Least non-grab-bag casting needed to be "actively" t2, leaving combat to Martials?

[Morphic tide]

By "non-grab-bag", I'm referring to highly multifunctional spells like the Summon Monster line or Monster Manual rummaging Transmutations. This is because they're rather a cop-out by allowing extremely small spell lists to cover a large number of problems, and almost all of them are inseparable from perfectly worthwhile combat performance. Artificer/Archivist shenanigans with underleveled PRC spells are also bad form, though such PRCs may be a good basis for determining the boundaries on spell slot progressions.

The purpose of this is wanting to know the "minimum viable product" for something like the Blackmoor Scholaress, quite possibly the ur-example of what we'd now call a Gish. The character began as a mundane combatant, then moved to studying magical spells in the wake of a magic item that turned the character into a basilisk leaving the character female afterward. When the Blackmoor playgroup started using D&D rules, the Scholaress referred to the Magic User, but restricted casting to "non-weapon" spells and bore armor and sword proficiencies.

[rel]

Not sure I'm understanding this question. Are you asking:

'What is the minimum number of published spells required to achieve broad competency in solving non-combat challenges without any competence in solving combat challenges?'

[ciopo]

the two activities where I felt most keenly the difference between having and not having appropriate spells were information gathering and traveling.

I could see an argument made for "recovery", too, but that can generally be "solved" with the good old "tithe to the church"

[Anthrowhale]

I'm not sure if this is helpful, but if you use the niche ranking system (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?314701-Person_Man-s-Niche-Ranking-System), you can ask "how many non-grab-bag spells are necessary to cover most of the niches". A list with just those spells and and the sorcerer chassis would plausibly satisfy T2.

It's also unclear what "leave combat to martials" means. Going through the niche ranking system, which of battlefield control, buffer, debuffer, dominator, meat shield, melee damage, ranged damage, or mobility related spells are desired? These are all combat related niches.

[RandomPeasant]

No purely martial character (using printed 3e material) hits T2 in combat, so the question doesn't really track. Honestly, I'm not sure it tracks at all if you're locking out stuff like planar binding and dominate person, because those are the spells that make people really sit up and notice. Benchmark, it'd have to be "more spells than the Sorcerer gets", because the Sorcerer gets to T2 by taking advantage of exactly the "grab bag casting" you want to avoid.

[MaxiDuRaritry]

Personally, I'm not a big fan of martial combat, and so I tend to go for skillmonkey/utility caster hybrids, such as factotum/psion builds.

Of course, the king of psionic utility is the shaper, and one of my psionic powers is usually astral construct. I use the ooey gooey constructs to supplement the martial abilities of my teammates, such as flanking buddies and grapplers for enemies to make approaching monsters safer for those who do enjoy wading into melee. But I mainly use them for defensive/utility/mobility stuff, such as blocking doors and hallways to give the party some breathing room, dealing with difficult traps (as they soak up hp damage from traps well, and their immunities make poison and negative levels completely moot), and smashing doors in to blunt ambushes when enemies know we're coming. They also make for pretty decent mounts if you can improve the duration by a couple orders of magnitude.

But overall, the kinds of powers I go for are utility powers that can be used in combat if you think outside the box a bit.

Psionic minor creation is great if you know your way around practical everyday plant-based materials (everything from pine pitch to flour to amber), and it's also great for on-the-fly poisons and plant-based alchemical items. Also everything from seasoning for food to temporary containers to ironwood- and amber-based equipment when you don't have a particular tool on hand to weapons, shields, and armors.

Time hop can take care of doors, locks, rope, chain links, chemical spills, and more, along with making weak-willed enemies (such as the mounts of mount-based chargers) and their equipment disappear. And since the targets come back after a few rounds, you can use more outside-the-box thinking to improve its utility even further.

Psionic grease is a heavy-duty workhorse all the way up into epic levels. For 1 pp you can almost completely neuter any enemy that can't fly and doesn't have ranks in Balance (which is a very large subsection of the game). Manifesting it on equipment and various objects is also quite useful, making enemies fumble handheld objects regularly, and making pushing heavy objects to block narrow passageways much easier.

Direct damage powers (from energy ray to disintegrate) have utility all their own. Destroying the scenery can cause all sorts of problems for your enemies, especially if your party is smart enough to take advantage of it. Knocking down bridges and balconies, blasting through doors and walls, and energy balling stalactites and chandeliers to fall on enemies and to create difficult terrain can be surprisingly potent, sometimes even more so than directly damaging enemies. Even better if you can catch enemies in the AoE as well, for double the fun.

