning misses into hits, so more ki= more hits.
Unfortunately not. I'm highly considering doing another one with different assumptions about magic items. Giving magic items to both sides would bring them both up, but I'll have to run some numbers with specifics to see where they will land.
@@DndUnoptimized It would be extremely helpful for DMs to have a measurable metric of not only when classes drop off but also the effect magic items have on mitigating it. A look into what each class looks like after multiple encounters before a long rest would possibly be another very useful piece of kit
@@DndUnoptimized I had to take a look to refresh my memory, so it took a bit, but on page 135 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide there is a magic item rarity chart that describes about when to give out items of various rarities; uncommon (+1) can be available from Levels 1-5, rare (+2) starting at level 5, right about where Martials are just peaking. I find that to be an interesting coincidence. Very rare (+3) starting at 11th, and legendary starting at 17th. It would be very interesting to see where Martials peak at +1 and +2, and very interesting if it happens to line up with this.
Good find! Yea, if/when I do it I'll assume +1 at 5, +2 at 9, +3 at 13, and legendary at 17. Maybe I'll compare if only the martials have them, and if both have them.
@@DndUnoptimized It definitely was a good idea to not make the assumption that people would be getting the magic items though--there are many games where you simply do not receive them.
So, from the start Control - caster 90/10 martial AoE - caster 100 Support - caster 90/10 martial Utility - caster 60/40 martial Social - caster 80/20 martial So, the HP pool is oversimplification of combat. It should work if you adjust HP pools with regards to AC of monsters. Single target sustain - caster 90/10 martial
Thanks for watching! I'm not sure I'd give those ratios (I haven't put thought into a rating), but I would definitely swing them in the caster's favour. You are definitely correct about increasing monsters AC as levels go up. I didn't want to get too deep into the damage percentage calculation, but these calculations do increase the monster AC based on the DMG's guide as you are suggesting.
Definetly agree with most ratios, and would maybe even say that casters might be 80/20 for utility, since the only martial that provides anything are Rogues, and only through good skill checks. Overall casters are jsut able to do MANY more things with their spells than any martial options. The only point I might disagree on is Single target sustained damage. The example in the video for martials are not super optimized, while the caster examples relly on "outlier spells" (broken spells that have too much power for their cost). I do find it annoying that martials have to even go through the lengths of thinking real hard about opmitization while casters can just pick broken spells, but I do think that martials have a good chance of pulling out ahead here. It's at least a 50/50.
@@someusername9591 it is frustrating that casters have access to so many powerful spells, and several completely broken ones. I hope the next version is able to fix spell balance. I did try to avoid very broken spells in the caster comparison (no conjure animals or what not). I show animate objects but agree it is broken and then show it with a Tasha's summon instead. I don't believe the community thinks Tasha's summons are broken, but they are strong for sure. Blade of disaster is powerful but doesn't feel like an outlier in 9th level spells. Shield needs a redesign too, but I did use it here for survivability. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on clean optimized martials I could use here as a better example. Of course picking up a subclass would very likely help, or multicasting, but I'm avoiding those here.
Good analysis! However I would note that the ability of a wizard to deal 28 damage on average with a lightning bolt against 3 foes might not be as great as we think. Many monsters have elemental damage resistance, and it is often more useful to focus on one monster at a time because that alters the action economy in the party’s favor. The greater burst damage potential of the martial classes is, I suspect, an inadvertent balance to the classes.
That's fair, targeting one enemy at the time is a better strategy so AOE could oppose that, but it is still extremely useful. Obviously the best example would be a room full of weak enemies that a fireball would completely kill, but would require a full turn of attacks from the fighter. Even if it doesn't kill them all, it could bring them low enough that the fighter needs one hit to take it out, and so could take out 2-3 on its turn. Fighters and paladins are good at burst (and gloom stalker), but the other martials are more consistent damage. So the average mage could blow a high level slot on a scorching ray or whatever to burst more. Plus the sad fact that action surge helps casters more than fighters. I'd say a martial optimized for burst damage (but this wouldn't be the average martial) would probably be around the same effectiveness as a caster if not more, but I have no facts to back this up. Maybe taking a look at the top nova builds from D4 deep dive would be a good reference point.
another thing casters have over martials in terms of damage is power output regulation, that is if the encounter is too easy they can just use cantrips all the time, if it's the final boss they can blow up all their spell slots by casting every turn, martials can't do the same thing as effectively, sure there things like action surge and battlemaster maneuvers but their power spikes won't be as high as using high level spells, martials in general tend to have a consistent power output, you are doing roughly the same thing regardless of how easy or how tough an encounter is, so your basically at the mercy of how much HP the enemy has since you can't boost your damage by a significant degree according to the difficulty of encounter.
That's true, they can choose when to let it all out and nova, or let things take longer and conserve more resources. Martials lack this for the most part
I always find these type of intellectual exercises interesting to watch but at the end of the day that is all they are. A player can have just as much fun at the table playing a martial character or a spell caster because fun cannot be quantified or classified. Personally I have an unusual approach to gaming be it war games or roll playing games. Most people seem to play to win at all costs. The easier it is to win the better. For me that approach quickly becomes unsatisfactory. I find that the more challenging it is to succeed the more rewarding it is when you do succeed. Therefore I always find myself putting obstacles in front of me that makes success more difficult to achieve. It’s the difference in satisfaction you get when you finish a ten piece jigsaw as opposed to a 1000 piece jigsaw. So casters are more powerful than martials. Does that make them less rewarding to play? My answer is possibly, it depends on the player. Consider the following example: A wizard can cast a spell to fly up to the top of the mountain. The fighter must climb. He must succeed on strength checks, find ways to cross ravines, set up safeguards against falling such as pitons hammered into the mountainside with ropes attached. Which player has the most ‘fun’ in the above scenario? The answer of course is it could be either, both, or none depending on the players involved. What’s my point? It’s this, just because spell casters are more powerful than martials does not mean you as a player will have more fun at the table. Your fun an thus the choices you make as a player is more closely linked to how you approach the game rather than the numbers on your character sheet. When I play spell casters I deliberately take steps to avoid the powerful options preferring to find creative ways to make the less optimised choices work. I am currently playing in 2 campaigns. One as a divination wizard, the other as a shepherd Druid. My wizard is old, short sighted and needs the support of a walking stick. I have chosen to give him disadvantage on perception checks, a speed of 20, and of course he’s human so no darkvision. His spells include grease, phantasmal force and levitate. My Druid when he wild-shapes does not incorporate his gear into his animal form. His clothes either rip apart Hulk-style or fall into a heap on the floor depending on the size and shape of the form he transforms into. The result being he spends a good deal of time running about naked trying to retrieve his gear. He takes cure wounds instead of healing word and of course is human so no darkvision. Sorry for a far too long and rambling post just to say interesting video, but in the end, meaningless to all but the optimisers of the world. I take it from the name of your channel you are not an optimiser. 😊
I could not agree more with you. It is 100% about the fun you have and I love martials. Honestly, I don't know whether to categorize myself as an optimizer or not, but my plan in creating this channel is to make character builds close to what you are describing. Take an idea that is suboptimal and make it viable, or to create a character with a weakness and try to overcome it. For example I'm working on a build that is a quadriplegic and want to see how much that can be overcome. Part of the reason is because I can't help but try to make my characters as powerful as possible, but I think it ends up making characters that are way more powerful than the other players, which is not really my intention. So if I place barriers in front on my character, then I can make them as powerful as possible without overshadowing others and get a really cool way to integrate the mechanics with my storytelling. I have two videos of build out currently that are somewhere in this vein. Throwing build is suboptimal, and the other is playing with a child on your back, which is a fun concept but actually turned out not to be as much of a handicap as I originally expected. Long story short, thanks for the comment and I agree!
You lost me at 14:20, but just as I was about to close the video, you made that comeback at 14:25! :D Assuming that there is a sane DM who prevents certain exlploits makes the data much more useful. One thing that still irks me about the way you calculate caster damage, is how you just expect the summon to survive the whole time. Realistically, that summon would get 1 round of attacking and then die from enemy damage (which may or may not make it MORE effective, since the damage prevented by its tanking could be equated to damage dealt). EDIT: The comparison at 23:00 seems pretty wonky. I suppose you assume the wizard has 17 INT form point buy, gets a half-feat at level 1, maxes INT at level 4 and grabs tough at 8, right? That would mean taking none of the feats they need to protect their concentration (resilient/lucky/warcaster). Truthfully, a wizard who optimizes offense needs to grab one of those feats before being free to take tough at level 12. I suppose the fighter needs PAM and GWM to maximize damage, right? So that takes up thier level 1 and 4 feats. Then they can grab Heavy armor master to push STR to 18 at level 6 and max out STR at 8. Just like the wizard, they can grab tough at level 12. Additionally, using shield every time you can is quite the stipulation. Using mage armor, your highest level spell for damage and ~4x shield per combat will eat up your resources in no time. Finally, after tanking with all of our HP during combat, the wizard can't heal back up the way the fighter can, due to their worse HD and lack of second wind. If we short rest after each combat, the fighter will be a lot tankier than the wizard in later fights, who will now be both on low HP and will need 2nd and 3rd level slots to keep shield up. As for multiclassing for an armor proficiency dip - that's once again optional rules territory that's up for the DM to invite into their game - or not.
Very true, there is a chance you lose concentration or it dies. Tasha's summons are good at outputting damage but aren't as good at soaking it, so that needs to be taken into account when deciding what spell to use and how to use them effectively in battle. Of course, even soaking up several turns of attacks is a pretty good use, but obviously less straight damage than lasting the full battle.
I would say that tackling the outlier spells is a must. The question is, what qualifies as an outlier spell? There are many we can ALL agree on hopefully, but there will be many we don't. I want casters to be able to do great damage too, so I don't want to nerf them to the ground, but I think there needs to be commitment from the casters that focuses their abilities on damage in order to do great single target damage and compete with martials if that's the route they want.
@@DndUnoptimized if they want to carve the single target damage as a niche for materials they could do that by nerfing just the concentration spells with damage. In this way, casters can surpass the damage of materials with single-use spells like disintegrate but can't do this every round all day.
Yes, I agree here! And then class or subclass features can boost those spells so they do more damage and the other casters get to do just average damage with them.
This becomes even worse when you remove it from the white room. Melee Martials suffer a LOT from having to get into melee, losing many rounds of their optimal damage and instead taking just one or two weaker ranged attacks at best, and that's if they're not using a shield, or you're using homebrew fixes like donning/doffing a shield once for free at the start of each round. A better comparison might be to make a gauntlet from a live play of an official D&D module and account for the enemies and positions. It should also account for the kind of loot available by those levels. That would be a lot of work to set up, but once done could boil down to things like "amount of movement needed per turn to stay in melee". This comparison really requires subclasses to be accounted for. I would argue that martials have a lot more of their power and features shifted to their subclass than casters do. Comparisons above Tier 1 should account for magic items. If you're playing stock 5e and your martials don't have weapons that deal extra damage on a hit and/or have cool effects by Tier 2, you're probably doing something wrong as a DM. The reason a fighter can be relevant at higher levels is exclusively because they're not swinging a 2d6+15 3-7 times per turn at level 11+ depending on Great Weapon Master and Action Surge. They're swinging something more like a 4d6+17, 3-7 times per turn at level 11+, because by mid Tier 2 they should have a +2 Flame Tongue or something else strong, evocative, and memorable. GWM or Sharpshooter -5/+10 lowers your accuracy, but still greatly boosts your DPR, and is compensated for even better by sources of Advantage or boosts to accuracy like Bless or Emboldening Bond. Important note from real play: Casters will usually want to either take War Caster by level 4-9 to allow for wielding a shield and a magic staff while still casting (as well as the other frankly overloaded benefits), or drop their shield to do so. Half-casters are not martials. Even if they get extra attack. They're half-casters. You can, at best, argue that the first level of Paladin is martial. lol 23:00 You don't even have to multiclass. You can get armor proficiency either from species, or from feats. Also, if Artificer isn't allowed, you can dip Cleric, which is great since you generally never want a low Wisdom score anyway, and they get their subclass at level 1. Any Charisma caster loves a 2 level dip in Hexblade Warlock for short rest spell slots AND Eldritch Blast + Agonizing Blast + Repelling Blast. Suddenly the Bard's not going to want to pick their nose while their summon fights. The problem becomes even worse when you start optimizing, as casters can often do equivalent OR BETTER damage at low levels to martial characters, with few exceptions. This is often thanks to outliers like Magic Stone and Eldritch Blast. That said, there are one or two extremely hyper-optimized half caster builds that can match up point for point with optimized casters. Notably, the benefit brought by having a pure striker Gloomstalker multiclass and an optimized Paladin for Aura of Protection who then multiclasses out later. Clerics can easily be straight-class front-liners as well, with Spirit Guardians and amazing AC. A martial grappling build can also be extremely potent IF combined with a team of casters who focus on dragging enemies in and out of persistent area damage spells for extra damage. That's a situation where something like a Rune Knight could really show off. Even at low levels, Create Bonfire can suddenly become compelling and powerful. Some suggested fixes: My favorite solution is that first, casters should not be able to access the spell slots or cast spells from a class that does not provide proficiency for the armor they're wearing. This almost immediately solves most of the optimization that causes casters to vastly overshadow martials by outdamaging them while ALSO being much tougher to kill thanks to Shield and Absorb Elements. I would also suggest downgrading any full caster class/subclass that gets medium armor to light armor instead. Half casters can keep medium/heavy. Full casters should be needing to spend resources on protection and evasion so they don't go down. Remove Silvery Barbs entirely. Shield should be reduced to +2 AC and only if you're not already benefiting from a shield. Remove summon spells entirely, they're exclusively too strong and delay the gameplay. Nerf damage on some standouts like Fireball, Spirit Guardians, limit max damage per turn on spells like Spike Growth, limit affected targets on control spells like Web (a great option is to remove squares whenever they're traversed after casting) and Hypnotic Pattern. Perhaps by the spellcasting modifier. I've also seen some good ideas like a Parry reaction for martials, allowing them to use their reaction to gain +2 AC as if using a shield, when not using a shield. Rework Wild Shape temp HP, perhaps similar to how OneD&D has it in the current playtest. Handful of other fixes... but you can get it into a pretty decent state where casters are not OP but still incredibly relevant and desirable, and martials can stay relevant throughout most or all tiers.
Wow a great picture here. You've clearly got a good handle on this issue. I think you are right that martial subclasses are more likely to add damage than caster ones, depends on the class though, and there are quite a good percentage of martial subclasses that don't add any damage. I could go with the "Default" subclass for each class, but I don't think that would add too much since the "Default" ones are usually kind of weak. Forced movement, especially grappling is quite good. I just made a Control Per Round (CPR) video showing grappling and forced movement. I'm sure you'd have interesting insights there. This definitely depends on group synergy to work, so almost impossible to account for. As for magic weapons, I think I'll have to do another set of comparisons making some assumptions about the types of magic items they get, then compare casters and martials. Depending on the strength of the magic item it could even things out somewhat. But if that was the design intent (and I think it is), then it should say that somewhere, and state that the balance is assuming some level of magic item by certain points. I should point out that I do use sharpshooter/gwm here too. It is a big help, especially when they get archery fighting style, or some advantage. Balance suggestions are interesting, and all sound pretty fair to me. Thanks for the feedback and info!
I'm very surpised that summon celestial is a superior upcast vs Spirit guardians... is this an action economy effect or is it the result of assumptions as to number of foes near you on the battlefield?
Before even going into the video my biggest issue is flavor :(. The feats/ outside of combat ability Martials get are so lame. Especially intimidation like you juat mentioned lol
Yea, intimidation feels the worst especially when you are a barbarian. PHB does say that you could use Str intimidation checks, but I've never seen people actually do that. One DnD is helping there at least, whew! Make barbarians scary again!
Don't nerv, buff. What do you think about giving all martial classes the Martial Adept feat for free once they have 3 martial levels, half caster levels count half?
Am interesting idea. It might give martials more options. I know a lot of people thought battlemaster maneuvers should be in the base class so this would kind of accomplish that. Weapon masteries in One DnD kind of do the same thing too.
Monsters from a spread of all the books. What do you mean how do I count the math? I have a video on calculating good damage that goes through it more. That one might help
I evaluated at CRs 5, 9, 13, and 17. Here are the numbers. As levels go higher there are less monsters, so Dragons end up taking up a larger percentage of the damage. Level 5 AC damage 82.59% Con Damage 9.76% Dex damage 7.65% Level 9 AC damage 80.82% Con Damage 11.94% Dex damage 7.24% Level 13 AC damage 69.62% Con damage 11.47% Dex damage 18.91% Level 17 AC damage 74.64% Con damage 6.95% Dex damage 18.42%
@@DndUnoptimized Thank you! Very good info, and an overall good way of capturing some of the complexity of incoming damage. Damage types, target selection, damage vector selection, and sequencing can all affect incoming damage and the ability to mitigate it. I don't really thing there's a good way to model all of that stuff though, especially when some of it comes down to DM decision making. For example, an adult dragon can blast you with its breath weapon and hit you with multiple tail attacks in the same round. Or you might be facing some enemies that rely on attacks and others who rely on saves. And some enemies can choose whether or not they want to use an attack or subject you to a saving throw. Some damage types can be absorbed, while other's bypass Absorb Elements completely.
Sure. It will vary on how you add up the damages. I did also calculate damage type percentages at these levels too, so resistance can be calculated. Of course it is all just an exercise. Character placement and play style is closely tied to damage taken.
While it would be way too late to lessen the power of spells since the ones released in later books have been scaled according to the spells released in the PHB, I think that is what should have happened. Reducing things like range, duration, maybe even damage, or making concentration more difficult would even out the divide and make certain spells and casters less busted. We're way past that point though, and the only option seems to be to make martials OP as well, which sounds like a nightmare for the DM to balance.
A surprising number of broken spells come from the PHB. I'd say on average, the newer spells are more powerful, so I agree with you, but usually less broken (minus a few exceptions). Maybe a fresh slate with less problematic spells with the new ruleset will be a big help!
True, I could have used it but likely won't be able to use it for 4 rounds straight either because we miss on round one, the enemy dies early, or they move out of range. So it's better to launch one attack in my opinion.
