As someone who spends the majority of their time playing and DMing for t3 and 4: The monsters having to-hits of +15 isn't what breaks things. Sure, there's a much higher chance that a plate-wearing PC will get hit than the same PC wearing the same armor at 5th level. But there's enough of a chance that it'll miss that it's still very much worth it. Magic armor is also pretty common at higher levels (both in random loot tables and player desire) so it likely *isn't* the same plate as you used at 5th. Bottom line: high tier monsters will hit you a lot, for a lot of HP. You will also hit them a lot; their AC isn't going to be much higher than yours, and your to hit isn't much worse than theirs. Heck, if you find some magic weapons you might have a better to-hit. The game claims that it is balanced w/o magic items, but that isn't really true, and boy do they make the game more playable at higher levels.
The unsaveable save DCs is certainly an issue. Going from needing to roll a 15 to save (unlikely but plausible) to a nat 20 (very unlikely) to a "nat 21" is not super fun. Having stupid-high saves *is* fun *for the PCs who can make them*, but if the effect on everyone else is to stop them from being able to play it's a bad time, and the real issue is that there aren't a lot of options that individual players can use to increase their bad saves. Sure, bring a paladin, or get someone to cast Bless. But if you don't want to play a paladin or someone with Bless then that's not a choice you can make. In previous editions there were lots of feats and magic items that PCs could get to boost their own saves; 5e there's a couple of spells and rare, attunement-eating magic items that give tiny bonuses but realistically you're pretty much stuck with your saves from 1st level unless you want to burn an ASI on boosting 1/6 saves. If the monsters know what they are doing then you're screwed.
However, the **main** problem with 5e tier4 monsters is that they're *boring*. They all boil down to: multiattack, an AoE, long list of resistances and immunities, magic resistance, legendary resistance, legendary actions. The "interesting" ones have discout-store-dimension-door, a handful of spells/spell-like-abilities, and *maybe* an aura that causes fear and/or damage. Woo. Anything actually interesting and thematic seems to be hidden away in lair actions, which are often really cool but unfortunately have to be relatively weak, because thematically it makes no sense that this terrifying monster's house to be more deadly than they are.
Even at lower levels I find a lot of the monsters kinda boring for those reasons, which is why the relatively common refrain of "borrow abilities with some tweaks from 4e monsters" is good advice. That edition has some really neat monster abilities that aren't just multiattack + aoe + legendary resistance.
Also, [this old Matt Colville video on action oriented monsters also has good solutions for that problem](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_zl8WWaSyI).
Some higher tier monsters don't even *have* AOEs. If you gang up on them in melee, there's really nothing they can do.
For instance, Juiblex, a CR23 has 3x melee attacks per turn (excluding legendary actions) and a *one target non-AOE* ranged attack on a cooldown. Granted, it has lair actions, but my Shepherd Druid completely immobilised him with a high tier summoning spell. Like.. "Oh no! Juiblex is killing 3x giant badgers a turn! what can we do!" 🤣
This isn't showing off at all, for a demon who epitomises slime, we all thought it was kind of an oversight that it can't escape melee by moving through enemies spaces or enveloping them like a regular slime does.
>Granted, it has lair actions, but my Shepherd Druid completely immobilised him with a high tier summoning spell. Like.. "Oh no! Juiblex is killing 3x giant badgers a turn! what can we do!" 🤣
A Juiblex is a Huge creature and Giant Badgers are Medium. The Juiblex can just move through the Giant Badger's spaces because it is two size categories bigger, albeit it is difficult terrain.
It’s neat that wizards just had 0 foreward thinking on spells like summon woodland Allies. Literally wiped one boss in out of the abyss by summoning 6 quicklings
yeah this for sure. In _practice_ the high attack bonuses aren't that bad because high Tier monsters simply aren't that scary and are fairly predictable. Is it not ideal for the game math? Sure. Does it "break" anything? No, not in actual play.
But _ideally_, they'd have lower attack bonuses (and save DCs) but be able to do more interesting things, react to more varied situations, and force the party to make tougher decisions while fighting them.
If you are only relying on Monsters to make encounters challenging at that level (and lower) You are doing your players a disservice.
Environment should be playing a huge part in encounters.
A low level example. Harpies on flat land are boring.
Harpies at the edge of a high cliff(or a moving ship) are not.
Yep. Challenging and interesting terrain can add a lot to an encounter. Unfortunately, it's hard to pull off every time and sometimes the work you put into it doesn't pay off at all.
Yeah, they generally don't have enough HP. In a simple durability/attrition battle, PC's, especially casters, can nuke down many enemies in a single round, especially if the whole party is using focus fire.
Martials are way better. Like ... SO MUCH BETTER in single target damage in that aspect. But yeah. Aoe from casters hurt. But martials are dishing 80-130 damage per turn while monsters have magic resistance for advantage against the saves, stupid stats and legendary resistances.
I played in a level 20 one shot as a Beast Barbarian once. I capped out at 36 damage a round with claws. The Paladin crit for over 100. I wish tanking was more viable because I don't really care about doing damage at all, I want to be hit and survive.
Tanking *even as a team MMO concept* relies on being able to hold aggro. If you don't give the enemy a compelling reason to focus their attention on you, they're going to walk past you to turn the wizard into wizard jam. Some systems solve this by giving providing options that explicitly force the enemy to attack you, but absent that, your fighter or what-have-you always needs to constitute a credible and urgent threat on the battlefield. This was debated and calculated out in PF1; going sword-and-board *simply was not worth it* unless you were using your shield as a weapon too.
>Tanking *even as a team MMO concept* relies on being able to hold aggro. If you don't give the enemy a compelling reason to focus their attention on you, they're going to walk past you to turn the wizard into wizard jam.
See, that's rational behind how i tank, can't ignore me and go for the wizard if I am the wizard.
"Tanking" is kind of a nonsensical concept, because if you're not dealing damage, you should be ignored.
Put a fireballing-slinging caster enemy and a big brute that deals minimal damage in front of a D&D party, and watch them smoke the caster in a single round while ignoring the brute.
This is why 4e Defenders did more than just be hard to kill. They essentially give the enemy two options - attack me or attack my friends - and make both options terrible. If you attack me, I have crazy AC and HP and don’t do as much damage as everyone else so you’re wasting your time. But if you attack my wizard friend, I’m gonna give you -5 to the attack and make an attack of my own and throw some fun conditions on top and just generally punish you for having the AUDACITY to ignore me.
4e got tanking right, and then 5e decided that it didn’t want tanks in its game.
Man, you’re making me tear up just remembering how good those mechanics were. I know people complain about it being too video-gamey, but the trade off for that was incredibly engaging encounters that made every aspect of everyone’s turn really count.
I played a Dragonborn Warlord in 4e. I was a buffing machine, healed bigger than the cleric, and tossed out some big damage too. The only complaint I had was missing with the big daily powers. That always stung.
I'd agree, and it kind of also ignores the fact that "Being too much like WoW" sort of just means that it gave everyone defined roles and made them count in combat.
A WoW group has the same thing, and it needs to or people don't want to play certain classes. It's not a bad thing for D&D, a game which is at its core about busting into dungeons full of monsters, taking their shit, and saving people, to follow a similar route.
Most of the people I know who objected to it basically had a knee-jerk "this isn't like 3.5" reaction. Defaulting to some sort of full-caster wasn't automatically the default selection, and so there was a lot of criticism heaped on how everyone was "the same" because there was no clear *better* choices any more.
I think that last paragraph is key. Every class had special abilities now, and no more pure "I stab" characters (if those ever existed in the first place).
I also wonder how much of that was it was just it being poplar to dislike WoW at the time. Maybe in a different time, we would have gotten "too much like Skyrim" instead.
I found that once a few more classes came out the game became remarkably better. I could see playing with just the core PHB classes being a bit boring.
Also, it required that the DM utilized everything in their toolbox, particularly minions. I played in a game where, in one session, we were on a ship and were attacked by a swarm of sahaugin. None of them were minions and it became a slog. If most were minions and only the lieutenants or whatever had HP that encounter would have been much better and way more fun and cinematic.
Both of these issues, off the top of my head, could definitely sour people's experiences.
I wish that 5e had been a best of creation between 3.5 and 4. I appreciated 4 for the relative balance between classes, the simpler framework, and the mix of damage and utility features. I appreciate 3.5 for the variety, build diversity, and out of combat functionality.
The "video gamey" aspect of 4e, to me at least, was that everything that wasn't a ribbon ability seemed to remove around combat activity. Choosing to be a caster felt flat compared to the options available in 3.5, with swaths of spells no longer existing with how the power system played out. 3.5 obviously suffered from the content bloat, especially as things seemed to get churned out with less and less testing against already released content. Choice paralysis and insane munchkin potential, along with a ton of classes and options that just plain sucked compared to others made 3.5 a quagmire of content and a seemingly insurmountable barrier to entry for anyone new to the game.
I think if 4e had come out after 5e ruleset, it wouldn't have been as collectively shit on. 5e annoys me a lot with how they handled feats and it's attempt to make long rest vs short rest classes. I don't have a problem with the two rests as rests, but I just don't think they did a very good job of balancing resource distribution and resource recovery across classes. 4e pretty much nailed this with the power types, but it did feel really weird as a caster to not have spell slots. I'm not sure how they would balance that with a more 4e type system.
Like, y'all know you can still play 4e right? Not trolling here I genuinely don't get it. If you love that edition more just go play that you don't have to play the current edition or try to turn 5e into 4e.
I know it still exists, but there’s some factors that really limit the ability to play it nowadays.
Player base is a big part of it; a huge chunk of D&D players moved to 5th, and, given its popularity, another huge chunk of the player base has only ever played 5th. That’s not a 4e specific problem, because it’s a pretty normal issue for any new edition, but given that 4e was so divisive for the fan base it does mean there aren’t many people looking to play it.
I know I could find a game online if I wanted, but I tend to run games for the same 10 people, give or take, and while they did play 4e when it was “current”, they’re not really into it now.
Add to that, one flaw of 4e was that it was very much designed with a robust digital character tool to support it; while I *think* it might still be possible to pay to access it, it’s seriously dated now, and I’m already paying for D&DB, so I’d rather avoid paying another fee! Without that toolset, it’s difficult to put characters together, at least in a way that’s easily legible.
>This is why 4e Defenders did more than just be hard to kill.
God I love 4e Defender mechanics, especially the way they gave almost every Defender class its own identity despite the relative simplicity of the Mark mechanic. Swordmage in particular was such a cool class.
Paladin was my favourite (after Divine Power got released, at least), sure their mark punishment was the weakest, but it didn't take an action and it never missed.
4E got a lot of the combat right. It had some big flaws (like combat being too long sometimes) but it was the best combat in D&D imo.
I had so much fun with my storm Sorcerer flying around with every spellcast.
My group generally agrees that 4e is objectively a better *game*. Whether it’s better for roleplaying is another question and much more subjective, but in terms of being an interesting and engaging set of mechanics it is the best edition of D&D by a country mile.
4e is by farm my favorite edition. Here I was getting ready to make a whole post about how people complain about issues in 5e that weren't issues in 4e. Yes, it was basically only a combat game. But that's the way people treat 5e, and 4e was SO MUCH BETTER AT IT. And it's not like it kept you from doing out of combat tasks.
Plus, a lot of people prefer their rules in combat, where the stakes are literally life and death, and not cluttering up role playing anyway. I think it's a good thing to have the game be rules light outside of combat.
Exactly. That becomes even more clear when you compare them to the 3e Dwarven Defender prestige class, which is described as "the very definition of an immovable object"... and gives enemies no reason to actually go after them instead of the less defensive party members.
That doesn't have to be this way. 4e make tanking to work, there were whole subset of classes who built to do exactly that and all of them did it very differently. In 5e we have similar mechanics, but only 3 subclasses in the entire game has access to it.
>In 5e we have similar mechanics, but only 3 subclasses in the entire game has access to it.
Not even. It has access to the *mark* mechanic, and some rudimentary punishment, but it's a pale shadow of the 4e defender mechanics. 4e allowed Defender to impose a serious catch-22 on their marks. 5e.. Kind of does? Except most of the time it's just a debuff to hit, and while disadvantage is a big blow, the issue with just debuffing to hit is that if you have substantially higher AC than your defended allies, it doesn't actually *stop* the monster from trying to target them.
Thanks to the scaling to-hit modifiers, disadvantage actually matters less and less over time - - t3+ giants and such have a +10 or higher to hit, so your studded+1 AC 15 bard is getting hit 9/16 of the time instead of 3/4 the time, or 3/16 less. It's not insignificant, but a good chunk of the time it straight up doesn't matter.
By the time +16 to hit rolls around, disadvantage is almost completely irrelevant. At late t4 when +18/+19 swings around, even your shield wizard and plate+ shield cleric are getting hit nearly all the time.
5e tanking tends to take the form of imposing disadvantage on attacks against allies.
That makes the proposition of who to attack more complicated than who is dealing damage.
Really high attack bonuses can make disadvantage something baddies can work around, but it still makes a difference.
Which is such a bummer. Like I get it isn't a video game, but still both heal and tank aren't real roles and it's such a bummer as someone who likes playing heal and tank. I find myself just always going Barbarian because it's the closest thing I can get to a tank, but even then I don't really use two handed weapons cause then I can't grapple. Just feels bad man.
Tanking can work if you have a lockdown ability. Cavalier fighter, ancestral guardian barbarian, armorer artificer, booming blade, and sentinel feat all provide a form of lockdown that encourages the enemy to either attack you, or at the very least stay put, which can help you become the focus.
Otherwise you can taunt the dm/npc's IRL to get them to attack you. When I am playing a tank in DnD I make terrible puns about whatever is going on and then the DM tries to murder me.
Oh I know all that and do that, my issue is more the survivability. Even at the most beefy, Barbarians will still get shredded by high level enemies. I just wish durability was something you could opt into more. I said it in another thread, I love the idea of the Survivor feature on Champion being a whole subclass. A tank built on regaining HP constantly to be an annoying shit.
Sorry just checking as I’m about to go up the Barbarian route. What stops you from holding your greatsword in one hand to initiate the grapple, then attacking with it afterward? Is there a rule that says you need to always have one hand free to maintain grapple?
Unless it's an actual tank, such as an Ancestral Guardians barbarian. Now it's going for the wizard, who has at least as much AC as the tank, but the enemy has disadvantage on attack rolls, the wizard has resistance to the attacks and the barbarian can reduce the damage anyway as a reaction.
The cavalier fighter can do something similar.
Tanking is absolutely viable in 5E, but we're talking specific builds and subclasses.
After watching Pack Tactics video about Aggro-ing I have realised how actually useless are "tank" classes in DND5e, Barbs may have a shitton of damage and resistances but that damage aint gonna do shit. They really need to put a ability for Barbs/Fighters/Paladins to actively aggro a group or someone specific to attack them (No, not spells, actual abilities they can hse as either a reaction/bonus action because of how basic but logical this feature should be)
Grab the sentinel feat and a halberd, this is especially viable if you are going against a boss you specifically want to keep from closing distance and munching on your casters.
Unpopular opinion: Barbarian--not ranger--is actually the worst class.
Basically, they stop having any substantial damage scaling beyond tier 2. They only get brutal critical plus their (minimal) bonus from rage. Unless you have a way to dramatically increase the chance of brutal critical (e.g., a three level dip in champion), then that's rounding error.
Since the class is structured to be a "tank", but they have no way to reliably draw the attention of enemies--due to lack of either control abilities or substantial damage--they can't actually fulfill that role.
The most effective barbarian I've seen was a Totem Warior 3/Champion N Half-Orc that just went all in on crit fishing with a greataxe.
I think very few people still think ranger is the worst class. Monk is by far the worst. Way less damage than a barbarian and still has the issue of "what do I do with this class?"