If you choose your powers (or spells) and tactics with helping your martially-inclined allies in mind, and your party is willing to work with you, rather than at cross-purposes (such as jumping in the middle of a group of enemies and putting themselves in the middle of the energy ball you were about to fire off, as an example of what not to do), then you can be as powerful as you want, while letting your weaker party members shine.

Heck, I soloed the end of an Elder Evil-based campaign by myself when the rest of the party was paralyzed, but I'd spent the entire game up to that point using tactics similar to the above, and the party never felt outshined until then. I had no way to unparalyze them, and we were facing down a TPK, so I bit the bullet and nova'd the hell out of the endbosses. The party never would've known how strong I was if I hadn't been forced to reveal my hand, because I helped them shine, only pulling out stronger, more direct stuff when absolutely necessary to save the day.

[Morphic tide]

Not sure I'm understanding this question. Are you asking:

'What is the minimum number of published spells required to achieve broad competency in solving non-combat challenges without any competence in solving combat challenges?'
That's t3 to my understanding, the Sorcerer's distinction from Wizard is being "expected" to break a few parts of the game by taking a few good spells that brick a few kinds of challenges against the Wizard really only needing the ability to buy scrolls and somebody thinking about niche-filling at all to break most of what can be. Wilders, for instance, don't have access to the sort of in-bulk grab-bags nor enough Powers Known to have extremely broad competency, but end up one of the contentious boundary cases because they have so few and Augmentation makes such a mess of it.


I'm not sure if this is helpful, but if you use the niche ranking system (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?314701-Person_Man-s-Niche-Ranking-System), you can ask "how many non-grab-bag spells are necessary to cover most of the niches". A list with just those spells and and the sorcerer chassis would plausibly satisfy T2.
In case it's not clear, I'm focused on JaronK's original definition of Tier 2 as "the same power level as Tier 1, but less options of it", with later work finding the line of how many such options you need somewhere between Psion (who's so debatably t1 that there's been a number of cases of classifying single decision points as such) and Wilder. That niche-ranking system has many issues, with how many niches are "ways you're getting other niches", not having any explanation how it's separating subset limits that define the Wizard/Sorcerer split, and the fundamentally lopsided value of the niches in question.

I'm much more in favor of a Same-Game Test framework for that way of comparing classes, for all there isn't a clear "standard", because it naturally handles the "portion of overall set" problem that flatly ranking the entire class niche by niche simply doesn't work for.


It's also unclear what "leave combat to martials" means. Going through the niche ranking system, which of battlefield control, buffer, debuffer, dominator, meat shield, melee damage, ranged damage, or mobility related spells are desired? These are all combat related niches.
At the most basic, the Martial functionality would be "Meat Shield/Melee Damage", with spells covering mobility and buffs as needed to apply the melee damage from it. Making ranged damage or martial-style battlefield control work at combat trivializing potency wracks up a lot of countermagic demands and a staggering volume of mobility spell use.


No purely martial character (using printed 3e material) hits T2 in combat, so the question doesn't really track. Honestly, I'm not sure it tracks at all if you're locking out stuff like planar binding and dominate person, because those are the spells that make people really sit up and notice. Benchmark, it'd have to be "more spells than the Sorcerer gets", because the Sorcerer gets to T2 by taking advantage of exactly the "grab bag casting" you want to avoid.
The trouble Martials have is applying damage output between distant-from-eachother targets, movement modes, damage resistances, Regeneration conditions, and so on, which answering with spellcasting is fairly easily understood. It takes significant investment for a CoDzilla to out-beatstick even the most basic Shock Trooper without becoming one themselves (this is one of the things you actually need Persistomancy for), but the CoDzilla has all the permissions to apply that everywhere, spells to cover the relatively few combats not handily gutted by the Shock Trooper, and things to do outside combat.

Furthermore, optimization floor is in fact part of the tier judgement, in that Fighters have plenty of ways to make the raw math of combat implode, but far more ways to brick themselves. As such, the overall class is tier 5 because it is not safely assumed to be an efficient combatant due to all the trap options that must be avoided and how few outliers properly trivialize combat in various conditions. Mildly optimized Martial functionality is perfectly fine as the combat complement of a t2 character, given that less than it in a "typical" Cleric or Druid per Tiering consideration is still worth calling "CoDzilla".

[Troacctid]

If you're standing back and letting the martials take care of combat for you because you don't have the tools in your toolbox to deal with it effectively, you obviously haven't broken the game, right? Because there is the game's most prominent test of inter-class balance, just sitting there, completely intact and clearly not broken at all.

