Wizards should be better than fighters.

[Gnaeus]

That I had to quote a bunch of stuff shows that it wasn't really transparent if that was even intentional or not for players. Nowhere in the rule book does each martial class have, "Weaker than magic" written next to it for players to read. To my knowledge, there is no, "Magic is superior to everything ever" in big bold letters in the Player's Handbook. This isn't transparent, and you yourself said it was bad form for a warrior to be "waking up and realizing that now you are a gimp compared with the wizard and cleric." I was playing 3.PF and the higher level we got, I was noticing how more and more useless my Fighter and Barbarian were compared to the magic users in the party beyond hitting things. Nowhere in Pathfinder either did it, to my knowledge, have a big title saying, "Magic is GOAT. If you want to play anyone that doesn't use magic and remain useful after X level, you're wasting your time!" next to every single none magical class. .

Did I say 3.5 was transparent? No. But the error wasn’t in having a range of classes. It was in labeling them poorly and pretending they were even.

Once again, your definition of fun is not everyone else's.

If I'm understanding this correctly, you're trying to tell other people what is and isn't fun because you enjoy being weak....? .

Nowhere did I say that there shouldn’t be strong classes. I’ve repeatedly said there should be classes at the T1 and T3 as well as T5 levels. If you want to play a supergod on easy mode, fine. Heck some days I like playing with all the toys at once too.

Your argument however is incredibly hypocritical. I have no desire to remove your high power game. You should stop trying to gut the low power one. There’s one person here telling others how to “play the game right (well, 2 with Nigel)” and it isn’t me.

Yeah... While fun is subjective, I'm fully in support of all PCs being strong. If I wanted to play weak characters, I'd just play a lower level character than the challenges we're facing or an NPC class or something.

And again, if the NPC classes were designed for play that would be fine. But they are boring. Expert, Warrior, noble have no class features. I didn’t say I wanted the option of playing a blank sheet. And I pointed out several lower power classes that do have class abilities.

3.5 doesn’t actually support play froma wide variety of levels as well as it does class tiers. If I want to play a soulknife or a ninja in a higher tier party to allow for optimization or not outshine weaker players, I can’t as easily just play, for example, a 1/2 level cleric. The skill system and combat system both just shut you out.

Having to rely on skills and wits against higher power challenges can be fun. Instadying to level appropriate traps and aoes and not being able to have meaningful skills less so. Maybe I want to hit people with my shovel sometimes while the ninja throws forks at people. Or be 4 fat lazy hobbits roaming the wilds hiding from nazgul. Saying “I don’t think invisibility (from the actual bad guys) and teleport are things we want in this campaign” doesn’t mean that I might not want to make level appropriate stealth checks or have the bab to be able to stab the wraith in the final boss fight.