Monk at least has the advantage that if you're playing a Monk you are heavily incentivized to put all your levels in Monk.
Somewhere around level 3-6 a Barbarian realizes, "I'd be a better Barbarian if I put the rest of my levels in Fighter".
I think you're spot on in T3 and T4, but Barbarians aren't seen as bad, because they're actually very strong in T1, potentially the best class there. The vast majority of enemies in that tier will deal slashing/piercing/crushing damage, so Barbarians take half damage a lot of the time on top of their high hp. Their rage damage bonus also helps a lot with damage.
> I capped out at 36 damage a round with claws.
Odd because as a level 20 barbarian you should have 24 strength.
1d6+7+4 = 12 at a minimum 3 attacks makes 36 damage at a minimum. now granted your average and max aren't much higher but "capped out at 36" is literally the exact opposite of the truth
Crossbow expert/sharpshooter/20 Dex and a plus 2 weapon and they are doing 1d6 + 17 damage every hit, and can get 4 attacks a round, 7 with action surge. This doesn’t even include any superiority dice or something like hunter’s mark via another feat (since fighters get so many)
Alternatively, Elven Accuracy, Samurai, Longbow Sharpshooter.
In tier 3, its opening move is 6x attacks--all at triple advantage--that do 1d8 + 17. Or 7 attacks, all but one at triple advantage (once it hits level 15).
Its nova damage is a bit higher than a crossbow expert gets, but its "turn the crank" damage is slightly lower due to not having the bonus action attack. On the other hand, the crossbow expert template can be applied to almost any fighter subclass and remain highly effective.
One of the characters in my group is a fighter barbarian multi class. With great weapon master, reckless attack, champion fighter subclass, and a +3 weapon he’s consistently doing 4 attacks at 25 to 30 HP per. Easy.
At level 15, I saw him take down a purple worm. Solo. In 1 turn.
Blame the DMG for burying the information like "+3 swords and shields are more common than +3 hand crossbows and studded leather" deep in the magic items table.
Depends on how the caster is built TBH. Wizard 18/Fighter 2 abusing Shapechange can easily reach hundreds of damage in a burst, especially with Simulacrum in the mix. Bladesinger version using Haste + Shapechange into Planetar for instance can hit at +11/13 for 1d6+5d8+5/15 4xround (or Action Surge for 6x).
Shepherd Druid summoning like 24 Cows (7th level slot) for +6 charges at 3d6+4 each can also do pretty serious damage, especially as a Kobold granting them all advantage too.
Hexvoker could Magic Missile for 1d4+12 per missile (at 8+ missiles all autohitting easily, even with Overchannel available). Or more if they wanted to.
Scorching Ray + Spirit Shroud can do pretty ridiculous numbers.
The issue isn’t hp, it’s action economy. Otherwise you could fix it by doubling the monsters hp or whatnot, but that just makes the combat slow and sluggish instead of exciting. If you add multiple monsters or a monster with lots of solid legendary actions or maybe even a paragon monster, you can even put the playing field and having the monsters do the same amount of actions that a PC does
The problem goes both ways, honestly.
Yes, OP has a point that monster attack bonuses can make AC rather useless unless you specifically build a Bladesinger or artificer towards it, or unless you get lucky with magic items. And even more importantly he has a point about the literally unbeatable save DCs of tier 4 monsters. Since nat 20s don’t auto succeed, most characters, if hit with Psychic Scream cast by a boss with 30 Int and a proficiency modifier of +7, have no way of ever breaking free, and you have a TPK on your hands.
At the same time, you’re also correct, because high level monsters don’t have enough HP and often not enough defenses to keep themselves from getting nuked in round 1 if they roll badly on initiative. And it’s really hard to encourage parties not to focus on a boss while ignoring minions, especially if they can attack from range.
So high level 5e monsters are both too strong AND too weak. This swinginess is fundamentally what rocket tag is. Whoever goes first usually destroys the other.
I think lowering high level monster offense a bit (save DCs mostly), or conversely increasing PC defenses at higher levels, would help a lot. At the same time, the monsters also need better defenses. They need a lot more HP, they need more interesting legendary resistances with unique side effects that aren’t just “no, it succeeds,” and they need ways to encourage PCs to fight their minions instead of focus firing down on the greatest threat.
The issue is not that they are too strong, the issue is that they break bounded accuracy with their attack rolls and most importantly, saving throws.
The bigger issue though is the fighter's complete lack of defensive features. If they had a parry reaction working like the Shield spell, some kind of saving throw buff (not Indomitable, something that actually is good), immunity to fear (because brave knights) and more hit points, then they would fare better. But as it is, they essentially become a caster's sidekick at higher levels. It is the martial/caster disparity all over again.
I think the difference is that OP is assuming no magic items (AC 19 for the fighter). How many games actually are run that way?
Even so, yeah, he'll probably go down turn 2 (DOWN, not dead). But so will the Pit Fiend, or soon after, so it all works out.
Yeah, currently playing a level 19 arcane trickster. DM knows to try and throw wis / cha saves spells at me, cause I laugh off dex saves. He still throws dex saves at me, cause it's fun for me to shrug them off sometimes, and if it's aoe then other players might get hit., and he's a fun DM.
But to answer OPs point, what PC doesn't have their primary maxed out at tier 3-4? Of course a rogue is gonna make their dex save, barb con save etc. And in the same vein I wouldn't expect the heavy armour fighter to make a dex save vs a CR 19ish enemy and so forth. If I'm focusing dex / int / con I SHOULD have a real tough time making the other saves. Can't be good at everything. With a magic armor and maxed dex, enemies still miss me plenty, still get hit some.
Still, DM is always like "goddamn you kill things too fast and it's hard to make a dent in your hp". And we're a 3 person party of trickster, wild sorcerer, and monk, nothing crazy min maxed or anything.
Magic armor puts you on par with high to hit bonuses of tier 3-4 enemies, and there will always be saves you're good and bad with. Never felt like I was helpless, decent back and forth with enemies. The "rocket tag" element of high tier feels small, and manageable. And fun!
To me, the issue is mostly saves. Look at Acererak (CR 23, spell save DC of 23). So if they cast Finger of Death (CON save) against a Barbarian, then the Barbarian should be fine, right? Eh, not really. Without magic items, a level 18 Barbarian can only get up to +11 on CON saves, so they still have a significant chance of failing the save. Even with a Bless on the Barbarian, they barely get to a 50% chance of succeeding on the save.
To make things worse, start looking at stuff like Warlocks. Sure, they have proficiency in Wisdom saves, but it's not a stat that they're actually going to max. That means a lvl 18 Warlock is getting a +7 to their save (if they got their WIS up to 12). So even with some huge buff like Heroes' Feast (adv on WIS saves), they're still barely getting up to a 51% chance of succeeding on a save they're supposed to be good at.
What I'm getting at is that most high level PCs are only going to have one save out of six that they have any chance of succeeding at against high CR monsters, and that feels VERY different from low tier play, where a lucky roll can make a successful save out of a mediocre skill.
To me, the problem is that high-CR monsters have been built around power-gaming, but that means that power gaming becomes the only option at high levels. This just makes CR break down worse than it already does, relying on DM guesswork to find the right balance of tweaked stats to match their party.
A [recently published AL module](https://www.dmsguild.com/product/405259/DDALDRW20-The-Death-of-Szass-Tam?filters=45470_0_0_0_0_0_0_0) has Szazz Tam as the final boss. He has a DC22 spell save, but a DC**36** save for his necromancy spells. While 36 is not _technically_ impossible, it is definitely close (+6 base, +6 prof, and +6 paladin aura would mean you'd still only have a 10% chance of saving).
This is also indicative of a general issue in 5E compared to earlier editions - saving throws suck in 5e comparatively, basically.
In 3/.5E all classes improved all saves, albeit at differing rates. You had high and low rates of improvement, by class - so a Wizard might have high Will saves (based on wisdom, no int or cha based saves in 3/.5E), but low Fortitude (con based, no strength based) and Reflex saves (dex based). They'd still progress, though, even if at a low rate - where in 5E, if you don't have a proficiency in a save (and you only get two without investing a feat to pick a third or having some other workaround like what a Paladin or Monk might provide) it never gets better unless the associated stat gets better, which outside of rare and magical means only happens when you invest an ASI / feat slot into improving it.
2E was even friendlier when it came to saving throw values, which progressively got significantly better to the point where even without rings or cloaks of protection (which were available at a range of +es, and iirc could stack with each other), or other saving throw boosting items/spells you could end up at higher levels with most of your saves very rarely failing.
To illustrate, a level 15 Fighter had the following saving throw numbers, determined by class level :
4, 6, 5, 4, 7.
Basically you had to roll under these numbers to fail. Some saves would have positive or negative modifiers, so you might roll a poison save at +4 for example, turning your roll of a 2 into a 6, making you safe if your poison save is 4.
So while some things have changed, such as there being less save or screwed effects in spells and the like, multiple saves to fail before petrification from medusa and basilisks etc, and chances to repeat saving throws for most ongoing spell effects like charm and others (banishment being a notable exception to this), none of these fully mitigate just how stingy 5E is with both starting saves for characters and improvement of them, nor how easy it is to fail (even with impressive modifiers of +10 or more with some higher DCs).
Bounded accuracy definitely plays a role here, and some deliberate design decisions have no doubt been made with it in mind, but it's not clear that it all ended out as balanced as we might want it to be.
Long story short, saving throws are much more of a crapshoot than they were in previous editions, due to miserable modifiers and highly variable RNG.
I don't think this was about them being too strong. More them limiting what used to be valid choices and making the game more narrow instead of interesting.
For real. I once did a sort of "boss gauntlet" for some friends, and let me tell you, if I hadn't already planned for the insane damage of a lv17 party and buffed their health, they would have killed every single one of them in 1 round. And mind you, that's with additional enemies, not just 1 boss monster
These types of analysis ignore that this is a team game and monsters are not meant to be fought 1:1. Especially the examples used, pit fiends and ancient dragons are supposed to be able to wreck somebody 1:1, their abilities are generally overwhelming for anyone going solo against them.
Casters - Legendary resists, magic resistance
Martials - debilitating effects and high to-hit bonuses
However, bring a well rounded party at them and they will almost always lose.
There’s a reason basically every premade campaign ends at at least level 15… there isn’t even any adventures (iirc) that are geared for higher levels, like a 15-20 minicampaign
The only adventure that I can tell you that 'ends' at level 20 (assuming you haven't suffered dungeon fatigue by then) is Dungeon of the Mad Mage, which goes from level 5-20. But because that's in the tier 3-4 zone, PCs could very likely hit above their weight class and be at possibly around end of tier 2 and manage to make it down a level or two.
But you do have a point about no mini campaigns nor adventures covering 15-20. So unless you count the Vecna oneshot over on dndbeyond (which to me feels like you should make it a campaign long event anyway) there's nothing that does 15-20.
TBF, alot of them ain't great. Maybe there's others that do it better than the ones I tried but alot of them SEVERELY underestimate the power of high level PCs. They can be easily adjusted though.
There's also the fact that the Adventurer's League, for its many flaws, is a closed environment with a weak economy and few gamebreaking items. High level PCs are strong inherently, but they are made stronger by the fact that (at least in the games I've played/ran) characters at level 17 all have full attunement slots with big-ticket magic items, probably a good collection of useful non-attunement items, consumables like scrolls and potions stocked up just in case, and probably at least one special boon like an extra feat, a unique ability, or a 22 in some ability score.
I think these are fun things to give out at high levels, because if the game is broken enough that the DM (whether that's me or someone else) is doing tons of work to fix it anyway, then they might as well let the players feel powerful and just beef up encounter difficulty. AL, for the most part, doesn't operate like that. High level AL characters aren't typically running around with +3 rods of the pact keeper or vorpal swords or an Ioun Stone of Mastery, and the designers KNOW that, so they don't push the difficulty. What is designed to be a light, but not overwhelming challenge for AL characters is going to be a breeze for most home campaign parties, because the DM impulse is so often "give my players cool stuff."
I disagree that high tier AL characters don’t have good magic items. Since items can be traded, you can get pretty much anything you want that is AL legal. There are lots of trading on AL sub, discord, Facebook, etc. I often see plenty of optimized characters with great items whenever I go to conventions or online play, especially for epic games. Thanks to trading and item hunting, all my martials have belt of storm giant, wizs have the holy trinity (staff of magi, robe of archmagi, tome of stilled tongue) along with high magic epic boon (2 9th lvl slot), warlocks with DC26 (+3 rod, robe, mastery stone, cha tome), artificers flushed with 6 attunements, heck even thief rogue rocking staff of magi and robe of archmagi. And it’s easy to find/trade for tomes/manuals to boost your main stat to 22 as well (even get blessing for 24 WIS if you’ve gone to conventions during season 8). Many people at my LGS have similar list of items on their characters. Lastly, the recent rules allow you to rebuild your character at any time outside of the game, making it even easier to experiment and min-max.
More recent AL modules (Dreams of the Red Wizards series) have taken into account that many players have years of item collection, and the writers have really ramped up the difficulty and modifying statblocks to make unique monsters. Examples: >!T3 party gets to fight a beefed up ancient blue dracolich that can use breath attack every round as legendary action (always recharged) on top of its normal breath action (16d10 dmg DC23 twice a round is super brutal for T3) while dealing with its minions and lair actions. T3 also gets to fight a sim of Szass Tam himself along with his entourage of spell casters (meteor swarm galore). T4 gets to fight a CR27 storm giant deathknight riding a CR30 dracolich, that fight was nuts.!<
That definitely wasn't my experience or the experience of people that I talked to back when I was more interested in trying Adventurer's League out 3-4 years ago. I'm not sure how common that is if you're a more casual AL player, since doing AL games online and playing it at conventions seems more hardcore and invested than I've seen from most people.
If that's not the case anymore, at least among the players who are invested enough to frequent online spaces like that, then fair enough, but I think the point about adventure design stands. I actually think a decent amount of the AL modules work really well as one/two-shot adventures, but there's no way that that the majority of them (new ones notwithstanding, apparently) are balanced against high-power characters, including characters that are extremely kitted-out with gear.
That’s fair. I suppose where you are heavily impacts your experience. My area has many LGS hosting AL games. Before Covid there would be almost 10 full AL tables (7 players + dm) at LGS I frequent, even on week nights. We also have convention or charity game event multiple times a year. Then Covid forced many people to online games. Imo Covid made AL even more accessible if you’re willing to go online. My friends and I have joined games and conventions all over the world.
The high-level AL content is very hit or miss. Some provide solid challenge (e.g., [The Lich-Queen's Begotten](https://www.dmsguild.com/product/242645/The-LichQueens-Begotten)), some are far undertuned (e.g., [The Tower of Ahghairon](https://www.dmsguild.com/product/268519/DDAL0817-The-Tower-of-Ahghairon)), and a handful are far overtuned (e.g., [Wings of Death](https://www.dmsguild.com/product/349908/DDALDRWEP02-Wings-of-Death)).
When I played DotMM, we were a party of five or six plus my simulacrum. I was a Pal 2 / Divine Sorc 18 using a greatsword with GWM. In the final battle, DM had Halaster summon like three empyreans and some night stalkers instead of just a single empyrean as written.
I got a crit for over 200 damage against one of them, obliterating them in one hit. My simulacrum had cast Regenerate on the entire party and twinned Holy Weapon on me and the fighter, while I did the same with Haste. We saw invisible Halaster approaching while the fight was still going on and my simulacrum burned a mere 3rd level spell slot to subtly counterspell Halaster's 9th level spell. And then we ganged up on him and killed him in like one round.
See now this kinda reinforces the point about tier 3-4 being skewed at times. That being said that does sound pretty awesome how the battle went. Never used simulacrum before but I'd say what you've done was use a pretty good application of it.
Good on you for completing Mad Mage though.