[Morphic tide]

If you're standing back and letting the martials take care of combat for you because you don't have the tools in your toolbox to deal with it effectively, you obviously haven't broken the game, right? Because there is the game's most prominent test of inter-class balance, just sitting there, completely intact and clearly not broken at all.
Most of the tools to take control of the narrative have comparatively little value in combat. Teleport is one among many escape buttons, Mount is a heavily-conditional movement speed boost, Overland Flight is a binary permission for melee generally done better by a spell two levels lower, and occasionally one three levels lower. But outside of combat, these three spells radically transform how you interact with the world due to how they screw with travel time. Similarly, Astral Projection changes almost nothing about the combat math in itself and Ethereal Jaunt in combat is often just an escape button, but the former reduces long-term risks to an incredibly tiny handful of cases and the latter is vastly more useful as a terrain bypass or extreme stealth tool.

Also the gish setup that reserves magic for the non-combat stuff. Which for some reason doesn't have a PRC intended for it, even in the Spellsword that requires you to beat people without using magic. It's probably a ham-fisted attempt to avoid 100% outmoding the Eldritch Knight, the way Arcane/Divine theurges are obligated to be terrible so Mystic Theurge keeps a point. Nearest is Ruby Knight Vindicator, who burns Turn Undead charges to propel Crusader while just "having" 8/10 casting.

[Troacctid]

Most of the tools to take control of the narrative have comparatively little value in combat. Teleport is one among many escape buttons, Mount is a heavily-conditional movement speed boost, Overland Flight is a binary permission for melee generally done better by a spell two levels lower, and occasionally one three levels lower. But outside of combat, these three spells radically transform how you interact with the world due to how they screw with travel time. Similarly, Astral Projection changes almost nothing about the combat math in itself and Ethereal Jaunt in combat is often just an escape button, but the former reduces long-term risks to an incredibly tiny handful of cases and the latter is vastly more useful as a terrain bypass or extreme stealth tool.
Shortening overland travel time is game-breaking? That seems like a pretty low standard to me. Especially in the case of mount, which isn't actually any faster than an ordinary horse—saving 90 gp or so is hardly what I would call a game breaker.


Also the gish setup that reserves magic for the non-combat stuff. Which for some reason doesn't have a PRC intended for it, even in the Spellsword that requires you to beat people without using magic. It's probably a ham-fisted attempt to avoid 100% outmoding the Eldritch Knight, the way Arcane/Divine theurges are obligated to be terrible so Mystic Theurge keeps a point. Nearest is Ruby Knight Vindicator, who burns Turn Undead charges to propel Crusader while just "having" 8/10 casting.
Well, if you want a gish, then mystic ranger doesn't have any notable "grab bag" spells off the top of my head, and most people agreed that it's on the lower border of tier 2 or the upper border of tier 3, so...there you go, I guess?

[Anthrowhale]

If I look at the top-10 lists we created recently and select for out-of-combat use spells that are non-grab-bag, I see:

L0: Detect Magic, Mage Hand, Fire Eyes, Ghost Sound, Prestidigitation, Message, Read Magic.
L1: Conviction, Improvisation, Snowsight, Loresong, Silent Image, Lesser Vigor, Protection from Evil.
L2: Lesser Restoration, Rope Trick, Suffer the Flesh, Obscuring Snow, Linked Peception.
L3: Shrink Item, Disobedience, Heart of Water, Anticipate teleportation, Nondetection, Glibness, Primal Instinct.
L4: Last Breath, Restoration, Consumptive Field, Favor the Martyr, Mindworms, Sheltered Vitality.
L5: Teleport, Control Winds, Surge of Fortune, Plane Shift, Contact Other Plane, Power Leech,
L6: Antimagic Field, Heal, Energy Immunity, Dream Casting, Gemjump.
L7: Planar Bubble, Greater Consumptive Field, Control Weather
L8: Moment of Prescience, Project Multiple Images, Evil Weather.
L9: Genesis, Astral Projection, Disjunction, Teleport Through Time, Hide Life.

In the context of someone else able to do melee combat or a gish chassis, I expect this would be a strong tier 2 list with just 55 spells. Plausibly, you could reduce the number even further (1/2?) and stay in tier 2.

[Morphic tide]

Shortening overland travel time is game-breaking? That seems like a pretty low standard to me. Especially in the case of mount, which isn't actually any faster than an ordinary horse—saving 90 gp or so is hardly what I would call a game breaker.
Mount means you don't have to arrange for the spare horses for Hustling until it drops (whether from damage or duration), meaning that you can actually travel several times the distance a day compared to one permanent Light Horse, instead of being confined to Pony Express infrastructure. Overland Flight removes terrain consideration outside very abnormal conditions as well as fully disables Nonlethal Damage from Hustling, making you ultimately outpace things with twice your speed, if not more with Forced March. And the things Teleport does to travel considerations is one of the largest drivers toward fortress-cities in Tippyverse thinking, because you just can't hold a countryside against that kind of strategic mobility.

