Pathfinder Balanced alternatives to Path of War? [Archive]

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Togath

2017-01-22, 07:04 PM

exelsisxax

2017-01-22, 07:12 PM

So while I kind of like the concept between the maneuvers/boosts/stance concept of Tome and Battle and Path of War...
Well, Path of War... is frankly op. There is no cost to maneuvers, and the damage output is insane.
I've also never seen a game actually use the super-op-casters so many people seem afraid of, which just makes Path of War's wonky balance(how is "+1d6 damage to each attack of a full attack" equal to a 15d6 line attack?) get worse.:smallconfused:

So... does anyone know of some more balanced alternative? Would just a quick and dirty conversion of Tome of Battle to pf rules work best?

Thinking that PoW is unbalanced is like thinking wizards don't overshadow fighters at all. As in, contrary to all evidence and experience.

If you want something more balanced, you first have to stop playing PF. PoW is more balanced than core by a longshot.

JoshuaZ

2017-01-22, 07:19 PM

So while I kind of like the concept between the maneuvers/boosts/stance concept of Tome and Battle and Path of War...
Well, Path of War... is frankly op. There is no cost to maneuvers, and the damage output is insane.
I've also never seen a game actually use the super-op-casters so many people seem afraid of, which just makes Path of War's wonky balance(how is "+1d6 damage to each attack of a full attack" equal to a 15d6 line attack?) get worse.:smallconfused:

So... does anyone know of some more balanced alternative? Would just a quick and dirty conversion of Tome of Battle to pf rules work best?

Path of War maneuvers are about the same strength as Tome of Battle maneuvers. The primary difference is that the PoW classes have more class features than the classes in ToB. So, if it is bothering you, you could use the ToB classes with the PoW maneuvers and it would be about the same thing.

Note that while the optimization in this forum is often very high, one doesn't need that high optimization for spellcasters to outperform melee after fairly low levels. However, at very low levels both ToB and PoW will generally outperform spellcasters. Around what levels are you intending to play?

Coretron03

2017-01-22, 07:41 PM

Thinking that PoW is unbalanced is like thinking wizards don't overshadow fighters at all. As in, contrary to all evidence and experience.

If you want something more balanced, you first have to stop playing PF. PoW is more balanced than core by a longshot.

This.

Also why did you start 2 threads on this subject? They are literally the same thing as you reference the same POW abilities in both threads. Read my reply to your other thread on how to utterly dominate your "Op path of war damage"

Also joshua, in his example he reference level 13.

Thaneus

2017-01-23, 04:52 AM

I really don't get ppl which say ToB, PoW, Psionics and Incarnum (those a rare though) is OP.
They seem to me like Supermarket Grannys which see a 30% reduce price tag on something and must immediately buy it, but when you compare it to the same product next row the per pound price is still the same...
They seem to forget that a fight will not be done with initiating one move, otherwise 3.5 Fighter is OP since he can charge for 1000+ damage... poor PoW guys with their puny 15d6 damage.

Fizban

2017-01-23, 05:00 AM

Psyren

2017-01-23, 10:43 AM

You could also just wait for that Spheres of Combat thing being kickstarted. But PoW is fine, unless your group is lower-OP, in which case just use the first-party stuff like Stamina and Weapon Training that gives martials nice things that are less powerful.

Red Fel

2017-01-23, 12:30 PM

Man, I love how the guy makes a separate thread asking for alternative suggestions that agree with his veiwpoint rather than an argument, and the first thing he gets is a bunch people coming from the other thread trying to shove "OMFG you're so wrong!" down his throat.

See, thing is, (1) it is possible to be objectively, demonstrably wrong, and (2) creating a separate thread for a nearly identical point isn't going to win you many fans, and (3) the intersection of the two is where magic happens.

So, yeah. OP comes in with a provably faulty assumption, makes two different threads to get the point across. I'm not surprised she hasn't responded to either (except for one response early on); she hasn't found a lot of people who agree, and in fact at least a few (myself among them) aren't entirely pleased with the duplicity.

Know what, let me retract that last point. I can't speak for anyone else, but when I see two near-identical threads, I can assume either that the poster didn't accidentally double-post, because the threads are not identical, but close to it. I tend to assume, then, that the poster seeks to pull the wool over my eyes, as if these threads somehow aren't the same, and I tend to react with a certain sadistic glee.

Trying to "shove things down her throat," as you put it, isn't quite what I consider an appropriate reaction. But it is nearly identical.

Serafina

2017-01-23, 12:51 PM

Togath, your question doesn't really make sense. Or in other words: Balanced against what?

PoW has pretty good internal balance - there's some stuff that's a bit stronger, some stuff that's a bit weaker, but overall the classes and maneuvers are pretty much at the same power level, and all about as versatile and competent too. So it's balanced against itself.

PoW-classes certainly don't out-shine main casters in utility, or even 2/3 casters. They also don't provide more damage than main or 2/3 casters that actually focus on dealing damage. So it's balanced compared to a lot of Pathfinder classes, too.

PoW-classes are stronger than a Fighter, Rogue or Barbarian. That's intentional, because first-party classes are badly balanced against each other. In a game that has both Wizards and Fighters, you can't really make a class that's balanced against both of those because those two classes aren't remotely balanced against each other.

Now you keep saying that you've never see "super-OP casters". If so, that's entirely a matter of players playing a class a certain way. Please stop dismissing people who say "casters are stronger than non-casters", because it's demonstrably true. Because it's trivial to demonstrate how a Magus can out-fight a Fighter, or an Investigator can out-skill a Rogue.

But again - you'd have to answer what you want things to be balanced against.
If your answer is "against Fighters and Rogues and Monks, oh my" then I'm afraid we can't really help you. Nobody has bothered making one of those, and frankly for a good reason because those classes are rather poorly designed in a lot of ways.

Fizban

2017-01-23, 03:34 PM

See, thing is, (1) it is possible to be objectively, demonstrably wrong, and (2) creating a separate thread for a nearly identical point isn't going to win you many fans, and (3) the intersection of the two is where magic happens.
In order to objectively prove something is or isn't OP you have to objectively prove how the game is meant to be played. I find that most people's "objective" view of how the game is meant to be played, isn't. It's clear at a glance that the examples given in the last thread for why PoW is objectively not OP are all over the place, and ignore almost everything but total damage when it is one of many factors. That's not surprising, as doing more than a single point damage comparison takes time and forces you to recognize that your assumptions probably don't match others'.

So, yeah. OP comes in with a provably faulty (perfectly reasonable and common) assumption, makes two different threads to get the point across. I'm not surprised she hasn't responded to either (except for one response early on); she hasn't found a lot of people who agree, and in fact at least a few (myself among them) aren't entirely pleased with the duplicity.

Know what, let me retract that last point. I can't speak for anyone else, but when I see two near-identical threads,
Three actually, I just checked. From the two I'd seen there'd be an understandable progression of frustrated rant dogpiled by naysayers->thread explicitly soliciting help from similar viewpoints. However, there is a third preceding those two, which is more of a problem. That thread (asking how balanced PoW is "mechanically") had much more activity from the OP but seems to have been mostly vague assurances of stronger in this situation weaker in others without any numerical breakdowns as originally requested. I hypothesize that what happened was after that thread the OP either read some more of it since no one posted any numbers or saw it in use at the table, reacted poorly and posted a the second thread rant which went nowhere, and now here we are on number three.

Three threads is too far, but I can still understand the urge. It's impossible to shake people out of a thread once they've shown up, so if your thread's full of people you don't find helpful there's not much to do but give up or start another and hope they don't notice.

I can assume either that the poster didn't accidentally double-post, because the threads are not identical, but close to it. I tend to assume, then, that the poster seeks to pull the wool over my eyes, as if these threads somehow aren't the same, and I tend to react with a certain sadistic glee.
This is a bit off. What wool is there to pull? What "duplicity" is there to so offend?

Regarding super-OP casters, a quote from the first thread:

I'm also assuming no 15 minute "burn all spells asap and sleep" type adventuring days, and prepared casters not being perfectly prepared for the challenges they might face
This attempt to phrase things as the forum usually does I think unfortunately turns into an understatment. When straw-theorycrafters see "no 15 minute days" they move to day= 4 encounters exactly and "not perfectly prepared" to perfect genaralist lists. The meaning behind the statement from a non-theorycrafter is that casters can and will have spells wasted and endure through as many encounters as neccesary, being forced to rely on non-casters to pick up the slack. Encounter based powers with spell equivalent effects are by definition better than both fighter and wizard in that situation, making them overpowered.

Red Fel

2017-01-23, 04:11 PM

In order to objectively prove something is or isn't OP you have to objectively prove how the game is meant to be played. I find that most people's "objective" view of how the game is meant to be played, isn't. It's clear at a glance that the examples given in the last thread for why PoW is objectively not OP are all over the place, and ignore almost everything but total damage when it is one of many factors. That's not surprising, as doing more than a single point damage comparison takes time and forces you to recognize that your assumptions probably don't match others'.

Know what? This is fair. OP is a relative term. And it is true that, in a combat encounter, being able to do above a certain threshold of damage is certainly encounter-ending in its own right.

My position remains, however, that there are ways - ample, abundant ways - to avoid direct HP damage. There are also ways - again, plenty of them - to do other things. And as strong as PoW may be, and I won't claim it isn't, no martial is going to stand up. That is demonstrable. It is provable.

Whether it holds up in ordinary play is a question of who is playing. But in a vacuum, all other things being equal, a martial - even a PoW class - will not stack up to a caster. Therefore, calling PoW overpowered or unbalanced is ignoring the spellcasting polymorphed elephant in the room.

Three actually, I just checked. From the two I'd seen there'd be an understandable progression of frustrated rant dogpiled by naysayers->thread explicitly soliciting help from similar viewpoints. However, there is a third preceding those two, which is more of a problem. That thread (asking how balanced PoW is "mechanically") had much more activity from the OP but seems to have been mostly vague assurances of stronger in this situation weaker in others without any numerical breakdowns as originally requested. I hypothesize that what happened was after that thread the OP either read some more of it since no one posted any numbers or saw it in use at the table, reacted poorly and posted a the second thread rant which went nowhere, and now here we are on number three.

Three threads is too far, but I can still understand the urge. It's impossible to shake people out of a thread once they've shown up, so if your thread's full of people you don't find helpful there's not much to do but give up or start another and hope they don't notice.

And, see, I get that too. But it bugs me nonetheless. Yeah, I can see how, when so much of this forum is like-minded on certain issues, it can be frustrating to feel like you're in the minority and your position is being ignored. But I don't think that justifies the multitude of threads.

This is a bit off. What wool is there to pull? What "duplicity" is there to so offend?

First, I'm easily offended.

Second, by "duplicity," I mean the idea that if you post multiple threads with near-identical premises, somehow you won't receive identical responses. It's not like people will see the threads with parallel language, posted closely in time, by the same poster, and assume they deal with completely different topics. We know what you're doing, and it's kind of insulting to think that we don't.

Third, I'm wearing a surprisingly comfortable woolen sweater-vest. Quite pleasant. I think everyone will be wearing them before long.

Regarding super-OP casters, a quote from the first thread:

This attempt to phrase things as the forum usually does I think unfortunately turns into an understatment. When straw-theorycrafters see "no 15 minute days" they move to day= 4 encounters exactly and "not perfectly prepared" to perfect genaralist lists. The meaning behind the statement from a non-theorycrafter is that casters can and will have spells wasted and endure through as many encounters as neccesary, being forced to rely on non-casters to pick up the slack. Encounter based powers with spell equivalent effects are by definition better than both fighter and wizard in that situation, making them overpowered.

Yeah, that seems clear. Frequently, the position of "martials are OP" comes from the fact that there is no limit on how many times you can swing a sword, while spells are a resource which diminishes over the course of the day. The "15 minute adventuring day" argument stems from the idea that your caster suffers from premature evocation, and fires off his entire load of spells in the first combat. Even assuming that this is so, however, as levels progress, a spellcaster has enough of an arsenal to cast spells in several encounters and still be able to contribute.

Basically, any time I see someone ranting about how overpowered it is that martials can have nice things, I want to put them in a gym. I want them to run on a treadmill until the batteries wear out. Or swing a stick at a dummy until their arms can't move. Or anything, really, just to demonstrate that these are fantasy heroes and are not bound by what you puny mortals in your meatsack bodies can do.

And then I vanish in a burst of fire and brimstone, because this is my dream sequence, Me damn it, and in my dream sequence, I can teleport.

JoshuaZ

2017-01-23, 04:29 PM

If one really thinks that PoW is too op in terms of damage one could just adjust the extra damage from maneuvers until you feel it is good. Reduce each die by one level would be an easy one (so d6 becomes d4, etc.) Or you could half the extra damage.

Mehangel

2017-01-23, 05:07 PM

I also have to ask what you mean what is a "balanced alternative to Path of War"

I suppose I could say that since Path of War is clearly Tier 3 material, than you could alternatively use anything else that is also Tier 3, so that means most 6/9 Casters.

But that is probably not what you mean since this is the third thread on this topic that you wrote this month (1st (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?511827-How-balanced-is-quot-Path-of-War-quot-(Dreamscarred-Press)) and 2nd (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?512837-Why-so-much-OP-3rd-party-stuff)).

Like many others, I believe Path of War to be balanced, not just against itself, but against other DSP material, and often use Path of War hand-in-hand with Spheres of Power.

Coretron03

2017-01-23, 05:35 PM

(how is "+1d6 damage to each attack of a full attack" equal to a 15d6 line attack?)
I'm Gonna get to your actual point but this bit confuses me. Can you find me a 7th level manuaver/stance that all it does is give 1d6 damage? Because your literally comparing a 1st level manuaver (Pulgist stance or simliar) to a 7th level manuaver (black winds) which is like saying the magic system has wonky balance because disintegrate does more damage then magic missile.

So... does anyone know of some more balanced alternative? Would just a quick and dirty conversion of Tome of Battle to pf rules work best?
They can seem a bit crazy, I agree. I mean, Broken blade gets rediclous output (admantite knuckle deals 6d6 extra damage on every attack, 7th level manuaver and a the 3rd level broken blade stance gives a extra attack) deals (with a unarmed build) around 1d8+19+6d6 over 2 attacks at full base attack bonus followed by the normal iteratives with just power attack and the unarmed line of feats which is pretty good but uh, I have a core only level 13 fighter that has around 86.1 every round which is pretty competive with that using just the weapon spec and focus line and power attack and very little effort.

Honestly if you dislike it that much just look for manauvers you don't like and hit them with the nerf stick a couple times and reduce the damage they deal like stated above change them to d4's or reduce the higher level manuavers bonus dice.

Fizban

2017-01-23, 09:18 PM

My position remains, however, that there are ways - ample, abundant ways - to avoid direct HP damage. There are also ways - again, plenty of them - to do other things. And as strong as PoW may be, and I won't claim it isn't, no martial is going to stand up. That is demonstrable. It is provable.

Whether it holds up in ordinary play is a question of who is playing. But in a vacuum, all other things being equal, a martial - even a PoW class - will not stack up to a caster. Therefore, calling PoW overpowered or unbalanced is ignoring the spellcasting polymorphed elephant in the room.
Randomly staggered encounters approximately every hour or so for 48 hours (doesn't have to be full strength every time) is probably enough to break anyone that isn't a Crusader or equivalent, but is also so obviously extreme that no one should be able to put it forth as a serious argument. Should anyway.

Even assuming that this is so, however, as levels progress, a spellcaster has enough of an arsenal to cast spells in several encounters and still be able to contribute.
I don't disagree, but like I said I think the assumption is supposed to be that rather a lot of spells go down the drain. Which makes sense if your casters aren't good at playing casters.

Basically, any time I see someone ranting about how overpowered it is that martials can have nice things, I want to put them in a gym.
Ooh, you said that line, now I'm offended :smalltongue: The secret is, if someone hadn't linked the probable maneuver in question and it didn't have a reflex save instead of an attack roll, I'd probably be right there with everyone else. There's nice things and then there's other people's things, and save for half AoEs are firmly on my list of other people's things when it comes to maneuvers. If it used an attack roll I'd hardly mind (and full BAB characters should never actually have a problem with AC unless the DM is being a butt).

exelsisxax

2017-01-23, 10:28 PM

Fizban, could you please name any maneuver that you think is actually a problem for the game as a whole?

Coretron03

2017-01-23, 10:40 PM

Thealtruistorc

2017-01-23, 10:44 PM

Weren't you the person who designed a Warlord archetype on the DSP forums a while back? Did something in a game go sour?

exelsisxax

2017-01-23, 10:50 PM

He is refering to the black winds manuaver which deals 15d6 damage in a line, ref for half. The reflex save in particular he seems to dislike because powers that cause reflex saves shouldn't be available to a martial. Making it a attack roll would probably make the manauver better because your chance to hit is going to be better the chance of them failing the save.

Then i'm going to have to agree with the many people basically saying "fireball". Dazing fireball, 6th level spell. You can hit everyone that was hit with the line, plus everyone else, probably with a higher save because you're SAD and they only need to fail one save to be dazed, but for 3 rounds instead of 1. You could also dazing intensified fireball to up the damage from 10d5 to 15d6, or just lv4 intensified fireballs to sweep the place clean from the start.

It's ridiculous to think that maneuver is actually overpowered.

Fizban

2017-01-23, 11:13 PM

Fizban, could you please name any maneuver that you think is actually a problem for the game as a whole?
I don't think there are any in ToB (throwing people around is annoyingly easy but that's about it), I can't be bothered to read through PoW since I have no intention of using it. From what I have seen on occasion it's more powerful than ToB and has a least a couple maneuvers I find in appropriate, if not necessarily gamebreaking, and deals more damage than I want to be easily dealt with at least some of them (a boost someone was complaining about a while back was a little OTT). And if you can accept the possibility that an inexhaustible resource could be overpowered, then it's possible PoW is overpowered, and if the OP thinks it is you're going to need a more thorough argument than "wah spells" to convince them otherwise (which is what they were looking for three threads ago).

He is refering to the black winds manuaver which deals 15d6 damage in a line, ref for half. The reflex save in particular he seems to dislike because powers that cause reflex saves shouldn't be available to a martial. Making it a attack roll would probably make the manauver better because your chance to hit is going to be better the chance of them failing the save.
Indeed, most of the time it would be more powerful, but it would also keep everyone in their niches so they can be challenged by different things. It's not the raw number of d6's that's really the problem, those are just something people latch on to. Though the fact that it's structured as a pile of d6's also infringes on the caster shtick, it'd be better if it involved weapon damage-but then it would have room to abuse anything you can find for weapon damage so you've gotta choose between control and infringement. I'd guess that might be why it's 15d6 instead of the 13d6 you'd expect at 13th, throwing in another +2d6 so it feels better even without weapon damage.

Then i'm going to have to agree with the many people basically saying "fireball". Dazing fireball, 6th level spell. You can hit everyone that was hit with the line, plus everyone else, probably with a higher save because you're SAD and they only need to fail one save to be dazed, but for 3 rounds instead of 1. You could also dazing intensified fireball to up the damage from 10d5 to 15d6, or just lv4 intensified fireballs to sweep the place clean from the start.

It's ridiculous to think that maneuver is actually overpowered.
The point, you are missing it. Or rather I expect you're not even looking for it.

CasualViking

2017-01-24, 12:12 AM

15d5 line damage save half is chump change at level 13. 25-50 damage to a handful of creatures? A level 13 martial should be doing about 100 points of damage per round without trying too hard, 200 points in good circumstances.

Coretron03

2017-01-24, 12:23 AM

So fizban, Your point is you want people to stay in their niches? That only casters(and rogues) should be dealing fistfuls of D6's? And martial should not be able to force people to make reflex saves? I guess thats a fair veiw but doesn't have very much to do with the balance of POW.

Anyway, the people replying were basicly saying "15d6 damage in a line requiring 2 rounds of actions is op? Then lighting bolt/fireball are really OP too because they can do even more damage!" which I think is fair because the original poster called them OP, not stepping on niches like you seem to have a problem with.

If I am missing anything about your dislike of manauvers then sorry, I can't see everthing and I feel like I am on base about you not calling this specific manuaver OP becase you seemed fine with buffing it by making it a attack roll.

Also, In POW throwing people is a 8th level manuaver if I remember correctly. I think they made the black winds manuaver deal 15d6 damage instead of 13d6 because it A: Doesn't scale B: Line is a pretty bad form of Aoe C: Need to remain decent when you hit 15th level because you Can't ready all 8th level manuavers straight away.

Fizban

2017-01-24, 12:58 AM

Anyway, the people replying were basicly saying "15d6 damage in a line requiring 2 rounds of actions is op? Then lighting bolt/fireball are really OP too because they can do even more damage!" which I think is fair because the original poster called them OP, not stepping on niches like you seem to have a problem with.
Part of my stance is that the OP and those of similar views don't actually know what they're really complaining about. Freaking out about a pile of d6's is the kind of thing you do when you with a fairly superficial understanding of the game, but from that understanding one can draw further conclusions about how the rest of their game goes and reach the bigger problems of encounter based abilities and niche infringement. Call me arrogantly condescending, but when I see someone complain about dice I'm fairly certain they're failing to recognize what's really bothering them. I could be wrong, but if all they really care about is damage then there's very little to discuss since as has been said, 25-50 damage at 13th isn't game-stopping on its own single round merits.

Also, In POW throwing people is a 8th level manuaver if I remember correctly.
Almost too far in the other direction by that point but good to know.

I think they made the black winds manuaver deal 15d6 damage instead of 13d6 because it A: Doesn't scale B: Line is a pretty bad form of Aoe C: Need to remain decent when you hit 15th level because you Can't ready all 8th level manuavers straight away.
They give you a larger number of top level maneuvers but you can't ready them all at once? That is a pretty significant change from ToB, might go examine that at some point.

Coretron03

2017-01-24, 01:43 AM

Part of my stance is that the OP and those of similar views don't actually know what they're really complaining about. Freaking out about a pile of d6's is the kind of thing you do when you with a fairly superficial understanding of the game, but from that understanding one can draw further conclusions about how the rest of their game goes and reach the bigger problems of encounter based abilities and niche infringement. Call me arrogantly condescending, but when I see someone complain about dice I'm fairly certain they're failing to recognize what's really bothering them. I could be wrong, but if all they really care about is damage then there's very little to discuss since as has been said, 25-50 damage at 13th isn't game-stopping on its own single round merits. So... We agree then? That the manuavers aren't broken because of their damage output? Or are you saying their still broken but not because of their damage output but because of niche stealing?

Almost too far in the other direction by that point but good to know. Well, to be fair the manuaver actually throws your target at someone else which is awesome. Does have a reflex save, although you have to grapple the target first and succeed on a touch attack to work. Of course, Its awesome Because your killing someone by throwing someone else at them is just awesome

They give you a larger number of top level maneuvers but you can't ready them all at once? That is a pretty significant change from ToB, might go examine that at some point. I am not entirely sure on the exact mechanics on TOB But path of war works like this: You know a certain amount of manuavers and gain more from leveling up (In our case lets use a level 14 stalker, they know 17) and can ready a certain amount of manuavers (level 14 stalker can ready 9). Readied manuavers can be used once each before they become unavaible until you re ready them (Generally takes a standard action for 1, fullround actionfor a amount equal to your Initation modifier (generally Either Int, Cha or Wis) plus you gain some bonuses if you use the fullround action options, What exactly depends on your class. The important bit is how you manuavers known scale and in the higher levels we are talking about you generally on get 1 on every odd level and like fighter bonus feats on even levels you can swap out a manuaver and replace with something else. Like spells you gain access to new manuavers on odd levels. This means a stalker who leveled up to level 15 can choose only 1 new manauver and you can only ready each manuaver once, which in effect leaves you to (if you don't expend actions) with your highest level manuvers on odd levels (even let you replace your old manuaver with a new one which will usually be one of your highest level) only being able to be used once. This is way too long and drawn out but hopefully it makes sense.

Fizban

2017-01-24, 02:25 AM

So... We agree then? That the manuavers aren't broken because of their damage output? Or are you saying their still broken but not because of their damage output but because of niche stealing?
Martial adepts are broken if they are broken. The most likely way they'd break the game is by introducing encounter based resources to a game that expects everything fancier than an attack/maneuver roll to have limited daily uses (see: 3.5 core), though it's also possible that they could boost damage output higher than expected. Since core is in fact core and the rest of the game flows from there, that first reason means yeah, they're kinda broken. For most practical purposes they're not broken enough to upset the game so it doesn't matter, but that doesn't mean the problem isn't there, and the more a given table relies on daily limits for their balance the more broken encounter or at-will based classes will be.

Niche protection is more of a style thing, as long as your AoE and utility guy is fragile and has daily limits you could refluff it as whatever you want including "weapon attacks," but it'd be weird as heck and the guy who wants to play wizards might be offended. Same way the fighter guy would be offended if someone took their beatstick role and filled it with a tough guy who takes hits and makes infinite single-target attacks because "magic."

digiman619

2017-01-24, 02:31 AM

Niche protection is more of a style thing, as long as your AoE and utility guy is fragile and has daily limits you could refluff it as whatever you want including "weapon attacks," but it'd be weird as heck and the guy who wants to play wizards might be offended. Same way the fighter guy would be offended if someone took their beatstick role and filled it with a tough guy who takes hits and makes infinite single-target attacks because "magic."
Because Clerics, Druids, and Wizards never step on others niches by being more stealthy that the Rouge, or better in battle that Fighters.

Milo v3

2017-01-24, 02:39 AM

Martial adepts are broken if they are broken. The most likely way they'd break the game is by introducing encounter based resources to a game that expects everything fancier than an attack/maneuver roll to have limited daily uses (see: 3.5 core), though it's also possible that they could boost damage output higher than expected. Since core is in fact core and the rest of the game flows from there, that first reason means yeah, they're kinda broken.
So if core is broken, and people make a thing that is more balanced but it happens to use a different resource system.... The balanced thing is the thing considered broken?

Coidzor

2017-01-24, 03:03 AM

I don't think there are any in ToB (throwing people around is annoyingly easy but that's about it)

Other way around, really. Taking a mother ****er and beating another mother ****er with them is inordinately cumbersome in general.

Fizban

2017-01-24, 04:08 AM

Other way around, really. Taking a mother ****er and beating another mother ****er with them is inordinately cumbersome in general.
The Setting Sun throws use trip checks, which are the foundation of one of the more popular melee builds, doesn't seem very cumbersome to me. Hitting people with other people isn't the problem there, it's the forced reposititioning. What's one of the first things people will tell you is needed for building better encounters? Use of terrain and positioning, which is all well and good until you have a PC who can toss your guys around from level 1. Not the end of the world, but a little annoying.