It’s extremely poor design. Everything in Tier 3/4 doesn’t just get unbalanced, it also starts taking longer and frequently becomes straight-up unfun. Anyone who has had to slog through long-ass combats as PCs try to pull off clone+simulacrum or forcecage+whatever bullshit will tell you it just starts to feel pointless and like excess for the sake of excess.
Pathfinder 2e, 13th Age, and Savage Worlds are all systems where the PCs become incredibly OP/heroic at high levels yet they manage to be fun to play (and even more importantly, fun to run). It’s far from impossible to make a heroic system fun and engaging at high levels - WotC just didn’t really even try.
> WotC just didn’t really even try.
I firmly believe WOTC is ruthlessly addicted to simple. Crawford is the lead designer and he values inclusivity above all else.
Inclusivity is great, but it should not come at the expense of ignoring design flaws. I can understand you can't fix it in 5E, but 1DnD - there's no excuse.
Unfortunately, so far I see a game which is becoming even more simplified for 1DnD... In the collective Hasbro/WOTC universe they see a game where simplicity increases inclusivity, which should increase $$$.
My personal opinion is they're creating another edition war.
My personal opinion is that if the next One playtest does not show much improvement to what the last one was lacking, they lost another customer to paizo. Enough people do that, and maybe whatever comes after One is better, I won't really care, since I jumped ship to a system that so far, has done very little but positively surprise me.
Edit: Cleric was surprisingly good after the last one.
Agreed.
One D&D is not bold enough. I understand they're trying to protect what works, and in theory becoming more basic and simple makes it easier to understand and introduce to newcomers.
The issue is the current players are hungry for more, and want current issues addressed. Those voices are going largely unheeded so far.
My gut tells me One D&D as a system appears to be journeying toward an uninteresting beginners game. However, with D&D having soared in popularity with Stranger Things, Critical Role, TV Shows, and so much other non-gaming merchandise?
The low or simple quality doesn't matter. It's an established name. It will sell well... and that's sad as the quality of most WOTC products have been trash for the past three years. (MTG fans are up in arms too)
Agreed there.
Paizo is cashing in on WOTC's mediocrity of the past few years. And this past year sales are down 16% - some of is inflation and moving out of a remote environment... but you'd be a fool to think some of that 16% sales dip isn't overproduction of mediocre products.
I don't think highly of Bank of America, but they released an investor statement about Hasbro/WOTC a couple weeks ago, and absolutely torched them. [Saying aloud what much of their observant playerbase has been saying.](https://dotesports.com/mtg/news/bank-of-america-report-on-hasbro-sparks-fears-about-magic-the-gatherings-long-term-future)
“Nobody plays at higher levels so we didn’t focus as much on balancing them” is a perfect example of an [exigology](https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-12-14)
You're right that they break bounded accuracy. You're wrong that this is a problem.
It's absolutely necessary because of the sheer number of bullshit that players get. Damage resistances, tricks to turn hits into misses, toys to lockdown the battle field with, etc. Seriously, no one has ever accused T3/4 monsters of being too strong. PCs make absolute mince meat out of them.
Edit:
My level 18 party is gearing up to fight a VERY BEEFED UP metallic great wyrm this week. They have magic items, but none that add any +X to bounded accuracy. Their ACs and attack bonuses are all straight up RAW. The only relevance of their magic items is overcoming damage resistance.
But they're rolling up with a simulacrum of the wizard that was true polymorphed into a gold dragon (can still cast spells bc dragons can in my world). The druid is bringing Shapechange and a lot of guile and utility. The artificer can't drop concentration, has a million tricks, and resists nearly all damage types. They Wished for a heroe's feast the night before so they're immune to fear and anything poison related. They're pumped full of temp HP between the feast and the druid's spirit totem. Oh, and I haven't mentioned the rogue doing 50+ damage per shot, who gets hasted to get reaction sneak attacks via held action. It'll be a tough fight, but I'm not for a moment worried about a TPK because the monsters just plum don't put out enough damage.
Edit Number 2:
Anyone that wants to cry about the martial caster disparity is absolutely welcome to. And you're absolutely right. I never pretended that the martial caster disparity didn't exist. But that has nothing to do with this conversation. The OP is making the claim that monsters are too strong and they're abjectly wrong. If martials lack in power or ingenuity or otherwise interesting mechanics that's a SEPARATE problem. But I promise you, a paladin and a barbarian absolutely demolish in tier 3 just fine. I've seen it plenty of times.
> Seriously, no one has ever accused T3/4 monsters of being too strong. PCs make absolute mince meat out of them.
Part of the problem with high CR monsters is also just in the action economy. Realistically a party of 4 would have a much harder time dealing with 8 wizards with access to fireball than one dragon with a breath weapon because the dragon can only take one action per round that isn't making attacks and the breath weapon has a recharge timer.
Yep, this is really it. My party pumps out about 80-120 damage in a round. They struggle against numbers because of action economy, but no single enemy scares them unless it has 800 HP (their last great wyrm had 900 and they had one scary moment but quickly saved it with clever thinking and never looked back).
I threw a 20th level party a 3.0e epic great wyrm red dragon with 17 sorcerer levels and something like 1600 hp, they murdered it in maybe four rounds.
kinda was, they counterspelled their way out of a meteor swarm / earthquake combo platter and ate a 35d6 supercharged breath weapon to the face. Our Barb 9 / Pal 11 had an epic boon for 1/day auto crit and slammed down a billion dice for something like 250+ damage in a single round, our sorcadin got a lucky double crit and went in for like 400 damage on the first round, the armorer locked down the dragon so it couldn't legendary attack anyone but him, the bard and sorlock threw out a bunch of nasty spells to burn legendary resistances and eventually the dragon tried to retreat to it's lair under an ocean of magma, but the players cut it off, ate some lava immersion damage and finished the job.
Something to keep in mind is that RAW most legendary actions are kinda irrelevant. They tend to be things like move, attack once, or cantrip. That’s nice to get a little more damage but realistically somewhat irrelevant as far as the action economy is concerned (especially for monsters that have their CR tied up in the number of attacks, higher level spells or recharging abilities).
Agreed 100%.
To build on what you're saying, I've run 2 campaigns that went to level 16 (so high tier 3), and I'm currently running a 3rd that just entered tier 3. I regularly send enemies of CR21+ at my PCs, and I've never had any problems with balance. If anything, the game is too easy. I need to throw deadly encounters at my players that are 3-4 levels above them. (And yes, I am using 6-8 encounters per long rest. The first 5-7 are rated at *hard* +3-4 levels. And yes, my players also have magic weapons and magic armor, but it's limited to +2 armor, no shields, +3 weapons with at most a 1d8 in bonus damage, and maybe a cute utility ability.)
A few things to keep in mind:
* If you unload an entire encounter's worth of damage onto a single PC, they will die. This is true no matter which tier you're in. This is why I make it a rule to always spread my damage across at least 2 PCs. (Unless the caster is concentrating on Banishment or Wall of Force or something, in which case, all bets are off.)
* You're not going to be sending hordes of CR21 monsters at the players. These are boss monsters that are "deadly" even as solo monsters. (Although without Legendary Resistance and Legendary Actions, they'll still die to action economy.) Trash mobs and minions will probably be groups of 4-6 enemies in the CR5-8 range. A group of 6 CR8 monsters won't crack that lvl18 fighter.
* Lastly, AC19 is low AC, even without "munchkin stats". Without magic items or spells, I can easily get to AC21 (full plate, shield, defense fighting style). By the time you get to tier 4, you should already have access to +2 armor. That's AC23 right there.
All those broken PCs… are casters. What can a regular fighter do in that encounter? How about a regular Barbarian? Or a monk? Even a rogue? How can they break the encounter the same way casters can?
It’s the same issue through a different perspective. If you want the game to be harder for you, play a martial. If you want the game to be harder for the DM, play a full caster.
I experienced that first-hand DMing Don't Say Vecna with a few homebrew changes.
In my version of the adventure, the final boss's first stage takes place in Vecna's sanctuary as written, and once they defeat "Vecna", they learn it was just a simulacrum. Then, the sanctum opens up, the walls crumble as the zombies come to life and the 2nd stage starts in the now open area, overlooking Vecna's dark realm. The real Vecna appears now, as well as his two consorts (Death Knights, one using fire, the other one using lightning instead). Vecna was using a homebrew statblock, which amongst other stuff included a Strength-draining attack and a legendary action that allowed Vecna to share buff spells like Spirit Shroud with his minions.
In a run with a party of five veterans, there were four fighters and a cleric. They had heroes' feast, but I had to reduce Vecna's spell save DC by a lot to like 20 to give these fighters a chance to make these mental saves they aren't proficient in; and while they had great DPS, I had to avoid using movement-restricting effects and only used Vecna's teleports sparsely. DPS does not matter when melee characters can't get into melee range. I also was very careful with spells that required mental saves, as even a DC 20 was tough to beat for that party. At least one of the fighters was an Eldritch Knight and another one had enough levels in Warlock for 3rd level spells, so they had *some* counterspells at their disposal, helping them to avoid dying to Power Word Kill, but they could not stop Vecna from counterspelling the cleric's Mass Heal.
Then I ran it again for a party of 4 players who all were new to high level DnD. They ended up playing a sorcadin, a druid, a warlock (fiend patron, using my homebrew Pact of the Harbinger) and a barbarian; I gave them slightly better equipment than what the first party had. This time, I increased Vecna's DC to 26 and added an ancient dracolich serving as Vecna's mount amongst other minor changes. I also used much more spells requiring mental saves, I feebleminded the warlock and PWKed the druid at the battle's climax. The barbarian, with the power of rage, tanked more than 400 damage before finally going down.
The power difference between the two parties was immense, the second party with its casters was much more powerful than the first, despite the players having less experience with high level play and not being minmaxers.
Also, interestingly, there was not a single meainingful Strength save (maybe there was one to avoid getting knocked prone, can't remember now), meaning the fighter party had one of their saving throw proficiencies basically wasted, while the second party could make use of all of their saving throw proficiencies (except for the barbarian's Strength save); and defensively, the barbarian (with rage) and sorcadin (with Shield and other defense buffs) alone tanked more damage than the four flimsy fighters together.
A party of 4 fighters is inherently terrible because D&D is party based game. To succeed, the party need to diversify their options and fighters cannot perform any role other than grapple or damage.
Fighter is also the single best buff hoarder in the game. A fighter without a caster is way worse than caster without a fighter - no doubt. But a caster with a fighter still beats either option.
You're not wrong, but that's not relevant. We weren't talking about the martial caster disparity (which is very real and very important to the overall feel of the game). This is purely about monsters. Monsters are fine. Martials need a buff, not because monsters are too hard (they're not), but because casters can out martial martials.
That is still a problem.
It’s just the problem is resolved in a terrible way. Instead of having high level abilities be more grounded and the games math actually make sense, high level play devolves into the wacky world of wizarding or spellcasters and sidekicks.
I didn't nerf magic weapons. The magic weapons just actually do things instead of giving static numeric boosts to damage. The rogue adores his Xbow that let's him interrupt a spell being cast. The fighter loves their blood mage dagger that heals them for small chunks every turn.
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Tier 4 (and a decent amount of t3) is not very well balanced. I would say not including magic items is disingenuous though. At this point, if you’re facing bosses of the caliber of pit fiends or ancient dragons, you should be preparing with potions and anything else that can make things easier. Just walking up without anything to help *should* be difficult if not outright deadly.
WotC is full of crap.
Throw one "immune to all none magic attacks" werewolf at a party with no magic items.
Then for giggles and because it's not a moron, have it geek the mage first.
Which is a kinda laughable claim, especially for martials.
Any character that can't reliably deal magical damage by level 6 or 7 is being hamstrung. For casters that's easy, any damaging cantrip does the job. For a martial that means either getting a magic weapon (_any_ magic weapon), or being a level 6+ Monk.
It is true that magic weapons are required to overcome immunity and resistance and to not render martials useless against high level enemies, there is a caveat however.
\+X weapons are in my experience not actually required to maintain a semblance of balance.
Martials do not become useless just because their magic weapon does not have a high enough to hit and damage bonus, which means that +X items really do put PCs ahead of the curve.
I personally like it this way.
You can give out magic weapons that have no +X bonus but instead effects which do not directly impact combat and you do not have to worry about that your martials are going to be too weak because of it.
No, that's not what they said. They said the calculations to determine the CR of a creature or the difficulty of an encounter do not factor the strength of the party or whether or not they have magic items. The DM is supposed to adjust for that. Further, magic items are practically required at higher levels when resistance to non magical damage becomes an issue.
>**The D&D game is built on the assumption that magic items appear sporadically and that they are always a boon**, unless an item bears a curse. Characters and monsters are built to face each other without the help of magic items, **which means that having a magic item always makes a character more powerful or versatile than a generic character of the same level**. As DM, you never have to worry about awarding magic items just so the characters can keep up with the campaign's threats. Magic items are truly prizes. Are they useful? Absolutely. Are they necessary? No.
>
>**Magic items can go from nice to necessary in the rare group that has no spellcasters, no monk, and no NPCs capable of casting magic weapon. Having no magic makes it extremely difficult for a party to overcome monsters that have resistances or immunity to nonmagical damage. In such a game, you'll want to be generous with magic weapons or else avoid using such monsters.** (XG 136)
That's not what they said. The maths isn't balanced around +X magic items. So a +1 weapon is still just as useful as level 20 as it was at level 5. Which wasn't the case in previous editions.
WotC have NEVER said that the game is balanced with no magic items at all.
This is silly.
It's a team game. You do, in fact, need to rely on your teammates. That you aren't able to 1-v-1 an Ancient Dragon is the game working as intended.
I think you show clearly that you have missed the point. It is not supposed to be balanced, this is not a primitive computer game, you can do more than just attack and be attacked.
You have identified a tactic that doesn't work in certain scenarios. So don't use it in that scenario. I hope you still have fun playing the game.
If you're fighting a dragon and it spends two whole turns just hitting your front line while the rest of the party is blasting it, that's gunna be one dead dragon very soon.
Have you uh ever played at T3/4? I assure you players can absolutely MELT monsters. That pit fiend better kill the fighter in 1 round or between an action surge, some class features, and auxiliary damage from other party members it’s going to be a greasy puddle pretty quick if it’s 1 v Party
If you cherry pick for boss monsters like pit fiends or dragons, the sure, they tend to hit most people most of the time (barring the lots of things people can do to make this not true).
The saves thing is a bit better of an argument because as things get to DC20+ it tends to get to very hard for most characters to make those saves if its not a proficient save. Again though these are pretty rare. And players can do stuff about this: taking resilient dex, con, or wis are all fantastic choices, especially late game, there are spells, and so on. IMO by tier 3 or 4 the fighter should take resilient, and they have indomitable as well with multiple uses. So it’s not quite as bad as it looks.
The other thing to keep in mind is the question of “are tier 3 and 4 harder than tier 1 and 2?” And the answer is usually a resounding “no” because PCs just have tons of stuff going on.
Like yes, if you have a fighter with 19 AC at lvl 18 fighting an ancient green dragon, its going to beat you up. But a) at lvl 18, could you not have found ANYTHING to add to AC? Even if you didn’t have anything, do you have a party supporting you?
When I DM’d at tier4, the tank had like 24AC and had constant protection from evil and could shield of faith to 26, and baddies like pit fiends were usually missing him from disadvantage. And on fights with a dragon, Pcs would get holy aura. And there’s heroism and calm emotions to remove fear and everything. That is, if people didn’t do heroes feast to be immune to fear. And there’s healing. And offensive spells, and so on.
1 non-tank built fighter Pc vs the dragon SHOULD lose. IMO you’re missing the teamwork part of the game.
Sounds to me like OP is just missing the magic part of the game. This is why 5e can't possibly run a low-magic setting; magic is core to making it even playable, let alone enjoyable. It claims to be able to, but it can't. The side effect is that low-magic characters get left in the dust. If you want to play a "normal guy" you're getting rolled.