Travel time is a clock for campaigns run on. Changes to it when at all relevant are likely to invert something that dictates combat conditions without heavy-handed plot enforcement tools. If you aren't in an urban campaign, chances are that travel magic can break something very important to the narrative, and by extension break something in the premise of the game as it is being run.


Well, if you want a gish, then mystic ranger doesn't have any notable "grab bag" spells off the top of my head, and most people agreed that it's on the lower border of tier 2 or the upper border of tier 3, so...there you go, I guess?
Summon Nature's Ally line is in there, it relies on battlefield control and heavy-handed buff spells to keep up in a lot of cases due to being archery-slanted on the Proficiencies, much of the value is from underleveled Ranger spells especially as it pertains to distended archery benefits, and it scales completely horribly past 10th because its design is an abomination. Though even with all that said, it is noteworthy for being the only real attempt at a "canned Gish" that has full spell level progression at any point.


If I look at the top-10 lists we created recently and select for out-of-combat use spells that are non-grab-bag, I see:

L0: Detect Magic, Mage Hand, Fire Eyes, Ghost Sound, Prestidigitation, Message, Read Magic.
L1: Conviction, Improvisation, Snowsight, Loresong, Silent Image, Lesser Vigor, Protection from Evil.
L2: Lesser Restoration, Rope Trick, Suffer the Flesh, Obscuring Snow, Linked Peception.
L3: Shrink Item, Disobedience, Heart of Water, Anticipate teleportation, Nondetection, Glibness, Primal Instinct.
L4: Last Breath, Restoration, Consumptive Field, Favor the Martyr, Mindworms, Sheltered Vitality.
L5: Teleport, Control Winds, Surge of Fortune, Plane Shift, Contact Other Plane, Power Leech,
L6: Antimagic Field, Heal, Energy Immunity, Dream Casting, Gemjump.
L7: Planar Bubble, Greater Consumptive Field, Control Weather
L8: Moment of Prescience, Project Multiple Images, Evil Weather.
L9: Genesis, Astral Projection, Disjunction, Teleport Through Time, Hide Life.

In the context of someone else able to do melee combat or a gish chassis, I expect this would be a strong tier 2 list with just 55 spells. Plausibly, you could reduce the number even further (1/2?) and stay in tier 2.
...I completely forgot about those threads, and really should have looked at them for a starting point on good candidates for outsized effects. Bit late for me to be combing over them to prune down, but much appreciated.

[RandomPeasant]

the Sorcerer's distinction from Wizard is being "expected" to break a few parts of the game by taking a few good spells

The spells that do this are the exact set of spells that you have decided you do not want. teleport is not a broken spell for Sorcerers to learn. planar binding is. I can write an adventure for every level from 10th to 20th that works just fine for a Sorcerer that uses teleport as much as the game allows. I cannot write any adventures for a Sorcerer that does that with planar binding, because the limit of power you can get from planar binding is "as much power as you can describe". That is what it is to be broken, not "I can opt out of travel adventures if they don't involve moving a large number of people.


not having any explanation how it's separating subset limits that define the Wizard/Sorcerer split, and the fundamentally lopsided value of the niches in question.

These are problems with specifically the "total" column. Which, admittedly, is a weird thing to add to what is fundamentally a tool for asking "if I want to do X, is class Y good for that" or "is class A or B better at doing X". But if you look at the individual rankings for niches, it's a fine tool (in the same way that JaronK's tiers are mostly directionally correct even if his descriptions are hot garbage).


I'm much more in favor of a Same-Game Test framework for that way of comparing classes, for all there isn't a clear "standard", because it naturally handles the "portion of overall set" problem that flatly ranking the entire class niche by niche simply doesn't work for.

I agree. The SGT is a better tool for balance than a lot of alternatives. But, fundamentally, it works because CR provides a framework for telling us when characters are expected to deal with what things. That does not exist for non-combat challenges. There is no CR for "get from DC to Tampa in 15 minutes" to tell us whether teleport is over-leveled, under-leveled, or correctly leveled. So deciding whether it is "game-breaking" is essentially meaningless. It's not game-breaking in the way that planar binding is (you can have functional campaigns with RAW teleport), and it can't be game-breaking in the way that a maxxed-out Mailman or Ubercharger build can be because we don't have the benchmarks for making that determination for anything which is not directly applicable to combat.


The trouble Martials have is applying damage output between distant-from-eachother targets, movement modes, damage resistances, Regeneration conditions, and so on

So, you know, "doing combat". Other than that they're really good at combat.