A thing have to be considered are magic items tho. They are much more easy to find and use items for martial class.I don't know the damage, but a fighter with a vorpal sword is going to be nuts
Yes and no. A lot of items are best used by characters with a martial playstyle, but almost none of them need you to be a Fighter, Rogue etc. Paladin, Ranger, Bladelocks, Valor/Swords Bards and Bladesingers can often use these items just as well, while also providing powerful spells to the party. In addition to this, most of the *really* powerful magic items require you to have the spellcasting feature (sometimes also a specific class) to attune to them. Like the Staff of the Magi. But even less insane items often favor spellcasters, like Wands of Web/Lightning, Staff of Fire etc.
@@DndUnoptimized By your example of animate object being single target, Spirit Gaurdians is also a single target. The single target is the caster. It just has a passive damage to an area that follows the caster.
What I mean by single target damage is that I just want to see how much damage the caster can deal to one enemy. Spirit guardians is an AOE, so it'll deal 3d8 to many creatures, but 3d8 to one creature doesn't look as good when you take out the AOE portion. Anyway, it is a fantastic spell, and one you can create excellent builds around, no doubt about that, just not AS good if you are fighting just one person obviously.
The social spells, (Charm Person, Suggestion, Detect Thoughts, Modify Memory etc) are actually not very usable in social situations due to their obvious components. You'd have to have Subtle Spell Metamagic or in some cases only be an Aberrant Mind Sorcerer if you don't want people to be tipped off that you are casting spells. For example, casting Charm Person on the king in front of his court will just get you killed. Also there is something to be said for a Rogue being able to solve utility problems for zero resource cost. Why blow a 2nd level spell on something that the Rogue can do for free?
I don't know about social spells being useless without subtle spell. Most tables I've seen will either hand wave it, or call for a stealth/sleight of hand check to hide the somatic component of whatever. Even if they don't , things like modify memory can completely change the rules I'm sure there are higher levels of scrutiny when meeting a king though, you are right. But also, charisma is more likely to be high on casters. Yea martials can usually solve problems without resource expenditure, but often the right spell could just do it better. Of course this means the caster needs to have the right one prepared, which is the hard part in my opinion.
Gritty realism would do a ton for sure. Exploding dice is about a 0.5 damage increase, so I don't see that helping. It'll make rolls more exciting though!
Not to ITYS as a PF2E player, but the fact that damage optimization isn't really accounted for in the way most Martials are designed in 5e/1DnD, or how the squishiness of casters is highly subjective, I think there are some pretty simple ways to narrow these gaps. Firstly, Martial weapon damage should scale similarly to the Monk's Martial Arts damage, especially for classes that specialize in accurate attacks with lighter weaponry (Rangers, Rogues, Duelist/Archery Fighters). Secondly, we need to shorten and make Short Rests more tactically essential, ideally by adding cool-down mechanics to spells like Shield (i.e.: make Shield last until an attack roll bypasses it, or it blocks a Force damage Spell, then force the caster to take a Short Rest between castings). Lastly, the game needs to do a better job in accounting for and providing guidance for using magical items in the game, as the Martials need access to those items and effects to keep pace with casters most of the time, despite the developers claiming that Magic items aren't necessary to be able to play.
Seems like PF is a better balanced game for sure! I haven't played it much unfortunately, but hopefully one day. I definitely agree with your last point about magic weapons.
Good question. I create a deadly encounter for the level, see which percentage of their damage would come in through attacks to AC, Dex saves, and Con saves. Then I use the default attack bonus and save DC to calculate how much damage you'd take each round with that focused fire. Also, if the character gets resistance to damage, I have tables of what percentage of damage is dealt of every type at each tier, so I can see what gets resisted. Unfortunately it doesn't account for things like range, skirmishing, or a bunch of other stuff. It's just "if I sit here getting hit, how long would I last".
@@DndUnoptimized have you posted this table anywhere? I’m looking to account for durability and control when I’m deciding how to build my characters. Also how do you compare damage vs control vs durability. For example the how would you determine if it’s worth it to dual wield vs use a shield?
I haven't posted it anywhere, it's pretty ugly. I plan on doing a nicer and more modern one once the new MM comes out. In terms of how to decide if it's worth it that's a hard one because it all depends on what you want for your character. If you want tanky, you probably want to aim for the 2 round mark, if you only last 1 round then you might want to invest some resources into buffing your defenses (1.5 is ok). Once you have hit the desired defense then usually you can pump everything into damage. This is of course using my ways of calculating rounds of survival.
Well, 0.5 is very fragile, 1 is kind of average for a weak character, 1.25 is probably the minimum for a front liner. It's something like this at least. Like bear totem barbarian is around 3, and blaster mage is around 0.7.
it should be noted barbarian damage peaks again at level 20 because they get 22 strength. And yeah your martials really ought to be optimized better. multi-class 2 levels of barbarian into our fighter can really because of reckless attack. Even without this, subclasses can add a lot more damage too. Rapier rogue could use a race with access to cantrips like half-elf and get booming blade. Arcane tricksters can also set up out-of-turn sneak attacks with haste or sentinel+mirror image
But if you're going into power-player meta optimization, you might close that gap on unoptimized casters. For full comparison you then have to meta optimize the casters, and they just bring the gap back to this video again, or close to. Then you unshackle them from the silly one leveled spell per combat this video has, and then they just rocket that gap even further. Also it feels pretty gross when part of the optimization of martials is to just start giving them caster features...
Yes, Barbarians get +4 Str and Con, which is nice. This will definitely boost their damage, but no damage increase in base class between level 5 and 20 is quite sad. (Brutal Critical doesn't count for anything, so ignoring that) I actually forgot to get the magic initiate feat for booming blade on the rogue melee build, that would increase the damage somewhat, I'll have to run the numbers again to see how much. I've skipped subclasses, but yes, a potentially good optimization for rogues would be to have haste and ready action for a chance at two sneak attacks. I feel like Rogues should have some in-built way to do this themselves without dipping into haste, losing an action to cast, being vulnerable to losing concentration and then wiped for a turn if we do doesn't feel great, but looks great on paper for sure. I'll agree that the martials are not the MOST optimized they could be, but for the most part, they are reasonably tuned up for damage output with single class. The fact is that most tables aren't full of optimizers and my wish is that multiclassing a martial isn't the only way to gain more power. The class itself should scale well and make it a difficult choice to multiclass, not make it painful to stay in the class (I'm looking at you barbarians and rogues).
5e doesn't have any of the big (or maybe even small) tradeoffs that 1e had for casters. The biggest is probably Long Rest, where any caster can recharge their spell slots in a single nights sleep, whereas in 1e, a high level Wizard could take more like a week to get all their spells re-memorized. 5e glosses overland travel, which could easily milk a 1e caster before the party even arrived at the dungeon. 1e had "dangerous" spells -- compare old school Teleport to the 5e version -- there is no longer a chance to end up buried alive underground. 1e had "destructive" spells -- Fireball had a good chance of burning away scrolls and boiling away potions -- you don't lose Treasure in 5e. Hit Points are higher -- 1e capped Con bonus at +2, with a d4 hit die that maxed out at 9d4 (or maybe it was 10d4) -- 5e gives d6 every level, with no cap on Con bonus. And these are just the Tradeoffs I remember off the top of my head.
True, and good points! Earlier edition wizards had it rough in many ways. I don't mind softening their power curve in exchange for having them have less setbacks.
Back in the day, Wizards/Mages/Magic Users were kinda awful to play, so I understand why a lot of quality of life improvements were made. Even D&D video games like the gold- and silverbox and Baldur's Gate 1&2 simplify and remove a lot to make things more fun (and programming limitations). The problem is that martials didn't get the same treatment; if anything, martials have gotten weaker relative to the system around them than they used to be. They've been mostly stagnant on HP, while effectively losing damage output through the reduction in their relative accuracy compared to non-martial classes.
I presume most of this is without subclasses? For example, a wizard can become a Bladesinger, and get a relatively free +3-5 AC, that with mage armor and say a +2 in dex would be 13+ 2 (dex)+ 3 (int)+ 5 (shield) = 20 Also, wizards (and other casters) get absorb elements, counterspell, the ability to kite and defensive spells that are hard to quantify, like blink (if we assume resource expenditure to stay alive)
Correct, no subclasses. But I think I mentioned that casters often have a subclass option that gives the good defensive boosts, so if they want to play frontline they can be just as tanky as a martial for the most part. 100% agree with these defensive statements too. I didn't even get to those but even on sheer damage intake if they were to just sit there and take it, they are comparable to martials. It is hard to quantify kiting and how effective a certain technique will be. Wish I had a way to calculate it all! Hahahaha
Very true. If your goal is to be tanky, then you don't want to disappear because you want to take hits for the team. If your goal is to do damage with a concentration spell then use this to hide, it's alright. It definitely has it's uses!
@@burgernthemomrailer Yes, however it depends on the amount of turns you get to survive, since for each of those its a 50% extra to survive, also, you lose a turn setting it up, so if your odds of surviving where low to begin with, it might not be that valuable. In addition, it saves defensive resources yet makes others not count. So it could do a lot with the math in this case.
Good question. No, paladins use 1/3 of their spells each encounter, so they should be able to keep that damage output up for 3 encounters before being spent. The one spell per encounter is only for full casters.
@@DndUnoptimized I have another question. Does the paladin build focuses on maximising Charisma? I feel the boost to all saving throws by aura of protection should lift the line above fighter 22:06.
The Paladin build is a PAM GWM, so that eats up a lot of their ASIs after those and maxing Str, not leaving room to prioritize Cha. Aura of protection is fantastic, but in terms of damage mitigation it doesn't actually help as much as I thought. You take slightly less damage on average from Dex and Con saves, but I think probably Wis saves is the biggest impact, because usually those are save or suck, whereas Dex and Con saves are often half damage on success. But my damage is assuming all Dex/Con saves are half damage on success, which obviously isn't the case, so in the real world it'll help more than what I show here. Thanks for the good questions.
Nowadays the wizard doesn’t even have to worry about its low hit die, they can just start with Tough every time through custom background, as of Spelljammer/Bigby's/Dragonlance. Now 99% of wizards have roughly the equivalent of d10 hit die from first level. Throw on that artificer dip, and martials got nothing on them.
True, one DnD is the same. But martials also get it and an extra feat for a martial is probably more worthwhile than an extra feat for a caster since there is more scarcity. Right now it feels like power creep, but hopefully with the one DnD feats having level requirements it won't be as bad.
@@DndUnoptimized I don't like most of the onednd changes. Feels like they've ruined the classes I liked just to buff the ones I never play. I'm unlikely to move on to onednd and instead just cherry pick the rules I like to backport into 5e. I want to keep current magical secrets, smites, moon druids, etc. Onednd has killed my interest in three of my favorite classes.
@@3of6mylove well that's fair. For the most part I quite like the one DnD changes, but I get that not everyone will like the changes. It seems likely that Bard, smiting, and moon druid will all still need to see some alterations before publishing, so who knows where that will land. Bard as published is unplayable since they went back to spell lists, smites had a decent amount of negative feedback online, and moon druid will either need more changes, or the animal lists need to be vastly improved. I think moon druid is much better now though, what do you not like? HP pools?
@@DndUnoptimized Moon druids whole shtick is being nearly unkillable, and they've nerfed that specific aspect too much. For paladins, I play for the big damage, I live to hit 3 smites in one turn with PAM, and now not only can I not do that, but some rando can even counterspell it. I don't want ranged smites, or cantrips, that's not what a paladin is to me. Also perfectly okay with smites being capped at 5th level, it just makes sense since it's a half caster feature.
@@3of6mylove true, moon druids are nearly unkillable for a good while, which isn't really a great thing in my mind. I would need to run some numbers on how the new temp hp compares, but it is definitely less. I like the scaling of the new moon druid better, old moon druid seems to cap out damage wise pretty quickly, and it's a while before you get elemental forms. Smites are probably a good thing to limit to once per turn in my opinion, but counterspelling them isn't a nice change.
A big problem with martials and casters, is that martial features just do not scale If we lock in the first 3 level for every class and then randomize every non-ASI level, barring some outliers like barbarian's capstone, there's not gonna be a huge power difference for the martials Meanwhile for casters their features actually scale because spell levels scale
@@DndUnoptimized battlemaster is the most obvious example here where for level 15 you're getting 2 additional maneuvers, ehich are features balanced around being available at level 3 This makes especially no sense, when you consider that for Warlock's eldritch invocations, they were aware that they could put level restrictions on these features for stuff that would be too powerful at early levels, but for maneuvers they couldn't even think of just 1st level, 2nd level and 3rd level maneuvers, where 1st would be the stuff you get now, 2nd an echelon above that, like Stinger or Bloody Slash and 3rd something like Omnislash or Waterfowl Dance
@@DndUnoptimized in a lot of places this game feels like it was designed by different people, that were forbidden from communicating with eachother. Especially how in a lot of cases it just feels like the numbers haven't been crunched Like most egregiously prepared vs known casters
@@DndUnoptimized Wow thats actually incredibly surprising! I would have expected crossbow expert + sharpshooter fighter to have the highest dps given your limitations to casters.
@@InnerMedium well they are for some time, but martials seldom get boosts to damage (5 and 11 are the usual places), meanwhile monster HP is increasing every level, and casters get increasingly better spells every other level. Thanks for watching!
It is, but it is also a spell with guaranteed value. You only active Shield when it saves you from an attack, according to the conditions for the spell. So no wasting spellslots when an attack misses or when it would hit anyway. However, Shield isn't an issue in a vacuum, because turning 14-15 AC into 19-20 AC is very often not going to do much as the levels increase. Shield is an issue because it is too easy for spellcasters to get access to medium Armor + shield proficiency, giving them a basline AC of 18-19 without magical equipment, suddenly pushing Shield to 23-24 AC on demand. If Wizard and Sorcerer spells couldn't be cast while wearing armor (even if you pick them from Magic Initiate), Shield wouldn't really be a problem.
@@Einola_0.0 Yes, the damage output is considering only one spell per encounter, but for the examples I gave of the wizard using the Shield spell, I'm using the leftover spells. So yes, more than one spell (assuming 3 encounters/day).
Not really. Since one the rogue benefits from the spell. Second even if they class as expertise in stealth rogues at level 7 have reliable talent in one dnd now instead of level 11. Meaning that your roll is at least 10 and plus your stealth mod. Though for me it still feels wrong that the rogue can’t give advantage to stealth checks to their Allies so you don’t have to slit the party every time you want to sneak around.
So the math be at level 7 with 17 dex would be plus 11 to them. If you do nothing to increase dex by stander end array. At 18 dex the rogue gives them a plus 12 plus at least a 10. The only way hunters mark is better is because for the whole group. So other than before level 7 the Rogue will always be the best at stealth if we are not included in subclasses. Since with a rogue subclass we can make the number higher. Invisibility on the other than for stealth is a different story.
But the main difference is both those spells are concentration. Limiting the person casting on spells that can cast. Also as a rogue in 2024 you can play wood elf to get pass without trace at level 5 on top of what I mentioned. So no matter what you the rogue is always the best at stealth roll at level 7 and they gain the same benefit from pass without trace. As they do this without losing a resource. Since rogues need stealth for combat unlike every other class other than gloom stalker.
Pass without trace is fantastic and although it doesn't do it BETTER than rogue stealth, it gets you pretty much there. So I would say it kind of invalidates rogues stealth, yes.
@@DndUnoptimized Yeah as I stated in my comment the biggest problem with rogue at stealth is that they have no way to help the party with their stealth checks . Leaving to slit the party problems in campaigns unless you are playing wood elf and even then you only do it once a day for 1 hour of time in game or be force to play Arcane trickster. Like one idea I have is at level 6 they could give a passive 3 to stealth checks for your party only if they are following the rogue or within 20 feet of the rogue.
AOE is also another point of contention, martials don’t get AOE’s. So sure early on they deal more single target damage, but against multiple opponents a caster is still better. Martials honestly need some sort of AOE
That's true, the feat tax doesn't apply to fighters as much since they get several extra. The other martials will feel it worse. They can all take tough too, but it's a squeeze, not so much for a fighter.
Tbhe fact that you have to narrow the area of comparison to two points (durability and single target damage) ...since casters dominate the rest of the game (except anbti-magic aones) speaks volumes. -- Seems like Martials need Luck blades...for Wish...
Yes they dominate in most areas unfortunately, and I don't think luck blades would make up for that you need BG3 level magic items in all slots to make up for it.
@@DndUnoptimized I never finished, but yeah, the magic is limited. The games before it had the same durability as weapons because they were tomes. They were so versatile, though, because they could attack in both Melee & Ranged. The best part was that every unit had their own Spells. Sometimes, there were some overlaping common Spells, but it gave the characters more of an identity. It was especially interesting to build a character into a Mage when they weren't designed to be versus a character who was.
So I purposefully avoid conjure X spells because they are so problematic. Otherwise casters would be way higher but especially druids. Rangers would get a good bump too, but I just took them right off the table. I qualified animate objects as over powered too, but I showed numbers with and without so maybe I should have done conjure animals too but I didn't, sorry.
You'd think so, but in practice CA doesn't scale exponentially since despite doubling the number of creatures, their to hit bonus stays static (around +3 to +4). This means that as you increase in level and monsters get higher AC the individual effectiveness of each creature goes down. If your table uses flanking this can be greatly mitigated, but otherwise the DPR only increases moderately as you go up in level.
I have added conjure animals spells damage reports in a comment above. These are for the caster, but it will definitely boost ranger too. I'd say that the damage increase is not insignificant.
@DndUnoptimized I don't see whatever comment your referring to. But are you accounting for increases in average AC for level appropriate encounters? In my own experience playing a Shepard druid from 1 to 15, I was far less effective at 15 even with upcasting since we were fighting monsters with high AC and I rarely hit.
I'll repost it here. I think conjure animals can be alright depending on what you summon, but there are some egregious examples that are perfectly valid. For those who are interested in conjure animals, I've run some quick calculations summoning wolves and velociraptors. Level 5: +4 attack vs 15 AC 8 Wolves: 45.9 DPR (92% of an encounter) 8 Velociraptors: 64.7 DPR (126% of an encounter) Level 9: +4 attack vs 16 AC 16 wolves: 85.9 DPR (112% of an encounter) 16 velociraptors: 121.0 DPR (156% of an encounter) Level 13: +4 attack vs 18 AC 24 wolves: 108.7 DPR (100% of an encounter) 24 velociraptors: 152.6 DPR (138% of an encounter) Level 17: +4 attack vs 19 AC 32 wolves: 130 DPR (99% of an encounter) 33 velociraptors: 181.9 DPR (133% of an encounter) This is assuming pack tactics for advantage, which is hard to imagine them not having it considering the number of them. They don't do magical damage, but if you are a Shepherd Druid then they do. Even without magical damage, it is a force to be reckoned with and a massive clog on the battlefield unless the player is extremely skilled or the DM is. All in all I'd say it's a outlier spell and I didn't use it for calculations.