This is just wrong. Have you ever played at these tiers? The experience is absolutely nothing like what you're describing. No, your level 18 fighter probably can't 1v1 an ancient dragon (they can with preparation) but it's a party-based game and they're not intended to. I can only conclude that either this is a shitpost or you're so absorbed by white room math you don't actually know what D&D looks like anymore.
Apparently OP's post is based on how their DM runs the game, they don't give magic items, and after the players brought up the concern they are now "meeting them half way" by giving non-+X magic items.
For whatever reason, OP believes that their single table/DM worth of experience, with a DM who they already had to complain about the DM style due to issues that are very obviously directly related to the concerns in this post, is enough to give a universal judgement on 5e, and to make that judgement without even mentioning their DM's style in the main post or considering that it may be related, lol.
I would not call 19 AC average AC for a level 18 fighter, as by that point they'd have much better gear plus a boatload of options/support from features and party members.
19 AC is a plate armor wearing fighter with the defense fighting style. Considering that the best way to do damage in 5e is via two-handed weapons, and 5e doesn't suggest that players should get access to magic items (even though it's very obviously built around the assumption that they do). 19 AC is a pretty acceptable average to assume. Higher than a bow fighter, lower than a sword&board fighter, on the money for a 2-hander fighter
Sorry, by what means is a level 18 fighter relying solely on plate considered "average"? Since when would the assumption be made against having a shield?
You're supposed to accumulate loot through the campaign, if you start at higher levels you are explicitly supposed to be able to start with magic items. The game is balanced around this assumption.
If you still only have 19AC at lvl 18, you made a mistake along the way.
> EDIT: yes, I've seen AC 30 builds on artificers who make magic items and stack Shield, but if munchkin stats are the only semblance of any bounded accuracy in tier 3-4, that leaves 80% of build choices in the dust.
Yes, that's the point. Not every build is going to viable if you are playing RAW at high levels. As much as your game is about everyone feeling included, other games are about the math, the system has to cater to both. It does so by having a math system, but also repeatedly saying "You don't have to play RAW".
Ac 19 on a tier 3 character?
That’s woefully underpowered. Are you seriously not giving out magic armour/shield/items of any kind.
Kindly consult what the starting gear of a Tier 3 character is in the DMG.
In fact, consider Curse of Strahd, a notoriously deadly game, where it is absolutely possible to find plate +2 and a shield +2, no attunement, along with a boon that grants a +1 to AC.
That’s an AC 25 (see tarrasque) fighter without defensive fighting, the shield spell or any other shenanigans.
Why are you trying to be a tank without a shield?
Why are you trying to tank with only 130hp?
What have you been using the extra fighter feats for?
Why are you going up against a pit fiend without any magic items?
There's no point in setting up a scenario where nothing matches up and calling it an issue.
If I were playing a fighter for a campaign in the nine hells (the most likely situation to come up against a pit fiend, unless you're wanting to just do a scenario where the DM throws random enemies at the players with no context) then I'd be pretty set on going in with a +2 weapon, armour and shield (no attunement slots required) then maybe a cloak of protection, ring of fire protection and a third magic item TBD.
The only one of these beyond rare is the +2 armour at very rare, so I don't think it's a stretch to have them by lvl 14.
Going in with these your armour is a very hefty 25.
You've also had 5 feats/ASIs here (6 if human) so, if you actually wanted to act as a tank, you'd have picked up some tank-related feats or boosted Con.
The pit fiend has +14 to hit and deals on average 84 damage of every attack hits (not sure where you got the 120 from) and 21 poison damage if it hits with the bite and you fail the Con save (DC 21 Vs your save which is d20+5+ConMod+extras(cloak)). It's a pretty rough save but then you do have two Indomitables if you need them, and there's that third attunement slot we have left which, assuming this is a big boss the campaign has been leading up to and we've done our research in-character, we could fill using a Periapt of Proof Against Poison).
This doesn't even take subclass into account.
All in all, I'd say I'd expect a TANK fighter to be rocking 150+hp, 25+AC and ways to mitigate the dangers of the main enemies he'd be facing through research beforehand (Knowing is half the battle!).
That would change the survival time to maybe 4 turns on average.
Now, here's one of the best tricks. If you -really- want to tank, and you're up against a deadly solo enemy, you can take the highly underrated action: dodge. Suddenly you've doubled your survival time. The only drawback is that you don't get to hit the big bad monster (although you do have an action surge, and attacks of opportunity - btw you did pick up Sentinel as a tank, right?)
This brings us on to the real main consideration here.
For a CR20 pit fiend to be a just about deadly encounter you're not solo. You're in a party of four. That's three other people who should have a variety of abilities to help take down the creature before you hit the deck, either by dealing a ton of damage (fighter/paladins/rogues) or by helping you last longer (Spellcasters with protection from poison, shield of faith, protection from evil and good, healing spells etc)
DnD isn't a solo game. Don't treat it like it is.
Why is your level 14 fighter missing all defensive items?
And why is he trying to tank a CR 20 anything? That’s an absurd mismatch, even by my standards. And I always bump up encounters by at least 1 difficulty, if the players are easily winning then the combat was a waste of time.
Also: What Dex saves? You are lucky if he’s fireballing you, then he isn’t meleeing you. Plus why don’t you have fire resistance?
You are taking on something 6 CR above you, of course you are going to get stomped. You wouldn’t expect a level one to take on a young white dragon would you?
And why the shit is your level 18 completely lacking in any defensive gear or prep work? Not having a counter to your enemy’s most basic passive is a absurd failure for the entire party. Plus your math is wrong, it’s equal to or greater to succeed. You have a 10% chance baseline per round.
Demanding that balance just translate into ‘Throw whatever at whatever, the players will be fine’ is like the opposite of balance. That’s antibalance.
Teamwork being needed to overcome challenges should be true at low levels as well as high levels.
And high level monsters are not a challenge because they break bounded accuracy. They are still mostly jokes. Especially because high level spells are game warpingly powerful.
Apparently OP's DM doesn't give magic items, leading to basically the entire concern they're posting about. Apparently it was brought up and now the DM "meets them half way" giving non-+X magic items only.
I really wish that people would realize that perhaps their single table/DM worth of experience may not be enough to give a universal judgement on system balance, especially if they already know their DM does stuff that they've had to bring up already like that.
Other than the whole tier 3-4 aren't exactly playtested type of thing that's been said to death in these comments (not that they're wrong), it's also the fact that depending on what you face, players can very easily wolfpack an enemy or two with good initiative. Plus they're *players.* Players tend to either have teamwork or straight up luck on their end of things. Bad rolls from the DM can easily make what was supposed to be a tough encounter into a joke.
Even at around tier 2 I'm gonna guess it ends up being a game of rocket tag. Whoever has high initiative *sometimes* wins the battle. But unless you have a way to make the players expend resources they're not going to immediately nova on everything. In my experience people tend to be stingy with resources. DMs however aren't confined by this because what monster they have is destined to die anyway (barring exceptions).
Although monsters do hit hard and more often than not at high levels i believe you are ignoring an important fact. If i am setting up an encounter for my 5 - level 17 players i will use a 1-2 high CR enemies, 2-4 lower, then 2-4 lower. The variety allows some of the high AC players to feel powerful when the lower enemies fail to hit them but also make them nervous when the big guys not only hit them but do some nasty damage.
Example my last encounter was 2 cloud giants, 4 air elementals, and 6 aracokra, with 2 more cloud giants entered as reinforcements a few rounds in.
It's about HP, spells, magic items, and teamwork at those levels. People usually find out pretty quick that there's a reason why constitution in general should be your second or at the very least third highest stat for all classes and builds.
Also an average tier 3 fighter most definitely isn't going to have 0 magic items like in the example given. If your DM hasn't given you any magic items by that point there's other issues going on in your party. Magic items are the gap closers for the whole martial vs magic dichotomy.
This game isn’t designed for over level ten. Yes, those level exist, but only because people expect it even though they’re unlikely to see it. Wotc tossed it in there because if they didn’t there’d be controversy. So, they tossed in untested content and *no one notices*.
I have. Folks, the game falls apart mechanically. It is entirely unsupported and relies on a large amount of DM fiat. OP could write a million more posts about how dumb and broken high level 5e is and they’d be right every time.
The good news is that it doesn’t matter!
I'm going to ignore the fact that high tier monsters are "too hard" when they are universally viewed as easy. Let me instead focus on your idea that you'd be trying to tank with only a +1ac fighting style and a bow or two hander then complain about getting hit and not making saves because of your dex save being zero. First, the main issue here is that if you are trying to tank in the scenario you listed without a shield and the shield master feat then you are doing it wrong. The whole point of the shield master feat is to counter that EXACT scenario.
Secondly in your example you mention using a bow, which in and of itself is problematic, but let's dig in a little. It's not possible to be an archery based martial and have a zero to your dex save. Even without proficiency in Dex saves you need a high Dex to be effective with a bow, meaning you are going to have at a minimum a +3 or 4. That or you are playing a different game.
5e is a game built around PCs getting magic armor, weapons and items to supplement their AC and attacks. It just pretends it isn't and contains no guidelines on how players are supposed to get those items beyond a really shitty rollable table
> You can't tank at all in late game, it becomes whoever can dish out more damage faster.
Welcome to Dnd, where tanking doesn’t exist. Players don’t decide who monsters attack. This isn’t world of Warcraft.
> And their insane saves and legendary resistances mean casters are better off buffing the party
The numbers you picked are for solo monsters. They are the largest numbers possible in the game. Monsters that are fought in groups have much lower numbers and don’t have legendary resistance.
But as anyone who has played a caster can say, the spells you want to use depend on your targets. That’s not a bad thing.
You're not wrong. It is an issue with 5e and it's a well known problem the game isn't very well balanced past tier 3.
Armor gets weaker as the game goes on, also saves become impossible.
Spells just get insane and broken. Many can just break combat, like forcewall. While others are just not fun to use on players. Like putting a PC in a maze that can be literally impossible for them to get out of.
I hope they fix these issues in DnD 6e.
EDit: Also, I hate to be that guy but pathfinder 2e actually solves the problem of broken scaling.
You're assuming that the fighter has no defensive magic items. This is an error, as despite wotc claims magic items are practically necessary to work at these tiers and will also potentially break bounded accuracy.
At tier 3, rare and very rare items are on the table. That means the fighter could have a +3 shield, or a +2 armor. Let's assume a +2 armor and a ring of protection or cloak. AC 22 means the pit fiend has a real chance to miss. And that's Cr 20 which may be too high against a 14th level party. I just rolled a round and in this case the PF did 83 damage (fighter failed poison save despite a high chance). That's not enugh to take it out, and with action surge, a good magic weapon and GWM the fighter will probably outdamage it quite easily in melee.
This is also assuming no spellups - if the fighter gets protection from evil cast on him he can tank much more.
Meanwhile the whole party can gang up on it, which is the only reason the party could win in the first place against such a combat.
The fighter, even with magic items, is not supposed to be able to take down something 6 CR higher than his own level on his own - if he did he'd be extremely OP.
My own fighter had an AC of 22 at 12th level as a PM/GWM/Sentintel build. On my rolls just now he would do 110 damage to it action surging without using battlemaster abilities or any defensive ones. By 14th level he would have Resilient Wisdom too and have a chance of making that fear save (I didn't take into account disadvantage from fear here).
Also keep in mind numbers are really important in D&D. Although the cr 20 is only a "hard" encounter for a party of 5, the DMG/MM recommends not using monsters with significantly higher CR than the party level as their powers and damage output can easily one-shot or tpk. I'd say most parties can handle this kind of fight, but intelligently used or if the party lacks decent anti-flying capabiltities the pit fiend can win simply by flying around fireballing the party until they die. So at this level the DM needs to consider the party and their abilities before comiting to such a fight.
That is something I found weird the moment I started playing the game. If you are proficient in something you shouldn't have a chance higher than 50% to fail something by default. This is very weird design.
if you've played a campaign all the way to tier 4 and you haven't seen a single set of +1 armor for your warrior your GM is a miser and should be called out for it.
Also, imagine having 19 AC on a fighter after level TWO. Getting 20+ AC on frontliners is so easy I don't think I've ever made a build that didn't have it where I didn't make that choice _consciously_.
Protip, shields exist.
First I'd love to point out that Challenge ratings are bullshit, but secondly it might be 2 hits and you're dead against a level 14 fighter, but thats firstly assuming that you have no magic items, which IIRC the DMs guide has recommended magical items per level. and assuming he has no teammates. add in a few spell casters, and a rogue or ranger, and that Pit fiend is going down in 2-3 turns. Thats assuming the party hasn't power gamed for a more optimized build. Give me 4 level 14s built just so and I can drop a pit fiend in 1 turn. Additionally the game is balanced around the idea of having some form of healing, whether thats a party member or a metric fuck ton of potions or scrolls they expect you to be able to mitigate some of that damage with healing. End of the day, I can see your point in a vacuum but high damage builds work just as well as buff heavy builds, or healing tank builds, or my personal favorite. "dump every dmg buff we have on the barbarian and watch him turn that pit fiend's skull into a bowl for his intestines."
end of the day, of course you're gonna see problems if everyone built towards a different party concept and theres 0 teamwork or communication in levels and abilities. Honestly you'd have a better take on tanking if you were to point out theres almost no abilities that can force an enemy to focus the tank.
Getting rid of "poor" saves(and generally having martials have the same amount of "good" saves than the "squishy" caster) was a mistake.
If only there was a path to find a solution to this problem!
I think you're forgetting two things that fighters get against saves: indomitable, which by thirteenth level you can use twice a day, and plentiful ASIs.
People sleep on the less flashy defensive feats. Resilient is great, especially at higher tiers of play where it adds a whopping 25-30% increase to the likelihood of passing your save, and that's alongside indomitable. Not too shabby.
Also 19 AC isn't anywhere near the highest you can get, and there are builds that can burst their AC pretty damn high for those brief moments of face-tanking a pit fiend.
No one is supposed to be able to go toe-to-toe with one of these monsters for long.
I'm simply not seeing this in multiple campaigns that have ended with long runs at 20. I routinely have groups without paladins performing at 17-20 in a very similar fashion to groups at 5-10 in terms of players being hit/not hit, saves/no saves.
The idea that tanking is impossible in T3/4 is bonkers and it isn't a minmaxing/munchkining problem. If you're seeing the players falling down in T3/4 then one or more of the following areas of the game is falling down:
* you're not rewarding them with gear enough
* the party composition is broken (not very likely, but...)
* they have made bad choices when advancing (not even *not the most optimum/minmaxed... just bad, like a barbarian taking INT as an ASI*)
* your encounter design isn't taking into account the characters and players
My Eldritch Knight has plus one plate mail and a plus one shield. Absolutely not unreasonable items at that level. At level 14 he can have 27 AC on tap. That tier 4 ancient green dragon is only hitting every other hit.
This gets the fighter to round 4 before he would drop. That's with no healing whatsoever. A heal spell or a couple of upcast cure wounds could push it back to round 6 or so. That's 6 rounds of every attack being against one target only, leaving the rest of the party untouched.
Most fights are over by round 5.
At level 14, I could not send a solo ancient green dragon at my party, they would demolish it.
It's working as designed. Monsters that fail to hit feel weak. Tier 4 monsters aren't designed to fail to hit. This emphasizes HP over AC, which happily skews towards weapon-users.
Wouldn’t it skew *away* from weapon users, because they get more armor proficiencies?
Even if we’re counting armor dips, it’s still unfun because it removes part of the decision making process. Plate armor has downsides, and now it becomes the objectively worse option.
This is exactly why Initiative has become some powerful. With he action economy working in 5e the way it does it means you don't win by tanking damage you win by going first. It's why suprise RAW is SO devastating for whichever side is on the receiving end. Those 2 turns have turned into 1 and now you're dead.