As for the other two, fine, I've got some gas left.

Because Clerics, Druids, and Wizards never step on others niches by being more stealthy that the Rouge, or better in battle that Fighters.
Correct. Oh but you were being sarcastic so let's assume your premise anyway: Clearly if one side is wrong both sides should be wrong, that'll fix everything. Kelb has already gone over this at length in the other threads.

So if core is broken, and people make a thing that is more balanced but it happens to use a different resource system.... The balanced thing is the thing considered broken?
Who said core was broken, balanced against what, and yet another person completely ignoring my point. I'm getting tired of saying that.

digiman619

2017-01-24, 04:28 AM

Correct. Oh but you were being sarcastic so let's assume your premise anyway: Clearly if one side is wrong both sides should be wrong, that'll fix everything.

I was being a bit facetious, but in this edition there is literally nothing a martial can do that a caster cannot do better, cheaper, or faster. You cannot complain about anything a martial does, even with an alternate system backing them up, as OP compared to casters, considering a 20th level Cleric, Druid, or Wizard has more power than practically any other character in the history of fiction outside of direct reality warpers that have no limits on their power, a la Q from ST:TNG.

It's also clear that the imbalance is on both sides; most monsters by CR 10 or so (and perhaps earlier, but I don't feel like drudging through the data right now) have easy ways to just "nope" anything most martials can do unless they spend a great deal of time and money preparing to fight that one particular thing, (dimensional anchor, antimagic field, etc.). Even then, as the more rules-savvy among us point out, even those can be countered.

So, no when standard Vancian is on the table, martial-boosting subsystems will almost never be OP in comparison.

Serafina

2017-01-24, 04:43 AM

If you want "martials get fancy things" without outright increasing their power level too much, I suggest you just use the following house rules:

All characters automatically gain
- Power Attack
- Weapon Finesse and Agile Maneuvers
- Combat Stamina and Dirty Fighting

For all Combat Feats, you make the following changes:
- characters can ignore all feat-prerequisites for taking Combat Feats. Requirements such as Base Attack Bonus, Weapon or Armor Proficiency must still be met
- if a a character gets a bonus combat feat from their classes, all such feats (but not those from other sources) can be re-trained with one hour of martial practice
- if a feat has a Improved, Greater or (Combat Maneuver) Strike version, as long as the character has one feat of the line, they gain all others for whom they meet the non-feat prerequisites
- this also applies to Style Feats and Combat Style Master
- for the purpose of taking Weapon and Armor Mastery feats, characters count as having Weapon Focus and Armor Focus once their Base Attack Bonus reaches +5

There. This is pretty simple to apply. And while it looks like it makes characters much more powerful, in truth you've just done two things:
- you've made it less resource-intensive to have a fancy combat style, thus making it more common
- you've made sure that a class with bonus combat feats is never stuck with a bad selection
Yes, this obviously gives people more feats - but since feats have a ceiling anyway, that doesn't make them more powerful (as in, their numbers are still as large as before, and they're still limited by the same amount of actions and so on).

The above actually hurts the Fighter and Brawler much more than it does most other classes - but that's why I included the "re-train your bonus feats" clause. You can also apply that to Ranger combat styles, and in similar situations.

You could go one further and eliminate all feat-chains like we've done for combat maneuvers here. So a character who has Cut from the Air also gets Smash from the Air and Spellcut. That'd require a bit more work, but would probably work with the following wording:
- a character automatically gains all feats for which one of their combat feats acts as a prerequisite, as long as they meet all other prerequisites. This does not apply to Improved Unarmed Strike or Weapon Focus.
I'd be a bit more careful with that one, especially since the above-version already allows you to take many feats that are locked behind long chains, and those tend to be perfectly functional without their prerequisites.

Tuvarkz

2017-01-24, 04:55 AM

I don't think there are any in ToB (throwing people around is annoyingly easy but that's about it)

Well, this subjectively annoys me to be honest. Throwing mooks around like they were made of cardboard is a martial hero's 101 common skills and it should be easy to do. Regarding PoW, Broken Blade and Thrashing Dragon are overtuned on damage, Primal Fury becomes broken with natural attack builds, Scarlet Throne and Black Seraph have a few overtuned maneuvers, and Elemental Flux is a too flexible (but not too powerful).

Indeed, most of the time it would be more powerful, but it would also keep everyone in their niches so they can be challenged by different things. It's not the raw number of d6's that's really the problem, those are just something people latch on to. Though the fact that it's structured as a pile of d6's also infringes on the caster shtick, it'd be better if it involved weapon damage-but then it would have room to abuse anything you can find for weapon damage so you've gotta choose between control and infringement. I'd guess that might be why it's 15d6 instead of the 13d6 you'd expect at 13th, throwing in another +2d6 so it feels better even without weapon damage.

Except that the 'pile of d6s' is far more the gish class shtick or the rogue and sneak attack piles, since the caster's shtick isn't really pile of d6s damage as much as control and utility. Calling the d6s the caster's shtick is calling all casters blasters. And regarding AC vs saves targetting, there's also spells that target AC (and touch to boot) and don't offer a save in place.

Milo v3

2017-01-24, 04:59 AM

Who said core was broken
Wait, there are people who haven't realised core is broken yet?

balanced against what
There is an assumed amount of damage classes are meant to be dealing out which is taken into account when it comes to Paizo designing monsters. Because of Path of War's floor and ceiling being closer together than other martials, it ends up getting around the assumed numbers better than say the fighter class. So if it has to be balanced "against" something, I guess it'd be considered balanced against the game?

That said, iirc broken blade and primal fury end up at about the assumed damage on their own which means those two disciplines from Path of War are definitely not balanced.

and yet another person completely ignoring my point.
I got you're point. I disagree with the idea that things are broken just because they use a system that wasn't used in Core like encounter-based resources. So what if encounter-based resources weren't in core? That in no way results in being broken on it's own, which means you have to come up with an actual example of how it is broken in practice for someone to claim that it is broken.

Necroticplague

2017-01-24, 07:02 AM

Before PoW, I thought one of the easiest ways to do a s****** od damage was a Vivisector Bestmorph alchemist with a whole crapton of attacks to turn things internal organs into schwarma. Post PoW, I still consider this to be true. 156d damage at will at level 13? Please, that pales in comparison to the low-optimization 21d6 I've got from sneak attack alone by that level. And that's without going further into optimization or using anything temporary (though Feral Mutagen has the duration to last the entirety of a normal adventuring day at that level).

So, I have to ask: balanced to what? The game as a whole? Impossible, as the existing balance is already too wide a spread. If you balance to any one point, it'll be broken compared to something. If you balance it at the bard/magus level, it obsoletes fighters, rogues, and monks. If you balance it at the rogue,monk, and fighter levels, it's pointless besides the power of Magus and Alchemists.

Fizban

2017-01-24, 08:27 AM

Well, this subjectively annoys me to be honest. Throwing mooks around like they were made of cardboard is a martial hero's 101 common skills and it should be easy to do.
Cinematically, sure, but it plays havoc with a tactical wargame when your position doesn't matter because the enemy can just put you where they want you, and DnD is rooted in tactcial wargame.

Calling the d6s the caster's shtick is calling all casters blasters.
And by many anecdotes, common knowledge, and character suggestions in the books themselves, the designers first built the game expecting all (arcane) casters to be blasters to some degree or the other. The game does not expect you to be packing Web or Stinking Cloud: you can, but it expects you to be packing Fireball. They didn't print those conjuration AoEs because they made sense, they did it because they were afraid SR/banning evocation might stop people from being able to blast.

And regarding AC vs saves targeting, there's also spells that target AC (and touch to boot) and don't offer a save in place.
Touch AC has nothing to do with non-magicals, it is also a caster shtick. Non-magicals could only attack touch AC with the help of magic via psionic feats and magic items until martial adepts came along with Emerald Razor and infringed on the shtick.

Wait, there are people who haven't realised core is broken yet?
You're falling for your own trap dude, core broken/not-broken has nothing to do with it.

There is an assumed amount of damage classes are meant to be dealing out which is taken into account when it comes to Paizo designing monsters. Because of Path of War's floor and ceiling being closer together than other martials, it ends up getting around the assumed numbers better than say the fighter class. So if it has to be balanced "against" something, I guess it'd be considered balanced against the game?
Read your own statement: the only factor you have considered is "damage," with no further context, which apparently is the entire game.

I got you're point.
No you didn't, but I grant that you're not ignoring it.

I disagree with the idea that things are broken just because they use a system that wasn't used in Core like encounter-based resources. So what if encounter-based resources weren't in core? That in no way results in being broken on it's own, which means you have to come up with an actual example of how it is broken in practice for someone to claim that it is broken.
Let's go over this again: the core classes are built with two fundamental power sources: limited daily abilities, and unlimited daily abilities. Limited abilities are primarily spells, as well as rage and smite and such. Unlimited abilities are basic attacks and combat maneuvers, skills, feats, sneak attack, favored enemy, and so on. Classes with lots of daily abilities have fewer unlimited abilities, and classes with lots of unlimited abilities have fewer daily abilities. The PCs face an unknown number of encounters each day at unknown time intervals against unknown forces as well as an unknown number of non-combat obstacles.

Unlimited abilities are immensely valuable for anyone not so full of hubris as to expect they can perfectly predict and manage the unknown with a finite amount of resources. Limited abilities are immensely valuable for anyone who recognizes they may face foes stronger than themselves in a straight fight and obstacles they cannot innately overcome. Both are necessary, which is why the standard party is half unlimited Fighter+Rogue, and half limited Cleric+Wizard. Unlimited heroes shine against many waves of weak foes with their narrow non-flashy methods, and limited heroes shine against fewer waves of stronger foes with their broader flashier methods, and you have no way of knowing what's going to be needed in the next 5 minutes. Anyone can see those flashy effects found in magic are "better," but they are limited and can be exhausted, and this is the core balance of the game, something so mind-numbingly obvious it shouldn't require pointing out. Limited abilities are strong but run out, and unlimited abilities are weak and can only deal with weak foes on their own.

Most people seem to think martial adepts are better than their non-magical PHB counterparts, more powerful. Their encounter based abilities allow them to confront stronger foes with more powerful and flashier abilities similar to those of limited classes, but they never run out. The game expects attack rolls and skills and combat maneuvers and sneak attacks to never run out. It does not expect touch attacks and line attacks and throwing people across the room and teleporting and turning invisible to never run out (not for a long time anyway). It doesn't matter what you think, because unless those encounter abilities are so weak they're equivalent to basic attacks, they are by definition overpowered.

That in no way results in being broken on it's own, which means you have to come up with an actual example of how it is broken in practice for someone to claim that it is broken.
Actually I don't, as the one disagreeing with the OP (or in this case the surrogate actually advancing the general viewpoint of the OP), the burden of proof falls on you to show how encounter based abilities don't break the game. Most attempts to prove such are extremely narrow examples that ignore the principles of limited ability exhaustion and assume significantly more optimization than the original playtesters, and thus the game, did.

But I'll humor you, in similarly broad terms at least. How about any intelligent foe who seeks to wear down the PCs via repeated skirmishes? There are plenty of foes with fast healing or regeneration that should be able to wear you out of spells, forcing the players to get creative and find a way to win before they run dry and risk losing the straight up fight with only their unlimited resources. But a martial adept's encounter based abilities never run dry and are more powerful than normal unlimited abilities, so there's no way to wear them down and the threat is reduced, because encounter based abilities are not a standard part of the game. Demons and Devils are good examples of this.

Or, the zerg rush. Throwing waves of disposable minions at the caster to deplete their mass target spells is a classic, and those spells in turn exist to chew through disposable minions faster than unlimited basic attacks, but the minions must come in waves in order to draw as many spells as possible. But if they come in waves, those encounter based AoE's take the place of spells, requiring even more and/or tougher minions to soak, making the encounter worth far more than intended, or free up spell slots that the caster can use however they want for more power. Kobolds and Humanoid Zombies backed up by say, a time based trap or a caster in a defensive position, or suitably upgraded version at higher levels. More broadly, thugs, assassins, and random encounters. All meant to be threatening because they can strike when you're out of resources, but encounter based resources never run out.

How about any time based adventure? A standard suggestion for challenging high level magic is time pressure, missions where the PCs can't just fight their way through because they can't do it all in one day, can't do it with just their unlimited attacks, and can't afford to rest, so they have to get creative. Or with encounter based powers, they don't need to rest. The temple where a dark ritual is happening is one of these. That Black Wind line attack would be particularly good at clearing halls of foes meant to exhaust spells or allow other sneakier members a chance to find an alternative.

Penetrating defenses. Some monsters are designed so that the unlimited combatants cannot fight them effectively, thus the presence of those monsters forces you to dip into your limited combatant's resources. Contrary to popular belief, Damage Reduction and Regeneration are not meant to be bypassed all the time: they're are Easy if Handled Properly style encounters, and handling them properly means using limited spells unless you've been given access to the proper tools, which in a well-designed adventure will happen after you've dealt with them the hard way so that having the right tool is a reward. Or you could have an encounter based method of bypassing DR or dealing energy damage that allows you to take on an unlimited number of those foes without wasting any spells. Demons and Devils show up again here, as well as other things.

Unless your encounter based powers are no stronger than basic unlimited attacks/feats/etc, then they are stronger, and if they are stronger then you need to use stronger foes to combat them or find that your monsters don't perform as they should. This drives up the overall power level of the game, and any point of power higher than the original is yes, overpowered by definition. Weather or not it's a practical problem for you or me personally is immaterial. If someone plays at the baseline then it's a problem for them. You can't avoid it just by saying it's not a problem for you, anymore than the people who don't think casters are overpowered should ignore the possibility that they are. The difference is that the core game doesn't think casters are overpowered, while a splatbook that introduces a new paradigm not in the core game is a heck of a lot more likely to upset the original balance.

Funny thing I noticed while writing that: encounter based abilities threaten the skilled types more than anything. Spells can do whatever, but skills are usually limited to bypassing and preparing for encounters. The same way being able to ubercharge makes the shortest path always an ubercharge, having more at-will methods of engaging in combat means fewer reasons to go to skills for avoiding it. Driving up the combat capability of the party always penalizes people focusing on non-combat roles, which only stop existing when you demand everyone be good at everything.

Ualaa

2017-01-24, 08:37 AM

The best way to balance (to a high level of balance) is to restrict.

Force everyone to play the same class.
Give them all the same fixed stats, including forcing their stat ups to be the same.
Dictate their feat progression.
If they're casters, choose their spells for them and how many of each they memorize.
Give them the same items.
Make them all clones.

Remove d20 rolls, and assume they always 'take 10' whenever a d20 roll is called for.

Everyone is balanced equally against everyone else.

In a game that allows both spell casters and martial types, the balance is skewed horribly in the favor of casters.
The martial characters are so far behind the casters, except at very low levels, that the balance does not exist.
A Druid may have an animal companion that will kill a same level Fighter.
A Cleric, with a few buffs and disregarding their heals, will beat a same level Rogue to death in melee.
A Wizard has more options than a Cleric or Druid.

Giving the martial characters Path of War, increases their power dramatically.
A PoW character is massively stronger than a non-PoW martial type that tries to do the same martial style, be it archer vs archer, charge vs charge, sword & board vs sword & board, etc.
However, the caster is still far stronger.

You can weaken casters, with Spheres of Power...
The system allows for massively more options, in terms of concept of what you'd like to play...
So you can have much more variety in terms of what you're playing.
And unlimited uses of the 'base' sphere powers, but a finite limited spell point pool.
The Sphere caster has fewer options than the traditional caster, and their maximum damage is also lower.
They're essentially reduced in power, but are still stronger than martials.

If your casters can only use the Sphere system, your martials can only use Path of War, Ultimate Psionics, and Akashic Mysteries...
The system is still not balanced, but the disparity between Caster vs Martial is a lot closer.
So there is more balance.

Or go with the first option, force everyone to play the same thing.

Tuvarkz

2017-01-24, 11:28 AM

upho

2017-01-24, 02:58 PM

My position remains, however, that there are ways - ample, abundant ways - to avoid direct HP damage. There are also ways - again, plenty of them - to do other things.So much this. Damage, especially melee damage, is vastly overrated as a means for winning combats, not to mention that it does nothing in any other challenges PCs frequently face. And ironically, while very highly optimized DSP melee builds can indeed be silly effective in combat against virtually any monsters published by Paizo, and by that I mean "taking out entire families of tarrasques in the opening round"-kind of silly, they're certainly not being that silly by dealing damage.

@ Togath I would've understood your frustration had you been talking about PoW builds during the earliest levels, when there are indeed quite a few overtuned damage maneuvers (recognized by the devs and to be fixed in upcoming errata) and the game is stupidly rocket-taggy to begin with. But at 13th?

My advice is that you learn how to challenge more powerful PCs, and be glad that you got a soft start by only having to deal with high damage output builds. Trust me, you'll need the exercise in case your full caster players suddenly start playing their characters to their full potential, because in contrast to melee damage builds, that is not easy to deal with, and usually affects a whole lot more than combat.

Fizban

2017-01-24, 04:09 PM

Fizban, you've said it yourself: 3.5's combat is a tactical wargame. Being such, it is obvious that people would eventually notice ways to overwhelm enemy encounters as people played more and exchanged ideas and previous experiences-which naturally leads the DM to make combat harder since it otherwise is too easy.
Ah, but once you admit that everyone's pushing it, you can't make claims about stuff being underpowered. The fact that a fighter can't be as overpowered as a wizard doesn't excuse the wizard from making themselves overpowered in the first place. Players that recognize the DM isn't out to get them (requiring DMs that aren't) don't need to be overpowered, the DM doesn't need to overpower them, and there's no arms race. DnD 3.5 is a friendly game with no winners, dragging in the adversarial baggage from decades of previous editions is the problem.

Which pushes the old martials to the point where they are little more than glorified animal companions. ToB came out because the people that liked playing martials found that their preferred characters could no longer put up with what the DM needed to use so that the veteran fullcasters didn't crush through everything. Which meant that martials needed new, stronger toys.
Once again, Kelb has covered in various threads the hyperbole of the animal companion (and wild shape) comparisons. And ToB isn't actually all that strong- what it presents are unexpected unlimited abilities which reduce the ability of foes to wear down the PCs. It forces all fights to be tougher, or more accurately, reduces the threat of many weaker fights-something many people never use because they find it tedious, but was commonplace closer to the wargaming.

Your first statement implies that the arms race of char op vs foe op go so bad that certain abilities needed to be made unlimited in order to compensate. But ToB doesn't match the sort of numbers you'd expect of high op anything that could force that. It's fun and interesting and has a higher floor, but calling it a response to glorified animal companions and wargame mentalities is a bit much.

Resources are hardly an issue unless there is a hard time limit, and then avoiding encounters through a variety of means becomes possible. (Because if you can just mass invisibility to bypass an enemy instead of burning far more resources to kill it, it's an incredibly more efficient use of resources)
Expecting a module to stand up to a determined party unmodified is foolish to begin with, that's why there's a DM. Regardless, you just used a limited resource, which is the whole point and has nothing to do with encounter based abilities. Mass Invis your way past whatever you want, the DM can put an appropriate number of Mass Invis areas in to drain your resources until the threat becomes credible.

And then, Path of War martials also have to handle daily resources. Warlord has Warleader and Dual Boost, Warders have Armiger's Mark and Extended Defense (particularly this one-Extended Defense+Warning Roar or Fear the Reaper or Crushing Rebuke or Invulnerable Shell are party-savers), etc etc-these are their most flashy abilities, not the martial maneuvers themselves. And they are on limited levels-even if they still have stuff when running on empty of their daily limits.
And most likely they expect that their martial maneuvers aren't significantly stronger than baseline, so PoW is just a more interesting brawler with some daily abilities, same as a Barbarian or Paladin. Add in the fact that it's a splat based on a splat from late 3.5 for a system that's a whole step removed from 3.5, and no one should expect it to match up to 3.5 baseline. Which is why I studiously have made no definitive comments as to the effects of PoW vs Pathfinder core, since by the time Pathfinder came out it was frankly impossible to have a discernible baseline at all and I certainly haven't used it enough to evaluate them (since I don't like Pathfinder).

JoshuaZ

2017-01-24, 04:24 PM

So much this. Damage, especially melee damage, is vastly overrated as a means for winning combats, not to mention that it does nothing in any other challenges PCs frequently face. And ironically, while very highly optimized DSP melee builds can indeed be silly effective in combat against virtually any monsters published by Paizo, and by that I mean "taking out entire families of tarrasques in the opening round"-kind of silly, they're certainly not being that silly by dealing damage.

Can I see a build that does this?

Coretron03

2017-01-24, 05:14 PM

Milo v3

2017-01-24, 07:33 PM

You're falling for your own trap dude, core broken/not-broken has nothing to do with it.
I disagree, since comparing to core appears to be a way you measure if something is broken in the game.

Read your own statement: the only factor you have considered is "damage," with no further context, which apparently is the entire game.
It's not the entire game. It's just the only aspect of PoW classes which can be considered approaching overpowered. Their buffs and debuffs are useful, but in the end only about as useful as kineticists being able to put free debuffs on all their attacks are (would be more if they could reuse the same debuffs over and over though). Their static abilities give them abilities always levels after the caster gets such abilities.

No you didn't, but I grant that you're not ignoring it.
*Reads the lower part*
No, that's what I thought you were saying. I just disagree.

Let's go over this again: the core classes are built with two fundamental power sources: limited daily abilities, and unlimited daily abilities. Limited abilities are primarily spells, as well as rage and smite and such. Unlimited abilities are basic attacks and combat maneuvers, skills, feats, sneak attack, favored enemy, and so on. Classes with lots of daily abilities have fewer unlimited abilities, and classes with lots of unlimited abilities have fewer daily abilities. The PCs face an unknown number of encounters each day at unknown time intervals against unknown forces as well as an unknown number of non-combat obstacles.

Unlimited abilities are immensely valuable for anyone not so full of hubris as to expect they can perfectly predict and manage the unknown with a finite amount of resources. Limited abilities are immensely valuable for anyone who recognizes they may face foes stronger than themselves in a straight fight and obstacles they cannot innately overcome. Both are necessary, which is why the standard party is half unlimited Fighter+Rogue, and half limited Cleric+Wizard. Unlimited heroes shine against many waves of weak foes with their narrow non-flashy methods, and limited heroes shine against fewer waves of stronger foes with their broader flashier methods, and you have no way of knowing what's going to be needed in the next 5 minutes. Anyone can see those flashy effects found in magic are "better," but they are limited and can be exhausted, and this is the core balance of the game, something so mind-numbingly obvious it shouldn't require pointing out. Limited abilities are strong but run out, and unlimited abilities are weak and can only deal with weak foes on their own.

Most people seem to think martial adepts are better than their non-magical PHB counterparts, more powerful. Their encounter based abilities allow them to confront stronger foes with more powerful and flashier abilities similar to those of limited classes, but they never run out. The game expects attack rolls and skills and combat maneuvers and sneak attacks to never run out. It does not expect touch attacks and line attacks and throwing people across the room and teleporting and turning invisible to never run out (not for a long time anyway). It doesn't matter what you think, because unless those encounter abilities are so weak they're equivalent to basic attacks, they are by definition overpowered.
Except, we have all that sort of stuff At-Will with the kineticist. It's not only is as available with the frequency of encounter-based, it's "you can do that stuff every single round". Despite this, the kineticist is considered underpowered by most. Encounter-based abilities are not innately broken. Being able to do flashy things in all encounters does not brake the game, unless those flashy things themselves are powerful enough and versatile enough for doing them to be game breaking.

Actually I don't, as the one disagreeing with the OP (or in this case the surrogate actually advancing the general viewpoint of the OP), the burden of proof falls on you to show how encounter based abilities don't break the game.
The burden of proof is on anyone who claims a definite "X is Y". The OP hasn't said how Path of War is imbalanced outside of "How is a level one ability balanced with a level 13 ability", so, their proof so far has been poor. I have claimed it was balanced, causing you to ask what it is balanced against, which I answered.

Most attempts to prove such are extremely narrow examples that ignore the principles of limited ability exhaustion and assume significantly more optimization than the original playtesters, and thus the game, did.
Okay. How about this? Encounter based powers are not innately broken, because you can easily have them simply provide abilities around the sort you would associate with at-will characters meaning it will be performing as well as that at-will class at it's best. So if the at-will is considered non-game breaking in it's competency, why would consider that encounter-based character broken in this manner? Encounter-based powers can be balanced, and encounter-based powers can be imbalanced. But it depends on what abilities are actually granted by the abilities, rather than the format itself.

As for optimization, I do agree some of the people here showing how broken martial characters can get with level 2 fighters doesn't help anything because of how it'd likely never come up in a real game. I personally suck at optimization, so the martials I've played normally end up with numbers much closer to that of monsters of equal CR-1 and PoW initiators than getting over 100 on a level 2 character.

But I'll humor you, in similarly broad terms at least. How about any intelligent foe who seeks to wear down the PCs via repeated skirmishes? There are plenty of foes with fast healing or regeneration that should be able to wear you out of spells, forcing the players to get creative and find a way to win before they run dry and risk losing the straight up fight with only their unlimited resources. But a martial adept's encounter based abilities never run dry and are more powerful than normal unlimited abilities, so there's no way to wear them down and the threat is reduced, because encounter based abilities are not a standard part of the game. Demons and Devils are good examples of this.
Characters still get worn down through hit points, in the exact same way as other martials (though if there is an initiatior with silver crane manuevers, they can slow that down abit because they've got some in-combat healing). Their abilities are more useful than classes with unlimited abilities, but they do have an action-economy cost of this and the abilities are generally more versatility with things like attempting debuffs against creatures they've hit.

Or, the zerg rush. Throwing waves of disposable minions at the caster to deplete their mass target spells is a classic, and those spells in turn exist to chew through disposable minions faster than unlimited basic attacks, but the minions must come in waves in order to draw as many spells as possible. But if they come in waves, those encounter based AoE's take the place of spells, requiring even more and/or tougher minions to soak, making the encounter worth far more than intended, or free up spell slots that the caster can use however they want for more power. Kobolds and Humanoid Zombies backed up by say, a time based trap or a caster in a defensive position, or suitably upgraded version at higher levels. More broadly, thugs, assassins, and random encounters. All meant to be threatening because they can strike when you're out of resources, but encounter based resources never run out.
That sort of thing is likely why the initiators are much more limited when it comes to AoE attacks than casters. A blasting caster still would be much more effective against such hordes than the martial initiator, it's just the initator isn't near useless against such foes. I think worse at it than the characters who should be the best at it (casters), but not having to spend a tonnes of turns slowly trying to kill them all with your limited actions, is a good balance between the two extremes.

