Retiering the Classes: Battle Dancer, Monk, Mountebank, and Soulknife

[eggynack]

In this thread, we will cover those weird mediocre melee classes with a bunch of supernatural abilities that range from terrible to kinda decent. The monk is the classic class along these lines, with its wonky once/day or even once/week abilities alongside standard punch power. The battle dancer is patterned after the monk somewhat, except with dance theming, the mountebank has a bunch of infernal supernatural abilities running around, and the soulknife has a crappy supernatural weapon. This is also a weirdly dragon compendium based thread, given the battle dancer and mountebank both come from there, but whatcha gonna do? I realize only in this late hour that I should have done this yesterday, for monkday, but such is the way of the world.

Battle Dancer (DC, 26): On the upside, you get full BAB, which is nice. On the downside, your abilities are probably even worse than the monk's. You get some decent ones eventually, but it's not enough to make up for most of your levels being super crappy.

Monk: I think that the true defining quote for the monk comes from the dead levels web enhancement, "Players always have something to look forward to with the monk, which boasts the most colorful and unique special abilities of all the character classes." As much derision as that quote gets, it's not entirely wrong. The monk has a lot of really cool and really interesting abilities, and it is this fact that drives much of the interest in the class. But, of course, those abilities suck. There's a reason the quote calls these abilities colorful and unique rather than, y'know, good and useful. Still, the monk does have some optimization potential to it, between its potent ACFs, kinda wonky unarmed strike mechanic, and occasionally useful monk specific thing.

I think that there's going to be a lot of weirdness to untangle with this class, if my experience with monk discussions is any judge. At the outset though, I think it's fair to discount the proficiency with unarmed strikes issue. I personally think that it's a weapon you can lack proficiency in, and that the monk lacks said proficiency, by the rules at least, but I can't imagine anyone actually plays that way, except for some ridiculous exception. Thus we should probably just assume they have the proficiency, or that the proficiency is unnecessary, for the purposes of this thread.

Mountebank (DC, 42): This one is pretty interesting. You don't actually hit all that good, with deceptive attack as a mediocre at best source of extra damage, but some of the supernatural abilities on offer here are pretty good. Alter self at fourth level in particular, along with some teleportation and stuff. Not much that lets you take a super meaningful role in combat, but they're more worth note than most of what the battle dancer or monk gets access to. Also, your 20th level ability is to be removed from the game in a way that's particularly difficult to reverse, so that's a thing. The interaction between this and our current no dipping policy is problematic, but I think it's fair to assume that mountebanks can avoid that fate through the application of some variety of dip if they so choose. We're still assessing the base class here, so no particular dip abilities should be used or assumed, which means this would essentially take the form of a commoner dip, or perhaps something that roughly matches the mountebank chassis without adding much, but assuming that players that don't want to get their characters consumed by hell fire are forced down that path by way of a no dipping dictate seems really wonky.

SoulKnife (XPH, 26): You get a free supernatural weapon. It really doesn't do much. It has the occasional trick to it, and you get the rare somewhat unrelated ability, but this class is mostly just a halfway decent weapon that you don't have to pay for.

What are the tiers?

The simple answer here is that tier one is the best, the home of things on the approximate problem solving scale of wizards, and tier six is the worst, land of commoners. And problem solving capacity is what's being measured here. Considering the massive range of challenges a character is liable to be presented with across the levels, how much and how often does that character's class contribute to the defeat of those challenges? This value should be considered as a rough averaging across all levels, the center of the level range somewhat more than really low and really high level characters, and across all optimization levels (considering DM restrictiveness as a plausible downward acting factor on how optimized a character is), prioritizing moderate optimization somewhat more than low or high.

A big issue with the original tier system is that, if anything, it was too specific, generating inflexible definitions for allowance into a tier which did not cover the broad spectrum of ways a class can operate. When an increase in versatility would seem to represent a decrease in tier, because tier two is supposed to be low versatility, it's obvious that we've become mired in something that'd be pointless to anyone trying to glean information from the tier system. Thus, I will be uncharacteristically word light here. The original tier system's tier descriptions are still good guidelines here, but they shouldn't be assumed to be the end all and be all for how classes get ranked.

Consistent throughout these tiers is the notion of problems and the solving thereof. For the purposes of this tier system, the problem space can be said to be inclusive of combat, social interaction, and exploration, with the heaviest emphasis placed on combat. A problem could theoretically fall outside of that space, but things inside that space are definitely problems. Another way to view the idea of problem solving is through the lens of the niche ranking system. A niche filled tends to imply the capacity to solve a type of problem, whether it's a status condition in the case of healing, or an enemy that just has too many hit points in the case of melee combat. It's not a perfect measure, both because some niches have a lot of overlap in the kinds of problems they can solve and because, again, the niches aren't necessarily all inclusive, but they can act as a good tool for class evaluation.

Tier one: Incredibly good at solving nearly all problems. This is the realm of clerics, druids, and wizards, classes that open up with strong combat spells backed up by utility, and then get massively stronger from there. If you're not keeping up with that core trio of tier one casters, then you probably don't belong here.

Tier two: We're just a step below tier one here, in the land of classes around the sorcerer level of power. Generally speaking, this means relaxing one of the two tier one assumptions, either getting us to very good at solving nearly all problems, or incredibly good at solving most problems. But, as will continue to be the case as these tiers go on, there aren't necessarily these two simple categories for this tier. You gotta lose something compared to the tier one casters, but what you lose doesn't have to be in some really specific proportions.

Tier three: Again, we gotta sacrifice something compared to tier two, here taking us to around the level of a swordsage. The usual outcome is that you are very good at solving a couple of problems and competent at solving a few more. Of course, there are other possibilities, for example that you might instead be competent at solving nearly all problems.

Tier four: Here we're in ranger/barbarian territory (though the ranger should be considered largely absent of ACF's and stuff to hit this tier, as will be talked about later). Starting from that standard tier three position, the usual sweet spots here are very good at solving a few problems, or alright at solving many problems.

Tier five: We're heading close to the dregs here. Tier five is the tier of monks, classes that are as bad as you can be without being an aristocrat or a commoner. Classes here are sometimes very good at solving nearly no problems, or alright at solving a few, or some other function thereof. It's weak, is the point.

Tier six: And here we have commoner tier. Or, the bottom is commoner. The top is approximately aristocrat. You don't necessarily have nothing in this tier, but you have close enough to it.

The Threads

Tier System Home Base


The Fixed List Casters: Beguiler, Dread Necromancer, and Warmage


The Obvious Tier One Classes: Archivist, Artificer, Cleric, Druid, Sha'ir, and Wizard


The Mundane Beat Sticks (part one): Barbarian, Fighter, Samurai (CW), and Samurai (OA)


The Roguelikes: Ninja, Rogue, and Scout


The Pseudo-Druids: Spirit Shaman, Spontaneous Druid, Urban Druid, and Wild Shape Ranger


The Jacks of All Trades: Bard, Factotum, Jester, and Savant


The Tome of Battlers: Crusader, Swordsage, and Warblade


The NPCs: Adept, Aristocrat, Commoner, Expert, Magewright, and Warrior


The Vaguely Supernatural Melee Folk: Battle Dancer, Monk, Mountebank, and Soulknife


The Miscellaneous Full Casters: Death Master, Shaman, Shugenja, Sorcerer, and Wu Jen


The Wacky Magicists: Binder, Dragonfire Adept, Shadowcaster, Truenamer, and Warlock

The Rankings

Battle Dancer: Tier five

Monk: Tier five

Mountebank: Tier five

Soulknife: Tier five

And here's a link to the spreadsheet.