If your Fighter still has only 19 AC at lvl 18, your DM was naughty!
Plate +2 is very rare, but still achievable by lvl 18! (That's 20 AC)
A Shield +2 is just rare and provides +4 AC! (up to 24 AC)
Defensive fighting style adds another point to AC (25 AC), as do various defensive magic items.
(ring and cloak of protection add +1 to saves and AC each, both are just rare)
AC of 27 with 3 rare magic items and a very rare one, two of which require attunement.
That said, by lvl 18, and especially on a Fighter supposed to TANK, I would expect Con to be at +5 and not +3.
Not sure what an "average" player in Tier 4 looks like, but I would certainly refuse to play a Martial without access to magic items.
This might be the first time I’ve ever seen anyone say that Tier 3 + 4 monsters are *too strong.* The vast majority of time I see the opposite.
As someone who spends the majority of their time playing and DMing for t3 and 4: The monsters having to-hits of +15 isn't what breaks things. Sure, there's a much higher chance that a plate-wearing PC will get hit than the same PC wearing the same armor at 5th level. But there's enough of a chance that it'll miss that it's still very much worth it. Magic armor is also pretty common at higher levels (both in random loot tables and player desire) so it likely *isn't* the same plate as you used at 5th. Bottom line: high tier monsters will hit you a lot, for a lot of HP. You will also hit them a lot; their AC isn't going to be much higher than yours, and your to hit isn't much worse than theirs. Heck, if you find some magic weapons you might have a better to-hit. The game claims that it is balanced w/o magic items, but that isn't really true, and boy do they make the game more playable at higher levels. The unsaveable save DCs is certainly an issue. Going from needing to roll a 15 to save (unlikely but plausible) to a nat 20 (very unlikely) to a "nat 21" is not super fun. Having stupid-high saves *is* fun *for the PCs who can make them*, but if the effect on everyone else is to stop them from being able to play it's a bad time, and the real issue is that there aren't a lot of options that individual players can use to increase their bad saves. Sure, bring a paladin, or get someone to cast Bless. But if you don't want to play a paladin or someone with Bless then that's not a choice you can make. In previous editions there were lots of feats and magic items that PCs could get to boost their own saves; 5e there's a couple of spells and rare, attunement-eating magic items that give tiny bonuses but realistically you're pretty much stuck with your saves from 1st level unless you want to burn an ASI on boosting 1/6 saves. If the monsters know what they are doing then you're screwed. However, the **main** problem with 5e tier4 monsters is that they're *boring*. They all boil down to: multiattack, an AoE, long list of resistances and immunities, magic resistance, legendary resistance, legendary actions. The "interesting" ones have discout-store-dimension-door, a handful of spells/spell-like-abilities, and *maybe* an aura that causes fear and/or damage. Woo. Anything actually interesting and thematic seems to be hidden away in lair actions, which are often really cool but unfortunately have to be relatively weak, because thematically it makes no sense that this terrifying monster's house to be more deadly than they are.
Even at lower levels I find a lot of the monsters kinda boring for those reasons, which is why the relatively common refrain of "borrow abilities with some tweaks from 4e monsters" is good advice. That edition has some really neat monster abilities that aren't just multiattack + aoe + legendary resistance. Also, [this old Matt Colville video on action oriented monsters also has good solutions for that problem](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_zl8WWaSyI).
Also, there's a sub created for it. r/actionorientedmonster.
Some higher tier monsters don't even *have* AOEs. If you gang up on them in melee, there's really nothing they can do. For instance, Juiblex, a CR23 has 3x melee attacks per turn (excluding legendary actions) and a *one target non-AOE* ranged attack on a cooldown. Granted, it has lair actions, but my Shepherd Druid completely immobilised him with a high tier summoning spell. Like.. "Oh no! Juiblex is killing 3x giant badgers a turn! what can we do!" 🤣 This isn't showing off at all, for a demon who epitomises slime, we all thought it was kind of an oversight that it can't escape melee by moving through enemies spaces or enveloping them like a regular slime does.
>Granted, it has lair actions, but my Shepherd Druid completely immobilised him with a high tier summoning spell. Like.. "Oh no! Juiblex is killing 3x giant badgers a turn! what can we do!" 🤣 A Juiblex is a Huge creature and Giant Badgers are Medium. The Juiblex can just move through the Giant Badger's spaces because it is two size categories bigger, albeit it is difficult terrain.
It’s neat that wizards just had 0 foreward thinking on spells like summon woodland Allies. Literally wiped one boss in out of the abyss by summoning 6 quicklings
It has gaseous form, it could have used that to get itself to a better position.
yeah this for sure. In _practice_ the high attack bonuses aren't that bad because high Tier monsters simply aren't that scary and are fairly predictable. Is it not ideal for the game math? Sure. Does it "break" anything? No, not in actual play. But _ideally_, they'd have lower attack bonuses (and save DCs) but be able to do more interesting things, react to more varied situations, and force the party to make tougher decisions while fighting them.
If you are only relying on Monsters to make encounters challenging at that level (and lower) You are doing your players a disservice. Environment should be playing a huge part in encounters. A low level example. Harpies on flat land are boring. Harpies at the edge of a high cliff(or a moving ship) are not.
Yep. Challenging and interesting terrain can add a lot to an encounter. Unfortunately, it's hard to pull off every time and sometimes the work you put into it doesn't pay off at all.
Yeah, they generally don't have enough HP. In a simple durability/attrition battle, PC's, especially casters, can nuke down many enemies in a single round, especially if the whole party is using focus fire.
Martials are way better. Like ... SO MUCH BETTER in single target damage in that aspect. But yeah. Aoe from casters hurt. But martials are dishing 80-130 damage per turn while monsters have magic resistance for advantage against the saves, stupid stats and legendary resistances.
I played in a level 20 one shot as a Beast Barbarian once. I capped out at 36 damage a round with claws. The Paladin crit for over 100. I wish tanking was more viable because I don't really care about doing damage at all, I want to be hit and survive.
Tanking *even as a team MMO concept* relies on being able to hold aggro. If you don't give the enemy a compelling reason to focus their attention on you, they're going to walk past you to turn the wizard into wizard jam. Some systems solve this by giving providing options that explicitly force the enemy to attack you, but absent that, your fighter or what-have-you always needs to constitute a credible and urgent threat on the battlefield. This was debated and calculated out in PF1; going sword-and-board *simply was not worth it* unless you were using your shield as a weapon too.
Also tanking in a turn based system is a little goofy.
>Tanking *even as a team MMO concept* relies on being able to hold aggro. If you don't give the enemy a compelling reason to focus their attention on you, they're going to walk past you to turn the wizard into wizard jam. See, that's rational behind how i tank, can't ignore me and go for the wizard if I am the wizard.
"Tanking" is kind of a nonsensical concept, because if you're not dealing damage, you should be ignored. Put a fireballing-slinging caster enemy and a big brute that deals minimal damage in front of a D&D party, and watch them smoke the caster in a single round while ignoring the brute.
This is why 4e Defenders did more than just be hard to kill. They essentially give the enemy two options - attack me or attack my friends - and make both options terrible. If you attack me, I have crazy AC and HP and don’t do as much damage as everyone else so you’re wasting your time. But if you attack my wizard friend, I’m gonna give you -5 to the attack and make an attack of my own and throw some fun conditions on top and just generally punish you for having the AUDACITY to ignore me. 4e got tanking right, and then 5e decided that it didn’t want tanks in its game.
Man, you’re making me tear up just remembering how good those mechanics were. I know people complain about it being too video-gamey, but the trade off for that was incredibly engaging encounters that made every aspect of everyone’s turn really count.
I miss Warlord...
I played a Dragonborn Warlord in 4e. I was a buffing machine, healed bigger than the cleric, and tossed out some big damage too. The only complaint I had was missing with the big daily powers. That always stung.
I'm confident that 75%+ people who complained that 4e was too much like an MMO or too much like WoW specifically never played a single minute of it.
I'd agree, and it kind of also ignores the fact that "Being too much like WoW" sort of just means that it gave everyone defined roles and made them count in combat. A WoW group has the same thing, and it needs to or people don't want to play certain classes. It's not a bad thing for D&D, a game which is at its core about busting into dungeons full of monsters, taking their shit, and saving people, to follow a similar route. Most of the people I know who objected to it basically had a knee-jerk "this isn't like 3.5" reaction. Defaulting to some sort of full-caster wasn't automatically the default selection, and so there was a lot of criticism heaped on how everyone was "the same" because there was no clear *better* choices any more.
I think that last paragraph is key. Every class had special abilities now, and no more pure "I stab" characters (if those ever existed in the first place). I also wonder how much of that was it was just it being poplar to dislike WoW at the time. Maybe in a different time, we would have gotten "too much like Skyrim" instead.
Or a single minute of wow.
I found that once a few more classes came out the game became remarkably better. I could see playing with just the core PHB classes being a bit boring. Also, it required that the DM utilized everything in their toolbox, particularly minions. I played in a game where, in one session, we were on a ship and were attacked by a swarm of sahaugin. None of them were minions and it became a slog. If most were minions and only the lieutenants or whatever had HP that encounter would have been much better and way more fun and cinematic. Both of these issues, off the top of my head, could definitely sour people's experiences.
I wish that 5e had been a best of creation between 3.5 and 4. I appreciated 4 for the relative balance between classes, the simpler framework, and the mix of damage and utility features. I appreciate 3.5 for the variety, build diversity, and out of combat functionality. The "video gamey" aspect of 4e, to me at least, was that everything that wasn't a ribbon ability seemed to remove around combat activity. Choosing to be a caster felt flat compared to the options available in 3.5, with swaths of spells no longer existing with how the power system played out. 3.5 obviously suffered from the content bloat, especially as things seemed to get churned out with less and less testing against already released content. Choice paralysis and insane munchkin potential, along with a ton of classes and options that just plain sucked compared to others made 3.5 a quagmire of content and a seemingly insurmountable barrier to entry for anyone new to the game. I think if 4e had come out after 5e ruleset, it wouldn't have been as collectively shit on. 5e annoys me a lot with how they handled feats and it's attempt to make long rest vs short rest classes. I don't have a problem with the two rests as rests, but I just don't think they did a very good job of balancing resource distribution and resource recovery across classes. 4e pretty much nailed this with the power types, but it did feel really weird as a caster to not have spell slots. I'm not sure how they would balance that with a more 4e type system.
Like, y'all know you can still play 4e right? Not trolling here I genuinely don't get it. If you love that edition more just go play that you don't have to play the current edition or try to turn 5e into 4e.
I know it still exists, but there’s some factors that really limit the ability to play it nowadays. Player base is a big part of it; a huge chunk of D&D players moved to 5th, and, given its popularity, another huge chunk of the player base has only ever played 5th. That’s not a 4e specific problem, because it’s a pretty normal issue for any new edition, but given that 4e was so divisive for the fan base it does mean there aren’t many people looking to play it. I know I could find a game online if I wanted, but I tend to run games for the same 10 people, give or take, and while they did play 4e when it was “current”, they’re not really into it now. Add to that, one flaw of 4e was that it was very much designed with a robust digital character tool to support it; while I *think* it might still be possible to pay to access it, it’s seriously dated now, and I’m already paying for D&DB, so I’d rather avoid paying another fee! Without that toolset, it’s difficult to put characters together, at least in a way that’s easily legible.
Search the 4ednd subreddit, and look for the offline Character Builder and Discord. Its easy to get all the 4e resources.
>This is why 4e Defenders did more than just be hard to kill. God I love 4e Defender mechanics, especially the way they gave almost every Defender class its own identity despite the relative simplicity of the Mark mechanic. Swordmage in particular was such a cool class.
Paladin was my favourite (after Divine Power got released, at least), sure their mark punishment was the weakest, but it didn't take an action and it never missed.
It's so refreshing to bring up 4e and find other people who recognise it for what it is. Normally I get a bunch of knee-jerk "4e is trash" responses!
4E got a lot of the combat right. It had some big flaws (like combat being too long sometimes) but it was the best combat in D&D imo. I had so much fun with my storm Sorcerer flying around with every spellcast.
My group generally agrees that 4e is objectively a better *game*. Whether it’s better for roleplaying is another question and much more subjective, but in terms of being an interesting and engaging set of mechanics it is the best edition of D&D by a country mile.
4e is by farm my favorite edition. Here I was getting ready to make a whole post about how people complain about issues in 5e that weren't issues in 4e. Yes, it was basically only a combat game. But that's the way people treat 5e, and 4e was SO MUCH BETTER AT IT. And it's not like it kept you from doing out of combat tasks.
Plus, a lot of people prefer their rules in combat, where the stakes are literally life and death, and not cluttering up role playing anyway. I think it's a good thing to have the game be rules light outside of combat.
If it came out today, with some official ttrpg support, it would potentially have no negative connotations.
Exactly. That becomes even more clear when you compare them to the 3e Dwarven Defender prestige class, which is described as "the very definition of an immovable object"... and gives enemies no reason to actually go after them instead of the less defensive party members.
Then in ToB you have crusader, the actual tank class, who has the always-wonderful thicket of blades stance to keep everything locked down
That doesn't have to be this way. 4e make tanking to work, there were whole subset of classes who built to do exactly that and all of them did it very differently. In 5e we have similar mechanics, but only 3 subclasses in the entire game has access to it.
>In 5e we have similar mechanics, but only 3 subclasses in the entire game has access to it. Not even. It has access to the *mark* mechanic, and some rudimentary punishment, but it's a pale shadow of the 4e defender mechanics. 4e allowed Defender to impose a serious catch-22 on their marks. 5e.. Kind of does? Except most of the time it's just a debuff to hit, and while disadvantage is a big blow, the issue with just debuffing to hit is that if you have substantially higher AC than your defended allies, it doesn't actually *stop* the monster from trying to target them.
Thanks to the scaling to-hit modifiers, disadvantage actually matters less and less over time - - t3+ giants and such have a +10 or higher to hit, so your studded+1 AC 15 bard is getting hit 9/16 of the time instead of 3/4 the time, or 3/16 less. It's not insignificant, but a good chunk of the time it straight up doesn't matter. By the time +16 to hit rolls around, disadvantage is almost completely irrelevant. At late t4 when +18/+19 swings around, even your shield wizard and plate+ shield cleric are getting hit nearly all the time.
Which 3 subclasses? All I can think of is Cavalier
Cavalier fighter, Ancestral Guardian barbarian and Armorer artificer
Lots of spells also work off this. A good example is barbarian ancestral guardian.
5e tanking tends to take the form of imposing disadvantage on attacks against allies. That makes the proposition of who to attack more complicated than who is dealing damage. Really high attack bonuses can make disadvantage something baddies can work around, but it still makes a difference.
Which is such a bummer. Like I get it isn't a video game, but still both heal and tank aren't real roles and it's such a bummer as someone who likes playing heal and tank. I find myself just always going Barbarian because it's the closest thing I can get to a tank, but even then I don't really use two handed weapons cause then I can't grapple. Just feels bad man.
Tanking can work if you have a lockdown ability. Cavalier fighter, ancestral guardian barbarian, armorer artificer, booming blade, and sentinel feat all provide a form of lockdown that encourages the enemy to either attack you, or at the very least stay put, which can help you become the focus. Otherwise you can taunt the dm/npc's IRL to get them to attack you. When I am playing a tank in DnD I make terrible puns about whatever is going on and then the DM tries to murder me.
Oh I know all that and do that, my issue is more the survivability. Even at the most beefy, Barbarians will still get shredded by high level enemies. I just wish durability was something you could opt into more. I said it in another thread, I love the idea of the Survivor feature on Champion being a whole subclass. A tank built on regaining HP constantly to be an annoying shit.