Though again, kineticist sticks his head in and blasts an at-will AeO touch attack which entangles all the survivors.

How about any time based adventure? A standard suggestion for challenging high level magic is time pressure, missions where the PCs can't just fight their way through because they can't do it all in one day, can't do it with just their unlimited attacks, and can't afford to rest, so they have to get creative. Or with encounter based powers, they don't need to rest. The temple where a dark ritual is happening is one of these. That Black Wind line attack would be particularly good at clearing halls of foes meant to exhaust spells or allow other sneakier members a chance to find an alternative.
Not needing to rest is normally a good thing in my experience with time-based adventures. Less reason for 15 minute adventuring day, which is normally the entire reason behind using time-based adventures.

Penetrating defenses. Some monsters are designed so that the unlimited combatants cannot fight them effectively, thus the presence of those monsters forces you to dip into your limited combatant's resources. Contrary to popular belief, Damage Reduction and Regeneration are not meant to be bypassed all the time: they're are Easy if Handled Properly style encounters, and handling them properly means using limited spells unless you've been given access to the proper tools, which in a well-designed adventure will happen after you've dealt with them the hard way so that having the right tool is a reward. Or you could have an encounter based method of bypassing DR or dealing energy damage that allows you to take on an unlimited number of those foes without wasting any spells. Demons and Devils show up again here, as well as other things.
Considering characters with DR penetrating maneuvers can only do so every couple of rounds, I don't really see how that is much of an issue.

This drives up the overall power level of the game, and any point of power higher than the original is yes, overpowered by definition.
It doesn't drive up the overall power level of the game, it drives up the overall power level of the weakest category of classes.

Coidzor

2017-01-24, 08:10 PM

If you want something lower powered, I suppose this old homebrew, realmofchaos's "Combat Techniques" (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?217700-Combat-Techniques-Adding-Depth-to-Mundane-Combat) might be worth taking a look at.

upho

2017-01-24, 09:14 PM

Can I see a build that does this?Sure. JoshuaZ, meet (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=21556361&postcount=89) Nelly (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=21556450&postcount=91).

And just in case someone thinks Nelly is uniquely powerful, I actually deliberately held back her most powerful stunts until the very highest levels, while for example a mass-grappling focused warder/bloodrager can probably be even more stupidly effective, and can start utterly dominating combat in a similar manner from as early as 9th level.

Sayt

2017-01-24, 09:36 PM

Dreadfox Ganmes has a class called the swordmaster, which I don't believe is incredibly high damage, and has an interesting action economy jigsaw puzzlw.

JoshuaZ

2017-01-24, 09:43 PM

Sure. JoshuaZ, meet (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=21556361&postcount=89) Nelly (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=21556450&postcount=91).

And just in case someone thinks Nelly is uniquely powerful, I actually deliberately held back her most powerful stunts until the very highest levels, while for example a mass-grappling focused warder/bloodrager can probably be even more stupidly effective, and can start utterly dominating combat in a similar manner from as early as 9th level.

Huh. That's very intriguing and sort of disturbing; it ruins to some extent my general impression that the ceiling of the Path of War material isn't too high. I've generally been under the impression that the highest level CR monsters are a bit weak for their CRs, but even given that, that's pretty impressive.

upho

2017-01-24, 10:49 PM

Huh. That's very intriguing and sort of disturbing; it ruins to some extent my general impression that the ceiling of the Path of War material isn't too high.I actually don't think it ruins your impression, generally speaking.

First, you cannot really compare very highly optimized builds to those that typically see actual play. The deliberate optimization required to break through the "normal" ceiling of PoW and have a melee build capable of being objectively OP (whatever that is), is simply on a completely different scale than the rudimentary, not to say accidental, optimization required to have a full caster build do the same. It's not even remotely comparable.

Second, PoW specifically probably isn't the primary reason for the stupid power potential of melee control/debuff builds, while boosts to size, reach, Str, and combat maneuvers and demoralization related feats (most of them made by Paizo) are. (Note for example that two of Nelly's far most powerful options - Soulless Gaze and Dirty Trick Master - were made by Paizo.) Heck, you can make a Paizo-only melee build able to make every non-immune opponent within 30' panicked in a round, in every round, in every fight.

Third, builds like Nelly are only going to be OP in terms of pure combat effectiveness. They're not going to be OP when facing any other challenges adventurers typically face, which full casters can be with a trivial amount of optimization.

I've generally been under the impression that the highest level CR monsters are a bit weak for their CRs, but even given that, that's pretty impressive.Yeah. With the exception of some particular immunities and numbers that are actually just boringly OP IMO (such as CMD), and a rare few particular monsters (such as Cthulhu), I agree.

Fizban

2017-01-25, 01:55 AM

I disagree, since comparing to core appears to be a way you measure if something is broken in the game.
Then allow me to bold the part I didn't bold before for politeness's sake: it doesn't matter what you think, because you're wrong (edit: that still sounds more aggressive than intended, but mirroring the word "disagree" sounds a lot more pompous and apparently I defaulted to mean instead). Pulling a completely predictable 180 after telling off Red Fell for trying to claim an objective measure of OPness, I have provided my "objective" measure of OPness. It is based on the only objective baseline possible: the mechanics, flow, and intent of the starting point of the system and its playtesters. Which is core, weather you like it or not. 3.0 or maybe 3.5 core actually, as Pathfinder is so far removed and had so many cooks in the kitchen after years of internet that it can't be expected to hold firm. For more practical purposes it's the monsters vs resource expenditure, and shocker, unlimited abilities drive down resource expenditure.

kineticists
Have nothing to do with anything, they're their own splat. Notice how I never mentioned warlocks either. Or reserve feats.

Okay. How about this? Encounter based powers are not innately broken, because you can easily have them simply provide abilities around the sort you would associate with at-will characters meaning it will be performing as well as that at-will class at it's best.
Duh, I already said that, several times: "Unless your encounter based powers are no stronger than basic unlimited attacks/feats/etc." I'm not arguing over weather or not they are, I'm taking the assumption that they are because otherwise people wouldn't be quite so gung-ho about defending them and there wouldn't be char-op builds claiming top end damage. I notice that you're not saying they're equivalent either, merely suggesting the possibility as if I hadn't already acknowledged it.

Characters still get worn down through hit points, in the exact same way as other martials
Do they? Expendable minions aren't supposed to be a threat, they're supposed to soak resources, as I already said. If they're chosen to soak spells rather than hit points, it's entirely possible they can't deal significant damage. AC is a thing, and you just went on about consumable items, what's the most common consumable if not the healing potion? Not to mention ranged attacks. You don't need to fight infinity in order to overwhelm the game, just be more efficient than expected, as you already said yourself. Why is it so hard to believe you could break the game by simply using an encounter based ability, when you'll claim that you can break the game simply by using some obvious feat or spell?

it's just the initator isn't near useless against such foes.
Funny how it's "oh lines aren't great they can only hit one or two people," and then "oh it's so much better than only attacking one or two people." (from various posters) Also, news flash: some foes and encounters are supposed to render a given character useless, it's a feature not a bug. That's why golems exist.

Not needing to rest is normally a good thing in my experience with time-based adventures.
Sounds like your solution to challenging the players is to let them do whatever they want and throw whatever you need to at them in order to mess it up. Just give them the ability to fight as many encounters as they want and then stop them with. . . what? You've already left the game's intended limits behind, now you're making up the game yourself. Don't come crying to me about how casters are OP when they can nova all their spells on the boss since you gave the party enough unlimited encounter abilities to fight all the way there without casting.

Considering characters with DR penetrating maneuvers can only do so every couple of rounds, I don't really see how that is much of an issue.
It doesn't really matter how many rounds they have to wait (1/2 rounds at 3rd, 2/3 at 9th for ToB), if the monster is expected to take 0-5 damage per attack and they're dealing 10, 20, 30. It's not an issue because you don't see DR as an actual defense, since you expect optimized characters who are never stopped by DR.

It doesn't drive up the overall power level of the game, it drives up the overall power level of the weakest category of classes.
The "weakest" category of classes that are half the foundation of the game. So half the player side of the game. Unless of course the encounter abilities aren't actually stronger than unlimited attacks, which is what you should be trying to prove, and you probably could aside from the difference in optimization floor/requirement.

What you should not be arguing is that an entirely new set of pacing mechanics not present in the original game is somehow perfectly balanced against the original. It's not, that's impossible. Encounter based abilities are, quite obviously, a medium approach between basic attackers/unlimited whatevers and spellcasters. They can be integrated into the game, but as a medium approach they necessarily disrupt the original dichotomy and will be overpowered in certain, possibly even many, situations. The same way replacing the non-casters with 2/3 caster will make the party overpowered, replacing the non-casters with martial adepts will make the party overpowered-assuming that the encounter abilities are stronger than unlimited.

DarkEternal

2017-01-25, 02:40 AM

My take on PoW is that it's a great system. but I agree that on a non optimisation level of play it can tend to be overpowered, especially with dips. Just one level in any of the martial classes gets you maneuvers, gets you crazy class features and usually doesn't do anything to weaken your other class at all, but rather strengthen it, especially with maneuvers and stances. (Had a guy play an occultist that changed into a pissed off huge cat that specialised in Prima Fury that pounced for a hundred damage every turn at like leve 7). I personally forbid dipping into PoW classes at my table. If you are in a class from that system, you have to stay in it.

There are some maneuvers that are a bit on the strong side, especially when used out of combat. Veiling moon has what is basically a dimension door as a maneuver which you can spam endlessly. I forgot if there's a maneuver in PoW like in ToB that makes you ignore hardness of stuff when you strike it so you can pretty much bash your way through anything.

Also, the class features. All three of the basic PoW have some crazy ones. I didn't even look into Expanded, but to me some are far too easy to use. This goes especially for the Gambit system of Warlord that gives you (and usually your party) great things on a success (which you will make in 90 percent of the cases, which makes it less of a gambit and more of a slight annoyance if you fail) which is always good, and just a slight debuff to the warlord himself in the rare cases that you fail. Stalkers get so much in the stealth department that they are virtually unnoticable by mid levels (seriously, I had a guy with like +30 to stealth or some crazy thing by mid levels). Didn't have much experience with Warders, but from what I've heard they've got their share of nice stuff as well.

CasualViking

2017-01-25, 04:55 AM

Fizban

2017-01-25, 10:58 AM

Fizban, stop fapping to the core book. The idea that an equal-CR would drain 25% of the party's resources turned out to be bogus in 2000, maybe early 2001. And you're talking about "game blance" while forcing people to reference both Wizard and Core ****ing Monk. That is as retarded as demanding exhaust-mounted particle filters on electric cars.
Hehehehe, it's nice to have a good giggle once in a while. Yup, that's how you can tell you're winning: when the other guy starts making sexual and disability infused insults because they don't have an argument. Not that you're the other guy- at least Milo actually has something to say, and if we worked at it long enough we could probably wrestle each others views into compatible phrasings, I've had enough of these arguments to know the real problem is that he doesn't find my root game design theory practical and I simply won't let people get away with pretending they had no hand in breaking the game. But you can't see the point when there's a literal essay on the subject staring you in the face and it leaves you with nothing but bile, and it makes me giggle. Hehehehe :smallbiggrin:

I personally forbid dipping into PoW classes at my table. If you are in a class from that system, you have to stay in it.
Interesting. Myself, I can't stand setting up a martial adept dip since it only makes it more obvious I could have made the non-adept class the dip instead. Unless the build is for a non-initiating PrC, but few of those are good enough beat out the adept.

On the subject of dips, I do feel like repeating an idea I had in another thread regarding non-martial adept dips and why they're a good thing: the best martial arts practitioners in real life know multiple schools of fighting, why on earth would a single classed Fighter or Barbarian or Monk be better at it than someone who took both? Martial adepts of course have this baked in with their multiple schools of maneuvers, but if dipping a different class makes their build stronger it still makes perfect sense. Just something to toss at a DM that hates on dips for fluff reasons.

Let's see, the Warlord's Gambit appears to be +cha on a chosen type of action right up front before even counting the extra benefits on sucess, with no limits on use (it's actually your recovery action), that is quite frontloaded indeed. The Warder also rolls in with a bonus feat and a "recovery" mechanic that usually requires more feats or prestige classes to get. So yeah, I can see why you'd ban the dips when they're packing 2-3 feats worth in a single level, before maneuvers and stances, that's frankly disgusting. Other than that, a glance at the tables shows what I expect from pathfinder: piles of class features on top of the casting or maneuvers, making them better by any class without casting or maneuvers by default.

There are some maneuvers that are a bit on the strong side, especially when used out of combat. Veiling moon has what is basically a dimension door as a maneuver which you can spam endlessly. I forgot if there's a maneuver in PoW like in ToB that makes you ignore hardness of stuff when you strike it so you can pretty much bash your way through anything.
ToB has teleport maneuvers as well, both versions seem to be limited to single/double move length distances, so it's just teleporting that's the problem. Some googling shows that PoW also has hardness bypass, 2nd level Primal Fury maneuver Devastating Rush, exactly the same as ToB's Mountain Hammer.

Alea

2017-01-25, 11:25 AM

I have provided my "objective" measure of OPness. It is based on the only objective baseline possible: the mechanics, flow, and intent of the starting point of the system and its playtesters. Which is core, weather you like it or not. 3.0 or maybe 3.5 core actually, as Pathfinder is so far removed and had so many cooks in the kitchen after years of internet that it can't be expected to hold firm. For more practical purposes it's the monsters vs resource expenditure, and shocker, unlimited abilities drive down resource expenditure.
Uh... no? That is not the only objective measure of balance.

If you use that as your measure, then almost-nothing can be overpowered. They're being compared to the core wizard. The 3.0 wizard, if I'm understanding you correctly. What's more powerful than that? Certainly absolutely nothing in Path of War. Actually, in all of 3.0, 3.5, and PF, only a handful of things are actually that powerful.

And by the same token, almost nothing can be underpowered. Core monk is completely incapable, so what's "underpowered" by that standard? Truenamer, I guess.

So no, I reject your premise in its entirety. Your "objective measure" is meaningless: everything more powerful than core monk (which is almost everything) and less powerful than core wizard (which is almost everything) would be balanced by that argument. That makes the standard worthless. Hence rejecting it as worthwhile.

In reality, the only standard that matters anywhere is "what fits best in my game?" for each individual person's definition of "my game." Cannot be applied universally, of course, but it does suggest an approach to trying to generalize. The things that fit best in anyone's game depend on the practical matter of how things actually play, considering people's individual games in aggregate. For both players and the challenges they face. Is a monk incapable of standing up to a lot of the challenges at its level? Then it is underpowered. Is the wizard capable of "win-buttoning" most challenges at its level? Then it is overpowered. If we make admittedly broad generalizations about the distribution of challenges being relatively uniform among those made available by sourcebooks (that is, not favoring things under-CRed nor things over-CRed), both of these things are true in core. For any given game, the exact distribution of challenges varies (wildly), so our generalization is imprecise, accepting that outliers exist where, say, the monk is perfectly capable or the wizard is reasonably challenged, but it is still possible to use this as an objective—if admittedly imprecise—measure of being over- or underpowered in a more abstract, generalized context than one's own game. An imprecise standard can still be objective.

Which is what good designers try to do. Certainly what the authors of Path of War have tried to do. I won't claim they succeeded 100% of the time (Broken Blade and Primal Fury, I am looking at you), but as I've already stated, this generalization is imprecise at best, and the data available to designers (and consumers and critics!) is, itself, inconsistent and anecdotal, so that isn't any huge surprise. But, notably, this is not what Paizo tries to do. They try to ignore any experience that shows that core is imbalanced, and insist on continuing to make the same mistakes that core did. That is deleterious to the game as a whole, and so are critics who insist on everyone else doing the same. We can, and thus should, do better than that. And that is what DSP tries to do.

But if you really want to insist, go ahead and use core as your absolute barometer of power. If you do, if you really honestly hold that up as the standard, then you have no grounds upon which to criticize anything DSP has ever published. They have never published anything as powerful as the core wizard. They have never published anything as weak as the core monk. By your own stated metric, DSP's work is perfectly within the boundaries of appropriate balance.

Which is kind of entertaining, because by my standards, they didn't hit the mark perfectly. It's only by your standards that we can state they hit the mark perfectly. Just because you're defining the mark as the incredibly, wildly expansive power-levels of core.

Gnaeus

2017-01-25, 11:47 AM

Did Kelb ever make those arguments against a summoners eildion? I would like to see that if Kelb has as the only ones I have seen him argue against are animal companions and clerics buffing them selves.

Kelb thinks that fighters come fully equipped with a chargepounce barbarian level and Shock Trooper but that the Bear is unbuffed. He uses the fighters WBL as a selling point over the bear, but not the Druid's ability to break WBL by crafting. He's taking an upper mid op fighter compared with a 0 op pet and concluding that the fighter wins... and it's not even like Fighter is the weakest martial. It could be bear v. Monk or TWF ranger.

Fizban

2017-01-25, 12:27 PM

Uh... no? That is not the only objective measure of balance.

If you use that as your measure, then almost-nothing can be overpowered. They're being compared to the core wizard. The 3.0 wizard, if I'm understanding you correctly. What's more powerful than that? Certainly absolutely nothing in Path of War. Actually, in all of 3.0, 3.5, and PF, only a handful of things are actually that powerful.
Standard party is Fighter, Rogue, Cleric, Wizard, who as a group should expend an average of 20% total resources vs level appropriate monsters, as defined in the DMG. A build or class is under or over powered based on what it does to that resource expenditure. Monks are in fact underpowered as they cannot perform any of the given roles as effectively as the main classes, driving up resource expenditure. Wizards are not overpowered, because they already hold one of the core roles. Some wizard builds are overpowered because they're so strong they reduce overall resource expenditure, and some of those builds can be done core-only. Etc. I think this is the most succinct phrasing I've found yet. Now that I've spelled it out, do you still reject it?

It's only by your standards that we can state they hit the mark perfectly. Just because you're defining the mark as the incredibly, wildly expansive power-levels of core.
No, you're using the wrong definition of balance and failed to understand my point, but admittedly I was going for the needling repetition of "core" and hadn't stated it in absolutely direct terms. See above. Your definitions of over/under powered aren't definitions, they're vague assertions that people will know it when they see it. Practical use obviously means evaluating each game individually, and that's the job of the table, but your idea of the aggregate is not the same as someone else's and only people who agree with your idea of the aggregate will ever agree with your idea of "balance."

You can't argue that something is overpowered, because you can't objectively measure it, because you don't have anything other than a personalized hunch. I can measure it because I'm using the actual definitions present in the game. I'm not crunching any more numbers than anyone else, but I'm asking the right question and have an objective frame of reference. If you reject my definition drawn from the DMG then you reject the class, level, and xp systems that use it, and are effectively making up your own rules so any balance problems are on your head.

Kelb thinks that fighters come fully equipped with a chargepounce barbarian level and Shock Trooper but that the Bear is unbuffed. He uses the fighters WBL as a selling point over the bear, but not the Druid's ability to break WBL by crafting. He's taking an upper mid op fighter compared with a 0 op pet and concluding that the fighter wins... and it's not even like Fighter is the weakest martial. It could be bear v. Monk or TWF ranger.
Point of order, WBL doesn't work that way unless the DM hands you nothing but straight cash, and they're under no obligation to hand you any straight cash. I'm also fairly certain that he doesn't assume maximum ubercharger but you don't need that to beat animals, which have very little room for optimization. But the main problem is that you're still asking the wrong question.

digiman619

2017-01-25, 12:46 PM

Standard party is Fighter, Rogue, Cleric, Wizard, who as a group should expend an average of 20% total resources vs level appropriate monsters, as defined in the DMG. A build or class is under or over powered based on what it does to that resource expenditure. Monks are in fact underpowered as they cannot perform any of the given roles as effectively as the main classes, driving up resource expenditure. Wizards are not overpowered, because they already hold one of the core roles. Some wizard builds are overpowered because they're so strong they reduce overall resource expenditure, and some of those builds can be done core-only. Etc. I think this is the most succinct phrasing I've found yet. Now that I've spelled it out, do you still reject it?

The designers clearly thought that, all things being equal, the classes should be equal in power. Clearly, that's not the case. The "standard party" that they thought was 5+5+5+5 was in reality 1+2+8+9. Complaining that a system that lets them be a 5 like intended as being "OP" while still having the 9 that is a Core Wizard seems almost vindictive in its attempt to preserve the status quo.

Alea

2017-01-25, 01:19 PM

Now that I've spelled it out, do you still reject it?
Now that you have spelled it out, I reject it that much more strongly.

I absolutely reject your premise that balance must be determined by mapping any given class to its role and comparing it only to the archetypal class of that role. That is wrong. That is a poor way to judge balance, and a deleterious approach to promulgate. That produces a worse game for everyone. The reasons for this are many, but to keep it short, 1. "roles" as such don't exist in 3.5, they're an artificial construct suggested by some designers and players and critics, 2. even if they did, any given role being definitively inferior or superior to any other role is bad design, which means cross-role comparisons are still valid anyway, are in fact more important because they speak to the balance of the game as a whole rather than any one particular class.

I absolutely reject your premise that the classic core party achieved the stated balance goal of 20% daily resource expenditure per encounter. The counterexamples for this claim are myriad: you can argue that conventional wisdom is not correct for every table, but you certainly cannot claim that the opposite of conventional wisdom is actually true instead. I stipulate there are tables where the 20% metric more-or-less holds—but then point out that, by necessity, that occurs because those playing the fighter, say, is optimizing more than the one playing wizard. We know that to be true through enormous amounts of anecdotal evidence as well as from some fairly-rigorous empirical testing: not as much as we'd all like, but just about the only thing that anyone has tried to rigorously test in this system are the relative capabilities of the fighter and the wizard. For example, the numerous duels run between core 13th-level wizards against all-supplements 20th-level fighters, wherein the wizard usually won unless the fighter resorted to Leadership for a spellcasting cohort or WBL-mancy. A 1v1 duel doesn't cover the myriad challenges of the game, but it does, if anything, present one in which the fighter ought to have an advantage.

I also absolutely reject the implication that Path of War doesn't involve resource expenditure because of the way maneuvers work. Maneuvers are not spells, and are not resources in the same way. They were never intended to be expended (you might have noticed that they aren't—that wasn't a mistake). But that doesn't mean that initiators don't have resources that do get expended—any more than a fighter has no resources that get expended. Initiators don't expend maneuvers, but fighters don't expend feats, either. This is actually critically important to the design of initiators, and is the primary reason why they are warriors, not spellcasters. But both fighters and initiators expend resources, generally in the form of HP.

Finally, on a personal note, I reject the notion of resource expenditure being a good metric to design a game around, full-stop. It's not, in my opinion. An obsession with resources and their expenditure and attrition makes for a game that bores me to tears. I realize there are those who prefer it, but I'm not one of them. And thus I absolutely reject your premise that this is the only metric worth using, and I care not one whit if Wizards of the Coast once gave lip-service to the idea.

Necroticplague

2017-01-25, 01:38 PM

But both fighters and initiators expend resources, generally in the form of HP.
Just to throw in an anecdote: in my experiences, the martial's HP, or things used to restore it, are typically what limits the ability of parties to keep going, not spell slots (beyond spell slots used to restore HP). I haven't seen "out of spell slots, let's stop" very often, but have frequently seen "one foot in the grave and we're out of healing potions, let's stop".

Finally, on a personal note, I reject the notion of resource expenditure being a good metric to design a game around, full-stop. It's not, in my opinion. An obsession with resources and their expenditure and attrition makes for a game that bores me to tears. I realize there are those who prefer it, but I'm not one of them. And thus I absolutely reject your premise that this is the only metric worth using, and I care not one whit if Wizards of the Coast once gave lip-service to the idea.
I agree. If I lose a character, I'd rather it be to something that was actually a challenging tactical encounter in it's own right, not simply because it was the 50th thing to come along. All the excitement of accounting.

Plus, that notion leads to classes that are impossible to balance. if you have resources to burn, you're ahead of the power curve. If you don't, you're below it. At no point is the game balanced. And, taken to further extremes, it just leads to people having to take turns to be bored to death (First half of day: Fighter and monk have next to nothing to do next to the wizard's power while they're expending slots, thus bored. Second half: wizard, out of spell slots, can't do anything of significance, thus has to just stand back and cross fingers while monk and fighter do things. wizard is now bored.

CasualViking

2017-01-25, 01:45 PM

Standard party is Fighter, Rogue, Cleric, Wizard, who as a group should expend an average of 20% total resources vs level appropriate monsters, as defined in the DMG.... A build or class is under or over powered based on what it does to that resource expenditure. Monks are in fact underpowered as they cannot perform any of the given roles as effectively as the main classes, driving up resource expenditure. Wizards are not overpowered, because they already hold one of the core roles. Some wizard builds are overpowered because they're so strong they reduce overall resource expenditure, and some of those builds can be done core-only. Etc. I think this is the most succinct phrasing I've found yet. Now that I've spelled it out, do you still reject it?

Oh god this bull**** burns my eyes. As someone pointed out, the balance in your classic party is like 9+8+2+1. Say that the Alchemist is a 6; So a bomb-throwing wizard replacement is unbalanced and underpowered, while a sneaky rogue-replacement Alchemist is unbalanced and way overpowered, regardless of the relative power of the two alchemists to each other?

You have obsessively decided that "equal CR drains 20%" and "the classic four man band is well balanced" are true, and there is no argument so circular or obviously wrong that you won't use it in service to your obsession.

Alea

2017-01-25, 01:50 PM

Just to throw in an anecdote: in my experiences, the martial's HP, or things used to restore it, are typically what limits the ability of parties to keep going, not spell slots (beyond spell slots used to restore HP). I haven't seen "out of spell slots, let's stop" very often, but have frequently seen "one foot in the grave and we're out of healing potions, let's stop".
Of course; that is the experience of the vast majority of people I have seen talking about the game. Which is an imperfect sample but a large one.

I agree. If I lose a character, I'd rather it be to something that was actually a challenging tactical encounter in it's own right, not simply because it was the 50th thing to come along. All the excitement of accounting.
Hah, I avoided a comment very similar to that because I did not wish to have even the slightest possible appearance of denigrating others' play preferences. There certainly is a challenge to that playstyle, much greater emphasis on player-skill which I can understand, even if it's not my own interest. And to the extent that games have their origins in education and preparation, long-term planning and strategical thinking are arguably the more rare and important skills here.

But it still does bore me to tears.