One thing that definitely needs to be assumed is magic items, late game, casters do not get any items which boost their damage, wheras martials do, so having them drop a little bit to make up for being assumed to have a +3 very rare weapon makes sense to me Personally, I think somatic components should take both of your hands to be free in order to perform, and that warcaster should let you cast spells with only 1 hand This would be like how it works in say Naruto, and I think it's a bit fairer Also the shield spell needs nerfed, animate objects needs an overhaul, and tasha's summons *die very quickly*, their durability should absolutely be taken into account, not just the caster's durability Durability is how much damage you take before your threat is mitigated, for a caster with a summon, how durable that summon is, is more important than how durable the caster is, because it is significantly easier to deal with (Monks didn't get magic items in 5e as it was, however, now they get +1, +2 +3 handwraps) Also, at high levels, martials pretty much always have advantage by synergising with casters, and can deal damage via grappling by taking advantage of the casters deadly effects Basically martials do more damage when they combo with casters, and casters do more damage when combo'd with martials There is definitely a martial-caster divide at higher levels, but, in the playtest UA, so many of the problem features have been addressed (now all we need is a fix to more problem spells, and maybe the concept of somatic components) Like, you should not be able to perform somatic components while both of your hands are occupied by weapons in my opinion, just, ever, you are a caster, not a martial, the martial should use their features while they use weapons and shields, and casters should need to actually have a staff of power in one hand and a free hand to cast spells from it, assuming no feats or whatever No show or movie or whatever has the magic user fantasy of hold a shield in one hand while reading from a spellbook in the other
Yes but it is kind of bad to have magic items be a requirement to deal decent damage. Also, I'll need to run some numbers but I don't think a martial with a +3 weapon will approach the realm of 9th level spells. I agree the play test is making good progress. We will need to wait for spells to show up before we can make a call on the divide though.
Maybe, but it's hard to account for because it is table dependent and varies wildly the types of magic items a martial will have. Magic items do affect casters as well. Maybe you can argue they help martials more than casters, but I'd say there is a reasonable argument both ways. Removing magic items on both sides isn't realistic, especially at high levels, but it is a data point that is interesting to look at. How would you include magic items into it? Maybe martials is possible to give +1 at 5, +2 at 10, +3 at 15. But what about flame tongues, or legendary items, or magic armor? For casters you can give +1 to attacks and saving throws which helps a bunch too (perhaps not as much damage as a magic weapon for a damage, but still something). Often casters get items that let them be used instead of the caster spending spell slots, (wands, staves, ring of spell storing, etc), so now the caster has more spell slots to use in the battle. It gets pretty difficult to account for that. If you have a good suggestion on how to fit it then please let me know and maybe I'll try it out to see how it fits.
Casters make better martial characters, a swords bard or bladesong wizard is just better than a fighter, the single target damage might not match but they do everything else better, an abjuration wizard is tankier than any barbarian, and they can spread that tankiness to their team. There's just no contest.
I don't like your level 1 example for a wizard, what I would do with just 1 spell is, wizard casts sleep which will almost always take out a single target at 1st level, then firebolt point blank for an auto crit, move back 30 feet. Enemy has to take 1/2 move to get up and can only reach 15 feet to make a ranged attack or dash for no attack. If it's only 1 spell why waste it on chaos bolt? (even better if you take away opponents weapons while they are sleeping)
For those who are interested in conjure animals, I've run some quick calculations summoning wolves and velociraptors.
Level 5: +4 attack vs 15 AC
8 Wolves: 45.9 DPR (92% of an encounter)
8 Velociraptors: 64.7 DPR (126% of an encounter)
Level 9: +4 attack vs 16 AC
16 wolves: 85.9 DPR (112% of an encounter)
16 velociraptors: 121.0 DPR (156% of an encounter)
Level 13: +4 attack vs 18 AC
24 wolves: 108.7 DPR (100% of an encounter)
24 velociraptors: 152.6 DPR (138% of an encounter)
Level 17: +4 attack vs 19 AC
32 wolves: 130 DPR (99% of an encounter)
32 velociraptors: 181.9 DPR (133% of an encounter)
This is assuming pack tactics for advantage, which is hard to imagine them not having it considering the number of them. They don't do magical damage, but if you are a Shepherd Druid then they do. Even without magical damage, it is a force to be reckoned with and a massive clog on the battlefield unless the player is extremely skilled or the DM is. All in all I'd say it's a outlier spell and I didn't use it for calculations.
It is absolutely an outlier spell and game breaking when abused (I mean optimised 😉) however a player doesn’t have to conjure the 8CR 1/4 they can choose the 1 CR2 or 2 CR1s.
Now when I use the spell, and it is a big favourite of mine because it is way more interesting in its effects than just a damage dealing spell, I always try and read the table and consider what impact the number of monsters I conjure will have on the fun of the other players. I’ve made the mistake of going for 8 wolves and it trivialised the encounter and was ultimately unsatisfying. A lesson learned.
Now I almost always limit the conjure to 2 level 1s or 1 level 2 so I’d love to see the calculations for 2 giant spiders and 1 giant constrictor snake which are my favourite summons.
Asking for the hard stuff eh? Alright I'll take a peek into it just for you Gareth.
Web is the best part of spider summon and that control element is extremely useful beyond straight damage. Let's say between all of our spiders, they get a restrained target 1/3 of the time. (Who knows if this is a valid guess, but it's something, and it doesn't even account for the extra damage we get by having all the other PCs attack at advantage too). Even though the target AC is going up, the number of spiders is going up too, so I'll leave it at 1/3.
Note that the con saves increase too which reduces the poison effectiveness, but it's save for half so never useless.
Level 5:
22.1 DPR (48.9%)
Level 9:
41.0 DPR (56.9%)
Level 13:
54.4 DPR (53.1%)
Level 17:
60.8 DPR (46.2%)
Definitely not as bad as wolves or velociraptors, and resistance to magical damage will reduce these numbers quite a bit (unless Shepherd Druid of course).
For giant constrictor snake, it's a much higher escape DC, so let's go with restrained half the time (again giving adv).
Level 5:
10.0 DPR (27.2%)
Level 9:
18.8 DPR (29.5%)
Level 13:
24.4 DPR (27.2%)
Level 17:
29.7 DPR (25.8%)
These numbers start to look a little poor actually especially when using a 9th level slot.
I should say that these numbers, and the other calculations I've done all take into account cantrip casting on other turns.
Also these are pretty quick calculations so don't hold me to them, but hopefully this give an idea!
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Did you calculate action surge I to your fighter baseline?
@tlemgr point buy stats, all builds starting with +3 in main stat then using ASIs to boost. If the build requires other feats we do those before stat boost. Ex. we do PAM first then GWM, then stat boost.
Of course if I show all calculations the video would be super long. But I'm sure I could have shown more details to inspire trust. What kind of info would you like to see more clearly next time?
Another thing to mention is the casters can create more hit points/bodies with their summon spells. Although not easily quantified, casters creating something to take some of the hits makes them more tanky by comparison.
Definitely true! Casters can summon creatures that have significant amounts of HP to soak up damage. I'm sure if we had a specific summoner build we could find out the HP they place on the table, but hard to say it for casters in general.
@@DndUnoptimized We do have specific summoner builds! 3 in particular: Conjuration Wizard, Shepherd Druid, and a multiclass of both, typically at level 14 Wizard and level 6 Druid to get all the HPs.
@@supersmily5811 yea those would probably be the most common summoners. Depending on what spell you use, it could bring in a ridiculous amount of HP onto the field
I think an important thing to note with Shield spell is that it only gets broken once you have armor and a shield. Turning a 15 AC to a 20 is whatever. Meanwhile, turning a 19 AC to a 24 is insanely good
Right, I could somewhat agree with this. If casters weren't allowed to cast spells in armor then I see the shield spell being less of a problem or maybe not at all.
Agreed, 15 to 20 is great, but 19 to 24 is just too good to ignore.
@@DndUnoptimized hell, even just barring the shield spell from being used in armor could do the trick! Add “while not wearing armor or using a shield” to the spell description.
You know, that could be a decent homebrew to tone it down! I feel like one DnD will make it for one attack only, and that will bring it down quite nicely as well.
@@thegloatingstorm8323 I am a tortle.
Haha that's a good point
what i think was ommited in the survivability comparison is that the exemplatory fighter is a melee combatant, which given just how more powerful 5e monsters tend to be in melee range than from distance actually means that way more damage will be coming the fighter's way whereas the caster can afford to use their movement to keep distance and stay relatively safe. Also a caster has a much easier time justifying taking the dodge action than a martial who really wants to be attacking every single turn.
also a caster dip on a martial for access to shield spell is not even in the same ballpark as an armor dip on a caster. a fighter with one wizard level can only cast shield a total of three times per day, and since their reaction can be pretty reliably weaponised via pam using it can actually reduce dpr.
also i find rogue's survivability chart to be a little dubious as the assumption of focus fire against the player would lead me to the assumption that uncanny dodge's impact would actually end up being not that great since it can only affect one attack per round.
True. It's hard to calculate for that, but the caster who stands back will definitely take a lot less hits and then when they do, they have the shield spell or silvery barbs if you are using it.
Yea, the dips aren't equal, but I wanted to address that isn't just a one way street.
For rogues survivability some guess work is required. Obviously the more hits you take the less helpful it is. I assumed 6 hits per round, so only halfing one of those. I will also say that evasion helps survivability more that I originally thought it would before running the numbers.
Just rewatched the video and one thing you said makes me want to rant a bit about design and community expectations.
"This is a level 9 spell; it is supposed to feel amazingly powerful" is a perfectly reasonable explanation/justification for a dedicated spellcaster being powerful at lvl 17. However, I think it is weird that a lot of people in the community won't apply the same logic to martials. "This is a level 17 Fighter; they're supposed to be amazing, practically superhuman" isn't a justification you see generally accepted in the case of a Fighter outperforming a Wizard in some way, for example with a homebrewed subclass.
The only martial classes that seems to be "allowed" to have truly epic abilities fitting the high fantasy nature of the 5e system are the half-casters (Paladin and Ranger), whether it is by WotC design choices or community feedback during testing. Let's use Ranger and Rogue as examples, since they fulfill a very similar niche; a martial providing utility while being geared towards stealth.
Gloom Stalker Rangers are essentially high fantasy Rogues. Umbral Sight lets them blend into the shadows, they have access to magical stealth options like Pass Without Trace and Dread Ambusher even lets them be better assassins than the actual Assassin Rogue. They're also a lot more independent than Rogues (because no Sneak Attack mechanics), which both frees them up to use more types of weapons and makes them better at being a scout. All Rangers can to a large extent do this, but Gloom Stalkers are the most blatant example in how much Rangers just do everything the Rogue does, but better.
Contrarily, almost all Rogues (except Arcane Tricksters) are limited to being pretty mundane in their abilities and, by extention, limitations. Even the "supernatural" Rogues, like Soul Blade and Phantom, are't capable of pushing much beyond their mundane limitations. Does Expertise (often just a +2 or +3 bonus in most campaigns) to a few skills matter when compared to Ranger spellcasting, combat capabilities, greater independence and outright supernatural subclasses? Not in my experience as a player or as a DM. Unless the DM takes steps to even the playing field, a Rogue just can't keep up. And by the time Reliable Talent comes into play (lvl 11), skill-utility has long since stopped being relevant (unless you're a Grappler strength Rogue, which is extremely niche). It's all about spell-utility at that stage in the game, which Rangers (and every spellcaster) do better.
Why is the game like this? I'm guessing it is because Rangers are an inherently magical class and Rogues aren't, so what WotC and the community accepts as "legitimate" features and acceptable levels of power will vary wildly between them. Being a magical class is more or less synonomous with being a stronger class in D&D. Or more accurately, being a *spellcasting* class is synonomous with being a stronger class, because supernatural features on characters without spellcasting are not given the same favoritism. For example, Rune Knights are cool, but they are balanced to be a fair alternative to Battlemasters rather than a clear improvement. Which is a problem when Battlemasters are underpowered not only compared to dedicated casters, but also compared to most Rangers and all Paladins.
"Of course Gloom Stalkers should be allowed to become invisible in the dark with no cost at level 3 (no action, no resource, no concentration); they're Rangers! Rangers have spellcasting!"
"Of course Rogues can't become invisible in the dark; they're Rogues! Rogues don't have spellcasting!"
Very well put! I agree, give martials something amazing that can compete with high level spells!
@@DndUnoptimized D&D is in need of a Tome of Battle more than ever. We need properly supernatural alternatives or subclasses for the non-caster classes to even the field.
Yea, that would be sweet! I think the problem ends up less severe for most people because of two points, most play is under level 10 where martials are still very strong, and most casters are not optimized. Picking the bad spells or not using their spells in good ways can pretty easily turn the caster into something lack luster. I've seen my share of casters that end up making a pretty small impact damage wise. And I'm fine with this. Hopefully we get balanced spells where the worst wizard is still useful and the optimized wizard is not dominating.
@@DndUnoptimized The benefit of introducing, say, a powerful supernatural subclass is that you don't need to put all the super powerful stuff at lvl 3 like the Gloom Stalker did. Using Fighters as an example, you can start with a Battlemaster-esque level of power for lvl 3 (which is mostly fine for that level), then start to give out the good stuff at lvl 7 and the really, really good stuff at lvl 10+.
Add in a few utility features on the side that aren't just skill checks so the Fighter feels less useless outside of combat and BAM, you're good to go.
Adding Fighter-exclusve feats would also be a good idea. Let's say when a Fighter gains an ASI/feat you can pick a bonus feat OR select a feature from a class feature list (so that other classes can't just multiclass to get them).
Yea, pretty much every fighter subclass is very front loaded and the features at later levels are small boosts. Echo knight, battle master, psi warrior, rune knight (though this does get access to great runes at lvl 7) are pretty front loaded. But scaling such as the rune knight damage increase at 10 and 18 is laughable.
Non-combat abilities would be fantastic too, or area of effect, or control.
I'm not certain about fighter exclusive feats, but definitely have to make sure there are a slew of good options for the fighters to take.
even aside from the insane damage that casters can put out, a lot of damage spells also have control elements built into them. Ice storm deals decent, but not crazy damage compared to other damage spells of that level but it creates difficult terrain for a round. Synaptic static does below average damage for a 5th level spell but any creatures that fail the save are subjected to a stronger form of bane, taking a bunch away from attack rolls and saving throws. These are the first two that come to my mind but there are more I'm sure. Just another advantage that casters have innately over martial classes without multiclassing or subclasses
I actually meant to say that in the video and forgot to, so glad you pointed this out!
Adding to the list off the top of my head:
- Dissonant Whispers (fear)
- Heat Metal (disadvantage/disarm)
- Thunderwave (knockback)
- Ray of Frost (reduced movement speed)
- Vicious Mockery (disadvantage)
- Chill Touch (prevent healing & regeneration)
- Eldritch Blast (knockback / pull with invocations)
- Booming Blade (dmg on movement)
- Arms of Hadar (prevents reactions)
And so many more, if one looked it up. Even cantrips often have useful control effects.
@@TheTdroid Heat metal is utterly insane--sure it doesn't do it all in one go, but it is such a useful spell
@@FarremShamist It's overpowered is what it is, and it due for a nerf. Seeing as it is forced disarm or disadvantage + damage over time with no save, the damage needs to be lowered. 2d4 would be more reasonable than 2d8.
Casters have spells that completely shut down combat encounters and make skills redundant. Example: Wall of Force and Pass Without Trace.
Very true!
Good video. I think it was very nice to see a breakdown of how casters do even when they're not expending much in the way of resources, because that is an oft used counter argument to the martial-caster gap.
Edit: I think there is a fundamental design problem at the core of D&D that will make it so that this remains a problem. Fighter and Rogue are treated as beginner classes, while stuff like Rangers and Paladins are more advanced versions of those classes. And dedicated spellcasters are the most advanced overall. That complexity translates to more resources to manage, which tend to translate to both more power and more versatility.
Thanks for the feedback!
Agreed, there is definitely increased complexity and difficulty as spells are introduced. But surely just adding more damage (like +1d8 to all attacks, or increasing sneak attack) won't make it more complex. It's so sad to see the martials get progressively weaker. Even a basic class with not many choices should still feel like it delivers, and hopefully there are options for more complexities in subclasses.
@@DndUnoptimized I agree. "Simple" and "Beginner Friendly" should not mean the same as "weak".
WotC actually intentionally set it up this way. 5e is legitimately one of the post poorly designed RPGs I've ever seen, outside of intentionally obnoxious stuff like FATAL.
Some homebrews that helped on my tables:
Martials = Fighters, Monks, Rogues and Barbarians
1) Martials gain the extra attack feature at levels 5, 9, 13 and 17.
It is beyond me why casters proceed to gain higher leveled spells, adding more damage dice to their spells, but martials only gain damage improvement one time at level 5.
Fighters also gain extra attacks at levels 11 and 20.
2) Martials get a feat every even level (aka levels 2, 4, 6...)
It just seems lame how casters can have infinite versatility and customization via spells, and martials get nothing. This kind of fixes that.
Fighters also get features at levels 3, 9 and 15.
3) At levels 7, 13 and 19, martials gain and epic boon.
These levels are when casters spike in power with spells like polymorph, forbiddance, force cage, etc. As such, martials need something to spike them as well.
I made a table with epic boons that are ok to be available at level 7, strong to be available begging at level 13, and the OP/broken ones only at level 19.
Now comparing old level 10 Paladin and Fighter:
-Paladin: Has 3rd, 2nd and 1st spell slots available, higher AC (shield)
-Fighter: ...
Damage-wise, fighter has action surge, but paladin has smites. They both attack the same amount of times. They both have same AC, but paladin can cast shield. Besides, paladin can heal and provide utility, while fighter can only bonk.
The homebrewed:
-Paladin: Has 3rd, 2nd and 1st spell slots available, higher AC (shield)
-Fighter: Has 5 more feats, attacks 1 more time, has an epic boon.