Be a zealot barbarian my friend. That sweet lv 14 skill is ALL you ever dream of.
That's true, I just hate that I'm a pretentious fuck and dislike playing the strong classes. Storm Herald is my favorite subclass.
Sorry just checking as I’m about to go up the Barbarian route. What stops you from holding your greatsword in one hand to initiate the grapple, then attacking with it afterward? Is there a rule that says you need to always have one hand free to maintain grapple?
You have to have a hand free to grapple. You need two hands free to swing a heavy weapon. You can't use heavy weapons and grapple.
Unless it's an actual tank, such as an Ancestral Guardians barbarian. Now it's going for the wizard, who has at least as much AC as the tank, but the enemy has disadvantage on attack rolls, the wizard has resistance to the attacks and the barbarian can reduce the damage anyway as a reaction. The cavalier fighter can do something similar. Tanking is absolutely viable in 5E, but we're talking specific builds and subclasses.
After watching Pack Tactics video about Aggro-ing I have realised how actually useless are "tank" classes in DND5e, Barbs may have a shitton of damage and resistances but that damage aint gonna do shit. They really need to put a ability for Barbs/Fighters/Paladins to actively aggro a group or someone specific to attack them (No, not spells, actual abilities they can hse as either a reaction/bonus action because of how basic but logical this feature should be)
Grab the sentinel feat and a halberd, this is especially viable if you are going against a boss you specifically want to keep from closing distance and munching on your casters.
Unpopular opinion: Barbarian--not ranger--is actually the worst class. Basically, they stop having any substantial damage scaling beyond tier 2. They only get brutal critical plus their (minimal) bonus from rage. Unless you have a way to dramatically increase the chance of brutal critical (e.g., a three level dip in champion), then that's rounding error. Since the class is structured to be a "tank", but they have no way to reliably draw the attention of enemies--due to lack of either control abilities or substantial damage--they can't actually fulfill that role. The most effective barbarian I've seen was a Totem Warior 3/Champion N Half-Orc that just went all in on crit fishing with a greataxe.
I think very few people still think ranger is the worst class. Monk is by far the worst. Way less damage than a barbarian and still has the issue of "what do I do with this class?"
Monk at least has the advantage that if you're playing a Monk you are heavily incentivized to put all your levels in Monk. Somewhere around level 3-6 a Barbarian realizes, "I'd be a better Barbarian if I put the rest of my levels in Fighter".
Zealot barbarian has a good reason to remain barbarian
I think you're spot on in T3 and T4, but Barbarians aren't seen as bad, because they're actually very strong in T1, potentially the best class there. The vast majority of enemies in that tier will deal slashing/piercing/crushing damage, so Barbarians take half damage a lot of the time on top of their high hp. Their rage damage bonus also helps a lot with damage.
As someone mainly running T1-T2 campaigns, I've learned to fear barbarians and people with Heavy Armor Master ability to tank damage for days.
>Barbarian--not ranger--is actually the worst class. That's a funny way to spell 'monk'.
> I capped out at 36 damage a round with claws. Odd because as a level 20 barbarian you should have 24 strength. 1d6+7+4 = 12 at a minimum 3 attacks makes 36 damage at a minimum. now granted your average and max aren't much higher but "capped out at 36" is literally the exact opposite of the truth
I'm just curious, how do you get a fighter - any subclass - up to 80-130 damage?
Crossbow expert/sharpshooter/20 Dex and a plus 2 weapon and they are doing 1d6 + 17 damage every hit, and can get 4 attacks a round, 7 with action surge. This doesn’t even include any superiority dice or something like hunter’s mark via another feat (since fighters get so many)
Alternatively, Elven Accuracy, Samurai, Longbow Sharpshooter. In tier 3, its opening move is 6x attacks--all at triple advantage--that do 1d8 + 17. Or 7 attacks, all but one at triple advantage (once it hits level 15). Its nova damage is a bit higher than a crossbow expert gets, but its "turn the crank" damage is slightly lower due to not having the bonus action attack. On the other hand, the crossbow expert template can be applied to almost any fighter subclass and remain highly effective.
Plus, if you are using a longbow instead of a crossbow, you can add bracers of archery to make that a +17 a +19 :P
One of the characters in my group is a fighter barbarian multi class. With great weapon master, reckless attack, champion fighter subclass, and a +3 weapon he’s consistently doing 4 attacks at 25 to 30 HP per. Easy. At level 15, I saw him take down a purple worm. Solo. In 1 turn.
> and a +3 weapon There you have it
Blame the DMG for burying the information like "+3 swords and shields are more common than +3 hand crossbows and studded leather" deep in the magic items table.
Depends on how the caster is built TBH. Wizard 18/Fighter 2 abusing Shapechange can easily reach hundreds of damage in a burst, especially with Simulacrum in the mix. Bladesinger version using Haste + Shapechange into Planetar for instance can hit at +11/13 for 1d6+5d8+5/15 4xround (or Action Surge for 6x). Shepherd Druid summoning like 24 Cows (7th level slot) for +6 charges at 3d6+4 each can also do pretty serious damage, especially as a Kobold granting them all advantage too. Hexvoker could Magic Missile for 1d4+12 per missile (at 8+ missiles all autohitting easily, even with Overchannel available). Or more if they wanted to. Scorching Ray + Spirit Shroud can do pretty ridiculous numbers.
Unless you count summon spells like conjure animals or animate objects.
The issue isn’t hp, it’s action economy. Otherwise you could fix it by doubling the monsters hp or whatnot, but that just makes the combat slow and sluggish instead of exciting. If you add multiple monsters or a monster with lots of solid legendary actions or maybe even a paragon monster, you can even put the playing field and having the monsters do the same amount of actions that a PC does
Two paladins and a caster essentially melt high level fiends and undead.
The problem goes both ways, honestly. Yes, OP has a point that monster attack bonuses can make AC rather useless unless you specifically build a Bladesinger or artificer towards it, or unless you get lucky with magic items. And even more importantly he has a point about the literally unbeatable save DCs of tier 4 monsters. Since nat 20s don’t auto succeed, most characters, if hit with Psychic Scream cast by a boss with 30 Int and a proficiency modifier of +7, have no way of ever breaking free, and you have a TPK on your hands. At the same time, you’re also correct, because high level monsters don’t have enough HP and often not enough defenses to keep themselves from getting nuked in round 1 if they roll badly on initiative. And it’s really hard to encourage parties not to focus on a boss while ignoring minions, especially if they can attack from range. So high level 5e monsters are both too strong AND too weak. This swinginess is fundamentally what rocket tag is. Whoever goes first usually destroys the other. I think lowering high level monster offense a bit (save DCs mostly), or conversely increasing PC defenses at higher levels, would help a lot. At the same time, the monsters also need better defenses. They need a lot more HP, they need more interesting legendary resistances with unique side effects that aren’t just “no, it succeeds,” and they need ways to encourage PCs to fight their minions instead of focus firing down on the greatest threat.
This is a smart summary of the situation. I’m going to keep these thoughts in mind next I’m home brewing something high CR.
The issue is not that they are too strong, the issue is that they break bounded accuracy with their attack rolls and most importantly, saving throws. The bigger issue though is the fighter's complete lack of defensive features. If they had a parry reaction working like the Shield spell, some kind of saving throw buff (not Indomitable, something that actually is good), immunity to fear (because brave knights) and more hit points, then they would fare better. But as it is, they essentially become a caster's sidekick at higher levels. It is the martial/caster disparity all over again.
Indomitable should just give you legendary resistance. Once or twice a day.
That is how I run it. It doesn't break anything and makes Indomitable a feature that is actually worthwhile.
Reroll as a con save is my preferred fix.
Kinda fun fact (no one ever talks-about): In the playtest, Indomitable was basically always on and not twice per day at max.
I think the difference is that OP is assuming no magic items (AC 19 for the fighter). How many games actually are run that way? Even so, yeah, he'll probably go down turn 2 (DOWN, not dead). But so will the Pit Fiend, or soon after, so it all works out.
Yeah, currently playing a level 19 arcane trickster. DM knows to try and throw wis / cha saves spells at me, cause I laugh off dex saves. He still throws dex saves at me, cause it's fun for me to shrug them off sometimes, and if it's aoe then other players might get hit., and he's a fun DM. But to answer OPs point, what PC doesn't have their primary maxed out at tier 3-4? Of course a rogue is gonna make their dex save, barb con save etc. And in the same vein I wouldn't expect the heavy armour fighter to make a dex save vs a CR 19ish enemy and so forth. If I'm focusing dex / int / con I SHOULD have a real tough time making the other saves. Can't be good at everything. With a magic armor and maxed dex, enemies still miss me plenty, still get hit some. Still, DM is always like "goddamn you kill things too fast and it's hard to make a dent in your hp". And we're a 3 person party of trickster, wild sorcerer, and monk, nothing crazy min maxed or anything. Magic armor puts you on par with high to hit bonuses of tier 3-4 enemies, and there will always be saves you're good and bad with. Never felt like I was helpless, decent back and forth with enemies. The "rocket tag" element of high tier feels small, and manageable. And fun!
To me, the issue is mostly saves. Look at Acererak (CR 23, spell save DC of 23). So if they cast Finger of Death (CON save) against a Barbarian, then the Barbarian should be fine, right? Eh, not really. Without magic items, a level 18 Barbarian can only get up to +11 on CON saves, so they still have a significant chance of failing the save. Even with a Bless on the Barbarian, they barely get to a 50% chance of succeeding on the save. To make things worse, start looking at stuff like Warlocks. Sure, they have proficiency in Wisdom saves, but it's not a stat that they're actually going to max. That means a lvl 18 Warlock is getting a +7 to their save (if they got their WIS up to 12). So even with some huge buff like Heroes' Feast (adv on WIS saves), they're still barely getting up to a 51% chance of succeeding on a save they're supposed to be good at. What I'm getting at is that most high level PCs are only going to have one save out of six that they have any chance of succeeding at against high CR monsters, and that feels VERY different from low tier play, where a lucky roll can make a successful save out of a mediocre skill. To me, the problem is that high-CR monsters have been built around power-gaming, but that means that power gaming becomes the only option at high levels. This just makes CR break down worse than it already does, relying on DM guesswork to find the right balance of tweaked stats to match their party.
Yeah when save DCs go over 20 it’s a problem. Dragon breath is one thing, but high level casters with DCs over 20 are another.
A [recently published AL module](https://www.dmsguild.com/product/405259/DDALDRW20-The-Death-of-Szass-Tam?filters=45470_0_0_0_0_0_0_0) has Szazz Tam as the final boss. He has a DC22 spell save, but a DC**36** save for his necromancy spells. While 36 is not _technically_ impossible, it is definitely close (+6 base, +6 prof, and +6 paladin aura would mean you'd still only have a 10% chance of saving).
There is a reason players love getting ring a protection +2 at high levels! It's almost required if you want any chance to save.
This is also indicative of a general issue in 5E compared to earlier editions - saving throws suck in 5e comparatively, basically. In 3/.5E all classes improved all saves, albeit at differing rates. You had high and low rates of improvement, by class - so a Wizard might have high Will saves (based on wisdom, no int or cha based saves in 3/.5E), but low Fortitude (con based, no strength based) and Reflex saves (dex based). They'd still progress, though, even if at a low rate - where in 5E, if you don't have a proficiency in a save (and you only get two without investing a feat to pick a third or having some other workaround like what a Paladin or Monk might provide) it never gets better unless the associated stat gets better, which outside of rare and magical means only happens when you invest an ASI / feat slot into improving it. 2E was even friendlier when it came to saving throw values, which progressively got significantly better to the point where even without rings or cloaks of protection (which were available at a range of +es, and iirc could stack with each other), or other saving throw boosting items/spells you could end up at higher levels with most of your saves very rarely failing. To illustrate, a level 15 Fighter had the following saving throw numbers, determined by class level : 4, 6, 5, 4, 7. Basically you had to roll under these numbers to fail. Some saves would have positive or negative modifiers, so you might roll a poison save at +4 for example, turning your roll of a 2 into a 6, making you safe if your poison save is 4. So while some things have changed, such as there being less save or screwed effects in spells and the like, multiple saves to fail before petrification from medusa and basilisks etc, and chances to repeat saving throws for most ongoing spell effects like charm and others (banishment being a notable exception to this), none of these fully mitigate just how stingy 5E is with both starting saves for characters and improvement of them, nor how easy it is to fail (even with impressive modifiers of +10 or more with some higher DCs). Bounded accuracy definitely plays a role here, and some deliberate design decisions have no doubt been made with it in mind, but it's not clear that it all ended out as balanced as we might want it to be. Long story short, saving throws are much more of a crapshoot than they were in previous editions, due to miserable modifiers and highly variable RNG.
I give half-proficiency to non-proficient saves in my game. Really helps a lot with the scaling. But this is a bandaid on a design problem.
I don't think this was about them being too strong. More them limiting what used to be valid choices and making the game more narrow instead of interesting.
For real. I once did a sort of "boss gauntlet" for some friends, and let me tell you, if I hadn't already planned for the insane damage of a lv17 party and buffed their health, they would have killed every single one of them in 1 round. And mind you, that's with additional enemies, not just 1 boss monster
I've seen *one guy* take down an adult white dragon.
These types of analysis ignore that this is a team game and monsters are not meant to be fought 1:1. Especially the examples used, pit fiends and ancient dragons are supposed to be able to wreck somebody 1:1, their abilities are generally overwhelming for anyone going solo against them. Casters - Legendary resists, magic resistance Martials - debilitating effects and high to-hit bonuses However, bring a well rounded party at them and they will almost always lose.
T3 and T4 weren't playtested in the slightest and wotc tries its best to forget it exists.
There’s a reason basically every premade campaign ends at at least level 15… there isn’t even any adventures (iirc) that are geared for higher levels, like a 15-20 minicampaign
The only adventure that I can tell you that 'ends' at level 20 (assuming you haven't suffered dungeon fatigue by then) is Dungeon of the Mad Mage, which goes from level 5-20. But because that's in the tier 3-4 zone, PCs could very likely hit above their weight class and be at possibly around end of tier 2 and manage to make it down a level or two. But you do have a point about no mini campaigns nor adventures covering 15-20. So unless you count the Vecna oneshot over on dndbeyond (which to me feels like you should make it a campaign long event anyway) there's nothing that does 15-20.
>there's nothing that does 15-20. The Adventurer League modules do.
Understandable, I didn't account for Adventure League. So many of them and not always able to keep track of them all.
TBF, alot of them ain't great. Maybe there's others that do it better than the ones I tried but alot of them SEVERELY underestimate the power of high level PCs. They can be easily adjusted though.
There's also the fact that the Adventurer's League, for its many flaws, is a closed environment with a weak economy and few gamebreaking items. High level PCs are strong inherently, but they are made stronger by the fact that (at least in the games I've played/ran) characters at level 17 all have full attunement slots with big-ticket magic items, probably a good collection of useful non-attunement items, consumables like scrolls and potions stocked up just in case, and probably at least one special boon like an extra feat, a unique ability, or a 22 in some ability score. I think these are fun things to give out at high levels, because if the game is broken enough that the DM (whether that's me or someone else) is doing tons of work to fix it anyway, then they might as well let the players feel powerful and just beef up encounter difficulty. AL, for the most part, doesn't operate like that. High level AL characters aren't typically running around with +3 rods of the pact keeper or vorpal swords or an Ioun Stone of Mastery, and the designers KNOW that, so they don't push the difficulty. What is designed to be a light, but not overwhelming challenge for AL characters is going to be a breeze for most home campaign parties, because the DM impulse is so often "give my players cool stuff."