Plus, that notion leads to classes that are impossible to balance. if you have resources to burn, you're ahead of the power curve. If you don't, you're below it. At no point is the game balanced. And, taken to further extremes, it just leads to people having to take turns to be bored to death (First half of day: Fighter and monk have next to nothing to do next to the wizard's power while they're expending slots, thus bored. Second half: wizard, out of spell slots, can't do anything of significance, thus has to just stand back and cross fingers while monk and fighter do things. wizard is now bored.
That isn't necessarily true—the wizard could (and, in practice, usually does) hold spells in reserve to get through the day. A game can be balanced according to the 20% daily resource expenditure per encounter rule, even with differing resources styles. My objection, more-or-less, is simply that 1. I don't think that's a good rule, and 2. even if it was, core isn't balanced according to that rule, no matter how much it was their intent that it be so balanced.

Cosi

2017-01-25, 02:07 PM

Arguing with Fizban about game balance is pointless because he has a completely different definition of what "balanced" means than everyone else does. When most people say a game is balanced, they mean that things with equivalent cost have equivalent values. So the game would be balanced if Fighter 5 and Wizard 5 were equally useful, because they both cost five levels. But when Fizban says something is "balanced" he means "consistent with the way it was playtested". That's totally a property things can have, but no one else refers to it as "balanced".

He's also wrong, because the game doesn't make any distinction between how a party of four Wizards should perform and how a party of four Fighters should perform. As we know that those parties do not perform the same, the game is not balanced even under his bizarre definitions.

I agree. If I lose a character, I'd rather it be to something that was actually a challenging tactical encounter in it's own right, not simply because it was the 50th thing to come along. All the excitement of accounting.

I think being worn down is something the game should support, but not what the default should be. Possibly some abilities should give day-duration debuffs like "lose a spell slot" or "-6 DEX".

Plus, that notion leads to classes that are impossible to balance. if you have resources to burn, you're ahead of the power curve. If you don't, you're below it. At no point is the game balanced. And, taken to further extremes, it just leads to people having to take turns to be bored to death (First half of day: Fighter and monk have next to nothing to do next to the wizard's power while they're expending slots, thus bored. Second half: wizard, out of spell slots, can't do anything of significance, thus has to just stand back and cross fingers while monk and fighter do things. wizard is now bored.

I'm increasingly convinced that you should just give everyone resource management systems that operate at the level of the encounter. So the Warblade gets a bunch of maneuvers that can be refreshed by brandishing his sword, the Wizard gets a bunch of spells that can be restored by taking 15 minutes with his spellbook, and the Warlock gets a bunch of at-will invocations. That's easy to balance (relatively speaking), and gives DMs a bunch of levers to pull to help characters who are under-performing at their table.

zergling.exe

2017-01-25, 03:20 PM

digiman619

2017-01-25, 03:34 PM

Gnaeus

2017-01-25, 03:35 PM

Point of order, WBL doesn't work that way unless the DM hands you nothing but straight cash, and they're under no obligation to hand you any straight cash. I'm also fairly certain that he doesn't assume maximum ubercharger but you don't need that to beat animals, which have very little room for optimization. But the main problem is that you're still asking the wrong question.

Sure. But he's under no obligation to hand the fighter the gear he needs either. But whereas the caster w/AC actually has a game driven mechanic to turn whatever cash he can muster into the gear the pet wants/needs, the fighter has no game mechanic to turn a +1 vicious defending flaming dagger into the spiked chain he needs. The power of WBLmancy is heavily stacked in favor of the side with the caster on it.

On the contrary, an AC has plenty of room for optimization. The TWF/sword and board fighter gets compared with a bear or tiger, and loses. The ubercharger gets compared with a (maybe warbeast) fleshraker with venomfire and heart of x and half a dozen other lingering buffs and who gets Bite of the Weretiger shared with him at the beginning of combat. At this point, it isn't exactly a clear loss, since their capabilities will be different. But either one can adequately fill the role of melee combatant/damage source.

Cosi

2017-01-25, 03:43 PM

Tuvarkz

2017-01-25, 03:48 PM

zergling.exe

2017-01-25, 03:56 PM

The "balance point" of the game only ever existed in the designers dreams. It is patently obvious that the designers intended the classes to relatively balanced, and they proceeded to write the DMG under that assumption. The fact remains that what they actually made was an unbalanced mess (see the dozens of caster/martial disparity threads on these boards).

This, to the point where the paizo designers actively deny the fact that there's any caster/martial disparity.

Well there are groups that play where the balance point the designers intended remains intact, just because you don't doesn't mean that there aren't others who play at that level. The disparity can exist, and can crop up entirely on accident; but when it does, some groups just decide the caster doesn't take that option and keep on going at a lower power level.

That's not a balance point, it's a design paradigm.

Balance is a state in which options with equal costs have equal benefits. Balance makes no assumption about how powerful characters are. Wizard and Druid are mutually balanced. So are Binder and Factotum. But Wizard and Factotum are not mutually balanced, because Wizard levels are than Factotum levels.

The balance point is whatever level of power you decide to balance things at. Wizard is a balance point.

The design paradigm is how you expect the game to be played. Tank/Skill-Monkey/Support/Blaster is a design paradigm.

The problem with Fizban is that he's talking about the third thing, but calling it the first thing, and that's just confusing people.

But the design paradigm lead to where the designers put the balance point of the game. They put in options that didn't meet their design paradigm, but they didn't know that because everyone playing it for their tests liked the paradigm and thus kept within it. The fact that you can move the balance point does not mean it doesn't exist and that the designers are bad for creating an unbalanced mess.

Cosi

2017-01-25, 04:03 PM

But the design paradigm lead to where the designers put the balance point of the game.

Probably not, and even if it did only marginally. Even with Tank/Skill-Monkey/Healer/Blaster as your design paradigm, you can put the balance point anywhere. You could have a Blaster who was anything from a Wizard with no metamagic to a Mailman with all of it. Same design paradigm, radically different balance point.

The fact that you can move the balance point does not mean it doesn't exist and that the designers are bad for creating an unbalanced mess.

Insofar as the designers' job was to make a balanced game, you not only can but should criticize them for failing to do so. Not doing that just causes games to continue to not be balanced.

Alea

2017-01-25, 04:19 PM

digiman619

2017-01-25, 04:22 PM

Well there are groups that play where the balance point the designers intended remains intact, just because you don't doesn't mean that there aren't others who play at that level. The disparity can exist, and can crop up entirely on accident; but when it does, some groups just decide the caster doesn't take that option and keep on going at a lower power level.
Gentleman's Agreements are an OOC answer for an IC problem. Even without ice assassin and assorted bull**** that's clearly broken, the casters are the only classes that have "I win" buttons. even without 7th to 9th level spells. (charm person, wind wall, summon monster/nature's ally, etc, etc, etc...), and it becomes obvious, even to newbies.

But the design paradigm lead to where the designers put the balance point of the game. They put in options that didn't meet their design paradigm, but they didn't know that because everyone playing it for their tests liked the paradigm and thus kept within it. The fact that you can move the balance point does not mean it doesn't exist and that the designers are bad for creating an unbalanced mess.
No, that's where they intended the balance point to be. Where it actually ended up in practice is vastly different

upho

2017-01-25, 04:39 PM

Standard party is Fighter, Rogue, Cleric, Wizard, who as a group should expend an average of 20% total resources vs level appropriate monsters, as defined in the DMG.But this doesn't take the reality of PC options into account. It's about as inane as if I was saying "everybody in the world should live in peace" and then expecting everyone to do so while I continue to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists and drop nukes on random cities every other day. It also says nothing about whether for example the wizard is a complete loser that only drags the rest of the party down (unlikely but fully possible), or a god which makes the other party members completely redundant (more likely). In other words, it tells you nothing of how powerful an individual build should be. If you claim that a "balanced build" is one which pulls 25% of the weight needed for this standard Fighter, Rogue, Cleric, Wizard party to get through a theoretical average adventure published by Paizo with mentioned resource expenditure, then a majority of the PC options found in the CRB should be banned or changed, because they're highly unlikely to produce such builds, and in effect put totally unreasonable demands on the poor players in terms of system mastery (way beyond having a bit of simple optimization-fu).

And more importantly, the so-called balance of the Fighter, Rogue, Cleric, Wizard is a complete and utter lie, even theoretically. Because it assumes that (simplified) being able to take care of 100 pathetic mooks in the beginning of the adventure is balanced to being able to take care of the super BBEG at the end. It isn't, even if the party's resource expenditure says it is. The fundamental assumption is simply wrong.

Krazzman

2017-01-25, 05:39 PM

Wow this seems to be quite a trainwreck.

How about some anecdotal evidence? Everyone still like's those, right?

In roughly 6 years of playing DnD3.5 in the shortest period before we switched to pathfinder (funnily coinciding with a new group) I got both ToB and MoI allowed for play. And as such played a Warblade and a Totemist in the 2 games we ran.

The Warblade sadly only got to level 6 before the campaign ended but I, as the sole "optimizer" got quite a good look into certain styles.
Party consisted of a Warlock/Bard, Favoured Soul and Warmage(?), later joined by a Rogue. The amount of obstacles a Spiked Chain Trip build could obliberate in that campaign were quite funny. But for actual combat the DM once said: "Man, I am lucky you are not a fighter, else you would do this every round, instead of every second." For the first few levels I used the hit two adjacent enemies maneuver exclusively. If I had played a Fighter there would be only one difference: about 6 HP and stronger in combat. After about level 3 I finally started to get more tricks. Getting better defenses from maneuvers and at no point was my Warblade a problem.

As such in my experience the system of maneuvers is not broken or OP in and on itself. Especially the early levels make it quite clear that a fighter build for it can be even better, but the initiator brings more out of combat bonus with him.

For the record though: We don't use PoW or any 3rd party (one player got a 3rd party oracle curse allowed) material in our PF games. Mainly because we are still quite fresh with the system and the new classes published (anything after Mythic Adventures is new to us... still waiting for the books) and the current other players are on their 1st and 3rd game of pathfinder which is confusing enough already if we didn't also play gestalt atm.

I was in games where Warlocks were deemed OP. I was in games where Wizards were deemed worthless. I saw people advocating the monk as a wizard killer.

But in a group of Cleric, uRogue, Warder, Wizard I believe Path of War to be not broken, because at least from what I can tell there are gentlemen agreements. Also having played in 2 games that reached level 11 (so far) how come that either the Barbarian or Paladin were the most essential characters for combat?

Fizban

2017-01-25, 06:32 PM

I've only got a couple more minutes before work, but:

being wrong
Ahem, DMG pg49-50.

But the design paradigm lead to where the designers put the balance point of the game. They put in options that didn't meet their design paradigm, but they didn't know that because everyone playing it for their tests liked the paradigm and thus kept within it. The fact that you can move the balance point does not mean it doesn't exist and that the designers are bad for creating an unbalanced mess.
Not quite, I'm pretty sure they knew. Reports have said that they deliberately put in some trap options, presumably they deliberately put in some OP options. Because a game of send in the clones is less fun than a game with options.

And thanks for the assist, it was starting to get noisy in here.

I just stated that he's wrong. That isn't true. No game material anywhere suggests that the standard of balance is that party and that any party that deviates from it will be imbalanced. The game itself defines no concept of role to begin with. Nor is it true that this party was the only thing that received playtesting and thus the only thing that's balanced—the playtest party involved a wizard with Intelligence 11, which does not by even the most generous of definitions fit the supposed "standard party role" exemplified by the wizard class.
If you actually have a source that proves me wrong I'd love to see it. DMG pg49-50 defines how encounters work and what is a challenge, and how the challenge will be off if you lack certain classes, you can't just "you're wrong" your way out of it, you're the one rejecting the system, not me. The DMG doesn't strictly define the main four, because that would be rude, but it's right there in the example of play, and the starter sets, and has been common knowledge since ever. So please, go ahead and disprove me, if you have any actual proof- it seems that you may have heard more about the playtesting than me, but have decided that testing the low end somehow invalidates the middle and the very definition of how it's supposed to work weather or not they got it right.

Xerlith

2017-01-25, 06:38 PM

I ran a three-person 2nd level party through the Frozen Whispers adventure two days ago, running it as-written (meaning it was balanced around four 3rd lvl D&D 3.5 characters - so a bit over their challenge rating).

They were a Harbinger (Edge Lord), a Hidden Blade Unchained Rogue and a Spellshot Marksman (http://www.minmaxboards.com/index.php?topic=6075.0) with the healing circle.

They almost died at least four times. And that's with unlimited healing readily available.

If you want a quick balancing fix to the PoW classes, here it is - disallow the PoW classes, BUT allow everything else. Meaning, the access to maneuvers comes from the archetypes for non-initiators. Meaning they get the 6th level slow progression. There it is.

Alea

2017-01-25, 06:44 PM

If you actually have a source that proves me wrong I'd love to see it. DMG pg49-50 defines how encounters work and what is a challenge, and how the challenge will be off if you lack certain classes, you can't just "you're wrong" your way out of it, you're the one rejecting the system, not me. The DMG doesn't strictly define the main four, because that would be rude, but it's right there in the example of play, and the starter sets, and has been common knowledge since ever. So please, go ahead and disprove me, if you have any actual proof- it seems that you may have heard more about the playtesting than me, but have decided that testing the low end somehow invalidates the middle and the very definition of how it's supposed to work weather or not they got it right.

The DMG is not gospel. They got stuff wrong. They got a lot of stuff wrong. They admitted they got a lot of stuff wrong. So your one-true-way-ism is wrong.

Furthermore, your citation of DMG 49-50 is wrong, too. One, if you're going to cite something, quote it. Don't make people look it up. There's a dirty debate trick wherein you cite something vaguely and assert the basis for your claim is in there somewhere, and just assume most people won't check—because they won't, they have more important things to do. Even if you aren't doing that, you should avoid the appearance of it. And you should also do us the courtesy of valuing our time enough to do your own digging, not making us find your evidence. If you don't have time to respond properly, don't. The thread isn't going anywhere.

But more to the point, on DMG 50 I see a section describing Difficulty Factors which includes a few lines about how missing certain classes makes encounters more difficult. There is no statement that says that encounters get easier if you have more than one of certain classes. There is no statement that suggests that having two spellcasters replace your trapfinder and warrior is going to make things easier. The designers give no indication that they believed this to be the case. Which is to say, there is nothing in that area that actually supports the claim you made.

The designers believed they had made a game in which having a balanced party was best, and having a party that was lacking certain elements of the traditional party would have a harder time—even if those elements were replaced with more of one of the other classes. This belief was incorrect. So, too, are the examples that they give.

Cosi

2017-01-25, 06:46 PM

Ahem, DMG pg49-50.

Notably absent is commentary on balance between characters, which is the thing people actually care about.

Not quite, I'm pretty sure they knew. Reports have said that they deliberately put in some trap options, presumably they deliberately put in some OP options. Because a game of send in the clones is less fun than a game with options.

It's kind of fascinating that you don't seem to understand you can have options that are balanced.

The DMG doesn't strictly define the main four, because that would be rude, but it's right there in the example of play, and the starter sets, and has been common knowledge since ever.

Surprisingly, "you know it, I know it, everybody knows it" does not comprise evidence for your position. You're going to have to try a little harder than that, I'm afraid.

Milo v3

2017-01-25, 07:14 PM

Then allow me to bold the part I didn't bold before for politeness's sake: it doesn't matter what you think, because you're wrong (edit: that still sounds more aggressive than intended, but mirroring the word "disagree" sounds a lot more pompous and apparently I defaulted to mean instead).
You kept saying that, and then you say exactly what I thought you meant. Maybe I'm miswording my objections or something.

Pulling a completely predictable 180 after telling off Red Fell for trying to claim an objective measure of OPness, I have provided my "objective" measure of OPness. It is based on the only objective baseline possible: the mechanics, flow, and intent of the starting point of the system and its playtesters. Which is core, weather you like it or not. 3.0 or maybe 3.5 core actually, as Pathfinder is so far removed and had so many cooks in the kitchen after years of internet that it can't be expected to hold firm. For more practical purposes it's the monsters vs resource expenditure, and shocker, unlimited abilities drive down resource expenditure.
I understand why you are using core as the measuring stick, it does have the general assumptions of how the game will be played. But you are ignoring the fact that those assumptions do not work in a colossal number of instances. It's assumptions are wrong more often than it is right, so there is no reason why something should be considered broken just because it does not follow those assumptions to the letter, especially when the rest of the game disagrees with those assumptions (especially letting martials do flashy-ness).

Have nothing to do with anything, they're their own splat. Notice how I never mentioned warlocks either. Or reserve feats.
Ignoring them does not cause them to not exist. There are classes which do what you claim to be broken when they were encounter-based, but are at-will, and said classes and then not only not considered broken but not considered overpowered. If having warriors with flashy powers that can operate all day and make AoE's and has utility powers does not break the game, why would the same thing break the game if access to those powers were made more limited which would actually bring it closer to the assumptions of the original system?

Duh, I already said that, several times: "Unless your encounter based powers are no stronger than basic unlimited attacks/feats/etc." I'm not arguing over weather or not they are, I'm taking the assumption that they are because otherwise people wouldn't be quite so gung-ho about defending them and there wouldn't be char-op builds claiming top end damage. I notice that you're not saying they're equivalent either, merely suggesting the possibility as if I hadn't already acknowledged it.
I was repeatedly arguing with the claim that encounter-based systems are broken.

Do they? Expendable minions aren't supposed to be a threat, they're supposed to soak resources, as I already said. If they're chosen to soak spells rather than hit points, it's entirely possible they can't deal significant damage. AC is a thing, and you just went on about consumable items, what's the most common consumable if not the healing potion? Not to mention ranged attacks. You don't need to fight infinity in order to overwhelm the game, just be more efficient than expected, as you already said yourself. Why is it so hard to believe you could break the game by simply using an encounter based ability, when you'll claim that you can break the game simply by using some obvious feat or spell?
You can break the game with encounter based abilities (encounter based abilities can be broken or balanced depending on their specifics). I just don't see how it's broken in this instance.

As yes.... Martial initiators lose hitpoints... like every character in the game, exactly like martials. Their abilities allow them to deal decent amounts of damage, but in my experience I cannot say the initiators dealt out more damage than other martials (outside of this one other player who was playing a paladin/monk and went around throwing their sword). So from my perspective the same arguments would have to apply to the fighter.

Funny how it's "oh lines aren't great they can only hit one or two people," and then "oh it's so much better than only attacking one or two people." (from various posters)
It's true that lines aren't the best configuration for area-based affects, but I'm not sure many people would argue against the idea that it is much better than attacking one or two people for multiple turns.

Also, news flash: some foes and encounters are supposed to render a given character useless, it's a feature not a bug. That's why golems exist.
And as we all know, golems don't work for that role. Casters are famous for being able to be useful in literally every encounter, while "encounter where one player is useless" tends to afflict classes like the fighter much more often. I mean hell, in my years of discussing whether Martial/Caster disparity exists, the only actual solid encounter-styles I've heard which actually make casters "useless" are "this area is covered in an anti-magic field" (which can feel really cheap if you do it too much and it does reduce the effectiveness and competency of the martials you're trying to give the spotlight to) and "because Paizo ruled that spells all make glowing aura things, casting in social situations is slightly more difficult to pull off than it used to be and is less of an auto-win" (which is less of a casters are useless situation IMO and more of a slight obstacle that is easy to get around).

Sounds like your solution to challenging the players is to let them do whatever they want and throw whatever you need to at them in order to mess it up. Just give them the ability to fight as many encounters as they want and then stop them with. . . what? You've already left the game's intended limits behind, now you're making up the game yourself. Don't come crying to me about how casters are OP when they can nova all their spells on the boss since you gave the party enough unlimited encounter abilities to fight all the way there without casting.
Except they don't. Because 1) if one party member isn't helping (like the caster you're suggesting), the group will probably get much more injured than they otherwise would meaning they are running out of resources.... just like normal. 2) They don't have the ability to fight as many encounters as they want. In my experience they tend to only last around 3-5 encounters in a day (depending on the individual CR of each encounter since I do follow Core's assumption that not every fight should be of their level in CR).

It doesn't really matter how many rounds they have to wait (1/2 rounds at 3rd, 2/3 at 9th for ToB), if the monster is expected to take 0-5 damage per attack and they're dealing 10, 20, 30. It's not an issue because you don't see DR as an actual defense, since you expect optimized characters who are never stopped by DR.
Only being able to do it every couple of rounds (much more than two rounds because of it being very unlikely for initiators to waste actions to refresh their manuevers after only using a single manuever) means it basically ends up equating to "as if someone used an energy based attack against the creature" every couple of turns. DR isn't that giant of a thing when casters are ignoring it so immensely. Also, what it equates to is +5/+10/+15 damage depending on how high level you are but only against creatures with damage reduction, which is generally pretty fine (though I have a problem with it being more effective against higher level creatures and think the abilities should ignore "x amount of DR" rather than just "ignore DR" so it's better balanced.

The "weakest" category of classes that are half the foundation of the game. So half the player side of the game. Unless of course the encounter abilities aren't actually stronger than unlimited attacks, which is what you should be trying to prove, and you probably could aside from the difference in optimization floor/requirement.
We have repeatedly said that the initators aren't actually doing more damage than other martials (though I agree it would be better if so many people didn't respond with over the top optimization which will never be used in actual play), they strengthen the category by being able to deal out the same damage while also being able to debuff every couple of rounds and can buff their allies every couple of rounds, the mobility of using standard actions more often is also useful but not something too special in PF because of new feats Core added in like vital strike. The fact that half the foundation has such a horrible optimization floor is really messed up if you ask me.

What you should not be arguing is that an entirely new set of pacing mechanics not present in the original game is somehow perfectly balanced against the original. It's not, that's impossible.
Not impossible. Though I didn't actually claim they were balanced against the original. I claimed balanced against the games assumptions. Though, I still don't see how encounter-based passing actually creates problems that at-will abilities do not already cause.

The same way replacing the non-casters with 2/3 caster will make the party overpowered
*Blinks*
Wait a minute...
What?

No. This is blatantly false. 2/3 casters are nearly all considered the most balanced classes in the game (summoner is the only 2/3 caster not considered balanced).

I've had enough of these arguments to know the real problem is that he doesn't find my root game design theory practical and I simply won't let people get away with pretending they had no hand in breaking the game.
To be clear, as a person who actually studies game design theory at university, I don't have a problem with the game design theory you are expressing, it is merely that the game does not actually function in the manner described by that theory.

This, to the point where the paizo designers actively deny the fact that there's any caster/martial disparity.
This is incorrect, and I really wish people didn't keep claiming it was fact. James Jacobs has that view, not any of the designers. The dev's have agreed. Mark Seifter recently did a rather long post about the subject. There is a reason why all the variant rules for casters in Unchained were nerfs. There is a reason why the fighter has been getting non-horrible options recently. There is a reason why unchained suggests fighters should get combat stamina for free. Etc. etc.

Because a game of send in the clones is less fun than a game with options.
You say that as if balance and character's being homogenous were linked in anyway? Just give a glance to 3rd party PF or even 1st party PF in the past few years and you'll see a lot of balanced classes without them being "clones".

upho

2017-01-25, 07:57 PM

Reports have said that they deliberately put in some trap options, presumably they deliberately put in some OP options. Because a game of send in the clones is less fun than a game with options.Huh. Makes me wonder how I've always been able to tell for example alchemists, bards, hunters, investigators and magi apart. So could you please walk me through the supposed logic of "no trap or OP options = game of clones"?

To be clear, as a person who actually studies game design theory at university, I don't have a problem with the game design theory you are expressing, it is merely that the game does not actually function in the manner described by that theory.This.

This is incorrect, and I really wish people didn't keep claiming it was fact. James Jacobs has that view, not any of the designers. The dev's have agreed. Mark Seifter recently did a rather long post about the subject. There is a reason why all the variant rules for casters in Unchained were nerfs. There is a reason why the fighter has been getting non-horrible options recently. There is a reason why unchained suggests fighters should get combat stamina for free. Etc. etc.And this.

Thank you, Milo!

Fizban

2017-01-26, 03:57 AM

And I'm back.

That's not a balance point, it's a design paradigm.

Balance is a state in which options with equal costs have equal benefits. Balance makes no assumption about how powerful characters are. Wizard and Druid are mutually balanced. So are Binder and Factotum. But Wizard and Factotum are not mutually balanced, because Wizard levels are than Factotum levels.

The balance point is whatever level of power you decide to balance things at. Wizard is a balance point.

The design paradigm is how you expect the game to be played. Tank/Skill-Monkey/Support/Blaster is a design paradigm.

The problem with Fizban is that he's talking about the third thing, but calling it the first thing, and that's just confusing people.
Now we're actually getting somewhere, someone is willing to state what they mean by balance, if not discuss it (or have any meaning, you've basically just said that balanced things are balanced). Do you have a citation for that definition of balance, or is it something the community made up? While I've most likely said "balance" in quite a few places, since that's what you guys complain about, there's nothing in the DMG about "balance" that I know of. As I have said a bajillion times, nothing says classes are supposed to be "balanced" as you would call it. The best you've ever supplied was your false equivalencies of CR, the deconstruction of which will reappear shortly.

In short, there's no such thing as balance, and every single one of you screaming about it is missing the point, as you always have been since you abandoned your social responsibility to the game in favor of whining about "balance." If you want to argue with me about it, follow the quote link in the spoiler and go read that whole thread first.

The point of comparison for determining weather things are over or underpowered has an entire book on the subject: it's called the Monster Manual, and whenever the DMG says monsters that's what it means. Standard party, resource expenditure, monsters.

The DMG is not gospel. They got stuff wrong. They got a lot of stuff wrong. They admitted they got a lot of stuff wrong. So your one-true-way-ism is wrong.
So what did they admit they got wrong? Because the basic design theory of a standard cooperative party expending 20% of resources against level appropriate foes is a perfectly solid design. They may have made it too easy to do better than that, but that doesn't make the rules defining it stop working. It means that you either tone down your build or accept that you want to play higher op than the rules accomodate, start optimizing everything on both sides of the screen and stop complaining about things that don't exist.

Furthermore, your citation of DMG 49-50 is wrong, too. One, if you're going to cite something, quote it. Don't make people look it up.
Did you miss the part where I said I only had a few minutes? Back the *** off. You want the citations? I've already done them, in my last drawn out slugfest with Cosi, disproving the "Same Game Test" he tried to put forth as objective evidence.

Your proof of CR=level is that CR=level, is what you're saying. Because the delta part is part of the same section, and you then refer back to the same thing. And it does, for NPCs. Which has nothing to do with PCs.

I'll point out that for all your occasional page numbers, you aren't actually citing anything more than I am: the same two pages, which I have also referenced. But hey, I can quote the full sentences.