Mildly optimized Martial functionality is perfectly fine as the combat complement of a t2 character, given that less than it in a "typical" Cleric or Druid per Tiering consideration is still worth calling "CoDzilla".

This is only true to the extent you are defining "mildly" as a much higher level of optimization than "typical" Clerics or Druids. You haven't really provided enough detail to push back on, but I suspect that your "mildly optimized Ubercharger" ends up with more moving parts than an Initiate of Mystra build that leaves it in the dust.


Teleport is one among many escape buttons, Mount is a heavily-conditional movement speed boost, Overland Flight is a binary permission for melee generally done better by a spell two levels lower, and occasionally one three levels lower.

None of these are "buttons to take control over the narrative". The closest one is teleport and all that really lets you do is opt out of specific encounters in some circumstances. You're not directing a campaign because you can skip the road trip from Sharn to Korth. But, like, if what you want is "how much utility magic do you need to feel like you are not useless compared to a Wizard" the answer is "take a look at this list (https://www.tgdmb.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=19949) and pick an amount that seems right", because as noted there are not objective metrics.


Astral Projection changes almost nothing about the combat math in itself

astral projection lets you savescum combats. That's not a numeric change, but it's disingenuous to claim it's not a change. It is also de facto a grab bag spell because it duplicates all your charged items. Honestly the idea that it's a strategic-impact spell is somewhat weird to me. It's much, much more significant for the way it changes your relationship to combat.


It's probably a ham-fisted attempt to avoid 100% outmoding the Eldritch Knight

It's because "guy who wants to use magic out of combat, but never in combat" is a tiny demographic. In-combat magic is the first thing people go for when gishing up, if it wasn't there'd be way less resistance to martials in general having non-combat abilities.


Well, if you want a gish, then mystic ranger doesn't have any notable "grab bag" spells off the top of my head, and most people agreed that it's on the lower border of tier 2 or the upper border of tier 3, so...there you go, I guess?

I suspect that the number of non-SotAO Mystic Rangers is in the single digits, so it's not really accurate to say it doesn't have "grab bag" spells.


Travel time is a clock for campaigns run on. Changes to it when at all relevant are likely to invert something that dictates combat conditions without heavy-handed plot enforcement tools. If you aren't in an urban campaign, chances are that travel magic can break something very important to the narrative, and by extension break something in the premise of the game as it is being run.

But the DM can start that clock with any amount of time on it. If mount doubles your travel speed, that only matters if your DM didn't know you had access to mount. As noted earlier, the only one of these that comes close is teleport, and that's because it allows you to travel arbitrarily, not because it allows you to travel faster. Again, if we look at the genuinely broken spells, they are not feasible to plan around. hide life means you can force people to do arbitrarily many dungeon crawls before combat encounters threaten you. planar binding allows you to recruit an unbounded number of expendable mooks. mindrape means every enemy you defeat becomes your ally. This ticky-tack stuff with "what if your DM sets the timer for four days when they should've set it for two days" does not remotely compare.

[Troacctid]

Mount means you don't have to arrange for the spare horses for Hustling until it drops (whether from damage or duration), meaning that you can actually travel several times the distance a day compared to one permanent Light Horse, instead of being confined to Pony Express infrastructure. Overland Flight removes terrain consideration outside very abnormal conditions as well as fully disables Nonlethal Damage from Hustling, making you ultimately outpace things with twice your speed, if not more with Forced March. And the things Teleport does to travel considerations is one of the largest drivers toward fortress-cities in Tippyverse thinking, because you just can't hold a countryside against that kind of strategic mobility.

Travel time is a clock for campaigns run on. Changes to it when at all relevant are likely to invert something that dictates combat conditions without heavy-handed plot enforcement tools. If you aren't in an urban campaign, chances are that travel magic can break something very important to the narrative, and by extension break something in the premise of the game as it is being run.
Listen, I'm happy to agree that teleport effects are great, but in my entire career of DMing, I don't think that I have ever, ever run an adventure across 10+ seasons of organized play that would fundamentally break if you doubled or even tripled the land speed of the party's horses. Especially not if you had to spend five spell slots a day on it.

Teleport and flight effects break modules all the time, especially if you can get them at lower levels! But horses? No. It doesn't happen.

[Gnaeus]

That's t3 to my understanding, the Sorcerer's distinction from Wizard is being "expected" to break a few parts of the game by taking a few good spells that brick a few kinds of challenges against the Wizard really only needing the ability to buy scrolls and somebody thinking about niche-filling at all to break most of what can be.

So, first, let me say this was IMO the LEAST useful of JaronK's metrics, and I told him so at the time. Campaign nukes is at best a side note in a tier system, as a responsible player won't nuke the campaign and a DM who is awake will just say "no". For all that Random's assessment of planar binding as broken is correct, I would rather have the summon monster line, because every game I have been in actually lets me use Summon Monster x, at least most of the time, and virtually none are ok with Planar Binding, at least without limits.