Now there's some reason to pick fighter over paladin.
Wow, that definitely swings things away from the casters. Yea it is weird that martials only get one extra attack but casters get boosts to cantrips way more.
This seems like a cool interpretation. But Fighters getting 7 attacks every turn for no cost/sacrifice is just insane.
Even with a mediocre weapon, they'll be downing most enemies, including bosses, in a couple of turns. By themselves.
I think a better amount would be 3/4 attacks for most martials and 4/5 for fighters.
I like the idea of feats every even level, to make it more interesting, there could be more feats added, especially some class and subclass exclusive ones, both mechanically and thematically tied to its class/subclass, to make each class/subclass further able to distinguish themselves from others.
You would have to massively increase the health of everything in dnd to make this work. Also if you're gonna double the others martials attacks and only give the fighter two more, you're kinda just stepping on the toes of what fighter is supposed to be. Fighter is the "attacks a lot" class, paladin and rogue are the burst classes, and the barbarian is the consistent meaty hits class. Monk, well, there's an argument to be made for more attacks, but that's just a bandaid for the greater issues of the monk.
One minor thing I can point out for the premise of the video (haven't watched all of it yet) is that I typically don't see people saying that "lower case m" martials are worthless, but rather that "upper case M" Martials are pointless. Martials being synonmous with non-casters (Fighter, Barbarian, Rogue and Monk), while martials include characters who are primarily weapon users while also having spells (Ranger, Paladin, Bladelock etc). It's a result of people being inconsistent or disagreeing about the language used.
Weapon based damage dealing is valuable, because as long as you have a magical weapon you can hurt whatever you're fighting. However, Gish* type characters (usually multiclass, but also Bladesingers, Swords/Valors Bards, Bladelocks and optimized Rangers) often provide all the damage you need from a Martial (sometimes even more), while also giving you extensive options for utility, control or other features you want.
If both a Ranger and a Fighter can kill X creature in the same number of turns, you're better off with the Ranger because they can provide powerful spells like Fog Cloud, Absorb Elements, Pass Without Trace, Silence and Spike Growth (even ignoring Conjure Animals as an extreme outlier). Abilities the Fighter just don't have an answer to. That the Fighter technically has a bit more DPR doesn't really matter unless you can leverage that to creating additional actions for the Fighter over the course of a combat. Actions that has to be more worthwhile than everything non-damage a Ranger brings to the table. And this is just comparing to Ranger, which is a mid tier class.
How large the gap is between a Gish and a caster, that's a lot harder to determine.
*I'm using "Gish" in the broad sense here, not exclusively as martial/arcane caster hybrids. Fore example, I consider the 5e Ranger a Gish, because despite using Divine spells, their core combat loop is very fitting of a Gish: Martial combat combined with control and utility magic.
There a quite a few ideas on what a gish is, but I agree the line on what a martial truly is becomes blurry.
@@DndUnoptimized Indeed, though my ultimate point was that even in encounter and campaign design that favor non-casters over fullcasters, half-casters and hybrids will always be good enough to fulfill that role while also bringing spells to the table.
The shadow cast by spells in 5e is inescapable, because they're made to be consistent independent of stat/feat investment. I don't think I've ever seen an optimized martial focused character without spellcasting features in 5e, if they're meant to be played next to spellcasters who know what they are doing.
The sad part is even if martials were able to match casters damage at higher level they would still be miles behind in... well... everything else. So for the divide to not shrink they would need to not only match casters, but actually be substantially better than casters at damage.
Yea that's true. I do think that a magical damage dealer is a great concept, but I think there needs to be some serious commitment to it, just like martials need to commit feats and class features to gaining good damage.
A DM *can* build campaigns and encounters where martial characters shine, for example by using creatures with good saving throws, condition immunities, anti-magic fields around treasure rooms etc. Requiring a spellcaster to adapt to the enemy is reasonable enough, as long as you don't go overboard and invalidate spellcasting because we still want spellcasters to have fun. And by introducing powerful weapon artifacts etc.
The problem is that Ranger and Paladin exists. They provide a lot of the benefits of spellcasting (versatility, utility, control, support) classes while still being martial characters. And they're not just martials; they're usually the *best* martials, even when they're not using their spells. WotC (and community feedback in the case of the Ranger) has shown a great deal of favoritism to the half-casters, so these classes have excellent class and subclass features. Especially the releases for Ranger after the PHB, but even a PHB Ranger is more than a match for the non-casters as soon as you start figuring out their spellcasting feature.
The way 5e and OneD&D are designed, there is basically no chance non-casters will ever be worthwhile because Paladins and Rangers are still treated as if they are pure martials. Looking at the buffed martial characters in OneD&D is cause for some hope, until you notice that Rangers and Paladins were also buffed as much, if not more. If non-casters and half-casters deal roughly the same amount of damage, non-casters are just not worthwhile even in campaigns where martials can shine.
@@TheTdroid true, it's kind of frustrating that the feature martials were supposed to get to make them cooler was weapon mastery, and half casters get it at level 1 like the rest of them (minus monk now, but they do pretty well without in the latest play test)
OMG I really want to see this for the new ONED&D info released. Thanks for making an understandable method.
Thanks! I appreciate the support. I am coming out with a video soon doing this exact thing for the new monk play test. Hope it'll be interesting to watch!
Onednd that makes the warlock a better martial than the fighter 😢 how are u going to give them two extra Attack
You don't see the fighter getting 5th and 6th level spells 😭
@ullebrammerloo74 I think we have to believe that was overtuned and will not exist as it was in onednd. That was bonkers. It was the best martial in the game as well as being a full caster
What AC and HP assumptions are you making for the encounters at each level? Also, is this assuming no magic item bonuses?
Thanks for watching! For AC I'm following the DMG pg 274. This usually ends up giving a 60-65% hit chance depending on when main ability score is boosted. For HP I calculate a deadly encounter HP pool using the method outlined in this video ua-cam.com/video/h-h7fKcnVCI/v-deo.html
It isn't perfect, but it gets a good idea of what it might look like.
No magic items, of course this would surely boost the martials, but it can easily boost the casters too. It's hard to guess what items a player may have since it varies so widely table to table.
@@DndUnoptimized how much do you think this all is in relation to the choices made in design of 5e modules for the vastly bigger part staying sub 13, and if not 11 often sub 9.
Really Solid general breakdown of the issues.
One thing I will say in response to the early part of the video, while it is true that it makes sense for AoE and Control effects to be something casters specialize in, I honestly think that AoE is too powerful of a concept to lock away from other classes. The thing about AoE is that it automatically passively scales with the size of an encounter. For instance obviously if you're fighting 1 big bad, a fireball will only do at most 8d6 to them. But if you're fighting 20 goblins, a fireball can hit every single one of them for the same amount of damage as if it were hitting just one.
This is the problem especially when comparing it to a martial with multiple attacks. They have to effectively divide up their damage between each enemy they wanna hit in order to fight a large number of enemies. But a caster can just yawn and toss out a fireball and it's equally as effective at hitting 3 people as it is at hitting 20 people.
Martials imo should get *some* access to real AoE attacks, things like the Hunter Ranger's Whirlwind Attack or Volley options should just be things that Martials can do by like level 5 or so. Casters can still have the biggest AoEs, but Martials should get at least something in that category as well to help them deal with large numbers of enemies.
And similar with control effects, martials really need more support in this category. Even if you tweaked the martials so that they were objectively tankier and did way more damage than a caster, a huge problem with them is that they just aren't that fun to play. So many martial classes have their entire gameplay boil down to "I run up and hit it with my sword" and that's pretty much it. Meanwhile a caster is getting to choose from dozens of possible spells to cast all kinds of fun stuff that can completely warp and change the flow of battle. Martials need more options if only for the sake of helping keep the game more varied and interesting for them.
Thankfully this is something that seems to be getting realized in 5.5e based on the playtest so far. The barbarian just recently got a really solid ability to effectively apply debuffs on enemies for free by sacrificing the advantage they get from Reckless attack. And the monk can finally use their Dexterity in place of Strength to do things like Grapple and Shove people. And while I do have some problems with the weapon mastery system, it is still a system that makes it so that Martail Weapon attacks are at least now akin to Cantrips by letting them apply various debuffs and whatnot to their attacks passively. So we'll see how this plays out.
This is a great analysis and I agree whole heartedly. Martials need some AOE, and some control. I'm fine if casters are the kings of it, but martials need to be able to do something.
Giving options to martials would definitely help. I think that's why people like the Rune Knight so much, because it has so many options to do cool and different things.
I'm playing a 9th level Ruin Knight in a campaign where we have no magic items. Most of the monsters we face have resistance to non-magical attacks. My character cannot even compete with the caster classes. Even if my damage wasn't being halved, the casters still out perform my damage significantly. Once I use Action Surge, I'm done.
That's really rough... DMs have to consider magic items essential for martial PCs. It can be a change of pace to have an enemy that is resistant to your attacks every now and again, but if it happens regularly and it's only you then that really sucks. I guess you have to go the tank route, grapple and prone them for your caster buddies to take out?
@DndUnoptimized The truth is that items should not be required to approach balance. The base class must be competitive!
I mean you *could* blame the designers for assuming you got a magic weapon at around level 6... but I think talking to your DM would be more sensible - and the latter could actually solve the issue as well.
Your DM should have given you a magic item to overcome that.
@@Yeldibus The designers of D&D 5e always told us that magical weapons or items of any kind are not necessary or assumed in the math they use and used to design the game.
The game should be balanced according to their design without magical items.
This was some amazing analysis and thorough work! Martials have more going for them than I thought. But even within the gracious boundary of 1 sloted spell per combat it pretty clear casters are just head and sholders above. Have you ever come up with some homebrew solutions to bridge this gap?
I'd check out some stuff by laser llama. It's some good homebrew across all classes.
Thanks, I really appreciate it! I'm terms of single target damage, (once outlier spells are off the table) martials aren't as behind as I originally thought they would be honestly. Minus the monk, but I'm coming out with a video on them next to talk about the play test 8.
Personally I haven't dabbled in home-brew but I'm sure it would be an interesting experience. Maybe once I get a really good grasp at all of the underlying reasons for the gaps I'll think about it, but I don't believe I can rightfully make a good solution at this time. My initial impression for damage is that we need to cut all outlier spells and give martials damage boosts at 11 and 17. Hopefully the lines will get flatter which is what I want to see. Definitely want to see more control options, area damage, and utility for martials.
@@DeadpoolAlithanks for the suggestion. I have no idea myself, so it's good to have a place to start if I go looking for home brew.
Only one Edition of D&D mastered (for the most part) the martial-caster divide - 4th edition. All the others without exception had this issue. Though original D&D and AD&D made caster survivability to moderate things slightly it was always known that this existed. AD&D added the strength % to help marital with power and other options were attempted to help with non-spell casting power in the first Unearthed Arcana book. I say all that to say, yeah this is well known and is more feature then bug at this point.
Agreed this is a well discussed and known part of DnD. It was interesting for me to look at how bad it is for single target, when it occurs, and how most martials scale poorly after lvl 10.
@@DndUnoptimized Until Tasha, one thing that partially mitigated this in 5e was the magic items system. The assumption of the designers is that weapon choices will keep up with tier and thus help mitigate. one negative in Tasha is that it gave DC boost items. This (imho) primarily because of small groups and as a reaction to lesser numbers of encounters (with a helping of power creep). This made things worst for the divide however.
@leodouskyron5671 Yes I agree that magic items have a role to play here. But it's hard to know what to give, and every table is so different. Do martials get items to boost their damage and casters don't? How do you run it?
@@DndUnoptimized I wish I had a perfect answer for you there. The issue is indeed table dependent and you can’t calculate a simple fix. Most DMs in this era seem to have a goal of trying to focus more on Role Play and tactical combat a lot less. Even the concept of optimizing is seen by many in terms akin to “cheating” or trying to “win”.
I think personally think you have to toss the DMG for weapons for martials. Give them +1 by lvl 5 (weapon and armor), +2 from level 9 to 12, +3 (weapon only) from 13 on. Again this does not fix the issue - the least popular edition did fix it so it is not really a beloved feature.
So, for me the very first dnd version did it best. They didn't try to balance the classes, instead each had their own niche and were needed as a party. Trying to balance each class just doesn't work in a ttrpg like it does in video games.
Long story short, yes. Casters are stronger than Martials. Thanks for the great break down!
22:15 Note: The above analysis seems to intentionally ignore higher tier survival spells that inhibit dpr or alter how the encounter would need to work. This makes sense for the purposes of his encounter % damage he was calculating, so just also keep in mind that Sorcerers have Twin Spell Polymorph and Wizards have Resilient Sphere and Wall of Force, and all full casters have many other options for skyrocketing their defense or completely taking targets out of the fight temporarily, essentially reducing the workload for the whole party in the process or allowing them to pick their fights. The survivability numbers only look close because of how he calculated it, at one spell per encounter focused on sheer offense, then assuming maybe 1 extra spell for defense. But Full Spellcasters (The ones that get 9th level spells) tend to get over 20 spell slots, and the game recommends up to ~8 encounters in a day. Meaning you can nearly spend 3 spellslots every encounter, converting Sorcery Points for more and using Arcane Recovery notwithstanding.
Correct. It is just sitting there getting smacked and trying to protect yourself. I think durability would probably be a better word for it, and I'm using that moving forward. Of course casters have amazing ways to prevent themselves from taking damage, like all of the ways you listed.
Cantrips scale pretty well against extra attack. They tend to get an additonal damage die or beam at the same time that martials get theor extra attacks.
Yes, very true! They don't scale super well, but the fact that they scale at all especially after level 5 is just cruel since several martials plateau in damage, but casters get more powerful spells, more spells in total, and their at will spells get boosts more often than the martials basic attacks.
I also think that spellcasters shouldn't be able to wear armor and cast spells. If a class or subclass gives armor proficiency, then you can cast those specific class spells while wearing armor. Fighter/artificer/hexblade dips are so common in optimisation, and it would add a lot of value to martials protecting the more vulnerable spell casters
That makes sense to me!
I think the front-loading is good, it just needs better scaling and options in combat. That being said, it feels like a lot of ability feats are things that martial classes should just be able to do and the feats should be enhancements of those abilities rather than simply granting them
Front loading is ok, as long as good features continue so that players feel rewarded for staying in a class instead of punished for it.
And yea, it would be nice if there were more cool feats that enhanced martials abilities. We have some, but they are usually a little lack luster.
That's so true.
One example of that would be the "parry stance" from Blade Mastery that gives +1 AC for a reaction. Are they telling me that a martial class needs a feat to know how to fucking stand with their melee weapon in a defensive position?
That's literally one of the most basic techniques they would learn upon starting their martial training.
Would love to see a breakdown of a damage per dmg taken metric. Experience and a glance through monster stat blocks has shown that being out of range of melee is a fantastic defense. In addition, a spell like web can effectively make dmg income =0 since nothing can get to the party while before range atks kill them.
Yea I'd love a clean way to represent that without me having a ton of arbitrary numbers thrown in, making it not very useful. Do you know of anything like that? I've heard Pack Tactics talk about that before but I've never seen anyone do calculations.
Fantastic analysis.
Please do a follow-up with the onednd playtests changes.
Thanks! You are in luck, my next video will be on the monk, comparing a PHB build with a play test 8 build. Hope it'll be interesting
Here i was waiting for wizard survivability to shoot up to infinity at 17, invulnerability is one hell of a spell
Haha yes well they do have a lot like that which would definitely help. I was just going for the stand there and get pummelled tactic to see how long we would last.
@@DndUnoptimized It's insane that they have that level of survivability when they're forcing themselves to put themselves in as much danger as martials have to deal with. I wonder how spellcaster survivability changes if we account for them being free to stay at range and can use the dodge action instead of a cantrip without compromising their damage that much. I mean, a Cleric casting Spirit Guardians and then dodging while occasionally tossing out a healing word is a pretty good core gameplay loop when you want to turn off your brain and still be an effective character.
@@TheTdroidyea, I wish I had a good way to calculate that... 😢 Let me know if you find a way
@@DndUnoptimized I have no idea either, but it is worth remembering since this is the lowball estimates for spellcasters.
Definitely!
Great video. I learned a lot.
Thanks! I did too making it
realistically cantrip damage should definitely be lowered. imo they shouldnt scale past 2 dice, with the exception of warlocks eldritch blast, which should gain extra blasts at warlock levels(to avoid 2 warlock level dips for the best cantrip bar none). id probably say eldritch blast gets 2nd blast at player level 5 like other cantrips, and bake into warllock that they get extra cantrip damage at 11 and 17 , since they are far more reliant on cantrips. id also give each class a thematic damage aoe and cc aoe they can use, the is proficiency/long rest and damage is twice per short rest. when exactly to unlock them would depend when they are balanced for, but giving a barbarian a roar to fear enemies within 30 ft if they fail a wis save against an 8+prof+con would be great, or maybe even a taunt for the iconic damage takers. rogue could get poison or smoke bombs, making enemies pass a con against their dex based dc, and give them disadvantage if the rogue does it from stealth.
I would love to see control and AOE for each class! Hopefully each in their own unique way so they don't end up feeling samey.
I'd love to see the exact details of this, the encounters you're pitting against the characters, the spells you used and the damage calcs for it
For encounters in terms of damage output, I take one creature of equal CR to character level, and another one to fill in the remaining XP gap for a deadly encounter.
I can list the caster spells here. It's mostly summon spells since the action economy for them is really good especially for single target.
For Wizard spells:
3rd: summon fey
5th: animate objects
7th: summon fiend
9th: blade of disaster
Sorcerer:
3rd: Melf's minute meteors
5th: animate objects
7th: Draconic Transformation
9th: blade of disaster
Warlock
3rd: summon fey
5th: summon aberration
7th: summon fiend
9th: blade of disaster
Cleric
3rd: spirit guardians
5th: summon celestial
7th: summon celestial
9th: summon celestial
(These are the only upcast spells on the list because cleric high level options for concentration damage spells are basically non existent)
Bard
3rd: heat metal
5th: animate objects
7th: summon fiend
9th: true polymorph (gold dragon)
Druid:
3rd: summon fey
5th: summon Draconic spirit
7th: whirlwind
9th: shape change (gold dragon)
I think part of the problem is that the fictional characters different classes are inspired by exist at different d&d levels.
Fighters and rangers in works of fantasy, such as Aragorn and Conan, are really about 5th level (iirc there was an Alexandrian article showing this mathematically), while a proper wizard is something like 15th.