DMG p37: "When the party defeats monsters, you award the characters experience points (XP). . . Each monster in that book has a Challenge Rating (CR) that, when compared to party level, translates directly into an XP award.
Party party party. The line you want seem to focus on is the one that sounds like a definition, but with less information:

p37: "A Challenge Rating is a measure of how easy or difficult a monster or trap is to overcome."
Note how previous and subsequent sentences continue to refer to party and PCs, in the plural:

p37: "Did the PCs defeat the enemy in battle? . . . Suppose the PCs sneak past the sleeping minotaur. . ."
There has yet to be anything supporting the idea of a solo adventurer. Continuing on:

p48: "A monster's Challenge Rating (CR) tells you the level of the party for which that monster is a good challenge. A monster of CR 5 is an appropriate challenge for a group of four 5th-level characters."
Here is the definition of party size.

p48: "Parties with five or more members can often take on monsters with higher CRs, and parties of three or fewer are challenged by monsters with lower CRs.
The game rules account for these facts by dividing the XP earned by the number of characters in the party (see Rewards, pg36)."
Here is the first indication that a party of one is possible, though from what I understand it would be considered weak evidence at best. There is also a direct statement of how changing the number of PCs affects the math-by altering the xp, not the party level. So the usual math of -4 EL for cutting the numbers in half twice explicitly does not function-but I'm getting ahead of myself, since you didn't even bring that up and we haven't dealt with the fact that EL has not once been used to refer to the PCs.

Question 2: What is the overall win rate of CR 10 encounters against CR 10 encounters?
A. 50%
B. Some other percentage
Answer: A
Citation needed. Moving on.

p48: "Obviously if one monster has a given Challenge Rating, more than one monster represents a greater challenge than that. You can. . . determine the Encounter Level of a group of monsters, as well as to determine how many monsters equate to a given Encounter Level, (useful in balancing an encounter with a PC party). To balance an encounter with a party, determine the party's level (the average of all the member's character levels) "
Still nothing about EL or CR applying on the party side of things or any sort of reverse equivalencies. More statements that EL, and thus CR applies to monsters and is used in comparison to PC party level. The rest of that section goes on to describe calculating the EL for multiple monsters/creatures. Let's skip down a bit.

p49: "An encounter with an Encounter Level (EL) equal to the PC's level is one that should expend about 20% of their resources."
That is the definition of encounter levels. Note that for anyone actually using the game in practical terms, this is the only important definition of anything using CR. If using the CR and EL calculations does not result in around 20% resource expenditure on encounters equal to the party level (and party has already been defined as four PCs), then you need to adjust something, PCs or monsters or CR values. This is also the proof that if your characters are beating encounters against printed monsters without expending that many resources, they are by definition overpowered. Varies based on coursebook as always.

p49: "The party should be able to take on many encounters lower than their level, but fewer encounters with ELs higher than their level. . . an encounter of even one or two levels higher than the party's level might tax the PCs to their limit. . ."
Considering that parties of fewer than four characters are challenged by monsters of lower CR, a party of one facing an encounter of equal level to their own is almost certainly within that range. Still nothing about single PC vs single monster being a 50/50 fight though, or even a single monster vs the same EL being a 50/50 fight.
Ah, the Difficulty section, maybe it's in here?

p49, Table 3-2: "15%, Very Difficult, EL 1-4 higher than party level."
Well, while there's no official support for a party of one, we know it would be at least challenged by things of party level-1, which means we can infer that things equal to its level would probably count at EL 1 or more higher, so we should look at Very Difficult.

p50: "Very Difficult: One PC might very well die."
Huh, nothing about their odds at all. Citation needed.

But more to the point, on DMG 50 I see a section describing Difficulty Factors which includes a few lines about how missing certain classes makes encounters more difficult. There is no statement that says that encounters get easier if you have more than one of certain classes. There is no statement that suggests that having two spellcasters replace your trapfinder and warrior is going to make things easier. The designers give no indication that they believed this to be the case. Which is to say, there is nothing in that area that actually supports the claim you made.
If you replace your Fighter and Rogue with more spellcasters, certain things will get easier and certain things will get harder. But you refuse to believe that because in your mind it's impossible for a spellcaster to be bad at anything, which is only true at higher levels of optimization than the game expects. When you exceed the limits of the system, you forfeit your right to complain about breakage.

The designers believed they had made a game in which having a balanced party was best, and having a party that was lacking certain elements of the traditional party would have a harder time—even if those elements were replaced with more of one of the other classes. This belief was incorrect. So, too, are the examples that they give.
It's not a difficult concept. The rules define what is an acceptable power level. If you exceed it, that's your fault, not the fault of the class, unless the class can do so at the absolute minimum of build and tactics (and that minimum is almost certainly lower than what you believe is the actual minimum)

Notably absent is commentary on balance between characters, which is the thing people actually care about.
And has no basis in the rules. You want to complain about social problems go ahead, but you have no basis in the rules to complain about "balance," not that I've seen.

It's kind of fascinating that you don't seem to understand you can have options that are balanced.
It's kind of fascinating how the only thing you care about is your made-up construct.

Surprisingly, "you know it, I know it, everybody knows it" does not comprise evidence for your position. You're going to have to try a little harder than that, I'm afraid.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAH! Says the man who has even less actual evidence to support his fictitious argument. "Balance between characters is the only thing people care about," uh huh, sure, you're going to have to try a little harder than that to convince me there's any relevant rules to support you. And yes, the starter sets are as good a piece of evidence as any, in lieu of digging through a mountain of old magazines and articles for interviews. I know you aren't going to, why should I?

Sorry Milo, you're making actual discussions of interest but my dinner's getting cold so I'll have to respond to you more fully later. Short version: I don't think it's reasonable to expect splatbooks to factor into party/monster balance when they were printed after the standard party and monsters at the root of the game. this line:

it is merely that the game does not actually function in the manner described by that theory.
stands out: what do you mean by the way the game functions? I expect what you mean, and the argument I was going to tell people they should be making, is that the game's baseline of power isn't of practical use because few people want to play at that baseline. Which is a completely valid point, as long as they're willing to accept the consequences, which include throwing off the party/monster CR balance.

digiman619

2017-01-26, 04:29 AM

Fizban

2017-01-26, 06:16 AM

Fizban: And your excuse for ignoring warlocks/kineticists who have more at-will utility without expendable resources who demonstrably don't break the game (while still swearing up one side and down the more limited per-encounter abilities of PoW are broken),
Can you read?

Short version: I don't think it's reasonable to expect splatbooks to factor into party/monster balance when they were printed after the standard party and monsters at the root of the game

or your assertion that a party with 6th casters rather than fighters/rouges make the game unbalanced (while having two 9th casters in the party) are... what, exactly?

If you replace your Fighter and Rogue with more spellcasters, certain things will get easier and certain things will get harder.
Evidently not.

Because it seems that you realize you are defending a flawed position and are ignoring everything you can't quickly brush over.
Gee, I'm sorry I don't have the time to fight. . . seven? I don't have the time to respond with a detailed hour long rebuttal to each of seven people arguing against me at once. Especially you, as you haven't added anything of worth. Milo has something interesting to say, Alea had a post last page covering her disagreement in detail that I should have responded to but I jumped to the later one because of the extra page worth of babble, and Cosi, well I'd love to see what Cosi'll try to come up with next since he did actually bring a new argument since last time. You haven't, so kindly shove off.

I was checking back on the off chance Milo'd decided to respond to my short version already, but it seems not, and I'm certainly done for the night. If one of you three I mentioned has something to say, leave it here and I'll get back to you eventually. Everyone else can just stew.

CasualViking

2017-01-26, 08:07 AM

Fizban, just accept that when everyone but you talks about "balance", we're talking about one character vs. another; not in a 1v1 white room duel, but mostly in an actual adventuring day. We talk about ability to participate and contribute, in and out of combat.

Your position is "Classic four-man band, core only and heavily sandbagged, is the golden balance point, and everything needs to be compared to that". I suppose that's a valid point. I don't want to play that, nobody ever plays that, but sure, it's a a standpoint.

So, while you may be technically correct, you are not helping. You are, deliberately or not, derailing the discussion that is relevant to people (relative character capabilities) and trying to make it about something you (and basically nobody else) care a great deal about (party capability relative to a heavily sandbagged classic four man band).

You are, of course, very welcome to discuss your issue, but doing it by sabotaging other discussions by insisting on a different definition of "balance" from what everyone else is using, that's just a **** move. Stop it.

zergling.exe

2017-01-26, 08:31 AM

exelsisxax

2017-01-26, 08:45 AM

It seems to be quite relevant to the OP though, unlike everyone else who says that PoW is totally balanced, yes even then; despite the fact that OP views it as unbalanced. Fizban is one of the few people even bothering to think that PoW is unbalanced like the OP.

But even by his own metric, path of war is balanced. Full attacks are non-expendable resources, as are combat maneuvers, weapons, armor, AC, charge attacks, etc. So if he was actually internally consistent, he would have to accept that there is no inherent imbalance with at-will and per-encounter abilities. Unless, of course, he's going to make the claim that combat stamina makes fighters overpowered. The main issue he has with PoW mechanics is only because he has construed it to be something it isn't.

His second idea of "anything other than the original thief/fighter/cleric/wizard is imbalanced" is, in addition to being idiotic on its own, would point to most PoW classes being less imbalanced than 6/9 casters like magi and warpriests. A warlord is basically an unsucked fighter, and you can switch them out in the 4-man band and nothing else changes. Switch the cleric out for a warpriest, and you do have a problem because a warpriest actually does intrude on both cleric and fighter roles.

He has yet to offer any method that actually indicates PoW being overpowered, other than "core is what balance is" and not applying it with any honesty.

Alea

2017-01-26, 09:37 AM

If you replace your Fighter and Rogue with more spellcasters, certain things will get easier and certain things will get harder. But you refuse to believe that because in your mind it's impossible for a spellcaster to be bad at anything, which is only true at higher levels of optimization than the game expects. When you exceed the limits of the system, you forfeit your right to complain about breakage.
No, I'm not seeing it because that is not written anywhere in the book.

The book claims that if you lack certain classes, things get harder. It does not say that things get easier if you have more of another class. There is a disconnect between your premises and your conclusion that you are filling by logical fallacy, something similar to affirming the consequent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirming_the_consequent), which is invalid. Your claim that the book says these things is demonstrably false. Your claim that it's "there if only you had eyes to see" is insulting and also, obviously, wrong, since that claim is always wrong.

It's not a difficult concept. The rules define what is an acceptable power level. If you exceed it, that's your fault, not the fault of the class, unless the class can do so at the absolute minimum of build and tactics (and that minimum is almost certainly lower than what you believe is the actual minimum)
That is not the definition of broken or overpowered. That is not what the words mean. You are not allowed to redefine words as you like. You are certainly not allowed to use your own personal definitions of words, and then accuse everyone you meet of being wrong, without so much as offering your own definitions of those words for people to reject.

If the game's rules allow overpowered characters, the game is broken. That is what those words mean.

digiman619

2017-01-26, 01:28 PM

Necroticplague

2017-01-26, 02:15 PM

Fair enough Fizban, I'll shove off. But before I go, I have two last questions: 1) If you "don't think it's reasonable to expect splatbooks to factor into party/monster balance when they were printed after the standard party and monsters at the root of the game", what's the point of having splats? They must obviously be broken if by definition if they don't "factor into party/monster balance" and 2) Other than "The entire dungeon is in a giant anti-magic field", (which is obviously a very contrived circumstance), how will having a Magus instead of a Fighter ever make thingsmore difficult?

Just to play devil's advocate:
1)To make money. If 3.5 and PF's community show, things being ridiculously broken doesn't stop them from financially supporting the system, so more splats, regardless of brokeness, make money.
2)In a suffeciently long-drawn-out day with a large amount of weak enemies that need taken care of, the magus will be out of Arcane Pool points and useful spells. They will then be almost strictly inferior to the fighter. Thus, any further encounters are more difficult.

Arbane

2017-01-26, 02:30 PM

Let's go over this again: the core classes are built with two fundamental power sources: limited daily abilities, and unlimited daily abilities.

tl;dr: "Fighters are SUPPOSED to suck!"

Since these seems to have turned into Yet Another C/MD Discussion, here's the Bingo chart.
http://i.imgur.com/jNT6Ce6.png

digiman619

2017-01-26, 03:07 PM

Just to play devil's advocate:
1)To make money. If 3.5 and PF's community show, things being ridiculously broken doesn't stop them from financially supporting the system, so more splats, regardless of brokeness, make money.
2)In a suffeciently long-drawn-out day with a large amount of weak enemies that need taken care of, the magus will be out of Arcane Pool points and useful spells. They will then be almost strictly inferior to the fighter. Thus, any further encounters are more difficult.

So 1) Greed, and 2) in a scenario that explicitly goes against Fizban's sacred DMG; in order to have enough weak enemies to get rid of all their spell slots would also either a) be worth more XP than appropriate challenges or b) be so easy as to not count for XP.

CasualViking

2017-01-26, 03:23 PM

2)In a suffeciently long-drawn-out day with a large amount of weak enemies that need taken care of, the magus will be out of Arcane Pool points and useful spells. They will then be almost strictly inferior to the fighter. Thus, any further encounters are more difficult.

However, "a suffeciently long-drawn-out day with a large amount of weak enemies" is boring as ****, especially for the GM.

Past level 3 or so, it also requires an unbelievably contrived setup.

EisenKreutzer

2017-01-26, 03:43 PM

LordOfCain

2017-01-26, 03:59 PM

Your position is "Classic four-man band, core only and heavily sandbagged, is the golden balance point, and everything needs to be compared to that". I suppose that's a valid point. I don't want to play that, nobody ever plays that, but sure, it's a a standpoint.

I actually played this up until a couple months ago. We just started to get some non-core sourcebooks and a DM not afraid of optimization.

JoshuaZ

2017-01-26, 07:32 PM

I actually don't think it ruins your impression, generally speaking.

First, you cannot really compare very highly optimized builds to those that typically see actual play. The deliberate optimization required to break through the "normal" ceiling of PoW and have a melee build capable of being objectively OP (whatever that is), is simply on a completely different scale than the rudimentary, not to say accidental, optimization required to have a full caster build do the same. It's not even remotely comparable.

Second, PoW specifically probably isn't the primary reason for the stupid power potential of melee control/debuff builds, while boosts to size, reach, Str, and combat maneuvers and demoralization related feats (most of them made by Paizo) are. (Note for example that two of Nelly's far most powerful options - Soulless Gaze and Dirty Trick Master - were made by Paizo.) Heck, you can make a Paizo-only melee build able to make every non-immune opponent within 30' panicked in a round, in every round, in every fight.

Third, builds like Nelly are only going to be OP in terms of pure combat effectiveness. They're not going to be OP when facing any other challenges adventurers typically face, which full casters can be with a trivial amount of optimization.

I agree with most of your points; but in some respects it seems like Nelly isn't that optimized; it seems that the build uses very little of WBL. What fraction of wealth is being used at the level 10 and level 20 versions?

Gnaeus

2017-01-27, 06:55 AM

Klara Meison

2017-01-27, 08:19 AM

All these people comically missing Fizban's point. He's talking about the balance point of the game, what the designers based the balance on.

The balance is on someone is tanking, someone is dealing with traps, someone is an HP battery, and someone is blasting things. Replace the party tank with another wizard and summons and you have unbalanced the game. Replace the trapfinder with another tank and you have unbalanced the game. The entire assumption of balance assumed by printed material goes out the window when you start coming in with non-standard parties, and that is what results in things being over- or under-powered.

So balance is on "someone is doing nothing, since tanking is passive, someone is dealing with a non-combat problem while the rest of the party plays Settlers of Catan, someone is doing something repetitive and reactive, and someone is actually playing the game"?

My, what a wonderful, well-crafted experience.

Balance is a state in which options with equal costs have equal benefits.

I'd say it's more about them not having visibly unequal benefits. It's pretty hard to compare the benefit of "you can now understand all languages" to "you can now ward a room against intrusion". It is pretty easy to compare the benefit of "you completely disable this room of enemies" to "you somewhat decrease the HP pool of every enemy in this room".

I've only got a couple more minutes before work, but:

Ahem, DMG pg49-50.

Not quite, I'm pretty sure they knew. Reports have said that they deliberately put in some trap options, presumably they deliberately put in some OP options. Because a game of send in the clones is less fun than a game with options.

And thanks for the assist, it was starting to get noisy in here.

If you actually have a source that proves me wrong I'd love to see it. DMG pg49-50 defines how encounters work and what is a challenge, and how the challenge will be off if you lack certain classes, you can't just "you're wrong" your way out of it, you're the one rejecting the system, not me. The DMG doesn't strictly define the main four, because that would be rude, but it's right there in the example of play, and the starter sets, and has been common knowledge since ever. So please, go ahead and disprove me, if you have any actual proof- it seems that you may have heard more about the playtesting than me, but have decided that testing the low end somehow invalidates the middle and the very definition of how it's supposed to work weather or not they got it right.

DMG 49-50 says nothing about an "assumed" party being one of Rogue, Fighter, Wizard, Cleric. Last time I've discussed this with you, you have been unable to provide any evidence to support that conjecture of yours, besides "everyone knows this is so", "WotC once stated it as such on a website that no longer exists" and "it's what has been used in some examples and starter kits by WotC".

None of which is, well.

Any sort of evidence to support your claim that game was designed around that party makeup.

Did something change since then?

Did you miss the part where I said I only had a few minutes? Back the *** off. You want the citations? I've already done them, in my last drawn out slugfest with Cosi, disproving the "Same Game Test" he tried to put forth as objective evidence.

Funny, I thought DMG wasn't OGL and thus couldn't be cited on these forums without violating copyright. Was I wrong? I'd love to cite MM1 if that's the case.

Can you read?

Evidently not.

Can you? DMG p49-50, which you are so fond of quoting, sends you to MM1 p293 which has rules for advancing monsters, including 0HD humanoid characters in player class levels and how their CR changes in accordance to that. It claims that it rises on a 1:1 basis when you compare a martial monster with Fighter levels to a caster monster with Wizard levels. So a lv 13 Wizard is supposed to be the same CR as a lv 13 Fighter. However, if you think that lv 13 Wizard drains as many resources from the party as a lv 13 Fighter, well...

You are really super mega wrong.

JoshuaZ

2017-01-27, 09:20 AM

I clearly missed that thread. What's Nelly or can you link to it?

See page 2 of this thread where upho linked to Nelly, a highly optimized PoW build that at level 20 can take down most published Pathfinder CR 30 monsters without breaking a sweat.

LordOfCain

2017-01-27, 11:51 AM

Funny, I thought DMG wasn't OGL and thus couldn't be cited on these forums without violating copyright. Was I wrong? I'd love to cite MM1 if that's the case.

Last time I checked, the DMG and the MM are both OGL. I mean, they're both on the SRD (save for WBL/xp per level and a couple monsters)

Klara Meison

2017-01-27, 12:09 PM

Last time I checked, the DMG and the MM are both OGL. I mean, they're both on the SRD (save for WBL/xp per level and a couple monsters)

It says on the second page that "no portion of this work may be reproduced in any form without written permission", hence why I thought it wasn't OGL.

JoshuaZ

2017-01-27, 12:10 PM

Funny, I thought DMG wasn't OGL and thus couldn't be cited on these forums without violating copyright. Was I wrong? I'd love to cite MM1 if that's the case.

Citing is fine. Quoting extended bits of text is what is a problem.

Fizban

2017-01-27, 02:31 PM

I am the lord of Castle Text and all its walls, and I return to smack people reprovingly with my ruler because class is in session or something. I suggest everyone go make a sandwich. First up, Eisen, followed by a main course of Alea, with a side of edgy ex and digi, then back to Milo as we steer the barge towards the mainland, and some Klara just to get that tension back before we hit the road.

No seriously this thing is insane.

I realise that you are being assailed by a cavalcade of people wanting to argue with you on all manner of points, but I'm not interested in that.

Instead, I just want to ask for some clarification:

It seems to me that your position on game balance in relation to D&D/Pathfinder is as follows:
The game was playtested and balanced around a core party of four, with one Arcane caster, one Divine caster, a martial character and a skill-based character (Wizard, Cleric, Fighter, Rogue).
That being the case, any and all deviations from this base can and will unbalance the game, as it alters the core assumptions of the game which it is balanced around.

Is that correct?
Raising another point of course, but thanks for being considerate. Yes, you have it right. I am willing to listen to anyone who'd like to present hard evidence that this is not the case, but I doubt it exists any more than I can present ironclad evidence that it does. I feel that I have, if not ironclad, then at least reasonable evidence to back up what was, at least, common knowledge for years. Klara's denial at the end of the post is more mystifying than anything else. You can say it's a bad balance point, that none of "the game" conforms to it, that the designers never even tried to follow it, but trying to pretend that people didn't know what the standard party was?

I suppose I could quote p150 of PHB2, "The fighter, the wizard, the cleric, and the rogue form the classic group." But I get the feeling they'll just say "well it doesn't say anything about playtesting or game design so you're still wrong!," as if it would make any sense for them to refer to an outlier party as the "classic group." That quote should serve well enough for reasonable people though.

Now that you have spelled it out, I reject it that much more strongly.

I absolutely reject your premise that balance must be determined by mapping any given class to its role and comparing it only to the archetypal class of that role. That is wrong. That is a poor way to judge balance, and a deleterious approach to promulgate. That produces a worse game for everyone. The reasons for this are many, but to keep it short, 1. "roles" as such don't exist in 3.5, they're an artificial construct suggested by some designers and players and critics, 2. even if they did, any given role being definitively inferior or superior to any other role is bad design, which means cross-role comparisons are still valid anyway, are in fact more important because they speak to the balance of the game as a whole rather than any one particular class.
. . .
Finally, on a personal note, I reject the notion of resource expenditure being a good metric to design a game around, full-stop. It's not, in my opinion. An obsession with resources and their expenditure and attrition makes for a game that bores me to tears. I realize there are those who prefer it, but I'm not one of them. And thus I absolutely reject your premise that this is the only metric worth using, and I care not one whit if Wizards of the Coast once gave lip-service to the idea.
That is a fair and respectable position, but you must admit it doesn't agree with the actual design of the game. Leaving aside your claim that any roles are definitively inferior or superior, the standard party roles were part of the design, as verifiably as any part of the design can be, and the resources per encounter bit is right there. You've yourself drawn upon "numerous pieces of anecdotal evidence," doing so means you have no defense against the same and there's a similar mountain of anecdotal evidence that could be put forth here.

I absolutely reject your premise that the classic core party achieved the stated balance goal of 20% daily resource expenditure per encounter. The counterexamples for this claim are myriad: you can argue that conventional wisdom is not correct for every table, but you certainly cannot claim that the opposite of conventional wisdom is actually true instead. I stipulate there are tables where the 20% metric more-or-less holds—but then point out that, by necessity, that occurs because those playing the fighter, say, is optimizing more than the one playing wizard..[/b]
I do not believe I have ever said they achieved that balance goal, or even that they were trying to. The definition is simply the definition, and the baseline builds are whatever matches that definition. If that means the builds are horribly anti-optimized and require moronic anti-tactics, that means the game isn't going to run very well, but it doesn't change the definition. It just makes it of less practical use.

We know that to be true through enormous amounts of anecdotal evidence as well as from some fairly-rigorous empirical testing: not as much as we'd all like, but just about the only thing that anyone has tried to rigorously test in this system are the relative capabilities of the fighter and the wizard. For example, the numerous duels run between core 13th-level wizards against all-supplements 20th-level fighters, wherein the wizard usually won unless the fighter resorted to Leadership for a spellcasting cohort or WBL-mancy. A 1v1 duel doesn't cover the myriad challenges of the game, but it does, if anything, present one in which the fighter ought to have an advantage
No, duels most emphatically do not cover anything of importance. The only balance of any kind that the rules care about is based on a party of characters fighting monsters, and I refer you once again to my breakdown. Fiz highlights every instance of the word "party" and "monsters" on the relevant pages and comments flippantly. (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?509329-Tiers-Caster-Noncaster-Disparity-and-the-Point-of-the-Game/page6&p=21516813#post21516813)

I also absolutely reject the implication that Path of War doesn't involve resource expenditure because of the way maneuvers work. Maneuvers are not spells, and are not resources in the same way. They were never intended to be expended (you might have noticed that they aren't—that wasn't a mistake). But that doesn't mean that initiators don't have resources that do get expended—any more than a fighter has no resources that get expended. Initiators don't expend maneuvers, but fighters don't expend feats, either. This is actually critically important to the design of initiators, and is the primary reason why they [b]are warriors, not spellcasters. But both fighters and initiators expend resources, generally in the form of HP.
Hp is generally not considered as significant of a resource. The expected standard cleric can convert their spells to hp, so the Fighter's hp don't stay down until the cleric is out of spells that can be converted to hp, and there's those potions again. In fact most optimizers don't consider it a resource at all, and trying to invoke it as a balancing factor requires lowering your optimization towards "my" level here. In any case, this doesn't conflict with the question of their power level: the Fighter and Rogue's only limited resource is hp. If the initiator's only limited resource is hp (or Rage or some equivalent), then their manuevers must not exceed the standard unlimited attacks. If you think that they don't, I have to quarrel with you. If you think they do, then admitting it means they're overpowered.

But even by his own metric, path of war is balanced. Full attacks are non-expendable resources, as are combat maneuvers, weapons, armor, AC, charge attacks, etc. So if he was actually internally consistent, he would have to accept that there is no inherent imbalance with at-will and per-encounter abilities. Unless, of course, he's going to make the claim that combat stamina makes fighters overpowered. The main issue he has with PoW mechanics is only because he has construed it to be something it isn't.
No, you haven't been reading what I'm writing. I have said, several times by now, that if at-will and per-encounter abilities are actually equivalent, then there's no difference in power. If you wish to prove they are of the same power go right ahead. You'll also have to deal with the fact that unlimited teleportation and healing, at the very least, have the great potential to be overpowered, as they are both normally tied to finite resources and impossible to achieve otherwise.

His second idea of "anything other than the original thief/fighter/cleric/wizard is imbalanced" is, in addition to being idiotic on its own, would point to most PoW classes being less imbalanced than 6/9 casters like magi and warpriests. A warlord is basically an unsucked fighter, and you can switch them out in the 4-man band and nothing else changes. Switch the cleric out for a warpriest, and you do have a problem because a warpriest actually does intrude on both cleric and fighter roles.
I find it amusing that you can claim in the same sentence that "A warlord is basically an unsucked fighter," and then imply that nothing changes. You said nothing else changes, but yeah, the fighter has become less suck, so what has happened to the party's power level?

He has yet to offer any method that actually indicates PoW being overpowered, other than "core is what balance is" and not applying it with any honesty.
We've drilled down far enough that right now I'm just trying to get people to realize most of their concepts of "balance" are personalized constructs clouding their ability to see what others see. As for impugning my honesty, you can sod off with the rest of them.