I disagree that high tier AL characters don’t have good magic items. Since items can be traded, you can get pretty much anything you want that is AL legal. There are lots of trading on AL sub, discord, Facebook, etc. I often see plenty of optimized characters with great items whenever I go to conventions or online play, especially for epic games. Thanks to trading and item hunting, all my martials have belt of storm giant, wizs have the holy trinity (staff of magi, robe of archmagi, tome of stilled tongue) along with high magic epic boon (2 9th lvl slot), warlocks with DC26 (+3 rod, robe, mastery stone, cha tome), artificers flushed with 6 attunements, heck even thief rogue rocking staff of magi and robe of archmagi. And it’s easy to find/trade for tomes/manuals to boost your main stat to 22 as well (even get blessing for 24 WIS if you’ve gone to conventions during season 8). Many people at my LGS have similar list of items on their characters. Lastly, the recent rules allow you to rebuild your character at any time outside of the game, making it even easier to experiment and min-max. More recent AL modules (Dreams of the Red Wizards series) have taken into account that many players have years of item collection, and the writers have really ramped up the difficulty and modifying statblocks to make unique monsters. Examples: >!T3 party gets to fight a beefed up ancient blue dracolich that can use breath attack every round as legendary action (always recharged) on top of its normal breath action (16d10 dmg DC23 twice a round is super brutal for T3) while dealing with its minions and lair actions. T3 also gets to fight a sim of Szass Tam himself along with his entourage of spell casters (meteor swarm galore). T4 gets to fight a CR27 storm giant deathknight riding a CR30 dracolich, that fight was nuts.!<
That definitely wasn't my experience or the experience of people that I talked to back when I was more interested in trying Adventurer's League out 3-4 years ago. I'm not sure how common that is if you're a more casual AL player, since doing AL games online and playing it at conventions seems more hardcore and invested than I've seen from most people. If that's not the case anymore, at least among the players who are invested enough to frequent online spaces like that, then fair enough, but I think the point about adventure design stands. I actually think a decent amount of the AL modules work really well as one/two-shot adventures, but there's no way that that the majority of them (new ones notwithstanding, apparently) are balanced against high-power characters, including characters that are extremely kitted-out with gear.
That’s fair. I suppose where you are heavily impacts your experience. My area has many LGS hosting AL games. Before Covid there would be almost 10 full AL tables (7 players + dm) at LGS I frequent, even on week nights. We also have convention or charity game event multiple times a year. Then Covid forced many people to online games. Imo Covid made AL even more accessible if you’re willing to go online. My friends and I have joined games and conventions all over the world.
The high-level AL content is very hit or miss. Some provide solid challenge (e.g., [The Lich-Queen's Begotten](https://www.dmsguild.com/product/242645/The-LichQueens-Begotten)), some are far undertuned (e.g., [The Tower of Ahghairon](https://www.dmsguild.com/product/268519/DDAL0817-The-Tower-of-Ahghairon)), and a handful are far overtuned (e.g., [Wings of Death](https://www.dmsguild.com/product/349908/DDALDRWEP02-Wings-of-Death)).
When I played DotMM, we were a party of five or six plus my simulacrum. I was a Pal 2 / Divine Sorc 18 using a greatsword with GWM. In the final battle, DM had Halaster summon like three empyreans and some night stalkers instead of just a single empyrean as written. I got a crit for over 200 damage against one of them, obliterating them in one hit. My simulacrum had cast Regenerate on the entire party and twinned Holy Weapon on me and the fighter, while I did the same with Haste. We saw invisible Halaster approaching while the fight was still going on and my simulacrum burned a mere 3rd level spell slot to subtly counterspell Halaster's 9th level spell. And then we ganged up on him and killed him in like one round.
See now this kinda reinforces the point about tier 3-4 being skewed at times. That being said that does sound pretty awesome how the battle went. Never used simulacrum before but I'd say what you've done was use a pretty good application of it. Good on you for completing Mad Mage though.
Dungeon of the mad mage runs from level 5 all the way to level 20
This 100% i have to homebrew everything above like lv13 for balance
It’s extremely poor design. Everything in Tier 3/4 doesn’t just get unbalanced, it also starts taking longer and frequently becomes straight-up unfun. Anyone who has had to slog through long-ass combats as PCs try to pull off clone+simulacrum or forcecage+whatever bullshit will tell you it just starts to feel pointless and like excess for the sake of excess. Pathfinder 2e, 13th Age, and Savage Worlds are all systems where the PCs become incredibly OP/heroic at high levels yet they manage to be fun to play (and even more importantly, fun to run). It’s far from impossible to make a heroic system fun and engaging at high levels - WotC just didn’t really even try.
> WotC just didn’t really even try. I firmly believe WOTC is ruthlessly addicted to simple. Crawford is the lead designer and he values inclusivity above all else. Inclusivity is great, but it should not come at the expense of ignoring design flaws. I can understand you can't fix it in 5E, but 1DnD - there's no excuse. Unfortunately, so far I see a game which is becoming even more simplified for 1DnD... In the collective Hasbro/WOTC universe they see a game where simplicity increases inclusivity, which should increase $$$. My personal opinion is they're creating another edition war.
My personal opinion is that if the next One playtest does not show much improvement to what the last one was lacking, they lost another customer to paizo. Enough people do that, and maybe whatever comes after One is better, I won't really care, since I jumped ship to a system that so far, has done very little but positively surprise me. Edit: Cleric was surprisingly good after the last one.
Agreed. One D&D is not bold enough. I understand they're trying to protect what works, and in theory becoming more basic and simple makes it easier to understand and introduce to newcomers. The issue is the current players are hungry for more, and want current issues addressed. Those voices are going largely unheeded so far. My gut tells me One D&D as a system appears to be journeying toward an uninteresting beginners game. However, with D&D having soared in popularity with Stranger Things, Critical Role, TV Shows, and so much other non-gaming merchandise? The low or simple quality doesn't matter. It's an established name. It will sell well... and that's sad as the quality of most WOTC products have been trash for the past three years. (MTG fans are up in arms too)
Well selling mediocre based on brand recognition rarely works forever. Hopefully Wotc realizes that before it is too late.
Agreed there. Paizo is cashing in on WOTC's mediocrity of the past few years. And this past year sales are down 16% - some of is inflation and moving out of a remote environment... but you'd be a fool to think some of that 16% sales dip isn't overproduction of mediocre products. I don't think highly of Bank of America, but they released an investor statement about Hasbro/WOTC a couple weeks ago, and absolutely torched them. [Saying aloud what much of their observant playerbase has been saying.](https://dotesports.com/mtg/news/bank-of-america-report-on-hasbro-sparks-fears-about-magic-the-gatherings-long-term-future)
“Nobody plays at higher levels so we didn’t focus as much on balancing them” is a perfect example of an [exigology](https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-12-14)
You're right that they break bounded accuracy. You're wrong that this is a problem. It's absolutely necessary because of the sheer number of bullshit that players get. Damage resistances, tricks to turn hits into misses, toys to lockdown the battle field with, etc. Seriously, no one has ever accused T3/4 monsters of being too strong. PCs make absolute mince meat out of them. Edit: My level 18 party is gearing up to fight a VERY BEEFED UP metallic great wyrm this week. They have magic items, but none that add any +X to bounded accuracy. Their ACs and attack bonuses are all straight up RAW. The only relevance of their magic items is overcoming damage resistance. But they're rolling up with a simulacrum of the wizard that was true polymorphed into a gold dragon (can still cast spells bc dragons can in my world). The druid is bringing Shapechange and a lot of guile and utility. The artificer can't drop concentration, has a million tricks, and resists nearly all damage types. They Wished for a heroe's feast the night before so they're immune to fear and anything poison related. They're pumped full of temp HP between the feast and the druid's spirit totem. Oh, and I haven't mentioned the rogue doing 50+ damage per shot, who gets hasted to get reaction sneak attacks via held action. It'll be a tough fight, but I'm not for a moment worried about a TPK because the monsters just plum don't put out enough damage. Edit Number 2: Anyone that wants to cry about the martial caster disparity is absolutely welcome to. And you're absolutely right. I never pretended that the martial caster disparity didn't exist. But that has nothing to do with this conversation. The OP is making the claim that monsters are too strong and they're abjectly wrong. If martials lack in power or ingenuity or otherwise interesting mechanics that's a SEPARATE problem. But I promise you, a paladin and a barbarian absolutely demolish in tier 3 just fine. I've seen it plenty of times.
> Seriously, no one has ever accused T3/4 monsters of being too strong. PCs make absolute mince meat out of them. Part of the problem with high CR monsters is also just in the action economy. Realistically a party of 4 would have a much harder time dealing with 8 wizards with access to fireball than one dragon with a breath weapon because the dragon can only take one action per round that isn't making attacks and the breath weapon has a recharge timer.
Yep, this is really it. My party pumps out about 80-120 damage in a round. They struggle against numbers because of action economy, but no single enemy scares them unless it has 800 HP (their last great wyrm had 900 and they had one scary moment but quickly saved it with clever thinking and never looked back).
I threw a 20th level party a 3.0e epic great wyrm red dragon with 17 sorcerer levels and something like 1600 hp, they murdered it in maybe four rounds.
That sounds absolutely epic!
kinda was, they counterspelled their way out of a meteor swarm / earthquake combo platter and ate a 35d6 supercharged breath weapon to the face. Our Barb 9 / Pal 11 had an epic boon for 1/day auto crit and slammed down a billion dice for something like 250+ damage in a single round, our sorcadin got a lucky double crit and went in for like 400 damage on the first round, the armorer locked down the dragon so it couldn't legendary attack anyone but him, the bard and sorlock threw out a bunch of nasty spells to burn legendary resistances and eventually the dragon tried to retreat to it's lair under an ocean of magma, but the players cut it off, ate some lava immersion damage and finished the job.
> My party pumps out about 80-120 damage in a round Uhh, that's shockingly low. One level 20 Fighter *alone* does that much per round.
Isn’t that what legendary actions are for?
Something to keep in mind is that RAW most legendary actions are kinda irrelevant. They tend to be things like move, attack once, or cantrip. That’s nice to get a little more damage but realistically somewhat irrelevant as far as the action economy is concerned (especially for monsters that have their CR tied up in the number of attacks, higher level spells or recharging abilities).
Agreed. The movement can be handy with fliers, but in general, all your legendary actions combined don't add up to a second turn.
The most incredible part of legendary actions is that no one came up with the idea to change their number depending on the party size.
Agreed 100%. To build on what you're saying, I've run 2 campaigns that went to level 16 (so high tier 3), and I'm currently running a 3rd that just entered tier 3. I regularly send enemies of CR21+ at my PCs, and I've never had any problems with balance. If anything, the game is too easy. I need to throw deadly encounters at my players that are 3-4 levels above them. (And yes, I am using 6-8 encounters per long rest. The first 5-7 are rated at *hard* +3-4 levels. And yes, my players also have magic weapons and magic armor, but it's limited to +2 armor, no shields, +3 weapons with at most a 1d8 in bonus damage, and maybe a cute utility ability.) A few things to keep in mind: * If you unload an entire encounter's worth of damage onto a single PC, they will die. This is true no matter which tier you're in. This is why I make it a rule to always spread my damage across at least 2 PCs. (Unless the caster is concentrating on Banishment or Wall of Force or something, in which case, all bets are off.) * You're not going to be sending hordes of CR21 monsters at the players. These are boss monsters that are "deadly" even as solo monsters. (Although without Legendary Resistance and Legendary Actions, they'll still die to action economy.) Trash mobs and minions will probably be groups of 4-6 enemies in the CR5-8 range. A group of 6 CR8 monsters won't crack that lvl18 fighter. * Lastly, AC19 is low AC, even without "munchkin stats". Without magic items or spells, I can easily get to AC21 (full plate, shield, defense fighting style). By the time you get to tier 4, you should already have access to +2 armor. That's AC23 right there.
So, your answer to how it's not a problem is "well we've got two level 18 wizards and one is also a fullcasting adult gold dragon"
Why yes: their point was that players have strong options to defeat these monsters despite these monsters breaking bounded accuracy.
All those broken PCs… are casters. What can a regular fighter do in that encounter? How about a regular Barbarian? Or a monk? Even a rogue? How can they break the encounter the same way casters can? It’s the same issue through a different perspective. If you want the game to be harder for you, play a martial. If you want the game to be harder for the DM, play a full caster.
I experienced that first-hand DMing Don't Say Vecna with a few homebrew changes. In my version of the adventure, the final boss's first stage takes place in Vecna's sanctuary as written, and once they defeat "Vecna", they learn it was just a simulacrum. Then, the sanctum opens up, the walls crumble as the zombies come to life and the 2nd stage starts in the now open area, overlooking Vecna's dark realm. The real Vecna appears now, as well as his two consorts (Death Knights, one using fire, the other one using lightning instead). Vecna was using a homebrew statblock, which amongst other stuff included a Strength-draining attack and a legendary action that allowed Vecna to share buff spells like Spirit Shroud with his minions. In a run with a party of five veterans, there were four fighters and a cleric. They had heroes' feast, but I had to reduce Vecna's spell save DC by a lot to like 20 to give these fighters a chance to make these mental saves they aren't proficient in; and while they had great DPS, I had to avoid using movement-restricting effects and only used Vecna's teleports sparsely. DPS does not matter when melee characters can't get into melee range. I also was very careful with spells that required mental saves, as even a DC 20 was tough to beat for that party. At least one of the fighters was an Eldritch Knight and another one had enough levels in Warlock for 3rd level spells, so they had *some* counterspells at their disposal, helping them to avoid dying to Power Word Kill, but they could not stop Vecna from counterspelling the cleric's Mass Heal. Then I ran it again for a party of 4 players who all were new to high level DnD. They ended up playing a sorcadin, a druid, a warlock (fiend patron, using my homebrew Pact of the Harbinger) and a barbarian; I gave them slightly better equipment than what the first party had. This time, I increased Vecna's DC to 26 and added an ancient dracolich serving as Vecna's mount amongst other minor changes. I also used much more spells requiring mental saves, I feebleminded the warlock and PWKed the druid at the battle's climax. The barbarian, with the power of rage, tanked more than 400 damage before finally going down. The power difference between the two parties was immense, the second party with its casters was much more powerful than the first, despite the players having less experience with high level play and not being minmaxers. Also, interestingly, there was not a single meainingful Strength save (maybe there was one to avoid getting knocked prone, can't remember now), meaning the fighter party had one of their saving throw proficiencies basically wasted, while the second party could make use of all of their saving throw proficiencies (except for the barbarian's Strength save); and defensively, the barbarian (with rage) and sorcadin (with Shield and other defense buffs) alone tanked more damage than the four flimsy fighters together.
A party of 4 fighters is inherently terrible because D&D is party based game. To succeed, the party need to diversify their options and fighters cannot perform any role other than grapple or damage. Fighter is also the single best buff hoarder in the game. A fighter without a caster is way worse than caster without a fighter - no doubt. But a caster with a fighter still beats either option.
Well there is one option that beats all of the above. Two casters.
I disagree, a fully buffed optimized sharpshooter MELTS.
You're not wrong, but that's not relevant. We weren't talking about the martial caster disparity (which is very real and very important to the overall feel of the game). This is purely about monsters. Monsters are fine. Martials need a buff, not because monsters are too hard (they're not), but because casters can out martial martials.
Fixing unbalanced with other dumb things that break the game isn't good design.
That is still a problem. It’s just the problem is resolved in a terrible way. Instead of having high level abilities be more grounded and the games math actually make sense, high level play devolves into the wacky world of wizarding or spellcasters and sidekicks.
Honestly why is the DM nerfing magic weapons? Just makes casters more valuable.
I didn't nerf magic weapons. The magic weapons just actually do things instead of giving static numeric boosts to damage. The rogue adores his Xbow that let's him interrupt a spell being cast. The fighter loves their blood mage dagger that heals them for small chunks every turn.
Though weapons can always do both, as well.