Rogues are done dirty by level scaling in part because thieves in sword and sorcery fiction are not much more than ordinary people with quick wits and lust for property that is not theirs.
The only class that doesn't really fit this model is monk, which going by the model of shonen anime and wuxia movies should peak at around 10th.
That is a really great point and I mostly agree. When people think fighter they think of someone really low level, when they think of wizard they think of someone very high level.
this is a really good point, these character archetypes simply arent designed in fiction culture to be at the same level of power
This is exactly why putting an extra 2d6 or more radiant damage on a longsword +3 is not broken.
Honestly I don't know what the right call is for magic weapons, but adding progressively stronger magic items to make the martial's damage output scale with enemy HP could make up for this disparity.
That kind of ends up being a lot of work on the DM unfortunately.
@@DndUnoptimized For fighters and barbarians this should be quite easy. It's quite hard when it comes to monks. I like to allow them to equip non physical items like memories, souls and even spirits.
Meanwhile wizard wants to give wizards and sorcerers permanent resistance to weapon damage with new Blade Ward. You have ZERO reason to be hopeful sadly
They have definitely gone back and forth a bit, giving wizards a massive boost then taking it away, but spell redesign for the most part has been a pretty good balance, boosting some underperformers (jump, healing spells) and nerfing overpowered ones (guidance, conjure spells). What do you mean by permanent resistance? The new blade ward is a reaction that provides disadvantage on one incoming attack, it doesn't seem crazy powerful to me especially comparing it to the current shield spell. Maybe I'm missing something.
Just wanna stress, 4E was SO much more balanced, especially in this specific area.
Shhh, don't let them hear you.
Yes 4e was incredibly balanced and they did many things in there that I thought was good. Unfortunately, it really did feel like everything was samey. I enjoy class distinction where they feel like they have a unique way of doing things, and that isn't going to strike a perfect balance. What I'm hoping for here isn't perfect balance, but movement to a game where each class can contribute meaningfully and uniquely in the game, and contributing in different aspects is perfectly acceptable and encouraged.
@@DndUnoptimized I mean, personally this is why I like classless games (particularly Mythras). Everyone can get magic so long as they study hard and actually learn spells (which you actually need to learn rather than them just _appearing in your brain_ when you level up. Instead of trying to nerf magical ability into the ground, now it gets to just be like yeah, magic is scary. Heck the one Sorcery spell that directly deals damage, Wrack, will easily kill the vast majority of enemies you can fight _at range_ when cast for 2 MP, the Mythras equivalent of a first-level spell practically. Solution, don't give your players Wrack. Maybe there's a local cult they can dedicate themselves to and start asking the local deity to lightning bolt people to death for them. Meanwhile everyone can get folk magic that supplements their characters rather than defining them. (It helps that Mythras casters can regain MP slow as hell, so even if you do have a terrifying wizard PC they're just gonna shoot their stuff once every couple days and probably get very powerful people wanting them dead...)
I wish at some point as they were working on the 2014 or 2024 PHB someone at WotC would have gone back and looked at the martial classes in the Tome of Battle 3.5 book. I contend that these are the best martial classes that have ever been created from the stand point of damage scaling and the use of the action economy built right into the classes. The stances and maneuverers they receive have good flavor and utility as well as scaling as your character levels.
I've heard good things about it but never actually used them. Martials definitely need better options all around. Seems like the 2024 ruleset will have more options. I hope they are enough
Very nice to see it quantified at all, very interesting video. Given the amount of variables and potential situations, it seems impossible to even start calculating, but it seems like you took a good crack at it. I'm interested to see some of your math if at all possible? Like how you came to the conclusion of the numbers you did and what specific choices certain build you selected made. It would be amazing to be able to have a way to plug in subclasses and homebrew/3rd party content for such a graph, and to see what its like at other levels too. Certainly way beyond my capabilities but one can always hope!
Yes it is definitely not a complete evaluation, it's more of a data point, but I found it interesting to see. I can try to share some of it but what parts do you want to see? Usually it's attack bonus vs target AC, plus crit chance and extra crit damage. Then see how many rounds of a combat we can do X and how many rounds we do Y and calculate a total DPR for the encounter based on that.
Wish I could just plug a subclass in and check haha. It'll take some work
@@DndUnoptimized Yes, definitely interesting, and probably the most work I've ever seen someone put into such a thing. I guess I'm just curious to see what one of the data points looks like. How about fighter 17 as an example? What are the build choices and the assumptions made at that point? I figured a spreadsheet, or a graph or chart or something along those lines were used and a screenshot of that, if you did use one would be interesting to see too.
Sure, I can try to give a bit of a breakdown. Let's take the xbow fighter that I included in the summary graph but never actually talked about.
Variant human, xbow expert at level 1
Starting with 18 Dex, 14 con. (Maybe 14 was a little too low here since they are pretty SAD)
Level 4 we go sharpshooter, level 6 we max Dex. Now... I don't actually choose feats beyond
Maxing the primary stat and getting all major damage feats. So we end up with a lot of unspent feats. Same for all classes, but feels the worst for fighters. Unfortunately there aren't too many feats we can take that will boost damage significantly. Definitely some that can boost damage small amount like martial adept, the new strike of giant, etc.
We don't get many choices after this point.i
I assume one action surge per combat, using all 3 attacks for shooting them again as a bonus action.
Dunno if this helps at all. I have a monk video coming out very soon which will give a more detailed breakdown hopefully that will help clarify things too.
This is fine, thank you. Very much looking forward to the monk video!
Just got released
I had the fighter repeat its first 10 levels in its next 10 levels, granting a second fighting style and a third wind at 11, a second subclass at 13(all features and progression migrated to levels 13, 17, and 20 accordingly), a third attack at 15, and feats at 14, 16, and 18, and I snagged eloquence's silver tongue feature for their capstone and made it apply to physical attacks, and I shuffled the first 10 levels to give the player a choice every level until 9(and 19) where they get their action surges instead of indomitable(they get a combat feat at 2(and 12) so they're still an attractive dip for other martials and half casters)
I replaced rage damage with rage dice so all criticals are brutal criticals(getting another one at levels 9, 13, and 17 and going from d4s to d6s at 20), spread the primal champion to do +1/+1 at levels 5, 10, 15, and 20 so it's a consistent boon, at level 17 they can choose once per day to just not take damage from something, their capstone is a little messy so I won't go over it here
flurry of blows is not a special bonus action that adds attacks it just adds an attack per ki point, martial arts just gives a bonus action unarmed strike, deflect works on effectively everything, subclasses have ways of boosting your ki back up, most things strength related are finesse, and you get weaker versions of kensei or open hand if you choose neither, so you can still be decent with or without weapons while picking the subclass you actually want
rogues get another sneak attack dice at levels 1 and 20, the odnd cunning strikes and devious strikes because mathematically speaking wizards have to have given them something even if by accident, scout has in addition been integrated into the base class and they get extra attack at level 16 and can sneak attack with it, they can pick their saves at level 1(with limits) and what they get out of slippery mind
all four of them get a fighting style and a feature I made called sign of war(paladin and ranger get this one too) where they effectively get military sign, tracking stuff, group movement stuff, special reactions, etc.
I removed much of the casters' armor and swords bards and blade wizards get combat feats instead of extra attack
I also split feats and combat feats into two lists and casters only get access to combat feats by going swords bard 6, blade wizard 6, or multiclassing
this is a loose rundown of what I did to the base martial classes there's a bit more ofc
Wow that's a big list of changes. I like the fighter repeating the first 10 levels again, that's an interesting way of doing it and probably pretty useful too.
Sounds like a big list of changes, but will definitely help the divide! Thanks for sharing these ideas
i honestly think that a good solution for this devide is making the outliar spells more reasonable.(like when you cast shield you cant cast other leveled spells untill the end of your next turn or smth)
100% agree. And I think that's a pretty common talking point. Some spells are just crazy powerful!
Sorry for being a bit late to this but something probably worth considering is that from what I can see constant single target damage spells all have weaknesses and more of them the greater the damage. Animate objects and summon spells for example, when optimising for damage the minions have low hp so aoe effects like a dragon's breath could wipe them all out. They're also concentration so if the enemies can get damage on the caster it may end the spell short, although to be fair the tankiness aspect does kind of mitigate this.
There are spells that don't have the squishy minion issue but with their own limitations. Assuming enemies are able to move out of harmful effects or the possibility of the spell ending after one passed save it seems like as a bonus action you can only really expect as a bonus action about 1d6 damage per spell level. Which isn't bad and when paired with toll the dead gets pretty close to fighter damage I think(idk how you calculate for passed saves or missed hits I just assumed they hit/fail) it can be more if you use booming blade but that requires melee range which runs greater risk of losing concentration.
Clerics do get 1d8 per spell level without bonus action tho, they kinda seem like the favourite child
So there probably is a point of critical mass where a say wizard has enough slots and summon spells that even if one is dealt with it properly did enough work that a weaker spell can finish the job while they still have plenty of slots to spam shield or throw an occasional fireball. And even if the fighter has a magic weapon to exceed this single target damage, the fact that every other aspect of the game is caster dominated properly doesn't feel too great
Regarding the weaknesses, yes summoning many small creatures (animate small objects) will have less HP, and concentration is always a risk. Securing concentration is definitely a priority for optimizers, and it can be pretty well protected.
Non summoning spells are usually better area damage, which is fine too, things like spirit guardians or whatever.
I agree that it is very unfortunate that often the only mechanical way a martial character can contribute is through damage, and then casters can meet or exceed that too.
Summoning spells are usually not a one size fits all solution, which would've helped balanced them, if it wasn't for the sheer amount of spells casters get, can prepare and how spellcasting works with their resources. If you're fighting an enemy with strong AoE, then you can usually just use your spellslots for something else and still reliably get value. And if the enemy can't AoE, the summons usually just win you the encounter, either through sheer damage output (if the DM tries to ignore them) or through wasting so much of the enemy's action economy (if the DM tries to deal with them).
"A 20th-level Fighter is Achilles, but a 20th-level Magic-User is Zeus." - GG
Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards
Great video! Now if everyone could just stop letting the party sleep whenever and throw more than one or two encounters at them per day, as is suggested in the books, this tired argument could be put to bed.
That's definitely a good way to put balance back in. I'm hoping to make a video on it soon
I strictly manage my players resting vs encounters and I can tell you that this "fix" doesn't have the outcome a lot of people expect. It does make the martial/caster gap less prominent, but it just creates another major issue: the martial/half-caster gap. The strongest martial characters are generally Paladins, Rangers (especially Gloom Stalkers), Hexblade Warlocks or multiclasses building on Paladins or Rangers.
The problem is that Paladin, Ranger and Hexblades are also generally better at resource management than Fighters, Barbarians, Rogues and Monks. They have their high impact long rest resources (spellslots, Mystic Arcanum), solid short rest resources (Pact slots+Hexblade Curse, Channel Divinity) and free resources (Ranger subclasses, Paladin Aura).
So in any campaign where you long rest a lot, dedicated fullcasters are unbeatable. In any campaign where you long rest rarely, but short rest a lot, half-casters and Warlocks are roughly on par with fullcasters, and beat out pure martials. In campaigns where you have few long and short rests, half-casters are the most reliable unit because they typically have the best infinite use features.
But lets look at a heavily multiclassed martial character that is typically good enough to play alongside most spellcasters lvl 1-12: The Gloom Stalker 5/Assassin 3/Battlemaster 3. This martial character is great at most levels of play. It has burst, sustainability, utility, the works. It doesn't have the super duper mega giga ultra resources of a fullcaster, but to achieve that it needs to have a lot of features across all 3 replenishment rates. Longrest: Spellslots. Short rest: Superiority dice, Action Surge, Second Wind. Infinite use: Umbral Sight, Dread Ambusher, Sneak Attack, Cunning Action, Assassinate.
This is about the closest you'll get to a "pure" martial build that is actually good, and not only do you require features from 3 different classes, but you still rely on spellslots. I'm pretty sure that between the 6 martial and half-caster classes in 5e, there are enough worthwhile martial features for maybe 2 classes. It's insane how badly martials are designed.
@@TheTdroid Hoo-boy! That's alot of text! :p
If I understand you correctly your point is that martial classes short rest abilities don't compare to half-casters.
You mention Paladin, ranger and hexblade warlock as superior choices. None of these can compare with pure martials for combat prowess but yes they do get back some small amount of sometimes high impact resources however as soon as those are spent they are back to square one as a worse fighter. And fighting classes also get impactfull (thouhg sometimes not as flashy) resources back in the form of action surges, battlemaster moves and more while losing very little in way of combat effectiveness. As martials there is no contest between a fighter or barbarian and any of the three for example. The halfcasters have traded that fighting prowess for some magical aptitude and does in the end become only OK at both.
Multiclassing is a balance issue, that's a fact, and that is the reason it is an optional rule. The complete freedom it gives you comes at the cost of completely destroying game balance, and that's fine as i don't understand the need to balance, ban and nerf when it comes to a cooperative boardgame. But using an optional ruling as the motivation for the tired martial/caster divide seems weak to me.
@@tobiaslundqvist3209 The point I make is that the short rest and infinite use resources for half-casters are good enough, not that they are outright better. Not always, anyway. Some of them certainly are though, like Vow of Emnity, Aura of Protection and Umbral Sight. Reading a list of Paladin, Ranger and Hexblade feature would probably add more.
Because they are good enough, the high impact resources from spellslots ultimately makes the half-casters the superior choice. And unlike the non-casters, you can't actually run a Paladin or Ranger out of resources because they get infinite use features. A Battlemaster Fighter has enough resources for 1 alright combat turn (not combat, combat-TURN) per short rest.
There are nummerous reasons for this. 1) Fighters are nothing special before lvl 11 anyway, but by then you're competing with half-casters with so many resources that it doesn't matter anymore. 2) Rogues are just underpowered in general. 3) Barbarians have too few Rage uses at low levels, but don't scale properly at high lvls. 4) Monk, lol.
As for Warlocks... well, up to 5th lvl spells on short rest vs Fighter resources? Yeah, no. Hexblade Warlock wins every time on spells alone, let alone their subclass features (Curse+curse upgrades), because spells are just stronger than what Fighters get.
Then there is this supposed "trade-off" half-casters make. Where is this? Because Fighters don't have any special martial advantages before lvl 11, as I mentioned, and the half-casters have much better scaling (spells) and subclasses. The favoritism shown to half-casters over pure martials is obvious, if you look at how Rangers were given Gloom Stalker, which is generally stronger and more versatile than both Fighters and Rogues for just about any dex build.
@@tobiaslundqvist3209 My original response seems to have gone missing, so I'll try to repeat most of my points briefly.
1) Half-caster features are good enough to warrant usage instead of non-caster classes when combined with their access to spells, even in cases where they are not outright better.
2) Some infinte use and short rest half-caster features are obviously better than anything non-casters can provide. Umbral Sight and Aura of Protection being undisputable examples, many Channel Divinity options, Warlock spells and so on.
3) Automatically scaling spells on short rest means Hexblade always wins out compared to non-casters. There is no way Action Surge and Superiority Dice can compete with up to 5th lvl spells recharging on short rest.
4) There are no meaningful trade offs for being a half-caster. They typically deal as much or more damage with similar amounts of optimization, but they scale better into higher levels (spells) and have generally better class features, because they are often explicitly supernatural (Lay on Hands, Aura, Ranger optional features, etc.).
5) By the time you have 3 attacks on a Fighter, you're competing with 3rd lvl spells for half-casters and 6th lvl spells for fullcasters. That extra attack stopped mattering several levels before you even got it.
6) Fighter is the best non-martial and that says a lot of how awful of a place the rest of them are in. Barbarians have a niche, but they have too few uses of Rage at low levels (because long rest recharge) and don't scale properly into higher levels, more or less stagnating at lvl 5-6. Rogues and Monks are just kinda bad overall.
3:30 easy fix: Use strength for intimidation if applicable. That's even RAW. You could even use constitution for intimidation if you are creative enough.
Yea it is a possibility for RAW, but I almost never see it. I let barbarians do it at my table though
Ah yes the contest of resources where one side has hp and the other has the ability to reshape reality.
Frankly imbalanced.
Haha well said
What do you think about the new 2024 martials? Instead of giving more for them in combat, it seems that they were given more control in the battlefield and utility outside the battlefield. Does this help with bringing martials closer to wizards at later levels, in ways besides just damage?
@@mrinfinity5557 For sure! You made have seen my latest video about weapon masteries, but they bring a lot of good control options to martials. Of course, it'll never compare to the big control spells like Wall of Force, but it offers enough to feel interesting and they are pretty strong.
In terms of utility out of battle, it mostly comes in the form of skill checks, which is not the BEST kind of utility, but their skills, like Barbarians and Fighters can be really solid out of combat skill users now. Casters will have much better utility options still like Languages, Teleportation, Scouting, Spying, Illusions, etc. but at least martials can do some useful things out of combat now.
Will you be doing this again with the 2024 classes? Probably don’t include conjure minor elementals though.
Yes, once I finish going over the base classes in 2024 then I'll do this analysis again. I'll probably have to address CME in that video as well. Might get to it before then inside one of the base classes
Theoretically if the Monk uses Empty Body for advantage on every attack (gives the Invisible condition), it should be much better (not as good as casters), but it's such a late feature that it's honestly not worth the investment. Nerfed in the latest OneDND playtest, so it's not even an option anymore with the upcoming PHB.
I also personally wouldn't even consider Paladins and Rangers as martials because they still get more options via spells 🤣
I've done those calculations a monk play test 8 vs PHB video. You can find them in the description. Advantage on every hit is great, but costing an action to set up is painful, especially because you can't flurry of blows after that action either.
Yea, most people wouldn't call them martials either, but interesting to see their damage.
Are we accounting for resource attrition over the course of the battle/adventuring day?
I see we're assuming 3 fights per day. Are 9th level casters assumed to be casting the same level 5 spell 3 times in a day, for instance? Do 5th level casters have to fall back on a 2nd level spell for the 3rd encounter of the day? But 3 fights is the absolute minimum you can run and still constitute a full adventuring day. You can face anywhere from 3 to 8 encounters in a day given 5e's system. Do casters maintain the same level of output as # of encounters per day scales up?
