[3.5] Fighter, Rogue, Blaster, Healer - Balanced?

[Particle_Man]

I have heard that if one plays a 4 player party in 3.5 where you play by core rules (phb, dmg, mm), in which the Fighter and Rogue are as normal, the Cleric does nothing but healing (including spells like remove disease, neutralize poison, raise dead, restoration, etc.) and the Wizard does nothing but blast spells (well, and read magic I guess) then the party is fairly well-balanced.

Has that been the experience of anyone who played in or ran a party like this?

[Sardonic]

The thing about that kind of party is that it isn't about balance as you may be thinking about it. Everyone knows who's going to do the most damage under ideal conditions - the blaster. That's his job.

The reason that kind of party is so traditional is because you have every role covered, and there's very little overlap. No one is going to be soaking up damage and heading up the front of the party besides the fighter, the rogue is the only member capable of disarming traps, the blaster deals damage en masse, and the healer keeps everyone alive. If you have all these roles covered, the DM can very easily make sure everyone is doing something useful in the party when he designs his adventures.

So, to answer your question in a nutshell, the party is not balanced in that everyone is always at the same power level, its balanced in that each role needed in a party is taken care of and there is absolutely no overlap of roles between party members (ideally).

[Eldariel]

To be honest, "doing everything" has always been Wizard's job. That's why you hauled the sorry ass of that one-spell d4 HD Mage who levels superslowly around in AD&D; because later on you need to be able to teleport and fly and so on, and Wizard does all of that while also turning enemies into sheeps, ripping off their resistances and wrecking their saves, making them explode and stopping the time and doing all this simultaneously.

Blaster isn't really covering the 4th party role. While no, a Core blaster won't probably overshadow warriors, having a Wizard dedicated purely to blasting is going to leave the party pretty weak overall. And the healbot will, in many playgroups, be considered so boring it'll be a chore to get anyone to play it (which is why Cleric has its martial prowess in the first place, and of course to share the Fighter's burden).


But no, a Cleric who casts Cures isn't going to be more efficient than a Fighter, and neither will a Wizard who only casts no-side-effect damage spells. However, by the nature of these classes this can change any given day of course; nothing's stopping them from picking different spells.

And a party with such Wizard and Cleric will wipe against the stronger CR appropriate encounters later on, probably (what does the party do against a Dragon, for instance? Wizard will try to blast it with poor success rate, Fighter will shoot a Bow, Rogue will look sadly at the sky hoping he could fly and Cleric will offset 1/10th of the Dragon's damage while burning his spell slots).

[ericgrau]

It's a bad stereotype never even intended by the original designers. And boring to play too. It originated as a strawman to claim that everything else in the world was broken or imbalanced because the original designers supposedly never looked at their own spells and other class features that they themselves wrote.

As for covering everything you need, nope it doesn't do that either. You need the mage to handle utility too, the cleric needs to be ready to remove 20 different afflictions, the primary damage dealer actually needs to be the fighter and the rogue better be covering half a dozen other skills besides traps. In any campaign DM made, WotC made or 3rd party made you quickly run into problems if you don't. The kind where you immediately obtain one of the above things and there's no way around it.