If, somehow, mount breaks your game, ban or nerf mount. I can't see why it would be a problem, and if chain summoning mounts somehow gave PCs an advantage, I would be likely to say "Hey, congrats, you got an advantage". But if it ruined the campaign there would be some kind of plague in the celestial horse herds faster than you can say Elminster. I guess I have been lucky to have imaginative DMs, but it is not at all difficult to run a campaign, even an exploration campaign, in a world with teleport and overland flight, but again, if somehow it were, Astral Storm conditions make teleporting to that continent inadvisable this week.

I cannot imagine why you would BOTHER setting up a time table, when as Random points out the only one setting both the timeline and the outcomes as the DM, if you aren't going to let the PCs get ahead of or behind the timetable. If the evil high priest IS going to sacrifice the girl right when the PCs arrive, just make that happen. Otherwise, let PC actions determine if they are early or late and have outcomes. Nothing is broken.

[RandomPeasant]

Teleport and flight effects break modules all the time, especially if you can get them at lower levels! But horses? No. It doesn't happen.

Honestly even flight doesn't really break modules out of combat. You're far more likely to run into a combat encounter that can be trivialized by a dude with flight and a ranged attack (such as: almost all the giant vermin) than an adventure where flying strategically messes stuff up. teleport is unique because teleport lets you completely bypass encounters unless relatively specific anti-teleport countermeasures are taken, and because it lets you go any place you have heard of that is within several hundred miles of where you are. Those things take effort to design adventures around, and module designers skimped on them a lot of them (though interestingly not always). Conversely, the thing you need to do to stop the party from flying past all the fights leading up to the BBEG is "place the fights before the BBEG and the fight with the BBEG inside the same physical building". Lots of modules do that.


So, first, let me say this was IMO the LEAST useful of JaronK's metrics, and I told him so at the time. Campaign nukes is at best a side note in a tier system, as a responsible player won't nuke the campaign and a DM who is awake will just say "no".

It's also especially pointless to use it to distinguish between T1 and T2. You might, as a DM, have a situation where you let someone use planar binding a couple of times too many and the game ends up unhealthy until you make an adjustment. That's a real problem. But "I can ban the one game breaker the Sorcerer learned but not the ten game breakers the Wizard learned" is a problem no DM is ever going to have.

[Gnaeus]

Honestly even flight doesn't really break modules out of combat. You're far more likely to run into a combat encounter that can be trivialized by a dude with flight and a ranged attack (such as: almost all the giant vermin) than an adventure where flying strategically messes stuff up. teleport is unique because teleport lets you completely bypass encounters unless relatively specific anti-teleport countermeasures are taken, and because it lets you go any place you have heard of that is within several hundred miles of where you are. Those things take effort to design adventures around, and module designers skimped on them a lot of them (though interestingly not always). Conversely, the thing you need to do to stop the party from flying past all the fights leading up to the BBEG is "place the fights before the BBEG and the fight with the BBEG inside the same physical building". Lots of modules do that.


I can quite clearly recall one AP where the party was all flying and we saw an encounter below us. And we absolutely could have skipped it, and decided that we were wandering through the wilderness to kill giants for exp and loot and fun and there was a band of giants right in front of us and if we didn't want to play the AP we wouldn't be there. If the players want to skip the encounters, maybe the encounters need more rewards or to be more interesting.

Honestly, I feel even more this way in the modern VTT environment. Ciopo can attest that I'm a slacker and I may just throw some generic icon on a map, and use math like a luddite to figure out if people hit it or not. But if my DM bothered programming all those stats into the interface and found pictures and a cool map, and set up all the walls and the dynamic lighting, I'm inclined to interact with it just to not be a jerk.

[RandomPeasant]

I can quite clearly recall one AP where the party was all flying and we saw an encounter below us. And we absolutely could have skipped it, and decided that we were wandering through the wilderness to kill giants for exp and loot and fun and there was a band of giants right in front of us and if we didn't want to play the AP we wouldn't be there. If the players want to skip the encounters, maybe the encounters need more rewards or to be more interesting.

This is true too. To the degree that something like flight "breaks the game" it's really just an extension of the basic problem that the players have to buy in to the premise of the game for there to be a game. If you have an encounter the players can fly past and they opt to fly past it, that's not really any different from having the players hear that the baron's daughter has been kidnapped and then go "well, sucks for her, wonder if there's any giant rats in them sewers". And flight is an even more mild version of this than teleport, because with flight you can just have that encounter be in the same building as something the PCs need to do it and their ability to skip it vanishes entirely.