No, I'm not seeing it because that is not written anywhere in the book.
I should have thought it was clear by now that I knew that, or I wouldn't have spelled out the neccesary reverse-engineering and alternate sources, including the much loved anecdotal evidence.

The book claims that if you lack certain classes, things get harder. It does not say that things get easier if you have more of another class.
And yet you will claim that wizards are objectively unbalanced because a team with two wizards is better than a team with one wizard and a fighter. So by your own admission things do get easier when you have more of a certain class. It is unfortunate that they did not state this outright, but they probably didn't because it's obvious that having two specialists will be better than one for any situation where they apply. That section is the only one in the DMG that comes close to officially endorsing the class roles -because to do so outright would have upset people and push them away from the diversity they were trying to build, not because they're invalid- and it's phrased defensively towards avoiding problems because they were worried about parties under-performing. Concerns about people over-performing are addressed other sections about problem characters, problem players, accidentally introducing something more powerful than expected and reminders that you don't have to allow everything if you don't want to. That last of which people like to ignore.

If the game's rules allow overpowered characters, the game is broken. That is what those words mean.
That is not a definition, that is a tautology. Or close enough anyway.

That is not the definition of broken or overpowered. That is not what the words mean. You are not allowed to redefine words as you like.
As Cosi likes to say, Citation Needed. Show me the definitions of broken and overpowered.

You are certainly not allowed to use your own personal definitions of words, and then accuse everyone you meet of being wrong,
Show me that definition by the rules of the game, not what the community tells you they mean.

without so much as offering your own definitions of those words for people to reject.
I have spent most of the thread doing that. I supplied the most succinct version, in direct response to one of your posts:

Standard party is Fighter, Rogue, Cleric, Wizard, who as a group should expend an average of 20% total resources vs level appropriate monsters, as defined in the DMG. A build or class is under or over powered based on what it does to that resource expenditure.
So kindly stop telling me I have no definition, when I do, and start using evidence to back up your claims, or just stop.

Fair enough Fizban, I'll shove off. But before I go, I have two last questions: 1) If you "don't think it's reasonable to expect splatbooks to factor into party/monster balance when they were printed after the standard party and monsters at the root of the game", what's the point of having splats? They must obviously be broken if by definition if they don't "factor into party/monster balance" and
The point of having splats is to have more cool stuff to play with. They don't need to factor into the original balance in order to be rated against it. The fact that splats are often more powerful than the core rules is to my knowledge well known in any game system, power creep exists.

2) Other than "The entire dungeon is in a giant anti-magic field", (which is obviously a very contrived circumstance), how will having a Magus instead of a Fighter ever make thingsmore difficult?
Well it should, shouldn't it? I believe you're referring to when I said, "If you replace your Fighter and Rogue with more spellcasters, certain things will get easier and certain things will get harder."

If you replace the Fighter with a Wizard, you will lack an actual frontline specialist (see Kelb's lists of all the differences). If you replace the Rogue with a Wizard, you will have a finite limit on things that the Rogue could do infinitely with normal skills and lack an actual stealth specialist. Similar effects for Cleric.

What happen if you replace the Rogue with a Bard? You trade sneak attack and two skills for inspire courage and spells. You've reduced at-will damage quite a bit and traded couple skills for limited spellcasting, but that spellcasting is far more powerful as long as it holds out. Depending on the pacing of the game, you might find yourself at a disadvantage against numerous waves of foes, and will likely be far more powerful against fewer waves.

Now we get to the Magus-but Pathfinder's so far removed they most likely didn't use the same balance*, so I'll use the Duskblade instead. Compared to a Fighter you lose some hp, more AC, and a lot of at-will abilities from the bonus feats. You gain, once again, a bunch of limited burst abilities from the spellcasting. You gain an advantage on short days and take the risk of being sub-par on days when you run out, and you're less effective against magic resistant monsters which are supposed to be one of the non-magical's big roles (the failure of magic resistant creatures has nothing to do with class design, that's monster and spell design at work).

The important part is that hardly anyone actually seems to run endurance tests more than once a campaign (indeed, the emminently reasonable CasualViking just said they're "boring as hell"), and while the DMG tells us how often to throw weaker/stronger encounters, it doesn't give us a standard pacing. Since more people seem to run rigid 4/day setups, or 2-3/day (because combat takes a lot of game time and spending weeks on the same game day gets annoying), or allow the players to control the pace, the way people are running the game never gives non-casters their advantage, and there's always some big fight that's the only one that day. Without a seven encounter marathon to match every single encounter day, they're allowing more resources per encounter on average, so of course casters will be more powerful.

*Cause it's, ya know, a new version after years of the internet complaining about class vs class "balance," and you give the people what they want if you want to sell books, so they probably had that in mind. For that matter, I'd never argue that WotC was actually running their design and playtests in the same direction as the definition-they were almost certainly eyeballing it, trying to lay down in rules what they'd been doing by feel for years, but they gave a definition and it's the only one we have.

Alright, back to Milo now. As a reminder, Milo was arguing with me over encounter based abilities, which are intimately related to evaluating PoW.

I understand why you are using core as the measuring stick, it does have the general assumptions of how the game will be played. But you are ignoring the fact that those assumptions do not work in a colossal number of instances. It's assumptions are wrong more often than it is right, so there is no reason why something should be considered broken just because it does not follow those assumptions to the letter, especially when the rest of the game disagrees with those assumptions (especially letting martials do flashy-ness).
The way you want to phrase that argument against me is by saying "it's not practical." The definition can't be wrong, but it's entirely possible that every group of players will exceed the limits without trying, making it useless. I don't think that's the case though, as anecdotal evidence shows that plenty of groups have played 3.5 as-is without any of the grievous imbalance issues so many like to complain about. If it can work as intended, that means the difference and thus the problem is in the users. At that point the question of practicality depends on how much of the userbase can use it as-is. When the game first came out I'll willing to bet it was very practical, though obviously after years of char-op and most remaining 3.5ers being dedicated diehards it's unlikely that many groups find the game practical as-is.

Incidentally, you can strip out the standard party and use the rest of the definition just fine, as p49: "An encounter with an Encounter Level (EL) equal to the PC's level is one that should expend about 20% of their resources," is all you really need to understand to balance your own game. All you have to do is accept that by using a non-standard party and/or optimization level, you're going to have to re-calibrate monsters accordingly. It's not the game's fault if unoptimized monsters are underpowered compared to books printed later than them and optimized characters.

If having warriors with flashy powers that can operate all day and make AoE's and has utility powers does not break the game, why would the same thing break the game if access to those powers were made more limited which would actually bring it closer to the assumptions of the original system?
I think you may have got confused, I'm saying that people getting AoEs and "utility" powers all day do break the game, in all likelihood. Other at-will classes like Warlock don't matter for balance the same way ToB itself doesn't matter: they're not part of the original balance system. You have to rate them against the original definition and see how they hold up.

I was repeatedly arguing with the claim that encounter-based systems are broken.
Fair enough. We agree that if the encounter-based powers are functionally the same strength as normal at-will powers, the system is fine (because duh). I will maintain that at-will versions of powers normally assumed to be limited and only limited (AoEs and teleportation mostly, but also healing), will always have room to be overpowered. How much so depends on encounter design and pacing, since almost no individual monsters are designed in such a way they're directly weak against AoEs or teleportation, and healing is one of the first things people optimize their way out of.

You can break the game with encounter based abilities (encounter based abilities can be broken or balanced depending on their specifics). I just don't see how it's broken in this instance.

As yes.... Martial initiators lose hitpoints... like every character in the game, exactly like martials. Their abilities allow them to deal decent amounts of damage, but in my experience I cannot say the initiators dealt out more damage than other martials (outside of this one other player who was playing a paladin/monk and went around throwing their sword). So from my perspective the same arguments would have to apply to the fighter.
To recap, Milo says: initiators still get worn down on hit points, so their at-will maneuvers don't mean they don't lose resources. I say: initiators can lose less hit points, because their abilities allow them to resolve certain situations faster or avoid other situations that an otherwise equivalent martial could not, thus reducing their overall resource expenditure. Once again, how far this goes depends on the pacing and encounter design, but the possibility exists as soon as you allow encounter based abilities that do anything you couldn't already do with the standard at-will Fighter/Rogue/feats.

It's true that lines aren't the best configuration for area-based affects, but I'm not sure many people would argue against the idea that it is much better than attacking one or two people for multiple turns.
I assure you at least one person did in one of these threads, arguing terms of pure dps as usual: a 15d6 line does x damage to y probable targets vs a full attack dealing z total damage, z is greater therefore AoE's aren't overpowered.

And as we all know, golems don't work for that role. Casters are famous for being able to be useful in literally every encounter, while "encounter where one player is useless" tends to afflict classes like the fighter much more often. I mean hell, in my years of discussing whether Martial/Caster disparity exists, the only actual solid encounter-styles I've heard which actually make casters "useless" are "this area is covered in an anti-magic field" (which can feel really cheap if you do it too much and it does reduce the effectiveness and competency of the martials you're trying to give the spotlight to) and "because Paizo ruled that spells all make glowing aura things, casting in social situations is slightly more difficult to pull off than it used to be and is less of an auto-win" (which is less of a casters are useless situation IMO and more of a slight obstacle that is easy to get around).
As above, that's not a failure of the definition, it's a failure of monster, encounter, and spell design. Mostly spell design as they printed more and more spells ignoring SR and perfectly solving this or that problem, facing a Golem you don't see coming cuts down on a lot of core spells just as intended-not a guarantee, but neither is any other "X class is useless" encounter once you include the player. Golems are just the easiest example for showing the obvious intent for such encounters to exist.

The encounters people like to say fighters are useless in are almost always social encounters, which are not officially endorsed by the rules (in 3.5): they say you can give out xp for them, but there's no official guarantees or values. Putting in social encounters where the fighter is useless is therefore a problem introduced by the DM, not the system. As for myself, I've never seen a problem will taking my non-social character in for participation and throwing aid-another checks.

Except they don't. Because 1) if one party member isn't helping (like the caster you're suggesting), the group will probably get much more injured than they otherwise would meaning they are running out of resources.... just like normal. 2) They don't have the ability to fight as many encounters as they want. In my experience they tend to only last around 3-5 encounters in a day (depending on the individual CR of each encounter since I do follow Core's assumption that not every fight should be of their level in CR).
To recap: Milo says not needing to rest is a good thing in time based adventures, I suggest he is saying they should be able to fight infinite encounters until stopped, not my best work. As for 1: my point is that it is possible there exists a mob level foe that a fighter could not dispatch indefinitely, but the martial adept could, thanks to their unlimited versions of normally limited effects. AoEs are capable of killing multiple foes at range, which a normal fighter can't really do, repeatable healing is repeatable healing, etc. So the fighter would still burn resources, weather potions or cure spells or artillery support, while the encounter guy might not, and thus encounter guy's party has more resources for the boss.

I'd also point out that if your party is doing time-sensitive missions "without rest" and is still only fighting a normal number of encounters, they're not really doing anything "without rest" are they?

Only being able to do it every couple of rounds (much more than two rounds because of it being very unlikely for initiators to waste actions to refresh their manuevers after only using a single manuever)
You seem to be saying that DR breaking maneuvers aren't good enough for beating DR to focus on using them, in which case why bother taking them? If DR matters then beating DR matters. And also saying that maneuver recovery wastes actions-on the Swordsage in ToB, but not the Crusader or Warblade, and the two PoW classes I checked had "recovery" actions that were better than normal attacks.

DR isn't that giant of a thing when casters are ignoring it so immensely.
Uh, that's the point, you use the caster's limited resources to take out the DR. Thought I just said that.

Also, what it equates to is +5/+10/+15 damage depending on how high level you are but only against creatures with damage reduction, which is generally pretty fine (though I have a problem with it being more effective against higher level creatures and think the abilities should ignore "x amount of DR" rather than just "ignore DR" so it's better balanced.
Creatures that actually rely on DR are those with 10 or 15 minimum, and have lower hp to compensate. +10/15 damage is quite a bit at the levels where DR reliant creatures show up, before the game does start assuming you'll beat all the DR. It's not a wide problem, but it is a subset of monsters that are denied their main shtick thanks to this at-will ability. And as you've noted, the sub-epic monsters that start relying on DR/epic get screwed.

they strengthen the category by being able to deal out the same damage while also being able to debuff every couple of rounds and can buff their allies every couple of rounds, the mobility of using standard actions more often is also useful but not something too special in PF because of new feats Core added in like vital strike. The fact that half the foundation has such a horrible optimization floor is really messed up if you ask me.
True, but if it walks like a fighter, talks like a fighter, and does extra things a fighter can't, it's better than a fighter and that's that. As long as the party still burns the right amount of resources it doesn't change the power level, but one must assume that having unlimited versions of normally limited abilities will always reduce resources expenditure, because as they say, it's just the obvious way to run the character isn't it? Casters might be assumed to waste a lot more spells than most players would actually waste, but it's a lot harder to waste encounter abilities.

Not impossible. Though I didn't actually claim they were balanced against the original. I claimed balanced against the games assumptions. Though, I still don't see how encounter-based passing actually creates problems that at-will abilities do not already cause.
Remember, when I say at-will or unlimited abilities, I'm referring to the core at-will/unlimited abilities: basic attacks, combat maneuvers, feats, and sneak attack. Those are the default, and cannot cause problems unless over-optimized. It's encounter based versions of limited abilities that can cause problems.

No. This is blatantly false. 2/3 casters are nearly all considered the most balanced classes in the game (summoner is the only 2/3 caster not considered balanced).
You're talking about "balance" again, class vs class "balance" doesn't exist. The 2/3 caster classes are "balanced" because they have some but not all of every main mechanic, about as much of a forced average as you can get making them closer to the other classes. When inserting them into the standard party, which has no 2/3 casters, they will always either have less or more limited abilities from spellcasting than the originals, making them unbalanced almost by definition, as they change the amount of limited resources and it requires a change of encounter design and pacing to offset that. Replacing the full casters with 2/3 means using fewer encounters that require big spells and allowing skills to handle more stuff, replacing non-casters with 2/3 means you need monsters that can pull more spells per fight but also don't flatten the front line without trying, which is usually rather difficult to manage.

To be clear, as a person who actually studies game design theory at university, I don't have a problem with the game design theory you are expressing, it is merely that the game does not actually function in the manner described by that theory.
Depends on what you mean by "the game." That's one of the big points of contention here: the opposition (including you in this case) usually wants "the game" to refer to all the books together as played to their standards. I am defining "the game" as the rules and guidelines in the DMG coupled with what we know and can guess about the intent behind it. I don't believe the former definition is useful at all, since (in 3.5 anyway) splatbooks were not written as part of any homogeneous whole and aren't meant to merge with each other, only putting in a token effort to respect core and always being defined as 100% optional, not guaranteed, use at your own peril with DM's permission by definition.

You say that as if balance and character's being homogenous were linked in anyway? Just give a glance to 3rd party PF or even 1st party PF in the past few years and you'll see a lot of balanced classes without them being "clones".
You're taking my fashionable hyperbole a little too seriously, but actually yes: I do see a lot of pathfinder classes as clones. Even if a lot of the individual abilities are slightly different, all those 2/3 casters are built on basically the same fill in the blanks table. Lots of the mundane classes are the same. It's nice "balanced" class vs class design, but unless the class has something that's actually unique I just go meh.

And a stinger for the close:

Last time I've discussed this with you, you have been unable to provide any evidence to support that conjecture of yours, besides "everyone knows this is so", "WotC once stated it as such on a website that no longer exists" and "it's what has been used in some examples and starter kits by WotC".
Sorry, but when basically everyone in the opposition is citing anecdotal evidence and common knowledge, you can't tell me mine's any less valid, and if the package meant to teach people how to play the game has zero weight with you I can't imagine anything else will. Have you brought any citations saying that every class in the game is perfectly interchangeable? Didn't think so.

Funny, I thought DMG wasn't OGL and thus couldn't be cited on these forums without violating copyright. Was I wrong? I'd love to cite MM1 if that's the case.
People have been using quotes and citations from the books for various purposes for years. In any case, you can cite MM1 all you want but it's the same rule that I've already cited from the DMG, proving the exact opposite point, so you're not going to prove anything other than the fact that you can't tell the difference between monsters and PCs.

CasualViking

2017-01-27, 02:41 PM

Fizban, those are a lot of words for something nobody but you actually cares about. Stop derailing threads with what you think discussions about "balance" should actually be about, you ****.

Alea

2017-01-27, 03:09 PM

That is a fair and respectable position, but you must admit it doesn't agree with the actual design of the game.

I admit no such thing. There is no evidence of that whatsoever. Which is what your entire argument boils down to: a bald, blatant appeal to an authority that doesn't in actuality support your position. I will echo Klara: this discussion has been ongoing for quite some time. Numerous people have pointed out that you have zero support for your position. Numerous people that you have attempted to hide that in floods of quotes and text and citations-without-quotatiosn that have don't actually support your position. None of the books regarding this have changed any in the time that this discussion has gone on. None fo these facts about your position has changed.

So please, echoing all the others: please stop repeating the same baseless claims over and over. Bring this up again only when you have some actual support or evidence for your position. And, if you are currently in doubt about this question, I will again explain that you currently have absolutely none. So if you're thinking about bringing this up again, I really strongly urge you consider whether or not anything has changed with respect to evidence for your position. Most likely, nothing will have, which means you really should not bring it up again.

I full well expect you are going to ignore my recommendations, and that saddens me, but I decided to give you the benefit of the doubt and explain things to you in case, somehow, you had misunderstood. At any rate, I consider the matter closed; I have no more time to spend digging through deluges of not-evidence.

CasualViking

2017-01-27, 03:16 PM

The important part is that hardly anyone actually seems to run endurance tests more than once a campaign (indeed, the emminently reasonable CasualViking just said they're "boring as hell"), and while the DMG tells us how often to throw weaker/stronger encounters, it doesn't give us a standard pacing. Since more people seem to run rigid 4/day setups, or 2-3/day (because combat takes a lot of game time and spending weeks on the same game day gets annoying), or allow the players to control the pace, the way people are running the game never gives non-casters their advantage, and there's always some big fight that's the only one that day. Without a seven encounter marathon to match every single encounter day, they're allowing more resources per encounter on average, so of course casters will be more powerful.

Well, since you're being so polite, I'll engage. Your very own personal la-la land argument is that equal CR encounters should drain 20% of the party's resources (even though that has never been the way things actually worked). And yet, here you are advocating that the same well-balanced party should be able to handle a 7 encounter marathon. Using the encounter mix table at the bottom of p. 49, because you fap hard to that section of the DMG, any way you slice it, it's going to take up more than 100% of the part's resources. Meaning, for the party of sandbagged retards you consider the correct balance point, everybody is going to die because Fizban wants mutually contradictory things to be true.

Klara Meison

2017-01-27, 03:19 PM

Sorry, but when basically everyone in the opposition is citing anecdotal evidence and common knowledge, you can't tell me mine's any less valid, and if the package meant to teach people how to play the game has zero weight with you I can't imagine anything else will. Have you brought any citations saying that every class in the game is perfectly interchangeable? Didn't think so.

First of all, that's not how logic works. Just because everyone is committing fallacies does not give you free reign to do the same.

Second, game assumes that a lv 13 wizard is as difficult as an enemy as a lv 13 fighter. See MM1 for details. Hence, game assumes that classes give equal returns for equal investment (i.e. levels) when it comes to enemies.

Red Fel

2017-01-27, 03:26 PM

And there you have it, folks. A pretty severe argument, all of which boils down to the point raised on the very first page of this thread, namely how you define balance.

For some people, "balance" means "the party in the context of the game." For others, it means "a given class as compared with another given class."

For still others, it means "How very neutral of you."

Damn Neutrals.

Point is, it's pretty clear this particular conversation isn't accomplishing much. Perhaps we could get past some of the less productive discourse and onto the topic?

Also:

Fizban, those are a lot of words for something nobody but you actually cares about. Stop derailing threads with what you think discussions about "balance" should actually be about, you ****.

Well, since you're being so polite, I'll engage. Your very own personal la-la land argument is that equal CR encounters should drain 20% of the party's resources (even though that has never been the way things actually worked). And yet, here you are advocating that the same well-balanced party should be able to handle a 7 encounter marathon. Using the encounter mix table at the bottom of p. 49, because you fap hard to that section of the DMG, any way you slice it, it's going to take up more than 100% of the part's resources. Meaning, for the party of sandbagged retards you consider the correct balance point, everybody is going to die because Fizban wants mutually contradictory things to be true.

There's a lot of hostility in these posts. Several of your fellow posters have learned to disagree, vehemently, without personal attacks. I'd suggest taking a lesson from them.

EisenKreutzer

2017-01-27, 03:33 PM

I think we have established beyond any reasonable doubt (and by Fizbans own admission) that Fizban operates with a definition of "balance" that is substantially different from the other posters in this thread.

Fizban's definition of balance is valid, theres no doubt about that, though it is pretty harsh in what it deems unbalanced.

Discussions where both parties have different definitions of what they are debating rarely end well. I think it's pretty clear at this point that none of the posters involved are going to change their definitions of balance or be swayed by the arguments of the other side.

CharonsHelper

2017-01-27, 03:35 PM

Discussions where both parties have different definitions of what they are debating rarely end well. I think it's pretty clear at this point that none of the posters involved are going to change their definitions of balance or be swayed by the arguments of the other side.

I'm being swayed by each and every post. I'll agree with whoever posts their wacky argument last!

EisenKreutzer

2017-01-27, 03:37 PM

I'm being swayed by each and every post. I'll agree with whoever posts their wacky argument last!

I think the currents of this discussion are making everyone who reads it surge back and forth under the forceful torrent of arguments.

digiman619

2017-01-27, 03:39 PM

Alright, Fizban, credit where credit's due, you convinced me on my first argument. Power creep is a legit aspect I failed to consider. As for the 2/3rds casters replacing martials making the game more difficult
Well it should, shouldn't it?
Yes, yes it should. In practice, 99%+ of the time it doesn't, but it really, really, should.

CasualViking

2017-01-27, 03:45 PM

RedWarlock

2017-01-27, 03:59 PM

That's not an honest representation of the discussion so far. It's not "some" and "others", it's literally one guy.

Not just one guy. I agree with Fizban's point, though I see it that you guys are mostly just arguing differing sets of terminology. He's arguing a platonic ideal which the developers were aspiring to, not necessarily the exact system that resulted, since there are too many variables to ever stick that landing exactly.

What we have here is a disconnect in what we consider acceptable behaviour. You think calling someone a **** is objectionable. Me, I consider hijacking threads, 10 posts in, with little regard to productive discussion or integrity of position, to be the objectionable behaviour.

He's actually the only one who is ON topic, because the rest of you all came in to dispute the point of the OP, who felt that PoW/encounter-based-powers were unbalanced. He's supporting the OP's viewpoint with an alternate definition of balance, while the rest of you are the actual jerks.

Serafina

2017-01-27, 04:01 PM

Alright, Fizban, credit where credit's due, you convinced me on my first argument. Power creep is a legit aspect I failed to consider.Power creep certainly happened - but that doesn't mean it's entirely a bad thing.

Consider what the Core Rulebook offered for someone who wants to play a frontline combatant.
You basically had a choice between Barbarian, Fighter, Paladin and Ranger.
Well, if you just want to be on the frontline and want to hit things really hard with a sharp stick, all of those classes work. They may work more or less well, but they do.

But that's all they do. Well, not the Ranger and Paladin, they get spells and actual class features.
But in core, the Fighter basically gained zero options to do anything but be good at one way of attacking enemies. The Barbarian got a little bit, but not terribly much anyway.
Neither of these make for a character who can contribute terribly much to a party.

Meanwhile, the power creep we got with all the supplements actually made for characters who could be good frontline combatants - but also do other things, and have a bit more variety in how they fight.
And frankly, most people eventually want their character to be able to contribute to the party in more than one specific way. This is a good thing, because it makes for an altogether more engaging game.

Krazzman

2017-01-27, 04:02 PM

Raising another point of course, but thanks for being considerate. Yes, you have it right. I am willing to listen to anyone who'd like to present hard evidence that this is not the case, but I doubt it exists any more than I can present ironclad evidence that it does. I feel that I have, if not ironclad, then at least reasonable evidence to back up what was, at least, common knowledge for years. Klara's denial at the end of the post is more mystifying than anything else. You can say it's a bad balance point, that none of "the game" conforms to it, that the designers never even tried to follow it, but trying to pretend that people didn't know what the standard party was?

I suppose I could quote p150 of PHB2, "The fighter, the wizard, the cleric, and the rogue form the classic group." But I get the feeling they'll just say "well it doesn't say anything about playtesting or game design so you're still wrong!," as if it would make any sense for them to refer to an outlier party as the "classic group." That quote should serve well enough for reasonable people though.

Sorry for ignoring the rest of your wall of textiness but I think you could get some hints for or against it when you look into the artwork of the 3.0 and 3.5 books and look which iconic is being pictured in what sort of part composition.

IF (and that is a big one since I don't have any 3.0 books) I remember correctly there was an artwork depicting the Bard, the Sorcerer, and two others battling some big monster in a room, the POV was in the back of the bard. From that and other artwork we could see if the designers and artwork creators thought about this party composition of Fighting Dude, Skill dude, Magic User and healing person.

And furthermore if I remember correctly someone claiming that the playtest was wonkers beyond belief. With the druid going "Hurr durr Dual Wield Scimitars" and using wildshape to scout exclusively. This might be also a point of consideration.

Red Fel

2017-01-27, 04:10 PM

That's not an honest representation of the discussion so far. It's not "some" and "others", it's literally one guy.

Correct. At least one person espouses one definition of balance, and at least one person espouses a different definition. And nothing will be accomplished by debating those definitions.

What we have here is a disconnect in what we consider acceptable behaviour. You think calling someone a **** is objectionable. Me, I consider hijacking threads, 10 posts in, with little regard to productive discussion or integrity of position, to be the objectionable behaviour.

Incorrect. I consider calling someone anything that needs to be censored objectionable, full stop. I don't give a toot what the other side did. Thread hijacking happens a lot in this forum. It's kind of our thing. Uncivil language, on the other hand, is objectionable, and I don't particularly care if you think the other kid in the playground was asking for it, you don't hit the other children, are we clear?

There are contexts in which topics deviate, and to do so is acceptable. There are not contexts in which insults are appropriate.

Cosi

2017-01-27, 04:17 PM

Incorrect. I consider calling someone anything that needs to be censored objectionable, full stop. I don't give a toot what the other side did. Thread hijacking happens a lot in this forum. It's kind of our thing. Uncivil language, on the other hand, is objectionable, and I don't particularly care if you think the other kid in the playground was asking for it, you don't hit the other children, are we clear?