And are we also assuming that concentration spells stay up for the full 4 rounds? Or are we depreciating the per round output for each round that concentration had to be maintained in order to get that round's output? Concentration can be broken on spells in the round they are cast, sometimes before the spell has had a chance to do anything. And to get the 4th round of output from something like Animate Objects, concentration had to be maintained for 3-4 rounds in a row.
This isn't just whiterooming either. I have seen Conjure Animals get dropped on the first turn before it even got to the wolves' turn. I have also seen casters get focused by enemies BECAUSE they were concentrating on a spell.
Good questions. I'm assuming 3 encounter per day, meaning I divide the number of spells in 3, but we use the highest level spell slot here. Once we get to 6th level spells, that ends up being a decent drop in damage if we can't use our highest slot.
For concentration, yes, assumed we never drop. Obviously that's not going to always be the case, but it's usually rare for casters to lose concentration if they are built with that in mind. Definitely can change table to table though.
So yes, these numbers aren't seeing the whole picture, and you've pointed to the appropriate places.
Seems like the martials need some of that Paladin love.
True. Sad that the reason paladins scale is because they get spells, but I'm glad at least one weapon using class scales well.
If a setup was implemented. Where when a magic-user cast a 5th level, or higher spell. The magic-user suffers 1 level of exhaustion for each spell level above 4. Clerics could have prayer and offerings required for spell levels 4 through 6. These spells are granted based on the DM discretion based on the what the deity determines is necessary. These granted spells may be used situations determined by a cleric. However, violation to that deity's tenets shall impact future requests. Cleric spell levels 7 or higher are handled like commandments. The cleric is told specific instructions in regards for casting those spells. If the cleric deviates from those instructions. The spell automatically fails, and the cleric loses it from their spell slot.
That's a pretty involved magic system. Sounds like it could be a really fun plot device for a cleric!
I've played a lot of high level 5e at this point, and it never actually ends up feeling like this in practice, to me. What ends up happening is always we're waiting for the fighter/barbarian to take their turn, at which point between a magic weapon, reckless attack, precise strike, a strength replacement belt, and whatever else they have going on, they basically never miss, and rack up hundreds of damage per turn. Often, battles are decided when the barbarian/fighter takes their first turn in the first round and burst damages one to three enemies to full dead in one turn, at which point the battle has already begun to tilt. When it's not the Barbarian/Fighter trivializing encounters, it's virtually always the monk, surprisingly. We'll regularly have boss monsters burn all three legendary resistances in the same turn against the monk, trying not to get stunned, and get stunned anyway. People talk about how Stunning Strike isn't that good, because Con saves are on average better than wisdom saves, but when you're talking about 4 or more consecutive attempts every single turn, and combining that with like, 60ish damage, versus a spellcaster forcing a single wisdom roll with a 5th level slot, if they succeed the save, that's your whole action with no damage to back it up, and you only have 2 per day, and often you're just burning one of their legendary resistances, and even if they fail and you actually impose the condition, it takes your concentration, so you can't do it to anyone else.
I am playing a Druid, and have had Maelstrom memorized in every single fight so far, and have not once had the opportunity to cast it, because the actual conditions of the battlefields we find ourselves in have always prevented it from being useful. While on paper it's a gobsmackingly horrendous spell, using it in actual play has ended up being kind of tricky. I'm using Shapechange to turn into dragons now, and still the martials are outperforming me.
Thanks for that data point! Sounds like your DM does a great job of bringing balance to it. I don't think DnD is unplayable at high levels. I think it's still great but especially for arcane casters (wizards most of all) they end up having game breaking options that they must avoid otherwise things become trivial. Ie, wish and simulacrum, and so many others.
Hopefully if DMs watch this they will realize that martials need magic items, especially strong ones at high levels.
I see a lot about stunning strike either hating or loving it. I do think it is powerful, and stunning the enemy for a legendary resistance pop is definitely worthwhile. Even with a +13 con save there is a 25% chance of getting it off, so it's not wildly impossible to land. I do think damage wise, monks underperform, but they turn into stun monkeys at later levels which is still useful. I like this new monk where you stun less often but do more damage.
Hopefully you don't feel useless in combat, I'm not vouching for martials to make casters feel terrible in combat. I hope everyone can contribute meaningfully.
@@DndUnoptimized Yeah, the ways I contribute tend to be in weird and esoteric things, like using Gust of Wind to push enemies out of or into allied threatened areas, or using Stone Shape to make a door in a stone wall, so we can pursue fleeing ethereal or gaseous form enemies. For me, Pass Without Trace is also really good because my DM is a weirdly big stickler for the exact conditions of triggering surprise, which he interprets as basically "every NPC gets to active roll perception against every PC's active stealth roll, if any NPC detects any PC, no NPC gets the surprised condition." which means our fighter/ assassin rogue would essentially never get his bonus damage, considering the Paladin with his +0 stealth roll, if I didn't add +10 to it for him. I honestly think this is mostly the DM ruling unfairly in a way the spell allows us to circumvent to allow his awesome class feature to function.
I'm having FUN turning into a dragon, it's just my average DPR is like, 30? 40, maybe? And that's basically just one hit for any of the martials. I end up choosing Brass dragon for the sleep breath, mostly. I could summon wolves, but a lot of the enemies can fly, or have damage auras or fear auras or petrification gazes that would damage or disable the wolves automatically if they approach or attack them, or we start combat on raised platforms and have to jump or fly over a gap to get to our enemies, or the enemies use sleet storm to break our spellcasters' concentrations, or they have blur and a 19 AC making a wolf miss like, 70% of the time even with pack tactics, but a fighter type with +16 to hit will still hit on almost anything but a natural 1, considering precise strike.
I just see a lot of discourse surrounding 5e D&D be like, "Considering a fight lasts 4 rounds, and 32 wolves' DPR adds up to 130, martials are useless." when like, yeah, I've almost never seen my action on round 3, because the Fighters have all killed everything by their 3rd action, and they usually beat me on initiative.
Let me put it this way. One time, we had the opportunity to press on to another combat immediately, or take a short rest, after I had cast Shapechange during the previous battle, but the monk only had 6 ki points left. We unanimously voted to take the short rest. Even though he would have been able to stun spam his first round of the next combat, we STILL thought restoring him to full working order would be better in the long run for our resource management and chances of success than my continuing use of a 9th level spell.
Yea, it seems like the martials in your game really bring the beatdown and that's awesome.
I've never seen conjure animals at high levels, so I'll have to take your word for it. Something like a damage aura or flying would totally destroy them. And flying is pretty common at high levels.
Do you feel like druid 9th level spells are powerful? Apparently not too bad. I should note that the druid at 17 in my graph was shape shifting into a dragon as well and it did decent damage but not crazy by any means.
@@DndUnoptimized I definitely credit my DM giving access to a broad and deep list of magic items for the PCs as why the martial types are doing so well. The way we see it, if there are 20 levels, and there are a range of strength belts from 21 to 29, even if the 29 belts are meant only for level 20 characters, when else would you be using the ones at 25 and 27 other than at levels 14-18? People also have +3 weapons, +2 armors, and rings and cloaks of protection and luckstones if they have the attunement slots for them from the same line of thinking. Our highly mobile and complicated battlefields have led to PCs prioritizing getting loot like winged boots or capes of the montebank into the hands of the melee fighters. We also do use feats, and of course the fighter/barbarian is shoehorned into the PAM/GWM/Sentinel build, which seems to be the only way to go for melee, which is unfortunate.
Druids don't have a lot of 9th level spells, and since very few of their spells have attack rolls, and my AC isn't very good (limited to Hide and Leather means I'm in dead last relative to the rest of the party's AC), so I'm not confident Foresight would stop me from getting hit by a person targeting my AC even with it on, so Shapechange kind of feels like the only real option. I could cast Foresight on another party member, but we have issues with player attendance because we're all in our late 30s and have sponsibileries, so if I did that, it could be wasted in important combats. So I selfishly want to use Shapechange on myself.
I have been struggling to find a place to cast Maelstrom, as I mentioned, but also Reverse Gravity. In my head, I leave a whole encounter floating helplessly as we pick them off one by one, but somehow I only end up able to center it over like, half or less the total number of enemies on the battlefield, and of those enemies, often at least one can fly, and the spell description doesn't seem to suggest any ongoing disadvantage or slowing effect for the targets who succeed their save, so sometimes they just grab onto something to avoid falling up and just move out of the area on their turn. So it ends up being a level 7 spell that often disables 1-2 targets. I would be better off using Plane Shift offensively. I stopped memorizing it after a while. The only spell that feels legitimately OP on my whole list is Sunburst, and it's extremely hard not to catch allies in the area, which can make it hard to utilize to its fullest, but when it pops off, oh man, that's so cool.
@@Jerthaniswhoa, I've never seen magic items get given out so freely. Kudos to your DM on making encounters challenging still.
I've never played a druid and part of the reason is because the spells just don't appear to have as big a bang for buck as other casters. What you are saying here seems to confirm that, but druid utility does seem quite useful. Play test 8 has already introduced new spells and ways of playing druid that makes me much more interested.
And yea, scheduling is a nightmare sometimes, especially as you get older and have kids... Good luck to us all.
great content, keep it up!
Thanks! I appreciate it
With a wizard, I actually prefer a one level dip in Cleric (I usually keep WIs at 13-14 for wizards) which helps a bit more than a one level dip in fighter, since you don’t lose spell slot progression, get more cantrips, and get access to some pretty nice early spells (Bless on a Wizard early before any other concentration spells go brrrrrr) That and several cleric subclasses give heavy armor proficiency means that you could have an insanely tanky Wizard, but of course the medium armor and shield route is always option and still good. Combine that with the Level 18 feature wizards get which could allow them to spam Shield and Misty Step for no Slot cost, and you have a rather tanky caster.
Yea, that's definitely a good option too. I think a lot of wizards would do fighter or artificer for the Con saves, but if you have other ways to secure concentration or are more worried about Wis saves then cleric is definitely a solid choice!
@@DndUnoptimized also fair. I prefer to almost always pick at least one of War Caster or Resilient Con for any caster (because some DMs are really annoying about what blocks somatic components with some ruling that *held Foci* do it, and Resilient Con speaks for itself) so that tends to cover me for Concentration checks lol.
Interestingly enough youve made optimised martials to reflect their dpr. Have you done the same for casters? Are the clerics going vhuman with telekinetic and doing double apriti guardians every turn?
Everyone is custom lineage here, but casters are relatively unoptimized, no spirit guardians multi hit build here, but that definitely is a good one. It's kind of a "martials try their hardest, and casters don't really try that hard" comparison.
that makes it even worse. I really enjoy your channel, you have a unique perspective on things and I look forward to viewing more of your stuff@@DndUnoptimized
@@haiclips3358 thanks ❤️ I hope I'll be able to make interesting content for ya!
soo when you talk about Monk DPR, especially Gunk, you need to take into account that more ki directly turns into more damage, thanks to focused aim turning misses into hits, so more ki= more hits.
True! I used up all of our ki on stunning strike, but focused aim with gunk is definitely the way to go
How does steel wind strike work as a 5th level spell option or are we only interested in single target damage?
@@Gafizal1 this one is just for single target damage. For AOE casters are certainly best, so I was just doing single target here
This is why I always play casters lol great breakdown
Thanks!
Did you take into consideration +1/2/3 magic items like shields, armor and weapons? Wondering if that affects the curve or if it’s already included
Unfortunately not. I'm highly considering doing another one with different assumptions about magic items. Giving magic items to both sides would bring them both up, but I'll have to run some numbers with specifics to see where they will land.
@@DndUnoptimized It would be extremely helpful for DMs to have a measurable metric of not only when classes drop off but also the effect magic items have on mitigating it.
A look into what each class looks like after multiple encounters before a long rest would possibly be another very useful piece of kit
@@DndUnoptimized I had to take a look to refresh my memory, so it took a bit, but on page 135 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide there is a magic item rarity chart that describes about when to give out items of various rarities; uncommon (+1) can be available from Levels 1-5, rare (+2) starting at level 5, right about where Martials are just peaking. I find that to be an interesting coincidence. Very rare (+3) starting at 11th, and legendary starting at 17th.
It would be very interesting to see where Martials peak at +1 and +2, and very interesting if it happens to line up with this.
Good find! Yea, if/when I do it I'll assume +1 at 5, +2 at 9, +3 at 13, and legendary at 17. Maybe I'll compare if only the martials have them, and if both have them.
@@DndUnoptimized It definitely was a good idea to not make the assumption that people would be getting the magic items though--there are many games where you simply do not receive them.
So, from the start
Control - caster 90/10 martial
AoE - caster 100
Support - caster 90/10 martial
Utility - caster 60/40 martial
Social - caster 80/20 martial
So, the HP pool is oversimplification of combat. It should work if you adjust HP pools with regards to AC of monsters.
Single target sustain - caster 90/10 martial
Thanks for watching! I'm not sure I'd give those ratios (I haven't put thought into a rating), but I would definitely swing them in the caster's favour.
You are definitely correct about increasing monsters AC as levels go up.
I didn't want to get too deep into the damage percentage calculation, but these calculations do increase the monster AC based on the DMG's guide as you are suggesting.
Definetly agree with most ratios, and would maybe even say that casters might be 80/20 for utility, since the only martial that provides anything are Rogues, and only through good skill checks. Overall casters are jsut able to do MANY more things with their spells than any martial options.
The only point I might disagree on is Single target sustained damage. The example in the video for martials are not super optimized, while the caster examples relly on "outlier spells" (broken spells that have too much power for their cost). I do find it annoying that martials have to even go through the lengths of thinking real hard about opmitization while casters can just pick broken spells, but I do think that martials have a good chance of pulling out ahead here. It's at least a 50/50.
@@someusername9591 it is frustrating that casters have access to so many powerful spells, and several completely broken ones. I hope the next version is able to fix spell balance.
I did try to avoid very broken spells in the caster comparison (no conjure animals or what not). I show animate objects but agree it is broken and then show it with a Tasha's summon instead. I don't believe the community thinks Tasha's summons are broken, but they are strong for sure. Blade of disaster is powerful but doesn't feel like an outlier in 9th level spells.
Shield needs a redesign too, but I did use it here for survivability.
I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on clean optimized martials I could use here as a better example. Of course picking up a subclass would very likely help, or multicasting, but I'm avoiding those here.
Ya subclass gets way too muddy. Especially with Twilight cleric and chronologist wizard and Shepard druid stomping the best martial sub classes.
Good analysis! However I would note that the ability of a wizard to deal 28 damage on average with a lightning bolt against 3 foes might not be as great as we think. Many monsters have elemental damage resistance, and it is often more useful to focus on one monster at a time because that alters the action economy in the party’s favor. The greater burst damage potential of the martial classes is, I suspect, an inadvertent balance to the classes.
That's fair, targeting one enemy at the time is a better strategy so AOE could oppose that, but it is still extremely useful. Obviously the best example would be a room full of weak enemies that a fireball would completely kill, but would require a full turn of attacks from the fighter. Even if it doesn't kill them all, it could bring them low enough that the fighter needs one hit to take it out, and so could take out 2-3 on its turn.
Fighters and paladins are good at burst (and gloom stalker), but the other martials are more consistent damage. So the average mage could blow a high level slot on a scorching ray or whatever to burst more. Plus the sad fact that action surge helps casters more than fighters.
I'd say a martial optimized for burst damage (but this wouldn't be the average martial) would probably be around the same effectiveness as a caster if not more, but I have no facts to back this up. Maybe taking a look at the top nova builds from D4 deep dive would be a good reference point.
another thing casters have over martials in terms of damage is power output regulation, that is if the encounter is too easy they can just use cantrips all the time, if it's the final boss they can blow up all their spell slots by casting every turn, martials can't do the same thing as effectively, sure there things like action surge and battlemaster maneuvers but their power spikes won't be as high as using high level spells, martials in general tend to have a consistent power output, you are doing roughly the same thing regardless of how easy or how tough an encounter is, so your basically at the mercy of how much HP the enemy has since you can't boost your damage by a significant degree according to the difficulty of encounter.
That's true, they can choose when to let it all out and nova, or let things take longer and conserve more resources. Martials lack this for the most part
I always find these type of intellectual exercises interesting to watch but at the end of the day that is all they are. A player can have just as much fun at the table playing a martial character or a spell caster because fun cannot be quantified or classified.
Personally I have an unusual approach to gaming be it war games or roll playing games. Most people seem to play to win at all costs. The easier it is to win the better. For me that approach quickly becomes unsatisfactory. I find that the more challenging it is to succeed the more rewarding it is when you do succeed. Therefore I always find myself putting obstacles in front of me that makes success more difficult to achieve. It’s the difference in satisfaction you get when you finish a ten piece jigsaw as opposed to a 1000 piece jigsaw.
So casters are more powerful than martials. Does that make them less rewarding to play? My answer is possibly, it depends on the player. Consider the following example:
A wizard can cast a spell to fly up to the top of the mountain. The fighter must climb. He must succeed on strength checks, find ways to cross ravines, set up safeguards against falling such as pitons hammered into the mountainside with ropes attached. Which player has the most ‘fun’ in the above scenario? The answer of course is it could be either, both, or none depending on the players involved.
What’s my point? It’s this, just because spell casters are more powerful than martials does not mean you as a player will have more fun at the table. Your fun an thus the choices you make as a player is more closely linked to how you approach the game rather than the numbers on your character sheet.
When I play spell casters I deliberately take steps to avoid the powerful options preferring to find creative ways to make the less optimised choices work.
I am currently playing in 2 campaigns. One as a divination wizard, the other as a shepherd Druid. My wizard is old, short sighted and needs the support of a walking stick. I have chosen to give him disadvantage on perception checks, a speed of 20, and of course he’s human so no darkvision. His spells include grease, phantasmal force and levitate. My Druid when he wild-shapes does not incorporate his gear into his animal form. His clothes either rip apart Hulk-style or fall into a heap on the floor depending on the size and shape of the form he transforms into. The result being he spends a good deal of time running about naked trying to retrieve his gear. He takes cure wounds instead of healing word and of course is human so no darkvision.
Sorry for a far too long and rambling post just to say interesting video, but in the end, meaningless to all but the optimisers of the world. I take it from the name of your channel you are not an optimiser. 😊
I could not agree more with you. It is 100% about the fun you have and I love martials.