Again, compare this to planar binding. The most basic usage of planar binding is that you bind up a Glabrezu (a CR 13/12 HD Outsider) and now you have a pet that is, by straight CR, slightly stronger than you are. That's already a much larger and much more direct impact than anything flight and teleport do, and it's pretty close to the floor of what the spell does. The ceiling is, as I've been saying, that you call up an Efreet, get a SLA wish, and have whatever insanely broken custom magic item you ask for. Or just an infinite army of Efreet. There's no comparison between that and "what if we blow up the DM's travel schedule".

[pabelfly]

The trouble Martials have is applying damage output between distant-from-eachother targets, movement modes, damage resistances, Regeneration conditions, and so on, which answering with spellcasting is fairly easily understood.

I don't know if that matches my experience playing, the one thing martials rarely have trouble with is applying damage to enemies.

Distant-from-eachother targets: Typically enemies want to fight the party and will make efforts to engage them by approaching them. After the first round, you should be close enough to be dealing damage. Many martial types are decent at ranged or covering good distance in combat, removing that issue entirely.

Movement: At very low levels, you can invest in a ranged weapon like a crossbow to contribute to hurting enemies with flight or in water. When you have some money, you can get temporary movement options, and at higher levels you can buy permanent movement options.

Damage resistance: damage resistance only really matters to characters who deal lots of small amounts of damage (so, stuff like two-weapon fighting or volley archers) but damage output will still generally be a lot higher than DR so you're still making meaningful contributions to dealing with enemies.

Regeneration: you can still knock a creature out with regeneration by nonlethal damage, and deal a coup-de-grace from there.

I can understand the criticism people have here of martials outside of combat, but inside combat it's not hard to have martial combatants being able to meaningfully contribute to killing enemies.

[rel]

Not sure I'm understanding this question. Are you asking:

'What is the minimum number of published spells required to achieve broad competency in solving non-combat challenges without any competence in solving combat challenges?'


That's t3 to my understanding, the Sorcerer's distinction from Wizard is being "expected" to break a few parts of the game by taking a few good spells that brick a few kinds of challenges against the Wizard really only needing the ability to buy scrolls and somebody thinking about niche-filling at all to break most of what can be. Wilders, for instance, don't have access to the sort of in-bulk grab-bags nor enough Powers Known to have extremely broad competency, but end up one of the contentious boundary cases because they have so few and Augmentation makes such a mess of it.


In case it's not clear, I'm focused on JaronK's original definition of Tier 2 as "the same power level as Tier 1, but less options of it"...

Oh okay, I think I get it. So you're asking:

"How many spells do you need to reach T2 (as originally described by JaronK on the min max boards back in the 2010's) Without being able to contribute much to combat challenges?"

[Gnaeus]

I don't know if that matches my experience playing, the one thing martials rarely have trouble with is applying damage to enemies.

Distant-from-eachother targets: Typically enemies want to fight the party and will make efforts to engage them by approaching them. After the first round, you should be close enough to be dealing damage. Many martial types are decent at ranged or covering good distance in combat, removing that issue entirely.

Movement: At very low levels, you can invest in a ranged weapon like a crossbow to contribute to hurting enemies with flight or in water. When you have some money, you can get temporary movement options, and at higher levels you can buy permanent movement options.

Damage resistance: damage resistance only really matters to characters who deal lots of small amounts of damage (so, stuff like two-weapon fighting or volley archers) but damage output will still generally be a lot higher than DR so you're still making meaningful contributions to dealing with enemies.

Regeneration: you can still knock a creature out with regeneration by nonlethal damage, and deal a coup-de-grace from there.

I can understand the criticism people have here of martials outside of combat, but inside combat it's not hard to have martial combatants being able to meaningfully contribute to killing enemies.

I think the distinction is less clear than that. Campaigns exist, roughly, in one of 2 states.

1. There is not a functional, available magic mart or equivalent. The fighter cannot fly, see invisible opponents, or move and full attack, because those are not fighter abilities and he cannot guarantee that he will have the items he needs. As opposed to a CoDzilla or other hybrid who can get a spell to cover problems that dropped loot didn't cover. This is the worst case scenario for muggles, as the "fighter" may lack tools he needs to fight.