For what it's worth, we're also not supposed to back seat moderate.

Red Fel

2017-01-27, 04:18 PM

For what it's worth, we're also not supposed to back seat moderate.

... Fair point, withdrawn.

Fizban

2017-01-27, 04:29 PM

Numerous people have pointed out that you have zero support for your position.
I'm only seeing you two and Mr. Poor Insults in such complete denial.

Numerous people that you have attempted to hide that in floods of quotes and text and citations-without-quotatiosn that have don't actually support your position.
Once again call me a liar straight to my face. I have linked you the relevant citations twice now, the fact that you can't be bothered to follow the link is your own problem. And you call my honest desire to respond fully to everyone who's engaged reasonably with me in the thread an attempt to "hide" their disagreements?

To hell with you sir. I specifically came back in part because I wanted to discuss your well articulated disagreement, and you accuse me of posting in bad faith.

I will tell people they are wrong, lace my posts with acid commentary, but I would never look at someone's work and say it wasn't what it was. Even without a language filter I don't know what to call you for that. I regret bothering to address you as an equal, you clearly don't deserve it, may you rot in obscurity. *spit*

Well, since you're being so polite, I'll engage. Your very own personal la-la land argument is that equal CR encounters should drain 20% of the party's resources (even though that has never been the way things actually worked). And yet, here you are advocating that the same well-balanced party should be able to handle a 7 encounter marathon. Using the encounter mix table at the bottom of p. 49, because you fap hard to that section of the DMG, any way you slice it, it's going to take up more than 100% of the part's resources. Meaning, for the party of sandbagged retards you consider the correct balance point, everybody is going to die because Fizban wants mutually contradictory things to be true.
That's actually a fair attempt, but you don't seem to understand what an average is. They must survive expending less resources in some encounters in order to average out with spending more in others. No one actually expects an exact 20% burn on every fight, that would be silly. Some fights cost little, some fights cost more, but ignoring the individuality of the fight, the main factor is how many fights you expect in the future and thus how much you use to win right now. If you have a fight where you get to splurge, you must have fights where you're forced to ration. The 7 encounter marathon would require a different strategy and tactics in order to survive, allowing and requiring the non-casters to have their time in the spotlight. Resources would be stretched and luck would be tested, but nowhere does it say that there is a limit on how many encounters you must fight in a day. It in fact says there is no change in rewards, challenge rating, or difficulty based on previous fights or bad luck. Thank you for making the attempt, but you've not beat me yet.

First of all, that's not how logic works. Just because everyone is committing fallacies does not give you free reign to do the same.
Ooh, does that mean you admit your're committing the fallacy? Cause I still have actual sources and you still can't pony up a single retort other than that.

Second, game assumes that a lv 13 wizard is as difficult as an enemy as a lv 13 fighter. See MM1 for details. Hence, game assumes that classes give equal returns for equal investment (i.e. levels) when it comes to enemies.
Yup, as expected, you have proved you can't tell the difference between rules that apply to monsters, and rules that apply to PCs.

Alright, Fizban, credit where credit's due, you convinced me on my first argument. Power creep is a legit aspect I failed to consider. As for the 2/3rds casters replacing martials making the game more difficult
Yes, yes it should. In practice, it doesn't 99%+ of cases, but it really, really, should.
Thank you for your consideration, I'm glad you found my post useful. And sorry I said you hadn't contributed anything- I won't take back my reaction, but you did say some useful stuff before that, and clearly I thought your next post worth a response.

I think we have established beyond any reasonable doubt (and by Fizbans own admission) that Fizban operates with a definition of "balance" that is substantially different from the other posters in this thread.

Fizban's definition of balance is valid, theres no doubt about that, though it is pretty harsh in what it deems unbalanced.
Victory! You don't have to use it, but you admit it exists. Now that I've got my definition down to a single line I can throw it down first thing in all future threads, not that anyone will take it without another full campaign. And now we can move on to the productive part.

Once you know what balance is, you can completely ignore it and optimize on both sides till they land wherever you want. Acknowledging that what little balance the game innately achieves is based on the standard party means you know that anything the standard party can't really, truly match, is something that will need to be accounted for in your encounter design.

The lesson for balancing Path of War is as I've already said: watch out for AoEs, healing, status effect, and especially teleportation, and if you don't want to adjust encounter design for them then ban those effects. Check the damage output you expect from your table's level of optimization, and adjust as needed to match normal attacks and such.

That's not an honest representation of the discussion so far. It's not "some" and "others", it's literally one guy.

What we have here is a disconnect in what we consider acceptable behaviour. You think calling someone a **** is objectionable. Me, I consider hijacking threads, 10 posts in, with little regard to productive discussion or integrity of position, to be the objectionable behaviour.
Three guys actually: myself, supporting the OP who started the thread, and zergling acknowledging I have a point. And that's if you consider it a completely binary situation. Oh, four now with RedWarlock.

As for weather I'm derailing anything, let's see. I tracked it back: I said martial adepts could be broken compared to core, Milo was like "core wut," we began discussing the effects of encounter based classes on the game but disagreed on what balance meant so I described mine, at which point all the gloves came off and people wanted me to throw a party. So I obliged them.

Sorry for ignoring the rest of your wall of textiness but I think you could get some hints for or against it when you look into the artwork of the 3.0 and 3.5 books and look which iconic is being pictured in what sort of part composition.
Certainly an interesting idea, but for the purposes for which I seem to need source it won't suffice: if they wont take PHB2 p150, I doubt they'll take art direction. Cool idea though, it'd fly in an anthropological sort of way, studying the culture without being able to read all the text.

And furthermore if I remember correctly someone claiming that the playtest was wonkers beyond belief. With the druid going "Hurr durr Dual Wield Scimitars" and using wildshape to scout exclusively. This might be also a point of consideration.
Indeed, that's part of my reasoning. We've heard that the iconic characters at the end of Enemies and Allies came from the playtest. The druid has a throwing+returning scimitar, and only the illusionist has any appreciable amount of metamagic. The dwarf has weapon spec in two different one-handed melee weapons as well as shot on the run, the rogue has spring attack, no one but the monk has improved trip and even the barbarian has point blank shot-just point blank shot. This is why I have no illusions about the expected level of optimization: there isn't any. CR is not as broken as some people think it is, but expecting things to hold up when that's what someone official built? Ridiculous. At the end of the day the only balance of any kind you should expect from dnd is what you make yourself, and remember that it's about a team.

EisenKreutzer

2017-01-27, 04:47 PM

digiman619

2017-01-27, 05:26 PM

upho

2017-01-27, 05:44 PM

I agree with most of your points; but in some respects it seems like Nelly isn't that optimized; it seems that the build uses very little of WBL. What fraction of wealth is being used at the level 10 and level 20 versions?I'd prefer if we could talk about Nelly's specifics in the thread where she's posted, but her gear (not including standard adventuring gear) is listed in the summaries as normal, including gold remaining according to WBL (1,250 gp @ 10th and 13,650 gp @ 20th). IOW, she uses a very large portion of WBL, to the point that she actually wouldn't be able to afford her gear had the build not used the alternative magic item rules from Steelforge. And aside perhaps the deliberate delay of certain very powerful options (especially Soulless Gaze and Dirty Trick Master), I'd say Nelly is indeed a highly optimized melee build; I mean her passive defenses alone - typically more than AC 62, Fort +44, Ref +32, Will +45 during most rounds - are pretty darn high in my world, not to mention her great action economy (she can typically take at least three standard actions, two move actions and two immediate actions per round, all day long) and very powerful control/debuff shenanigans.

But of course I'd highly appreciate any improvement suggestions you may have!

EisenKreutzer

2017-01-27, 05:51 PM

Fizban, not to be a Richard and bring up something else when we more or less settled things, but I just realized something: You're using the wrong balance point; not because your definition of balance is wrong, but you're applying it to the wrong game. Path of War is explicitly a Pathfinder product; judging it by 3.5's rules will of course make it seem wrong, It'd be like complaining that you can't really understand anyone in Portugal when you only speak Spanish; they're similar, but they are two separate things.

This is actually a very good point. Paizo rebalanced all the classes, changed their mechanics and abilities, and introduced new options and features that altered the basic assumptions (like experience and character advancement, for example).
As such, Path of War is balanced against a different system than the Tome of Battle was, and it's core mechanics need to be viewed in that light.

Klara Meison

2017-01-27, 06:03 PM

Ooh, does that mean you admit your're committing the fallacy? Cause I still have actual sources and you still can't pony up a single retort other than that.

You have not quoted a single source that directly supports your claim that game was designed around the "Wizard, Fighter, Rogue, Cleric" party. At best you have circumstantial evidence, and honestly not even that.

Yup, as expected, you have proved you can't tell the difference between rules that apply to monsters, and rules that apply to PCs.

I was specifically only talking about enemies (monsters), and not PCs. Strawman much? My point is that CR system assumes that one level of fighter is the same as one level of wizard in terms of draining resources from the party-a lv 13 fighter is CR 13, and thus should drain 20% of resources from a lv 13 party. Likewise with a lv 13 wizard. But that is not true. Since core claims that it is so despite it being wrong, core CR system is out of whack at best, and you can't use it to support your arguments regarding system balance. For example, you say that if party drains less than 20% of their resources on a level-appropriate encounter, it's overpowered. But that logic only works if level-appropriate CRs are consistent within the core. And they are not.

lord_khaine

2017-01-27, 06:18 PM

Must say i kinda agree with the OP. It does look like some of the schools are a touch overtuned in the path of war book.

Fizban

2017-01-27, 08:39 PM

I just want to go against the grain here and say that Fizban is some sort of text-based superhero for even being able to follow all these concurrent arguments, let alone keep so many arguments and lines of thought going simultaneously.

Kudos, man! I may not agree with your arguments, but I respect the work you put into laying them out and defending them!
So much positive reinforcement, I might decide keyboard warrior is more than a sarcastic title. But seriously, I'm just spending way more time on it than most reasonable people would. I said I don't have time for seven one-hour rebuttals, but once I got going on that last one I wanted to finish responding to everyone, and it took about six hours. I have more free time than most people, but even that will eat into sleep unless you're not doing anything else with your time, and I have not slept much this "night." So no special feats involved, just stubbornness and time.

Fizban, not to be a Richard and bring up something else when we more or less settled things, but I just realized something: You're using the wrong balance point; not because your definition of balance is wrong, but you're applying it to the wrong game. Path of War is explicitly a Pathfinder product; judging it by 3.5's rules will of course make it seem wrong, It'd be like complaining that you can't really understand anyone in Portugal when you only speak Spanish; they're similar, but they are two separate things.
Not sure if you caught it, but I did cop to that. The theory still applies in general, if you asked the same question about ToB it'd apply straight, and it's worth knowing when considering what's going on in Pathfinder and what to do from there. Can't know where you are if you don't know where you came from. That said, I'd love to see some designer commentary about what they intentionally changed regarding that. I'm guessing they were eyeballing things as much as WotC was, but it's possible someone did deliberately abandon the idea of resource based encounter design even with core-but I would expect that to come with core classes using more at-will and encounter based powers (except for all I know they do, I don't know all of pathfinder core even, admitting I don't like it). In the end I still say that PoW is probably about as broken as ToB, wherever that falls for the user.

You have not quoted a single source that directly supports your claim that game was designed around the "Wizard, Fighter, Rogue, Cleric" party. At best you have circumstantial evidence, and honestly not even that.
And you have at best circumstantial evidence that everything is meant to be perfectly balanced against each other. We can do this all day but you can't avoid the fact that in my world, the class "imbalance" isn't an issue, while in your world it's apparently so important they should have noticed. But they didn't, so which is more likely? I don't expect you to get it, but other readers might.

I was specifically only talking about enemies (monsters), and not PCs. Strawman much? My point is that CR system assumes that one level of fighter is the same as one level of wizard in terms of draining resources from the party-a lv 13 fighter is CR 13, and thus should drain 20% of resources from a lv 13 party. Likewise with a lv 13 wizard. But that is not true. Since core claims that it is so despite it being wrong, core CR system is out of whack at best, and you can't use it to support your arguments regarding system balance. For example, you say that if party drains less than 20% of their resources on a level-appropriate encounter, it's overpowered. But that logic only works if level-appropriate CRs are consistent within the core. And they are not.
It's all there if you could be bothered to read my previous argument, but admittedly you'd have to read more than just the citations to get it, because it requires some reading comprehension. You want to say that the classes are all defined as equal because the MM (actually the DMG) say that CR for NPCs is based on level, and is the same regardless of class. I already tore this apart in detail for Cosi, not that I expect you to actually consider it. Actually you may have read it in the previous thread, but you're bringing it up here again so either you didn't or you're just dragging the whole argument into here when I was specifically trying to avoid that.

Second, not only is NPC CR defined as equaling level, the CRs of various NPCs equal their level (delta templates or LA). For example, the sample Half-Fiend is a level 7 Cleric with the Half-Fiend template (MM, page 147-148). It is CR 9, having a CR from levels of 7 and adding 2 for its template. Or, exactly what it would be following the rules on page 39.

Your proof of CR=level is that CR=level, is what you're saying. Because the delta part is part of the same section, and you then refer back to the same thing. And it does, for NPCs. Which has nothing to do with PCs.
Furthermore, the declaration that level=CR for NPCs with class levels is not the primary definition of CR. It is a shortcut, an equivalence for determining rewards, but not the actual measure of challenge. It applies somewhat to NPCs, and has nothing to do with PCs. Not for power level, not for party balance vs monster, not for anything at all except the false-equivalence you need to prove your equally false claim. This is why I tore down the defintion of CR and encounters word by word, highlighting all the instances of party and monsters and pointing out the severe lack of PC in any of those equations. The simple fact is that the CR rules apply only to antagonists and have nothing to do with proving class equivalence, even if level=CR was the primary definition, which it is not.

You want the rules to apply "equally" to everything, but they don't. PCs are not NPCs, classes are not inherently balanced and nothing says they should be. The game just isn't what you want it to be, and you can't prove that it is. You say that I can't, but I'm the one actually arguing from the starting position and you have to disprove me first, not the other way around. You are not right just because some of the community backs you up. The ironic thing is that if you actually took your own advice and looked for a quote, I'm sure you could find one somewhere by a foolish designer claiming the classes are all equal. I still wouldn't count it, but at least you'd have some more "circumstantial" evidence for your side.

My apologies to anyone who's sick to death of this by now, I'm only dragging it over here because technically I haven't posted that part here and while I don't expect people uninterested to have followed the link, I figure having it directly in front of you might be less annoying than talking around it if Klara's just going to keep bringing it up. I have more to say than just that, so I think it's fair to keep brushing the hounds off my back while I do so.

Milo v3

2017-01-27, 09:18 PM

The way you want to phrase that argument against me is by saying "it's not practical." The definition can't be wrong, but it's entirely possible that every group of players will exceed the limits without trying, making it useless. I don't think that's the case though, as anecdotal evidence shows that plenty of groups have played 3.5 as-is without any of the grievous imbalance issues so many like to complain about. If it can work as intended, that means the difference and thus the problem is in the users. At that point the question of practicality depends on how much of the userbase can use it as-is. When the game first came out I'll willing to bet it was very practical, though obviously after years of char-op and most remaining 3.5ers being dedicated diehards it's unlikely that many groups find the game practical as-is.
Those 3.5e assumptions are actually not true in Pathfinder outside of a handful of things. Pathfinder was not playtested under the assumption you should have a Cleric, Fighter, Rogue, Wizard as you're party. Pathfinder has a completely different set of rules for encounter building. Pathfinder's playtesting was actually a public one, and wasn't full of things like "the druid's player is an idiot who does anti-optimization". One of the developers of Pathfinder actually recently made a large post about what sort of conditions can easily cause many groups to encounter issues like the Caster/Martial divide, because it's actually easy to encounter and the PF devs actually agree that the Core of the game is not balanced and the only reason they didn't balance it more was because they wanted to make it as backwards compatible with 3.5e as possible.

Incidentally, you can strip out the standard party and use the rest of the definition just fine, as p49: "An encounter with an Encounter Level (EL) equal to the PC's level is one that should expend about 20% of their resources," is all you really need to understand to balance your own game. All you have to do is accept that by using a non-standard party and/or optimization level, you're going to have to re-calibrate monsters accordingly. It's not the game's fault if unoptimized monsters are underpowered compared to books printed later than them and optimized characters.
1) There is no Standard Party in Pathfinder, so no I'm not going to accept that using a completely fictitious "non-standard party" means you're going to have to recalibrate monsters.
2) Anacdotal of course, but in my experience and the experience of other GM's I've discussed Path of War with. The 20% assumption was being met more regularly when players used PoW classes over Core martials (though about as regularly with the non-core martials like Vigilante, Slayer, or Kineticist).
3) It is the games fault if the monster's your saying are unoptimizated/underpowered actually incorrectly CR'd, and PF dev's have actually talked about how the first bestiary's CR's aren't really accurate because they didn't math things out as much originally. Pathfinder actually has numbers they use to try and determine how much damage a CR whatever creature or NPC should be dealing out.

I think you may have got confused, I'm saying that people getting AoEs and "utility" powers all day do break the game, in all likelihood. Other at-will classes like Warlock don't matter for balance the same way ToB itself doesn't matter: they're not part of the original balance system. You have to rate them against the original definition and see how they hold up.
And people have rated them against the original definition. They used it in play, and the result is *dramatic drums to build tension* they meet that definition perfectly. Kineticist is actually amazingly designed mathematically, it's floor and ceiling is tiny meaning it's ridiculously hard to optimise, but that's because you do not need to optimize with the class it automatically get's the damage and defence assumed by the math of the game's encounter system and CR system.

When a class which uses these at-will AoE's & utily powers all day is actually probably the class which meets your definition of balance best out of any class in the entire game including core. I'd say it is valid to bring up the class in this conversation.

[quot]Fair enough. We agree that if the encounter-based powers are functionally the same strength as normal at-will powers, the system is fine (because duh). I will maintain that at-will versions of powers normally assumed to be limited and only limited (AoEs and teleportation mostly, but also healing), will always have room to be overpowered. How much so depends on encounter design and pacing, since almost no individual monsters are designed in such a way they're directly weak against AoEs or teleportation, and healing is one of the first things people optimize their way out of.[/quote]
I agree with this. They do have room to be overpowered. In this case, I don't feel that they are. Encounter based powers could be broken depending on how they are implemented, but they can also be completely balanced.

To recap, Milo says: initiators still get worn down on hit points, so their at-will maneuvers don't mean they don't lose resources. I say: initiators can lose less hit points, because their abilities allow them to resolve certain situations faster or avoid other situations that an otherwise equivalent martial could not, thus reducing their overall resource expenditure. Once again, how far this goes depends on the pacing and encounter design, but the possibility exists as soon as you allow encounter based abilities that do anything you couldn't already do with the standard at-will Fighter/Rogue/feats.
I maintain that the Fighter/Rogue are under performing in regards to the math of the game (barbarian's are fine last I checked), and that initiators being slightly better in many ways (but mainly versatility) is what brings it closer to balance than those classes.

I assure you at least one person did in one of these threads, arguing terms of pure dps as usual: a 15d6 line does x damage to y probable targets vs a full attack dealing z total damage, z is greater therefore AoE's aren't overpowered.
Odd.

As above, that's not a failure of the definition, it's a failure of monster, encounter, and spell design.
So, the one part of the game which you have fixed onto is the part which isn't a failure, the whole rest of the system is the problem... When the whole rest of the system disagree's, I don't understand how that doesn't highlight that the assumption failed.

Putting in social encounters where the fighter is useless is therefore a problem introduced by the DM, not the system.
Social encounters are not a problem... The problem is that fighters cannot do anything but stab people.

To recap: Milo says not needing to rest is a good thing in time based adventures, I suggest he is saying they should be able to fight infinite encounters until stopped, not my best work. As for 1: my point is that it is possible there exists a mob level foe that a fighter could not dispatch indefinitely, but the martial adept could, thanks to their unlimited versions of normally limited effects. AoEs are capable of killing multiple foes at range, which a normal fighter can't really do, repeatable healing is repeatable healing, etc. So the fighter would still burn resources, weather potions or cure spells or artillery support, while the encounter guy might not, and thus encounter guy's party has more resources for the boss.
I disagree. As I don't the ability to do AoE's, in-combat healing, and tripping enemies would make them last much longer than the fighter maybe add 1d4 rounds to the character in a day.

I'd also point out that if your party is doing time-sensitive missions "without rest" and is still only fighting a normal number of encounters, they're not really doing anything "without rest" are they?
The "without rest" is that they don't inspire a 15 minute adventuring day like some feel that casters create. You cannot nova with an initiator and then just pause to rest for a day before continuing the adventure just so you can get your powers back, because you can't nova in the first place.

You seem to be saying that DR breaking maneuvers aren't good enough for beating DR to focus on using them, in which case why bother taking them? If DR matters then beating DR matters.
Less useful than your suggesting != useless.

And also saying that maneuver recovery wastes actions-on the Swordsage in ToB, but not the Crusader or Warblade, and the two PoW classes I checked had "recovery" actions that were better than normal attacks.
I don't know about ToB recovery because it's been over 5 years since I've even played 3.5e. But no, the recovery actions in PoW are standard action by default, and then things like full-action to increase the range of my AoE's, full-action to move with a +4 bonus to AC. Warlord does have the best recovery though, since it's basically "if I do a cool a specific cool thing then I get some manuevers back". Generally those gambits require the warlord to do things that aren't normal attacks like disarm people, and attempting them limits you to not using manuevers on that round, but still a pretty good recovery.

Uh, that's the point, you use the caster's limited resources to take out the DR. Thought I just said that.
At mid-levels where DR monsters actually come up, casters will have enough spells per day that they can spend a speel each round of combat in a day without running out. They are not losing anything by casting a spell which bypasses damage reduction by the time creatures with DR actually start mattering.

True, but if it walks like a fighter, talks like a fighter, and does extra things a fighter can't, it's better than a fighter and that's that. As long as the party still burns the right amount of resources it doesn't change the power level, but one must assume that having unlimited versions of normally limited abilities will always reduce resources expenditure, because as they say, it's just the obvious way to run the character isn't it?
And what makes you think the reduced resource expenditure isn't closer to the desired 20% per encounter?

Remember, when I say at-will or unlimited abilities, I'm referring to the core at-will/unlimited abilities: basic attacks, combat maneuvers, feats, and sneak attack. Those are the default, and cannot cause problems unless over-optimized. It's encounter based versions of limited abilities that can cause problems.
Thankfully there is a difference between Can cause problems and Does cause problems.

You're talking about "balance" again, class vs class "balance" doesn't exist. The 2/3 caster classes are "balanced" because they have some but not all of every main mechanic, about as much of a forced average as you can get making them closer to the other classes.
So what? Am I'm somehow cheating because the classes are designed to have numbers closer in competency to the games assumptions?

When inserting them into the standard party, which has no 2/3 casters, they will always either have less or more limited abilities from spellcasting than the originals, making them unbalanced almost by definition, as they change the amount of limited resources and it requires a change of encounter design and pacing to offset that.
Wait, so in your mind bard's aren't ever in a "standard party"?

Replacing the full casters with 2/3 means using fewer encounters that require big spells and allowing skills to handle more stuff, replacing non-casters with 2/3 means you need monsters that can pull more spells per fight but also don't flatten the front line without trying, which is usually rather difficult to manage.
I'm guessing you haven't seen many 2/3 casters in combat in PF then if you're saying this.

Depends on what you mean by "the game." That's one of the big points of contention here: the opposition (including you in this case) usually wants "the game" to refer to all the books together as played to their standards. I am defining "the game" as the rules and guidelines in the DMG coupled with what we know and can guess about the intent behind it. I don't believe the former definition is useful at all, since (in 3.5 anyway) splatbooks were not written as part of any homogeneous whole and aren't meant to merge with each other, only putting in a token effort to respect core and always being defined as 100% optional, not guaranteed, use at your own peril with DM's permission by definition.
No, I already said "the game" is the mathematical assumptions of how powerful characters are meant to be and how encounters are built (which is very similar to your definition). Don't really care about 3.5e in this case, as we aren't talking about 3.5e. In PF, the main books are specifically written to be part of a whole.

You're taking my fashionable hyperbole a little too seriously, but actually yes: I do see a lot of pathfinder classes as clones. Even if a lot of the individual abilities are slightly different, all those 2/3 casters are built on basically the same fill in the blanks table. Lots of the mundane classes are the same. It's nice "balanced" class vs class design, but unless the class has something that's actually unique I just go meh.
You should check out Occult Adventure's then, so you can see examples of PF making 5/6 of the classes in that book medium BAB spontaneous magic users without them being anywhere near each other in how they play or how they look on paper (the 6th class is a full caster rather than a medium BAB caster).

Must say i kinda agree with the OP. It does look like some of the schools are a touch overtuned in the path of war book.
Broken Blade and Primal Fury are overtuned, yes.

Fizban

2017-01-28, 05:28 AM

I realized I used some poor phrasing responding to CasualVikings very salient question of "if 20% per encounter then how is marathon of 7 fair?" when I said that endurance runs are important and under-used. I went back and filled it out to hopefully increase clarity.

Those 3.5e assumptions are actually not true in Pathfinder outside of a handful of things.
Good to know, but I was never restraining myself to the Pathfinder side of the question, as should be obvous.

And people have rated them against the original definition. They used it in play, and the result is *dramatic drums to build tension* they meet that definition perfectly.
Okay, and? It's still not the primary source. You can't use the fact that one at-will splat class has been found by some groups to pass muster as proof that all will do so. You still have to take PoW or ToB on its own, and the fact that some groups find ToB results in a better match than Fighter doesn't mean it will for other groups. It's still a personalized result, not a default or definition.

So, the one part of the game which you have fixed onto is the part which isn't a failure, the whole rest of the system is the problem... When the whole rest of the system disagree's, I don't understand how that doesn't highlight that the assumption failed.
Let's say my goal is to lose 10 lbs this summer. Can I fail to achieve that goal? Obviously. Can I fail to set that goal? Nope, already done. You can't fail to define a goal (unless you just don't), only fail to design a game that meets it. And I listed multiple potential points of failure because if I didn't someone would take issue with being less comprehensive. You keep saying assumption, which indicates you still have it backwards. The only assumption in saying that encounters should burn X resources is that the player will use builds that match that, there is no guarantee that they will, the definition doesn't fall apart. If players use builds that don't burn X resources, then their builds are either stronger or weaker than they should be by the definition.