Honestly, I don't know whether to categorize myself as an optimizer or not, but my plan in creating this channel is to make character builds close to what you are describing. Take an idea that is suboptimal and make it viable, or to create a character with a weakness and try to overcome it. For example I'm working on a build that is a quadriplegic and want to see how much that can be overcome. Part of the reason is because I can't help but try to make my characters as powerful as possible, but I think it ends up making characters that are way more powerful than the other players, which is not really my intention. So if I place barriers in front on my character, then I can make them as powerful as possible without overshadowing others and get a really cool way to integrate the mechanics with my storytelling.
I have two videos of build out currently that are somewhere in this vein. Throwing build is suboptimal, and the other is playing with a child on your back, which is a fun concept but actually turned out not to be as much of a handicap as I originally expected.
Long story short, thanks for the comment and I agree!
Was the rogues damage done with XBE? Getting a second chance to sneak attack helps them out a ton I feel like.
Yes I had two rogues, the one with xbow expert took into account two chances of getting one sneak attack off. It definitely helps
You lost me at 14:20, but just as I was about to close the video, you made that comeback at 14:25! :D
Assuming that there is a sane DM who prevents certain exlploits makes the data much more useful.
One thing that still irks me about the way you calculate caster damage, is how you just expect the summon to survive the whole time. Realistically, that summon would get 1 round of attacking and then die from enemy damage (which may or may not make it MORE effective, since the damage prevented by its tanking could be equated to damage dealt).
EDIT: The comparison at 23:00 seems pretty wonky. I suppose you assume the wizard has 17 INT form point buy, gets a half-feat at level 1, maxes INT at level 4 and grabs tough at 8, right? That would mean taking none of the feats they need to protect their concentration (resilient/lucky/warcaster). Truthfully, a wizard who optimizes offense needs to grab one of those feats before being free to take tough at level 12.
I suppose the fighter needs PAM and GWM to maximize damage, right? So that takes up thier level 1 and 4 feats. Then they can grab Heavy armor master to push STR to 18 at level 6 and max out STR at 8. Just like the wizard, they can grab tough at level 12.
Additionally, using shield every time you can is quite the stipulation. Using mage armor, your highest level spell for damage and ~4x shield per combat will eat up your resources in no time.
Finally, after tanking with all of our HP during combat, the wizard can't heal back up the way the fighter can, due to their worse HD and lack of second wind. If we short rest after each combat, the fighter will be a lot tankier than the wizard in later fights, who will now be both on low HP and will need 2nd and 3rd level slots to keep shield up.
As for multiclassing for an armor proficiency dip - that's once again optional rules territory that's up for the DM to invite into their game - or not.
Very true, there is a chance you lose concentration or it dies. Tasha's summons are good at outputting damage but aren't as good at soaking it, so that needs to be taken into account when deciding what spell to use and how to use them effectively in battle.
Of course, even soaking up several turns of attacks is a pretty good use, but obviously less straight damage than lasting the full battle.
Do you think they can fix this by tackling a few outliers spells?
I would say that tackling the outlier spells is a must. The question is, what qualifies as an outlier spell? There are many we can ALL agree on hopefully, but there will be many we don't. I want casters to be able to do great damage too, so I don't want to nerf them to the ground, but I think there needs to be commitment from the casters that focuses their abilities on damage in order to do great single target damage and compete with martials if that's the route they want.
@@DndUnoptimized if they want to carve the single target damage as a niche for materials they could do that by nerfing just the concentration spells with damage.
In this way, casters can surpass the damage of materials with single-use spells like disintegrate but can't do this every round all day.
Yes, I agree here! And then class or subclass features can boost those spells so they do more damage and the other casters get to do just average damage with them.
This becomes even worse when you remove it from the white room. Melee Martials suffer a LOT from having to get into melee, losing many rounds of their optimal damage and instead taking just one or two weaker ranged attacks at best, and that's if they're not using a shield, or you're using homebrew fixes like donning/doffing a shield once for free at the start of each round.
A better comparison might be to make a gauntlet from a live play of an official D&D module and account for the enemies and positions. It should also account for the kind of loot available by those levels. That would be a lot of work to set up, but once done could boil down to things like "amount of movement needed per turn to stay in melee".
This comparison really requires subclasses to be accounted for. I would argue that martials have a lot more of their power and features shifted to their subclass than casters do.
Comparisons above Tier 1 should account for magic items. If you're playing stock 5e and your martials don't have weapons that deal extra damage on a hit and/or have cool effects by Tier 2, you're probably doing something wrong as a DM. The reason a fighter can be relevant at higher levels is exclusively because they're not swinging a 2d6+15 3-7 times per turn at level 11+ depending on Great Weapon Master and Action Surge. They're swinging something more like a 4d6+17, 3-7 times per turn at level 11+, because by mid Tier 2 they should have a +2 Flame Tongue or something else strong, evocative, and memorable. GWM or Sharpshooter -5/+10 lowers your accuracy, but still greatly boosts your DPR, and is compensated for even better by sources of Advantage or boosts to accuracy like Bless or Emboldening Bond.
Important note from real play: Casters will usually want to either take War Caster by level 4-9 to allow for wielding a shield and a magic staff while still casting (as well as the other frankly overloaded benefits), or drop their shield to do so.
Half-casters are not martials. Even if they get extra attack. They're half-casters. You can, at best, argue that the first level of Paladin is martial. lol
23:00 You don't even have to multiclass. You can get armor proficiency either from species, or from feats. Also, if Artificer isn't allowed, you can dip Cleric, which is great since you generally never want a low Wisdom score anyway, and they get their subclass at level 1. Any Charisma caster loves a 2 level dip in Hexblade Warlock for short rest spell slots AND Eldritch Blast + Agonizing Blast + Repelling Blast. Suddenly the Bard's not going to want to pick their nose while their summon fights.
The problem becomes even worse when you start optimizing, as casters can often do equivalent OR BETTER damage at low levels to martial characters, with few exceptions. This is often thanks to outliers like Magic Stone and Eldritch Blast. That said, there are one or two extremely hyper-optimized half caster builds that can match up point for point with optimized casters. Notably, the benefit brought by having a pure striker Gloomstalker multiclass and an optimized Paladin for Aura of Protection who then multiclasses out later. Clerics can easily be straight-class front-liners as well, with Spirit Guardians and amazing AC. A martial grappling build can also be extremely potent IF combined with a team of casters who focus on dragging enemies in and out of persistent area damage spells for extra damage. That's a situation where something like a Rune Knight could really show off. Even at low levels, Create Bonfire can suddenly become compelling and powerful.
Some suggested fixes: My favorite solution is that first, casters should not be able to access the spell slots or cast spells from a class that does not provide proficiency for the armor they're wearing. This almost immediately solves most of the optimization that causes casters to vastly overshadow martials by outdamaging them while ALSO being much tougher to kill thanks to Shield and Absorb Elements. I would also suggest downgrading any full caster class/subclass that gets medium armor to light armor instead. Half casters can keep medium/heavy. Full casters should be needing to spend resources on protection and evasion so they don't go down. Remove Silvery Barbs entirely. Shield should be reduced to +2 AC and only if you're not already benefiting from a shield. Remove summon spells entirely, they're exclusively too strong and delay the gameplay. Nerf damage on some standouts like Fireball, Spirit Guardians, limit max damage per turn on spells like Spike Growth, limit affected targets on control spells like Web (a great option is to remove squares whenever they're traversed after casting) and Hypnotic Pattern. Perhaps by the spellcasting modifier. I've also seen some good ideas like a Parry reaction for martials, allowing them to use their reaction to gain +2 AC as if using a shield, when not using a shield. Rework Wild Shape temp HP, perhaps similar to how OneD&D has it in the current playtest. Handful of other fixes... but you can get it into a pretty decent state where casters are not OP but still incredibly relevant and desirable, and martials can stay relevant throughout most or all tiers.
Wow a great picture here. You've clearly got a good handle on this issue.
I think you are right that martial subclasses are more likely to add damage than caster ones, depends on the class though, and there are quite a good percentage of martial subclasses that don't add any damage. I could go with the "Default" subclass for each class, but I don't think that would add too much since the "Default" ones are usually kind of weak.
Forced movement, especially grappling is quite good. I just made a Control Per Round (CPR) video showing grappling and forced movement. I'm sure you'd have interesting insights there. This definitely depends on group synergy to work, so almost impossible to account for.
As for magic weapons, I think I'll have to do another set of comparisons making some assumptions about the types of magic items they get, then compare casters and martials. Depending on the strength of the magic item it could even things out somewhat. But if that was the design intent (and I think it is), then it should say that somewhere, and state that the balance is assuming some level of magic item by certain points.
I should point out that I do use sharpshooter/gwm here too. It is a big help, especially when they get archery fighting style, or some advantage.
Balance suggestions are interesting, and all sound pretty fair to me. Thanks for the feedback and info!
I'm very surpised that summon celestial is a superior upcast vs Spirit guardians... is this an action economy effect or is it the result of assumptions as to number of foes near you on the battlefield?
It's purely because we are evaluating single target damage here. Spirit guardians is fantastic, but not as good as summon celestial for one enemy.
Before even going into the video my biggest issue is flavor :(. The feats/ outside of combat ability Martials get are so lame. Especially intimidation like you juat mentioned lol
Yea, intimidation feels the worst especially when you are a barbarian. PHB does say that you could use Str intimidation checks, but I've never seen people actually do that. One DnD is helping there at least, whew! Make barbarians scary again!
Don't nerv, buff.
What do you think about giving all martial classes the Martial Adept feat for free once they have 3 martial levels, half caster levels count half?
Am interesting idea. It might give martials more options. I know a lot of people thought battlemaster maneuvers should be in the base class so this would kind of accomplish that. Weapon masteries in One DnD kind of do the same thing too.
Which monsters and how much you count on to do the math, i want test something to help martials.
Monsters from a spread of all the books. What do you mean how do I count the math? I have a video on calculating good damage that goes through it more. That one might help
This feels like you haven't taken fighters action surge into account
I do one action surge per combat in fighter calculations
What percentage of incoming damage was from attacks vs Dex and Con saves?
I evaluated at CRs 5, 9, 13, and 17. Here are the numbers. As levels go higher there are less monsters, so Dragons end up taking up a larger percentage of the damage.
Level 5
AC damage 82.59%
Con Damage 9.76%
Dex damage 7.65%
Level 9
AC damage 80.82%
Con Damage 11.94%
Dex damage 7.24%
Level 13
AC damage 69.62%
Con damage 11.47%
Dex damage 18.91%
Level 17
AC damage 74.64%
Con damage 6.95%
Dex damage 18.42%
@@DndUnoptimized Thank you! Very good info, and an overall good way of capturing some of the complexity of incoming damage. Damage types, target selection, damage vector selection, and sequencing can all affect incoming damage and the ability to mitigate it. I don't really thing there's a good way to model all of that stuff though, especially when some of it comes down to DM decision making.
For example, an adult dragon can blast you with its breath weapon and hit you with multiple tail attacks in the same round. Or you might be facing some enemies that rely on attacks and others who rely on saves. And some enemies can choose whether or not they want to use an attack or subject you to a saving throw. Some damage types can be absorbed, while other's bypass Absorb Elements completely.
Sure. It will vary on how you add up the damages. I did also calculate damage type percentages at these levels too, so resistance can be calculated. Of course it is all just an exercise. Character placement and play style is closely tied to damage taken.
While it would be way too late to lessen the power of spells since the ones released in later books have been scaled according to the spells released in the PHB, I think that is what should have happened. Reducing things like range, duration, maybe even damage, or making concentration more difficult would even out the divide and make certain spells and casters less busted. We're way past that point though, and the only option seems to be to make martials OP as well, which sounds like a nightmare for the DM to balance.
A surprising number of broken spells come from the PHB. I'd say on average, the newer spells are more powerful, so I agree with you, but usually less broken (minus a few exceptions). Maybe a fresh slate with less problematic spells with the new ruleset will be a big help!
13:16 Is witch bolt not a 1st-level concentration spell that deals damage?
True, I could have used it but likely won't be able to use it for 4 rounds straight either because we miss on round one, the enemy dies early, or they move out of range. So it's better to launch one attack in my opinion.
A thing have to be considered are magic items tho. They are much more easy to find and use items for martial class.I don't know the damage, but a fighter with a vorpal sword is going to be nuts
Definitely. I think I'll have to make a video doing the same here but with different magic item options
Yes and no.
A lot of items are best used by characters with a martial playstyle, but almost none of them need you to be a Fighter, Rogue etc. Paladin, Ranger, Bladelocks, Valor/Swords Bards and Bladesingers can often use these items just as well, while also providing powerful spells to the party.
In addition to this, most of the *really* powerful magic items require you to have the spellcasting feature (sometimes also a specific class) to attune to them. Like the Staff of the Magi. But even less insane items often favor spellcasters, like Wands of Web/Lightning, Staff of Fire etc.
Just waiting for the cleric part, Spiritual Gaurdians is insane as a 5th level
Spirit guardians is really good, but since the graphs are looking at single target damage only it isn't AS good from that perspective.
@@DndUnoptimized By your example of animate object being single target, Spirit Gaurdians is also a single target. The single target is the caster. It just has a passive damage to an area that follows the caster.
What I mean by single target damage is that I just want to see how much damage the caster can deal to one enemy. Spirit guardians is an AOE, so it'll deal 3d8 to many creatures, but 3d8 to one creature doesn't look as good when you take out the AOE portion.
Anyway, it is a fantastic spell, and one you can create excellent builds around, no doubt about that, just not AS good if you are fighting just one person obviously.
The social spells, (Charm Person, Suggestion, Detect Thoughts, Modify Memory etc) are actually not very usable in social situations due to their obvious components. You'd have to have Subtle Spell Metamagic or in some cases only be an Aberrant Mind Sorcerer if you don't want people to be tipped off that you are casting spells. For example, casting Charm Person on the king in front of his court will just get you killed.
Also there is something to be said for a Rogue being able to solve utility problems for zero resource cost. Why blow a 2nd level spell on something that the Rogue can do for free?
I don't know about social spells being useless without subtle spell. Most tables I've seen will either hand wave it, or call for a stealth/sleight of hand check to hide the somatic component of whatever. Even if they don't , things like modify memory can completely change the rules I'm sure there are higher levels of scrutiny when meeting a king though, you are right.
But also, charisma is more likely to be high on casters.
Yea martials can usually solve problems without resource expenditure, but often the right spell could just do it better. Of course this means the caster needs to have the right one prepared, which is the hard part in my opinion.
Easy solution. Play with grity realism resting rule plus, give martials exploding dice for weapon damage.
Gritty realism would do a ton for sure. Exploding dice is about a 0.5 damage increase, so I don't see that helping. It'll make rolls more exciting though!
Not to ITYS as a PF2E player, but the fact that damage optimization isn't really accounted for in the way most Martials are designed in 5e/1DnD, or how the squishiness of casters is highly subjective, I think there are some pretty simple ways to narrow these gaps. Firstly, Martial weapon damage should scale similarly to the Monk's Martial Arts damage, especially for classes that specialize in accurate attacks with lighter weaponry (Rangers, Rogues, Duelist/Archery Fighters). Secondly, we need to shorten and make Short Rests more tactically essential, ideally by adding cool-down mechanics to spells like Shield (i.e.: make Shield last until an attack roll bypasses it, or it blocks a Force damage Spell, then force the caster to take a Short Rest between castings). Lastly, the game needs to do a better job in accounting for and providing guidance for using magical items in the game, as the Martials need access to those items and effects to keep pace with casters most of the time, despite the developers claiming that Magic items aren't necessary to be able to play.
Seems like PF is a better balanced game for sure! I haven't played it much unfortunately, but hopefully one day. I definitely agree with your last point about magic weapons.
How do you calculate durability? I saw you had a figure based on rounds you’d survive under focused fire.
Good question. I create a deadly encounter for the level, see which percentage of their damage would come in through attacks to AC, Dex saves, and Con saves. Then I use the default attack bonus and save DC to calculate how much damage you'd take each round with that focused fire. Also, if the character gets resistance to damage, I have tables of what percentage of damage is dealt of every type at each tier, so I can see what gets resisted.
Unfortunately it doesn't account for things like range, skirmishing, or a bunch of other stuff. It's just "if I sit here getting hit, how long would I last".
@@DndUnoptimized have you posted this table anywhere? I’m looking to account for durability and control when I’m deciding how to build my characters.
Also how do you compare damage vs control vs durability. For example the how would you determine if it’s worth it to dual wield vs use a shield?
I haven't posted it anywhere, it's pretty ugly. I plan on doing a nicer and more modern one once the new MM comes out.
In terms of how to decide if it's worth it that's a hard one because it all depends on what you want for your character. If you want tanky, you probably want to aim for the 2 round mark, if you only last 1 round then you might want to invest some resources into buffing your defenses (1.5 is ok). Once you have hit the desired defense then usually you can pump everything into damage. This is of course using my ways of calculating rounds of survival.
@@DndUnoptimized Thanks, I’ll aim for that.
Well, 0.5 is very fragile, 1 is kind of average for a weak character, 1.25 is probably the minimum for a front liner. It's something like this at least. Like bear totem barbarian is around 3, and blaster mage is around 0.7.
it should be noted barbarian damage peaks again at level 20 because they get 22 strength.
And yeah your martials really ought to be optimized better. multi-class 2 levels of barbarian into our fighter can really because of reckless attack. Even without this, subclasses can add a lot more damage too.
Rapier rogue could use a race with access to cantrips like half-elf and get booming blade. Arcane tricksters can also set up out-of-turn sneak attacks with haste or sentinel+mirror image
But if you're going into power-player meta optimization, you might close that gap on unoptimized casters. For full comparison you then have to meta optimize the casters, and they just bring the gap back to this video again, or close to. Then you unshackle them from the silly one leveled spell per combat this video has, and then they just rocket that gap even further. Also it feels pretty gross when part of the optimization of martials is to just start giving them caster features...
Yes, Barbarians get +4 Str and Con, which is nice. This will definitely boost their damage, but no damage increase in base class between level 5 and 20 is quite sad. (Brutal Critical doesn't count for anything, so ignoring that)
I actually forgot to get the magic initiate feat for booming blade on the rogue melee build, that would increase the damage somewhat, I'll have to run the numbers again to see how much. I've skipped subclasses, but yes, a potentially good optimization for rogues would be to have haste and ready action for a chance at two sneak attacks. I feel like Rogues should have some in-built way to do this themselves without dipping into haste, losing an action to cast, being vulnerable to losing concentration and then wiped for a turn if we do doesn't feel great, but looks great on paper for sure.