or 2. There is a magic mart, or sufficient crafting availability to duplicate same. In this case, every PC has a pool of points with which to select powers called GP, that are functionally interchangeable between combat and non-combat. If I need Xgp to buy a flight item, or a see invisibility item, or just to get the necessary bonuses to hit my targets and do damage, I can't use that money to hire a teleport, or bribe the king. The DIRECT difference in out of combat utility between, for example, a Swashbuckler, which is bad at its job, and a Crusader, which is good at its job, may be negligible. But if the Swashbuckler needs 90% of its WBL to hit the combat effectiveness of a crusader spending 25%, the Crusader FUNCTIONALLY has a lot more potential utility. (or conversely, a utility specialist like a Factotum may want to devote a large % of his WBL to combat options, because they already have non combat niches filled). And the CoDzilla or gish wins at both ends, with both powers that remove the need for a range of specialist combat items, and powers that cover some of their out of combat utility, leaving less gaps to fill there as well. This is, of course, not even reaching the fact that the caster may also have tools with which to spend GP more effectively, like scrolls/wands being cheaper than potions, or better crafting access, etc. There is almost nothing a wizard can do that a fighter or at least a rogue can't do, in or out of combat, with enough gp. You could, essentially, redefine the tier list completely as "levels of GP advantage/disadvantage" and the rankings wouldn't change at all and it would mean exactly the same thing.

[Remuko]

Regeneration: you can still knock a creature out with regeneration by nonlethal damage, and deal a coup-de-grace from there.

im fairly certain that without a way to bypass regeneration, you can't deliver a c-d-g on an unconscious creature that has said regeneration.

[pabelfly]

im fairly certain that without a way to bypass regeneration, you can't deliver a c-d-g on an unconscious creature that has said regeneration.

Regeneration explicitly says you can do this.

https://www.d20srd.org/srd/specialAbilities.htm


A regenerating creature that has been rendered unconscious through nonlethal damage can be killed with a coup de grace.

[Anthrowhale]

Damage resistance: damage resistance only really matters to characters who deal lots of small amounts of damage (so, stuff like two-weapon fighting or volley archers) but damage output will still generally be a lot higher than DR so you're still making meaningful contributions to dealing with enemies.

Note also that Archery is the best combat style for bypassing damage resistance since you can keep the core enchantments on the bow and use the choice of arrow to bypass material-based (and alignment-based at high levels) damage resistance.

[Troacctid]

Regeneration explicitly says you can do this.

https://www.d20srd.org/srd/specialAbilities.htm
"A regenerating creature that has been rendered unconscious through nonlethal damage can be killed with a coup de grace. The attack cannot be of a type that automatically converts to nonlethal damage."

[Thunder999]

When Flight breaks things it's generally because the enemy lacks the ability to fight back at range, and that doesn't mean the party skips them, it means they pull out ranged weapons and shoot fish in a barrel.

[RandomPeasant]

I will say that overall I don't think regeneration is a huge deal for optimized martials. You can put out quite a lot of damage as an Ubercharger, and it's not like regeneration is instant. If something gets back 5 HP/round and you deal 100 damage per swing, it only takes a little bit for you to overdamage it enough that it will stay down for as long as the party is in the area.


But if the Swashbuckler needs 90% of its WBL to hit the combat effectiveness of a crusader spending 25%, the Crusader FUNCTIONALLY has a lot more potential utility.

And the reality is that the number for the Swashbuckler may well be over 100% of WBL, especially if they're trying to support a variety of combat tactics and/or not able to dumpster dive from every possible source. WBL is, at most levels, too low for martial characters to get the gear they need with standard itemization. Consider, for instance, that an 8th level martial is expected to spend a bit over a third of their WBL on a single +2 weapon while an 8th level Cleric can have a +2 weapon all day for a single casting of greater magic weapon (and have that slot back if they want it for a pearl of power that costs only 1k GP more than the weapon).


Note also that Archery is the best combat style for bypassing damage resistance since you can keep the core enchantments on the bow and use the choice of arrow to bypass material-based (and alignment-based at high levels) damage resistance.

The problem with archery as a martial is that wind wall exists. That's not a big deal for a Cleric Archer because most stuff won't have wind wall and you can just have minions or prepare some death spells on the off chance you run into something that does. But as a Fighter having a 2nd level spell that shuts down your whole deal means that your build is going to be useless against any moderately savvy BBEG.


"A regenerating creature that has been rendered unconscious through nonlethal damage can be killed with a coup de grace. The attack cannot be of a type that automatically converts to nonlethal damage."

Seems like that second sentence is important for understanding the meaning of the passage.


When Flight breaks things it's generally because the enemy lacks the ability to fight back at range, and that doesn't mean the party skips them, it means they pull out ranged weapons and shoot fish in a barrel.

As I said, flight is far more likely to break the game on the tactical level than the strategic one. A 6th level Warlock can kill arbitrarily many giant centipedes, but for it to "break travel" it has to A) apply to the whole party and B) the DM has to have set a detailed travel schedule that specifically depends on terrain but never considered the possibility of flight. That's just not really plausible.