Social encounters are not a problem... The problem is that fighters cannot do anything but stab people.
Nope, sorry but forced social encounters are not supported by the 3.5 rules and demanding that fighters do more than stab people is all on the group, another social problem. Pathfinder might say different and you can disagree in general, but you'll need a citation if you want to prove that fighters are expected to do anything other than stab people.

I disagree. As I don't the ability to do AoE's, in-combat healing, and tripping enemies would make them last much longer than the fighter maybe add 1d4 rounds to the character in a day.
As it's a narrow band I see no reason to go to great length proving it exists via example, but I will also point out that refusing to acknowledge theoretical situations is what leads to people ignoring other people's practical experience just because it disagrees with their own.

The "without rest" is that they don't inspire a 15 minute adventuring day like some feel that casters create. You cannot nova with an initiator and then just pause to rest for a day before continuing the adventure just so you can get your powers back, because you can't nova in the first place.
Another terminology cross then. But do you acknowledge that the marathon >5 encounter obstacle is a valid event? You've already said you don't think encounter abilities will ever significantly stretch daily ability, but I'd like to confirm marathon yes/no.

At mid-levels where DR monsters actually come up, casters will have enough spells per day that they can spend a speel each round of combat in a day without running out. They are not losing anything by casting a spell which bypasses damage reduction by the time creatures with DR actually start mattering.
Casters always have enough spells fallacy for one, but also irrelevant. The caster casts, and the guy who ignores DR makes it so they need to cast less to get the job done, or so I see the possibility. More importantly, there are DR dependent monsters from very low levels in 3.5, all the way down to CR 1 with the Grig. (It's only got DR 5 and said maneuvers don't show up till third, but my point is that they exist).

And what makes you think the reduced resource expenditure isn't closer to the desired 20% per encounter?
And why do you assume that the control group is spending more than 20% resources?

I'll rephrase as a whole thought: for the same encounter, if one party requires fewer resources to solve it, then by extension they can afford to spend the normal amount of resources to do more easily than the control party. This is concealed if the group takes that reduction in cost and uses it to fight more encounters than they normally would, "not stopping to rest" and avoiding the "15 minute day," as you say. Cramming in more fights doesn't change the fact that they're performing better than expected, so the same adventure would need more encounters to provide the same obstacle.

Note that if this "upgraded" party with at-will versions of limited abilities is still spending 20% to get only standard results, it's likely that without those abilities they would have been spending more resources. Being unable to take on encounters without spending more than 20% resources on average makes you underpowered, and they needed the new abilities to reach normal powered. Or more bluntly: if your group isn't good enough to handle more than a 15 minute day with the standard classes, they're just not gud enough. Char-op says monsters are borked: are they underpowered because wizards win everything or overpowered because their party can't handle fighting them in any other way? Git gud.

Thankfully there is a difference between Can cause problems and Does cause problems.
Congratulations, you've learned to ignore anything but your own personal experience and thus never be able to relate to anyone that doesn't have the exact same experience? Your "balance" is not "the" balance and is completely irrelevant when someone posts a thread indicating their games don't match yours. You can look at it from my direction and learn where design leads to differences and provide useful insight even when it doesn't match your experience, or refuse and leave yourself with nothing useful to say.

So what? Am I'm somehow cheating because the classes are designed to have numbers closer in competency to the games assumptions?
I'm not sure what this line means, but I do see that outrage I expect from people who need the RAW to validate their playstyle. You don't need that,

Wait, so in your mind bard's aren't ever in a "standard party"?
Refrain: The standard party is Fighter, Rogue, Cleric, Wizard. No Bard in there, warranty not valid if Bard.

I'm guessing you haven't seen many 2/3 casters in combat in PF then if you're saying this.
I haven't seen any PF anything in anything, never played it and don't intend to. I'm speaking from the original intended theory and predicting how it should work if one's trying to keep things otherwise the same. Weather or not Bards and Duskblades actually work out that way is a practical matter, and as always I'm not evaluating Pathfinder.

No, I already said "the game" is the mathematical assumptions of how powerful characters are meant to be and how encounters are built (which is very similar to your definition). Don't really care about 3.5e in this case, as we aren't talking about 3.5e. In PF, the main books are specifically written to be part of a whole.
Fair enough, but refusing to look at the past leaves one blind to the future. You said yourself earlier that the Pathfinder crew deliberately hamstrung their own ideas for class parity in order to encourage backwards compatibility at the start, maybe it's possible that because of this they effectively broke the original class balance in the process. Maybe it'd be a good idea to understand the design of the original so you know how the legacy classes were supposed to work, compared to Pathfinders ideas about how now things should work.

You should check out Occult Adventure's then, so you can see examples of PF making 5/6 of the classes in that book medium BAB spontaneous magic users without them being anywhere near each other in how they play or how they look on paper (the 6th class is a full caster rather than a medium BAB caster).
Yeah, I've seen their tables. The 2/3 and 4/9 casters have tables with the same patterns as always (maybe a bit less on the Spiritualist), the full caster is a full caster with a bunch of extra abilities, and the Kineticist actually has a new system, of a sort, though from what I've read it's over-complicated for little benefit and I'm flat not interested. Where you see special snowflakes, I see classes with the same chassis and the same menu-style abilities in the same progression. It doesn't matter what those abilities are, it's still the same base progression over and over again. You won't change my taste, no point in trying.

Gullintanni

2017-01-28, 08:40 AM

Another terminology cross then. But do you acknowledge that the marathon >5 encounter obstacle is a valid event? You've already said you don't think encounter abilities will ever significantly stretch daily ability, but I'd like to confirm marathon yes/no.

Refrain: The standard party is Fighter, Rogue, Cleric, Wizard. No Bard in there, warranty not valid if Bard.

On the first point there - the marathon day is not a valid event. WoTC specifically designed around 20-25% resource expenditure per encounter over the course of 4-5 encounters. That is the "balanced" adventuring day. If deviating from the standard party changes the implied balance point of the game, then so too does deviating from the standard encounter structure of a day, and delegitimizes the notion of game balance just the same as introduction of the PoW//ToB classes. If PF changed this assumption by assuming the stretch day was part of the standard encounter structure for a day, then they would also be justified in creating classes whose class features would be useful across a longer adventuring day (Ie. PoW classes), and accordingly those classes would be balanced for that gameplay paradigm.

On the second point - the best you can really assume is that the "Standard Party" includes "Martial, Skillmonkey, Divine, Arcane". Since 1st Ed, there has been at least one alternative within the core ruleset to each of the proposed classes. The "Standard Party", assuming AD&D rules, would include Fighter//Ranger//Paladin, Thief//Assassin, Cleric//Druid, Wizard//Illusionist. 3.5 Has a similar availability of classes built into its core, and its "Standard Party" would look like Fighter//Ranger//Paladin//Barbarian, Rogue//Bard, Cleric//Druid, Wizard//Sorcerer.

None of these standard, core classes includes unlimited all day abilities (Except maybe Rogues with Sneak Attack access), but...assuming that the game is only balanced per design intent if you use a specific set of four of its core classes is kind of silly.

phlidwsn

2017-01-28, 09:17 AM

digiman619

2017-01-28, 10:05 AM

I haven't seen any PF anything in anything, never played it and don't intend to. I'm speaking from the original intended theory and predicting how it should work if one's trying to keep things otherwise the same. Weather or not Bards and Duskblades actually work out that way is a practical matter, and as always I'm not evaluating Pathfinder.

Okay, I've tried to be civil, but you have just admitted to wasting everybody's time. You derailed this thread for about a hundred posts for a game you don't even play!?! You have lost all credibility. It's like you went into a bar, found a couple of people talking about (American) Football, then proceeded to get into an argument about it's flaws and why it's a bad game, only to admit you've only attended Rugby games. Or perhaps Canadian Football would be a better analogy.

You have no right to bitch about a product you have never used, do not own, and is indeed for a game you do not play. It'd be like me complaining about the Blade Dancer in AD&D. I take that back; the Blade Dancer was infamously overpowered and had virtually no downside. You are complaining about a subsystem that is widely praised and used by a noteworthy chuck of players.

And before you come out and say "Well, the basic design principle is still the same", no, you're wrong. Spanish is not Romanian; Dachshunds are not Great Danes, A pilot's license won't help you fly the Space Shuttle. Things have changed between 3.5 and Pathfinder. Not as much as some would like, perhaps, but they have.

EisenKreutzer

2017-01-28, 11:25 AM

I haven't seen any PF anything in anything, never played it and don't intend to. I'm speaking from the original intended theory and predicting how it should work if one's trying to keep things otherwise the same. Weather or not Bards and Duskblades actually work out that way is a practical matter, and as always I'm not evaluating Pathfinder.

I realise that you are arguing on a meta-level about design, but I find this problematic.

Pathfinder has a different set of design principles than D&D had, it was playtested and balanced around very different play experiences (Pathfinder was tested by thousands of fans in addition to rigorous in-house testing by Paizo), and the balance paradigm Paizo used was not the same as WotC.

Your argument about the standard party (Fighter, Cleric, Wizard, Rogue) falls apart here, because Pathfinder was tested with all the core classes and balanced around the observations collected from those experiences.

Your entire argument isn't turned over by this, but parts of it become invalid and parts of it go from pretty reasonable to kind of doubtful.

CharonsHelper

2017-01-28, 11:59 AM

Pathfinder has a different set of design principles than D&D had, it was playtested and balanced around very different play experiences (Pathfinder was tested by thousands of fans in addition to rigorous in-house testing by Paizo), and the balance paradigm Paizo used was not the same as WotC.

Indeed. Pathfinder has a much better balance than 3.5. The only two core classes that were really bad were rogue & monk: there's a reason they were changed in Pathfinder Unchained. Beyond that, the balance is pretty decent up through level 8-10ish. (You still eventually get caster/martial issues with some of the highest level spells, but I think the system starts to get worse for other reasons around then anyway, so they don't bother me much.)

Bucky

2017-01-28, 12:14 PM

To actually answer the original question,

If you want a Path of War feel but think it's too powerful, allow PoW feats but not classes. Also, give Rangers a campaign-specific combat style that incorporates the Martial Training line.

The result is that mundane characters get late access to maneuvers, and only get a few of them, so that the maneuvers generally complement their fighting style without defining it.

EldritchWeaver

2017-01-28, 12:35 PM

One of the developers of Pathfinder actually recently made a large post about what sort of conditions can easily cause many groups to encounter issues like the Caster/Martial divide, because it's actually easy to encounter and the PF devs actually agree that the Core of the game is not balanced and the only reason they didn't balance it more was because they wanted to make it as backwards compatible with 3.5e as possible.

Maybe I missed a link to this, but I'd be interested in reading that post. Can you please provide the link for me and other interested parties?

CasualViking

2017-01-29, 01:07 AM

I realise that you are arguing on a meta-level about design, but I find this problematic.

Pathfinder has a different set of design principles than D&D had, it was playtested and balanced around very different play experiences (Pathfinder was tested by thousands of fans in addition to rigorous in-house testing by Paizo), and the balance paradigm Paizo used was not the same as WotC.

I wouldn't give too much weight to marketing statements like that. I remember how dismissive the devs were of high-level play and people pointing out obvious problems.

Fizban

2017-01-29, 03:39 AM

On the first point there - the marathon day is not a valid event. WoTC specifically designed around 20-25% resource expenditure per encounter over the course of 4-5 encounters. That is the "balanced" adventuring day. If deviating from the standard party changes the implied balance point of the game, then so too does deviating from the standard encounter structure of a day, and delegitimizes the notion of game balance just the same as introduction of the PoW//ToB classes.
Of course. But it is inevitable that some days will have less and some will have more, which is why the specific line in question says average. I am merely pointing out that if you don't balance the average then allowing the occasional 15 minute day clearly disadvantages the classes that are meant to last all day. Without an official pacing though, we don't know how often to use marathons/short days like we do for how often to use weak/overpowering fights. Any amount you assign, including a strict 4 per day only, begins your own influence. The lack of an official pacing is very annoying.

I have to ask then: You do realize this thread is all about Pathfinder, specifically someone seeking alternatives to a particular third-party Pathfinder product. And not 3(.5)? And this whole giant debate you seem so intent on having has nothing to do with the original question?

Okay, I've tried to be civil, but you have just admitted to wasting everybody's time. You derailed this thread for about a hundred posts for a game you don't even play!?! You have lost all credibility.

If pathfinderites can bomb 3.5 threads shouting about how PF does everything better, I can show up to a pathfinder thread and discuss how 3.5 design influences balance and why that matters to a game based on 3.5. Furthermore, lets look back to the OP:

So while I kind of like the concept between the maneuvers/boosts/stance concept of Tome and Battle and Path of War...
Well, Path of War... is frankly op. There is no cost to maneuvers, and the damage output is insane.
The OP has specifically brought up Tome of Battle as one of their reference points, which is 3.5.

The digression about what "balance" means is simply me responding to the crowd. As I have already recapped, I was discussing encounter based abilities with Milo when he said my comparison to core was flawed, so I explained why it was not flawed (in typical forum "you're wrong" fashion) and then everyone took offense. Weather or not you consider it worthwhile, I do, and apparently a bunch of people including you thought it was worth discussing.

And furthermore: you think I can't evaluate a game without playing it? The reason I won't play Pathfinder is because I've read various parts of it and decided I didn't like it. You think every theorycrafter, every "oh noes casters are broken" poster out there actually has experience playing the things they claim exist? No, I can discuss Pathfinder without playing it, and if anything I could claim my commentary is more valid since I'm not hiding behind my personal anecdotes as proof that things work the way I say they do. I probably wouldn't because it would sound silly and most people ask for practical solutions based on experience, but I could if I wanted to annoy people.

I realise that you are arguing on a meta-level about design, but I find this problematic.

Pathfinder has a different set of design principles than D&D had, it was playtested and balanced around very different play experiences (Pathfinder was tested by thousands of fans in addition to rigorous in-house testing by Paizo), and the balance paradigm Paizo used was not the same as WotC.

Your argument about the standard party (Fighter, Cleric, Wizard, Rogue) falls apart here, because Pathfinder was tested with all the core classes and balanced around the observations collected from those experiences.

Your entire argument isn't turned over by this, but parts of it become invalid and parts of it go from pretty reasonable to kind of doubtful.
And you will note, as I have said many times by now, I was never arguing about Pathfinder's core design. Unless I screwed up editing something, every time I have talked about the standard party and objective balance, I specified 3.5 somewhere.

If you all had a problem with it you should have mentioned so first. Regardless of weather you think this is a Pathfinder Only thread, the OP specifically mentioned ToB which is 3.5, and if you all didn't want to argue about 3.5 balance you should have dropped it instead of trying to tell me I'm wrong. And you might want to consider that fact, since if the OP is comparing to a 3.5 class, maybe they don't know about Pathfinder's Superior Rebalancing that makes PoW okay even though it seems stronger than ToB.

If I had a Pathfinder DMG I'd be interested in reading their changes on the matter and could potentially offer analysis based on it, but I don't and they don't seem to have their level up systems on the srd either. If anyone would like to compile, quote, and summarize the same thing for Pathfinder as I have done for 3.5, it would be well worth reading, and allow them to make the much coveted claim of objectivity when evaluating PoW based on it.

I wouldn't give too much weight to marketing statements like that. I remember how dismissive the devs were of high-level play and people pointing out obvious problems.
Careful, if you squint it almost looks like you might be supporting me :smallwink:

CasualViking

2017-01-29, 03:56 AM

I wouldn't give too much weight to marketing statements like that. I remember how dismissive the devs were of high-level play and people pointing out obvious problems.
Careful, if you squint it almost looks like you might be supporting me :smallwink:

It's funny that you would think that, and I mean that in the tragic sense of "funny". Because just like people believe that PF was "playtested", you believe that a specific 3.5s stated design goal was met at all.

digiman619

2017-01-29, 04:10 AM

If pathfinderites can bomb 3.5 threads shouting about how PF does everything better, I can show up to a pathfinder thread and discuss how 3.5 design influences balance and why that matters to a game based on 3.5.

No. You see that [Pathfinder] tag? That's there to let posters know it's a Pathfinder post. There's one for [3rd Edition], too. If you only want 3.X advice, you use that tag. If you only want Pathfinder advice, you use the Pathfinder tag. And I'll admit, sometimes I have posted about Pathfinder stuff in a post when they want 3.X stuff, but a) I let everyone know I'm suggesting something Pathfinder and b) I make one post about the suggestion. I do not just "forget to mention" that I'm using a similar but different system, and I don't get into dozens-of-posts arguments with people about the wrong system!

Earlier this week, someone was asking for a class to simulate a Magical Girl (a la Sailor Moon) and I suggested the Aegis. Upon realizing the OP wanted 3.5 stuff, I immediately apologized an left the thread, being courteous as I did. That is not what you did. You got into a long, annoying drawn-out argument about a system you've never used, in a game you do not play. You have ignored well researched and accepted facts about 3.5 and then used those inaccuracies to judge another product. It seems like you legitimately cannot fathom that the guidelines the authors wrote assuming classes were more or less equal are no longer valid when it's a well-accepted and demonstrable fact that they are not, in fact, equal. Very far from it, in fact. Yet somehow you hold up the DMG as gospel truth.

Yes, the OP referenced Tome of Battle in their opening post. Because Paizo doesn't want to rock the Vancian boat (which is a whole other mess for another day), people who liked a subsytem like martial initiating from 3.X have to go to 3rd Party makers to get it. But you know what? Those publishers (but especially Dreamscarred Press) don't just slap a Pathfinder coat of paint on it and say "Done!" They take it apart, add new ideas and make it a new beast that is a totally different beast than what it started as. So mentioning ToB in the opening post is just for a frame of reference, not "Using your knowledge of ToB, explain the difference between the two"

I think I'm done with this thread. Somehow, I get the feeling that even if Monte Cook or Skip Williams (authors of the DMG) walked up to you and and in plain words told you that you're wrong about this, you'd still claim up one side and down the other that you're right about this. Happy gaming.

Fizban

2017-01-29, 05:24 AM

It's funny that you would think that, and I mean that in the tragic sense of "funny". Because just like people believe that PF was "playtested", you believe that a specific 3.5s stated design goal was met at all.
I said more than once that it's entirely possible they did not meet the goal, so. . . we don't disagree?

I do not just "forget to mention" that I'm using a similar but different system, and I don't get into dozens-of-posts arguments with people about the wrong system!
So you're calling me a liar too? Because I wrote "3.5" all over the place, even if I missed a particular paragraph it should be quite obvious what my primary source was, especially when I directly re-posted my citations from the 3.5 DMG.

So you did in fact get into part of a dozens of post long argument about the wrong system, don't blame me for your lack of attention.

Earlier this week, someone was asking for a class to simulate a Magical Girl (a la Sailor Moon) and I suggested the Aegis. Upon realizing the OP wanted 3.5 stuff, I immediately apologized an left the thread, being courteous as I did.
And if the OP had showed up and told me they didn't want that in the thread I would have also departed courteously. The OP did not do so, and in fact has not been present since the OP. If the thread wants to argue with me about balance then they can, balance is in the thread title. I'm willing to cut off just about any argument if people would just acknowledge my point exists and that they don't want to continue further rather than trying to shout me out of existence. I can acknowledge that people find class parity important, why can't you lot accept that there's an objective definition that you aren't required to follow anyway?

Unless you didn't pay enough attention to realize I was talking about 3.5 when I quoted the 3.5 DMG and thought I was contradicting the Pathfinder DMG, and so argued that I was objectively wrong. Which would have been easily detected and refuted by citing the Pathfinder DMG, at which point we could establish there was no significant argument.

You have ignored well researched and accepted facts about 3.5
After years of it not making sense and gaining my own practical experience I found that "researched and accepted facts" (ha) suspect and performed my own. Surprise, individual thought sometimes leads to ideas people don't like.

to judge another product
And it was not until after pages of argument that anyone bothered to notice, question it, and provide evidence to the contrary (no evidence actually provided yet, but as it's not my primary system I'll take it on faith).

It seems like you legitimately cannot fathom that the guidelines the authors wrote assuming classes were more or less equal are no longer valid
As point of fact, I have acknowledged the possibility and even liklihood multiple times, I simply retain the ability to see more than one version of the game based on the same rules at different tables.

when it's a well-accepted and demonstrable fact that they are not, in fact, equal.
By a definition of equal that I just spent a very long time telling everyone I (and others) find useless and unsupported by the rules, in 3.5 at least.

So mentioning ToB in the opening post is just for a frame of reference, not "Using your knowledge of ToB, explain the difference between the two"
That is what a frame of reference is. You'd be better off saying that the only question was directed specifically at PoW: "Well, Path of War... is frankly op." Then I would have to admit that I was stretching a little, in assuming they'd be interested in the full background.

Except. . . wait a minute. . . Oh, my first post wasn't anything like that at all. It wasn't until after I told the OP to do whatever they want to make their game fun, that people started telling me to shut up because the OP is wrong and I'm wrong for being wrong.

I think I'm done with this thread. Somehow, I get the feeling that even if Monte Cook or Skip Williams (authors of the DMG) walked up to you and and in plain words told you that you're wrong about this, you'd still claim up one side and down the other that you're right about this. Happy gaming.
Wrong about which thing specifically? There are a number of points of contention, hence the massive posts. And you can shove whatever expectations you want on me, but sure, if one of the authors wanted to speak up no freaking *** I'd listen. I seem to be the only person willing to take such evidence as evidence in fact, I'm sure that if I found an article defining the standard party Klara and Cosi would just ignore it as "circumstantial" anyway.

It still wouldn't change what they put on the page, but the only way to "disprove" the definition is for the person who wrote it to admit it was BS and tell you to ignore it. I'd get to tell people they have no definition, present the actual definition, and then show why that definition doesn't matter and everyone has to make their own, that's like three times as much smug superiority than just parroting the same thing as everyone else, and I get to be right too.

As for being done with the thread, there's nothing stopping you from participating in other discussions even if you're not still arguing with me. I never claimed it was my thread. For example:

To actually answer the original question,

If you want a Path of War feel but think it's too powerful, allow PoW feats but not classes. Also, give Rangers a campaign-specific combat style that incorporates the Martial Training line.

The result is that mundane characters get late access to maneuvers, and only get a few of them, so that the maneuvers generally complement their fighting style without defining it.
That's another good idea, I like it.

digiman619

2017-01-29, 06:04 AM

So you're calling me a liar too? Because I wrote "3.5" all over the place, even if I missed a particular paragraph it should be quite obvious what my primary source was, especially when I directly re-posted my citations from the 3.5 DMG.

I apologize. I checked and you did indeed cite correctly. I am sorry I falsely accused.

And if the OP had showed up and told me they didn't want that in the thread I would have also departed courteously. The OP did not do so, and in fact has not been present since the OP. If the thread wants to argue with me about balance then they can, balance is in the thread title. I'm willing to cut off just about any argument if people would just acknowledge my point exists and that they don't want to continue further rather than trying to shout me out of existence. I can acknowledge that people find class parity important, why can't you lot accept that there's an objective definition that you aren't required to follow anyway?
While I could argue that our arguments over the definition of the word balance might have scared them off, the fact that the OP hasn't posted since is a valid point.

That's another good idea, I like it.
Forgive me, but you argued that PoW was imbalanced because per-encounter abilities were in direct opposition to the limited per-day abilities that the game was "balanced" around. You never said anything about the classes being OP. In fact, you were pleasantly surprised that they couldn't ready all their maneuvers at once. Why are you now saying that a nerf about them (while still maintaining all the "broken" maneuvers) is good?

Fizban

2017-01-29, 08:12 AM

I apologize. I checked and you did indeed cite correctly. I am sorry I falsely accused.
Apology accepted, no harm done.

While I could argue that our arguments over the definition of the word balance might have scared them off, the fact that the OP hasn't posted since is a valid point.
Scaring people off is also a valid point- I actually mentioned all the way back at the beginning how it being nigh impossible to take back "control" of a thread was likely responsible for this being the third on the topic, after looking that up I'm not surprised they didn't (and as I showed up to defend them I would have been surprised if they told me to butt-out even if they did). Abandonment by the OP never stops a good thread though, and I at least found the honing of my arguments and new insights worthwhile.

Forgive me, but you argued that PoW was imbalanced because per-encounter abilities were in direct opposition to the limited per-day abilities that the game was "balanced" around. You never said anything about the classes being OP. In fact, you were pleasantly surprised that they couldn't ready all their maneuvers at once.
Potentially imbalanced- ToB is by encounter/resource definition since 3.5 never expected infinite healing and teleport abilities (practical use notwithstanding), but if PF truly did account for those then that problem is out the window. Or if they defined it differently enough by explicitly excising the 4 encounter/resource focus and/or directly stating that class roles aren't supposed to affect anything. Though I would lean towards declaring them OP by definition until I've seen PF's new definition, since they retained the original core classes and don't seem to use many encounter abilities outside of dedicated classes (why yes, I'm trying to bait someone into doing the legwork). When I say they're probably not OP it's in the practical terms of "groups who are ok with encounter abilities and play PF should be okay with PoW." For the OP's purposes we should assume they're OP.

Why are you now saying that a nerf about them (while still maintaining all the "broken" maneuvers) is good?
Because it's a nice simple (potential) solution to the OP's problem. Easier than converting ToB as they originally suggested and I endorsed. Thanks to the delay from acquiring them as feats (assuming it's the same as ToB, Bucky said "late") it's almost guaranteed to be less of a disruption. Groups who find the PoW classes fine at full strength obviously would not want to have them taken away, but people who would otherwise be unable to use them (because the DM banned them) should appreciate the option, and the DM can be confident that the PoW elements will have less total damage and their disruptive options will show up later. Make the game match the table.

Of course they might walk into a trap by not realizing that adding PoW feats to their presumably unoptimized core builds will still likely result in a power spike. But the spike will be smaller than if they allowed the full classes considering how much stuff you can get with a single dip (and you can't multiclass without hitting that dip). Really it's just hard to go wrong with a moderate approach, if the feats still turn out to be too good they can junk them without losing the rest of the character, and if the feats are fine maybe they'll be more comfortable using the full classes next time. It's not a solution I usually think of since I never thought ToB was strong enough to warrant a feat-only approach, but it was a good suggestion then and remains so for PoW.

CasualViking

2017-01-29, 08:53 AM

I said more than once that it's entirely possible they did not meet the goal, so. . . we don't disagree?

Right, right. We've moved on. We're no longer even arguing about your useless definition of "balance", we've moved into complete pettifoggery over whether another game was designed with a specific party composition in mind (and the other 6 classes that shipped with the PHB were some kind of mistake or vestige).

Also, despite uyour apparent admission that the "balance" design goal was never met, you still use that very same goal to call PoW overpowered. You're haranguing people to close the barndoor even though the horses have not only left but also died of old age because it happened 16 years ago.