I'll agree that the martials are not the MOST optimized they could be, but for the most part, they are reasonably tuned up for damage output with single class. The fact is that most tables aren't full of optimizers and my wish is that multiclassing a martial isn't the only way to gain more power. The class itself should scale well and make it a difficult choice to multiclass, not make it painful to stay in the class (I'm looking at you barbarians and rogues).
What are martials supposed to be better at again?
Wish they were indisputably best at single target!
What are you using to make your graphs
Good old excel. Or actually Google spreadsheet. Not the prettiest, but it works.
5e doesn't have any of the big (or maybe even small) tradeoffs that 1e had for casters. The biggest is probably Long Rest, where any caster can recharge their spell slots in a single nights sleep, whereas in 1e, a high level Wizard could take more like a week to get all their spells re-memorized. 5e glosses overland travel, which could easily milk a 1e caster before the party even arrived at the dungeon. 1e had "dangerous" spells -- compare old school Teleport to the 5e version -- there is no longer a chance to end up buried alive underground. 1e had "destructive" spells -- Fireball had a good chance of burning away scrolls and boiling away potions -- you don't lose Treasure in 5e. Hit Points are higher -- 1e capped Con bonus at +2, with a d4 hit die that maxed out at 9d4 (or maybe it was 10d4) -- 5e gives d6 every level, with no cap on Con bonus. And these are just the Tradeoffs I remember off the top of my head.
True, and good points! Earlier edition wizards had it rough in many ways. I don't mind softening their power curve in exchange for having them have less setbacks.
Back in the day, Wizards/Mages/Magic Users were kinda awful to play, so I understand why a lot of quality of life improvements were made. Even D&D video games like the gold- and silverbox and Baldur's Gate 1&2 simplify and remove a lot to make things more fun (and programming limitations). The problem is that martials didn't get the same treatment; if anything, martials have gotten weaker relative to the system around them than they used to be. They've been mostly stagnant on HP, while effectively losing damage output through the reduction in their relative accuracy compared to non-martial classes.
I presume most of this is without subclasses?
For example, a wizard can become a Bladesinger, and get a relatively free +3-5 AC, that with mage armor and say a +2 in dex would be 13+ 2 (dex)+ 3 (int)+ 5 (shield) = 20
Also, wizards (and other casters) get absorb elements, counterspell, the ability to kite and defensive spells that are hard to quantify, like blink (if we assume resource expenditure to stay alive)
Correct, no subclasses. But I think I mentioned that casters often have a subclass option that gives the good defensive boosts, so if they want to play frontline they can be just as tanky as a martial for the most part.
100% agree with these defensive statements too. I didn't even get to those but even on sheer damage intake if they were to just sit there and take it, they are comparable to martials. It is hard to quantify kiting and how effective a certain technique will be. Wish I had a way to calculate it all! Hahahaha
Blink is easy to quantify. It's a 50% chance to completely deny enemy damage for the duration of the spell.
Very true. If your goal is to be tanky, then you don't want to disappear because you want to take hits for the team. If your goal is to do damage with a concentration spell then use this to hide, it's alright. It definitely has it's uses!
@@burgernthemomrailer Yes, however it depends on the amount of turns you get to survive, since for each of those its a 50% extra to survive, also, you lose a turn setting it up, so if your odds of surviving where low to begin with, it might not be that valuable.
In addition, it saves defensive resources yet makes others not count. So it could do a lot with the math in this case.
12:30 For paladin are you assuming only 1 divine smite because it uses spell slots like full casters?
Good question. No, paladins use 1/3 of their spells each encounter, so they should be able to keep that damage output up for 3 encounters before being spent. The one spell per encounter is only for full casters.
@@DndUnoptimized Thank you. Very good video btw.
Thanks!
@@DndUnoptimized I have another question. Does the paladin build focuses on maximising Charisma? I feel the boost to all saving throws by aura of protection should lift the line above fighter 22:06.
The Paladin build is a PAM GWM, so that eats up a lot of their ASIs after those and maxing Str, not leaving room to prioritize Cha.
Aura of protection is fantastic, but in terms of damage mitigation it doesn't actually help as much as I thought. You take slightly less damage on average from Dex and Con saves, but I think probably Wis saves is the biggest impact, because usually those are save or suck, whereas Dex and Con saves are often half damage on success.
But my damage is assuming all Dex/Con saves are half damage on success, which obviously isn't the case, so in the real world it'll help more than what I show here.
Thanks for the good questions.
Nowadays the wizard doesn’t even have to worry about its low hit die, they can just start with Tough every time through custom background, as of Spelljammer/Bigby's/Dragonlance. Now 99% of wizards have roughly the equivalent of d10 hit die from first level. Throw on that artificer dip, and martials got nothing on them.
True, one DnD is the same. But martials also get it and an extra feat for a martial is probably more worthwhile than an extra feat for a caster since there is more scarcity. Right now it feels like power creep, but hopefully with the one DnD feats having level requirements it won't be as bad.
@@DndUnoptimized I don't like most of the onednd changes. Feels like they've ruined the classes I liked just to buff the ones I never play. I'm unlikely to move on to onednd and instead just cherry pick the rules I like to backport into 5e. I want to keep current magical secrets, smites, moon druids, etc. Onednd has killed my interest in three of my favorite classes.
@@3of6mylove well that's fair. For the most part I quite like the one DnD changes, but I get that not everyone will like the changes. It seems likely that Bard, smiting, and moon druid will all still need to see some alterations before publishing, so who knows where that will land. Bard as published is unplayable since they went back to spell lists, smites had a decent amount of negative feedback online, and moon druid will either need more changes, or the animal lists need to be vastly improved. I think moon druid is much better now though, what do you not like? HP pools?
@@DndUnoptimized Moon druids whole shtick is being nearly unkillable, and they've nerfed that specific aspect too much. For paladins, I play for the big damage, I live to hit 3 smites in one turn with PAM, and now not only can I not do that, but some rando can even counterspell it. I don't want ranged smites, or cantrips, that's not what a paladin is to me. Also perfectly okay with smites being capped at 5th level, it just makes sense since it's a half caster feature.
@@3of6mylove true, moon druids are nearly unkillable for a good while, which isn't really a great thing in my mind. I would need to run some numbers on how the new temp hp compares, but it is definitely less. I like the scaling of the new moon druid better, old moon druid seems to cap out damage wise pretty quickly, and it's a while before you get elemental forms. Smites are probably a good thing to limit to once per turn in my opinion, but counterspelling them isn't a nice change.
You failed to include action surge in the fighter calculation, which should be included if you are using rage and smites in the other calculations.
Action surge is included in the fighters numbers, once per encounter. I probably didn't say it in the video though, my bad.
A big problem with martials and casters, is that martial features just do not scale
If we lock in the first 3 level for every class and then randomize every non-ASI level, barring some outliers like barbarian's capstone, there's not gonna be a huge power difference for the martials
Meanwhile for casters their features actually scale because spell levels scale
True. Martials don't scale as well. Rage gets a +1 damage and casters get an entire new suite of powerful spells.
@@DndUnoptimized battlemaster is the most obvious example here where for level 15 you're getting 2 additional maneuvers, ehich are features balanced around being available at level 3
This makes especially no sense, when you consider that for Warlock's eldritch invocations, they were aware that they could put level restrictions on these features for stuff that would be too powerful at early levels, but for maneuvers they couldn't even think of just 1st level, 2nd level and 3rd level maneuvers, where 1st would be the stuff you get now, 2nd an echelon above that, like Stinger or Bloody Slash and 3rd something like Omnislash or Waterfowl Dance
That would be too logical and balanced. Martials can't get features that match powerful spells, that's crazy.
@@DndUnoptimized in a lot of places this game feels like it was designed by different people, that were forbidden from communicating with eachother. Especially how in a lot of cases it just feels like the numbers haven't been crunched
Like most egregiously prepared vs known casters
Maybe I missed it, but does this account for chance to hit?
I didn't quite say it, but yes this is taking int account attack bonus vs AC appropriate to the level.
Can we do this but now factor in sharpshooter and gwm?
I guess I didn't say it I the video, sorry. All PAM builds have GWM too, and all ranged builds have sharpshooter
@@DndUnoptimized Wow thats actually incredibly surprising! I would have expected crossbow expert + sharpshooter fighter to have the highest dps given your limitations to casters.
@@InnerMedium well they are for some time, but martials seldom get boosts to damage (5 and 11 are the usual places), meanwhile monster HP is increasing every level, and casters get increasingly better spells every other level. Thanks for watching!
not sure if you covered it but shield is a leveled spell
It is, but it is also a spell with guaranteed value. You only active Shield when it saves you from an attack, according to the conditions for the spell. So no wasting spellslots when an attack misses or when it would hit anyway.
However, Shield isn't an issue in a vacuum, because turning 14-15 AC into 19-20 AC is very often not going to do much as the levels increase. Shield is an issue because it is too easy for spellcasters to get access to medium Armor + shield proficiency, giving them a basline AC of 18-19 without magical equipment, suddenly pushing Shield to 23-24 AC on demand. If Wizard and Sorcerer spells couldn't be cast while wearing armor (even if you pick them from Magic Initiate), Shield wouldn't really be a problem.
@@TheTdroid sorry I was referring to the test being one leveled spell per fight
@@Einola_0.0 Yes, the damage output is considering only one spell per encounter, but for the examples I gave of the wizard using the Shield spell, I'm using the leftover spells. So yes, more than one spell (assuming 3 encounters/day).
Bro, pass without trace is like, "I make the entire party better than rogue at stealth" it's fully superior.
Not really. Since one the rogue benefits from the spell. Second even if they class as expertise in stealth rogues at level 7 have reliable talent in one dnd now instead of level 11. Meaning that your roll is at least 10 and plus your stealth mod. Though for me it still feels wrong that the rogue can’t give advantage to stealth checks to their Allies so you don’t have to slit the party every time you want to sneak around.
So the math be at level 7 with 17 dex would be plus 11 to them. If you do nothing to increase dex by stander end array. At 18 dex the rogue gives them a plus 12 plus at least a 10. The only way hunters mark is better is because for the whole group. So other than before level 7 the Rogue will always be the best at stealth if we are not included in subclasses. Since with a rogue subclass we can make the number higher. Invisibility on the other than for stealth is a different story.
But the main difference is both those spells are concentration. Limiting the person casting on spells that can cast. Also as a rogue in 2024 you can play wood elf to get pass without trace at level 5 on top of what I mentioned. So no matter what you the rogue is always the best at stealth roll at level 7 and they gain the same benefit from pass without trace. As they do this without losing a resource. Since rogues need stealth for combat unlike every other class other than gloom stalker.
Pass without trace is fantastic and although it doesn't do it BETTER than rogue stealth, it gets you pretty much there. So I would say it kind of invalidates rogues stealth, yes.
@@DndUnoptimized Yeah as I stated in my comment the biggest problem with rogue at stealth is that they have no way to help the party with their stealth checks . Leaving to slit the party problems in campaigns unless you are playing wood elf and even then you only do it once a day for 1 hour of time in game or be force to play Arcane trickster. Like one idea I have is at level 6 they could give a passive 3 to stealth checks for your party only if they are following the rogue or within 20 feet of the rogue.
AOE is also another point of contention, martials don’t get AOE’s. So sure early on they deal more single target damage, but against multiple opponents a caster is still better. Martials honestly need some sort of AOE
True. I have that in the video, but I definitely agree
Don't fighters get a lot of feats though? I guess at some point they have everything need for their damage and can take tough anyway, right?
That's true, the feat tax doesn't apply to fighters as much since they get several extra. The other martials will feel it worse. They can all take tough too, but it's a squeeze, not so much for a fighter.
Tbhe fact that you have to narrow the area of comparison to two points (durability and single target damage) ...since casters dominate the rest of the game (except anbti-magic aones) speaks volumes. -- Seems like Martials need Luck blades...for Wish...
Yes they dominate in most areas unfortunately, and I don't think luck blades would make up for that you need BG3 level magic items in all slots to make up for it.
This reminds me of Fire Emblem Three Houses take on Magic.
I've never played it, but I heard it's quite good!
@@DndUnoptimized I never finished, but yeah, the magic is limited. The games before it had the same durability as weapons because they were tomes. They were so versatile, though, because they could attack in both Melee & Ranged.
The best part was that every unit had their own Spells. Sometimes, there were some overlaping common Spells, but it gave the characters more of an identity. It was especially interesting to build a character into a Mage when they weren't designed to be versus a character who was.
It's always fun trying to force something that wasn't intended, but ends up working out alright!
Where was the damage numbers for conjure animals?
Also upcasting it doubles and triples the damage.
I have to say ranger gets a slight edge from this.
So I purposefully avoid conjure X spells because they are so problematic. Otherwise casters would be way higher but especially druids. Rangers would get a good bump too, but I just took them right off the table. I qualified animate objects as over powered too, but I showed numbers with and without so maybe I should have done conjure animals too but I didn't, sorry.
You'd think so, but in practice CA doesn't scale exponentially since despite doubling the number of creatures, their to hit bonus stays static (around +3 to +4). This means that as you increase in level and monsters get higher AC the individual effectiveness of each creature goes down. If your table uses flanking this can be greatly mitigated, but otherwise the DPR only increases moderately as you go up in level.
I have added conjure animals spells damage reports in a comment above. These are for the caster, but it will definitely boost ranger too.
I'd say that the damage increase is not insignificant.
@DndUnoptimized I don't see whatever comment your referring to. But are you accounting for increases in average AC for level appropriate encounters? In my own experience playing a Shepard druid from 1 to 15, I was far less effective at 15 even with upcasting since we were fighting monsters with high AC and I rarely hit.
I'll repost it here. I think conjure animals can be alright depending on what you summon, but there are some egregious examples that are perfectly valid.
For those who are interested in conjure animals, I've run some quick calculations summoning wolves and velociraptors.
Level 5: +4 attack vs 15 AC
8 Wolves: 45.9 DPR (92% of an encounter)
8 Velociraptors: 64.7 DPR (126% of an encounter)
Level 9: +4 attack vs 16 AC
16 wolves: 85.9 DPR (112% of an encounter)
16 velociraptors: 121.0 DPR (156% of an encounter)
Level 13: +4 attack vs 18 AC
24 wolves: 108.7 DPR (100% of an encounter)
24 velociraptors: 152.6 DPR (138% of an encounter)
Level 17: +4 attack vs 19 AC
32 wolves: 130 DPR (99% of an encounter)
33 velociraptors: 181.9 DPR (133% of an encounter)
This is assuming pack tactics for advantage, which is hard to imagine them not having it considering the number of them. They don't do magical damage, but if you are a Shepherd Druid then they do. Even without magical damage, it is a force to be reckoned with and a massive clog on the battlefield unless the player is extremely skilled or the DM is. All in all I'd say it's a outlier spell and I didn't use it for calculations.
One thing that definitely needs to be assumed is magic items, late game, casters do not get any items which boost their damage, wheras martials do, so having them drop a little bit to make up for being assumed to have a +3 very rare weapon makes sense to me
Personally, I think somatic components should take both of your hands to be free in order to perform, and that warcaster should let you cast spells with only 1 hand
This would be like how it works in say Naruto, and I think it's a bit fairer
Also the shield spell needs nerfed, animate objects needs an overhaul, and tasha's summons *die very quickly*, their durability should absolutely be taken into account, not just the caster's durability
Durability is how much damage you take before your threat is mitigated, for a caster with a summon, how durable that summon is, is more important than how durable the caster is, because it is significantly easier to deal with
(Monks didn't get magic items in 5e as it was, however, now they get +1, +2 +3 handwraps)
Also, at high levels, martials pretty much always have advantage by synergising with casters, and can deal damage via grappling by taking advantage of the casters deadly effects
Basically martials do more damage when they combo with casters, and casters do more damage when combo'd with martials
There is definitely a martial-caster divide at higher levels, but, in the playtest UA, so many of the problem features have been addressed (now all we need is a fix to more problem spells, and maybe the concept of somatic components)
Like, you should not be able to perform somatic components while both of your hands are occupied by weapons in my opinion, just, ever, you are a caster, not a martial, the martial should use their features while they use weapons and shields, and casters should need to actually have a staff of power in one hand and a free hand to cast spells from it, assuming no feats or whatever
No show or movie or whatever has the magic user fantasy of hold a shield in one hand while reading from a spellbook in the other
Yes but it is kind of bad to have magic items be a requirement to deal decent damage. Also, I'll need to run some numbers but I don't think a martial with a +3 weapon will approach the realm of 9th level spells.
I agree the play test is making good progress. We will need to wait for spells to show up before we can make a call on the divide though.
So the martial classes don't get any special items throughout the campaign ever? Seems like unfair comparisons in this regard.
Maybe, but it's hard to account for because it is table dependent and varies wildly the types of magic items a martial will have. Magic items do affect casters as well. Maybe you can argue they help martials more than casters, but I'd say there is a reasonable argument both ways.
Removing magic items on both sides isn't realistic, especially at high levels, but it is a data point that is interesting to look at.
How would you include magic items into it? Maybe martials is possible to give +1 at 5, +2 at 10, +3 at 15. But what about flame tongues, or legendary items, or magic armor? For casters you can give +1 to attacks and saving throws which helps a bunch too (perhaps not as much damage as a magic weapon for a damage, but still something). Often casters get items that let them be used instead of the caster spending spell slots, (wands, staves, ring of spell storing, etc), so now the caster has more spell slots to use in the battle. It gets pretty difficult to account for that.
If you have a good suggestion on how to fit it then please let me know and maybe I'll try it out to see how it fits.
Casters make better martial characters, a swords bard or bladesong wizard is just better than a fighter, the single target damage might not match but they do everything else better, an abjuration wizard is tankier than any barbarian, and they can spread that tankiness to their team. There's just no contest.
I don't like your level 1 example for a wizard, what I would do with just 1 spell is, wizard casts sleep which will almost always take out a single target at 1st level, then firebolt point blank for an auto crit, move back 30 feet. Enemy has to take 1/2 move to get up and can only reach 15 feet to make a ranged attack or dash for no attack. If it's only 1 spell why waste it on chaos bolt? (even better if you take away opponents weapons while they are sleeping)
Sure, that's an option. Sleep at level 1 is amazing!
Rogue, steady aim, sneak attack at least 75% of the time
True, as long as you never have to move that works!