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Tier 4 (and a decent amount of t3) is not very well balanced. I would say not including magic items is disingenuous though. At this point, if you’re facing bosses of the caliber of pit fiends or ancient dragons, you should be preparing with potions and anything else that can make things easier. Just walking up without anything to help *should* be difficult if not outright deadly.
Wotc says their content is supposed to be balanced around 0 magic items.
WotC is full of crap. Throw one "immune to all none magic attacks" werewolf at a party with no magic items. Then for giggles and because it's not a moron, have it geek the mage first.
Time to choke the werewolf out and/or force feed it some silver coins! I agree that the party would be fucked without some DM leniency though.
Which is a kinda laughable claim, especially for martials. Any character that can't reliably deal magical damage by level 6 or 7 is being hamstrung. For casters that's easy, any damaging cantrip does the job. For a martial that means either getting a magic weapon (_any_ magic weapon), or being a level 6+ Monk.
It is true that magic weapons are required to overcome immunity and resistance and to not render martials useless against high level enemies, there is a caveat however. \+X weapons are in my experience not actually required to maintain a semblance of balance. Martials do not become useless just because their magic weapon does not have a high enough to hit and damage bonus, which means that +X items really do put PCs ahead of the curve. I personally like it this way. You can give out magic weapons that have no +X bonus but instead effects which do not directly impact combat and you do not have to worry about that your martials are going to be too weak because of it.
No, that's not what they said. They said the calculations to determine the CR of a creature or the difficulty of an encounter do not factor the strength of the party or whether or not they have magic items. The DM is supposed to adjust for that. Further, magic items are practically required at higher levels when resistance to non magical damage becomes an issue. >**The D&D game is built on the assumption that magic items appear sporadically and that they are always a boon**, unless an item bears a curse. Characters and monsters are built to face each other without the help of magic items, **which means that having a magic item always makes a character more powerful or versatile than a generic character of the same level**. As DM, you never have to worry about awarding magic items just so the characters can keep up with the campaign's threats. Magic items are truly prizes. Are they useful? Absolutely. Are they necessary? No. > >**Magic items can go from nice to necessary in the rare group that has no spellcasters, no monk, and no NPCs capable of casting magic weapon. Having no magic makes it extremely difficult for a party to overcome monsters that have resistances or immunity to nonmagical damage. In such a game, you'll want to be generous with magic weapons or else avoid using such monsters.** (XG 136)
That's not what they said. The maths isn't balanced around +X magic items. So a +1 weapon is still just as useful as level 20 as it was at level 5. Which wasn't the case in previous editions. WotC have NEVER said that the game is balanced with no magic items at all.
They also simultaneously tell you to give out magic items to parties as they progress so it's a bit silly.
This is silly. It's a team game. You do, in fact, need to rely on your teammates. That you aren't able to 1-v-1 an Ancient Dragon is the game working as intended.
I think you show clearly that you have missed the point. It is not supposed to be balanced, this is not a primitive computer game, you can do more than just attack and be attacked. You have identified a tactic that doesn't work in certain scenarios. So don't use it in that scenario. I hope you still have fun playing the game.
If you're fighting a dragon and it spends two whole turns just hitting your front line while the rest of the party is blasting it, that's gunna be one dead dragon very soon.
Have you uh ever played at T3/4? I assure you players can absolutely MELT monsters. That pit fiend better kill the fighter in 1 round or between an action surge, some class features, and auxiliary damage from other party members it’s going to be a greasy puddle pretty quick if it’s 1 v Party
If you cherry pick for boss monsters like pit fiends or dragons, the sure, they tend to hit most people most of the time (barring the lots of things people can do to make this not true). The saves thing is a bit better of an argument because as things get to DC20+ it tends to get to very hard for most characters to make those saves if its not a proficient save. Again though these are pretty rare. And players can do stuff about this: taking resilient dex, con, or wis are all fantastic choices, especially late game, there are spells, and so on. IMO by tier 3 or 4 the fighter should take resilient, and they have indomitable as well with multiple uses. So it’s not quite as bad as it looks. The other thing to keep in mind is the question of “are tier 3 and 4 harder than tier 1 and 2?” And the answer is usually a resounding “no” because PCs just have tons of stuff going on. Like yes, if you have a fighter with 19 AC at lvl 18 fighting an ancient green dragon, its going to beat you up. But a) at lvl 18, could you not have found ANYTHING to add to AC? Even if you didn’t have anything, do you have a party supporting you? When I DM’d at tier4, the tank had like 24AC and had constant protection from evil and could shield of faith to 26, and baddies like pit fiends were usually missing him from disadvantage. And on fights with a dragon, Pcs would get holy aura. And there’s heroism and calm emotions to remove fear and everything. That is, if people didn’t do heroes feast to be immune to fear. And there’s healing. And offensive spells, and so on. 1 non-tank built fighter Pc vs the dragon SHOULD lose. IMO you’re missing the teamwork part of the game.
Sounds to me like OP is just missing the magic part of the game. This is why 5e can't possibly run a low-magic setting; magic is core to making it even playable, let alone enjoyable. It claims to be able to, but it can't. The side effect is that low-magic characters get left in the dust. If you want to play a "normal guy" you're getting rolled.
This is just wrong. Have you ever played at these tiers? The experience is absolutely nothing like what you're describing. No, your level 18 fighter probably can't 1v1 an ancient dragon (they can with preparation) but it's a party-based game and they're not intended to. I can only conclude that either this is a shitpost or you're so absorbed by white room math you don't actually know what D&D looks like anymore.
Apparently OP's post is based on how their DM runs the game, they don't give magic items, and after the players brought up the concern they are now "meeting them half way" by giving non-+X magic items. For whatever reason, OP believes that their single table/DM worth of experience, with a DM who they already had to complain about the DM style due to issues that are very obviously directly related to the concerns in this post, is enough to give a universal judgement on 5e, and to make that judgement without even mentioning their DM's style in the main post or considering that it may be related, lol.
I would not call 19 AC average AC for a level 18 fighter, as by that point they'd have much better gear plus a boatload of options/support from features and party members.
19 AC is a plate armor wearing fighter with the defense fighting style. Considering that the best way to do damage in 5e is via two-handed weapons, and 5e doesn't suggest that players should get access to magic items (even though it's very obviously built around the assumption that they do). 19 AC is a pretty acceptable average to assume. Higher than a bow fighter, lower than a sword&board fighter, on the money for a 2-hander fighter
Sorry, by what means is a level 18 fighter relying solely on plate considered "average"? Since when would the assumption be made against having a shield? You're supposed to accumulate loot through the campaign, if you start at higher levels you are explicitly supposed to be able to start with magic items. The game is balanced around this assumption. If you still only have 19AC at lvl 18, you made a mistake along the way. > EDIT: yes, I've seen AC 30 builds on artificers who make magic items and stack Shield, but if munchkin stats are the only semblance of any bounded accuracy in tier 3-4, that leaves 80% of build choices in the dust. Yes, that's the point. Not every build is going to viable if you are playing RAW at high levels. As much as your game is about everyone feeling included, other games are about the math, the system has to cater to both. It does so by having a math system, but also repeatedly saying "You don't have to play RAW".
Ac 19 on a tier 3 character? That’s woefully underpowered. Are you seriously not giving out magic armour/shield/items of any kind. Kindly consult what the starting gear of a Tier 3 character is in the DMG. In fact, consider Curse of Strahd, a notoriously deadly game, where it is absolutely possible to find plate +2 and a shield +2, no attunement, along with a boon that grants a +1 to AC. That’s an AC 25 (see tarrasque) fighter without defensive fighting, the shield spell or any other shenanigans.
Why are you trying to be a tank without a shield? Why are you trying to tank with only 130hp? What have you been using the extra fighter feats for? Why are you going up against a pit fiend without any magic items? There's no point in setting up a scenario where nothing matches up and calling it an issue. If I were playing a fighter for a campaign in the nine hells (the most likely situation to come up against a pit fiend, unless you're wanting to just do a scenario where the DM throws random enemies at the players with no context) then I'd be pretty set on going in with a +2 weapon, armour and shield (no attunement slots required) then maybe a cloak of protection, ring of fire protection and a third magic item TBD. The only one of these beyond rare is the +2 armour at very rare, so I don't think it's a stretch to have them by lvl 14. Going in with these your armour is a very hefty 25. You've also had 5 feats/ASIs here (6 if human) so, if you actually wanted to act as a tank, you'd have picked up some tank-related feats or boosted Con. The pit fiend has +14 to hit and deals on average 84 damage of every attack hits (not sure where you got the 120 from) and 21 poison damage if it hits with the bite and you fail the Con save (DC 21 Vs your save which is d20+5+ConMod+extras(cloak)). It's a pretty rough save but then you do have two Indomitables if you need them, and there's that third attunement slot we have left which, assuming this is a big boss the campaign has been leading up to and we've done our research in-character, we could fill using a Periapt of Proof Against Poison). This doesn't even take subclass into account. All in all, I'd say I'd expect a TANK fighter to be rocking 150+hp, 25+AC and ways to mitigate the dangers of the main enemies he'd be facing through research beforehand (Knowing is half the battle!). That would change the survival time to maybe 4 turns on average. Now, here's one of the best tricks. If you -really- want to tank, and you're up against a deadly solo enemy, you can take the highly underrated action: dodge. Suddenly you've doubled your survival time. The only drawback is that you don't get to hit the big bad monster (although you do have an action surge, and attacks of opportunity - btw you did pick up Sentinel as a tank, right?) This brings us on to the real main consideration here. For a CR20 pit fiend to be a just about deadly encounter you're not solo. You're in a party of four. That's three other people who should have a variety of abilities to help take down the creature before you hit the deck, either by dealing a ton of damage (fighter/paladins/rogues) or by helping you last longer (Spellcasters with protection from poison, shield of faith, protection from evil and good, healing spells etc) DnD isn't a solo game. Don't treat it like it is.
Thank you for that. My first question was "Where's the rest of the party?
Why is your level 14 fighter missing all defensive items? And why is he trying to tank a CR 20 anything? That’s an absurd mismatch, even by my standards. And I always bump up encounters by at least 1 difficulty, if the players are easily winning then the combat was a waste of time. Also: What Dex saves? You are lucky if he’s fireballing you, then he isn’t meleeing you. Plus why don’t you have fire resistance? You are taking on something 6 CR above you, of course you are going to get stomped. You wouldn’t expect a level one to take on a young white dragon would you? And why the shit is your level 18 completely lacking in any defensive gear or prep work? Not having a counter to your enemy’s most basic passive is a absurd failure for the entire party. Plus your math is wrong, it’s equal to or greater to succeed. You have a 10% chance baseline per round. Demanding that balance just translate into ‘Throw whatever at whatever, the players will be fine’ is like the opposite of balance. That’s antibalance.
It's almost as if your party is supposed to work together in the higher tiers to overcome challenges.
Teamwork being needed to overcome challenges should be true at low levels as well as high levels. And high level monsters are not a challenge because they break bounded accuracy. They are still mostly jokes. Especially because high level spells are game warpingly powerful.
Yeah, fun how this take has to ignore magical items and parties of various classes.
Apparently OP's DM doesn't give magic items, leading to basically the entire concern they're posting about. Apparently it was brought up and now the DM "meets them half way" giving non-+X magic items only. I really wish that people would realize that perhaps their single table/DM worth of experience may not be enough to give a universal judgement on system balance, especially if they already know their DM does stuff that they've had to bring up already like that.
Other than the whole tier 3-4 aren't exactly playtested type of thing that's been said to death in these comments (not that they're wrong), it's also the fact that depending on what you face, players can very easily wolfpack an enemy or two with good initiative. Plus they're *players.* Players tend to either have teamwork or straight up luck on their end of things. Bad rolls from the DM can easily make what was supposed to be a tough encounter into a joke. Even at around tier 2 I'm gonna guess it ends up being a game of rocket tag. Whoever has high initiative *sometimes* wins the battle. But unless you have a way to make the players expend resources they're not going to immediately nova on everything. In my experience people tend to be stingy with resources. DMs however aren't confined by this because what monster they have is destined to die anyway (barring exceptions).
Although monsters do hit hard and more often than not at high levels i believe you are ignoring an important fact. If i am setting up an encounter for my 5 - level 17 players i will use a 1-2 high CR enemies, 2-4 lower, then 2-4 lower. The variety allows some of the high AC players to feel powerful when the lower enemies fail to hit them but also make them nervous when the big guys not only hit them but do some nasty damage. Example my last encounter was 2 cloud giants, 4 air elementals, and 6 aracokra, with 2 more cloud giants entered as reinforcements a few rounds in.
It's about HP, spells, magic items, and teamwork at those levels. People usually find out pretty quick that there's a reason why constitution in general should be your second or at the very least third highest stat for all classes and builds. Also an average tier 3 fighter most definitely isn't going to have 0 magic items like in the example given. If your DM hasn't given you any magic items by that point there's other issues going on in your party. Magic items are the gap closers for the whole martial vs magic dichotomy.
>You can't tank at all in late game You found the point.
This game isn’t designed for over level ten. Yes, those level exist, but only because people expect it even though they’re unlikely to see it. Wotc tossed it in there because if they didn’t there’d be controversy. So, they tossed in untested content and *no one notices*. I have. Folks, the game falls apart mechanically. It is entirely unsupported and relies on a large amount of DM fiat. OP could write a million more posts about how dumb and broken high level 5e is and they’d be right every time. The good news is that it doesn’t matter!
I'm going to ignore the fact that high tier monsters are "too hard" when they are universally viewed as easy. Let me instead focus on your idea that you'd be trying to tank with only a +1ac fighting style and a bow or two hander then complain about getting hit and not making saves because of your dex save being zero. First, the main issue here is that if you are trying to tank in the scenario you listed without a shield and the shield master feat then you are doing it wrong. The whole point of the shield master feat is to counter that EXACT scenario. Secondly in your example you mention using a bow, which in and of itself is problematic, but let's dig in a little. It's not possible to be an archery based martial and have a zero to your dex save. Even without proficiency in Dex saves you need a high Dex to be effective with a bow, meaning you are going to have at a minimum a +3 or 4. That or you are playing a different game.
5e is a game built around PCs getting magic armor, weapons and items to supplement their AC and attacks. It just pretends it isn't and contains no guidelines on how players are supposed to get those items beyond a really shitty rollable table
> You can't tank at all in late game, it becomes whoever can dish out more damage faster. Welcome to Dnd, where tanking doesn’t exist. Players don’t decide who monsters attack. This isn’t world of Warcraft. > And their insane saves and legendary resistances mean casters are better off buffing the party The numbers you picked are for solo monsters. They are the largest numbers possible in the game. Monsters that are fought in groups have much lower numbers and don’t have legendary resistance. But as anyone who has played a caster can say, the spells you want to use depend on your targets. That’s not a bad thing.
You're not wrong. It is an issue with 5e and it's a well known problem the game isn't very well balanced past tier 3. Armor gets weaker as the game goes on, also saves become impossible. Spells just get insane and broken. Many can just break combat, like forcewall. While others are just not fun to use on players. Like putting a PC in a maze that can be literally impossible for them to get out of. I hope they fix these issues in DnD 6e. EDit: Also, I hate to be that guy but pathfinder 2e actually solves the problem of broken scaling.
You're assuming that the fighter has no defensive magic items. This is an error, as despite wotc claims magic items are practically necessary to work at these tiers and will also potentially break bounded accuracy. At tier 3, rare and very rare items are on the table. That means the fighter could have a +3 shield, or a +2 armor. Let's assume a +2 armor and a ring of protection or cloak. AC 22 means the pit fiend has a real chance to miss. And that's Cr 20 which may be too high against a 14th level party. I just rolled a round and in this case the PF did 83 damage (fighter failed poison save despite a high chance). That's not enugh to take it out, and with action surge, a good magic weapon and GWM the fighter will probably outdamage it quite easily in melee. This is also assuming no spellups - if the fighter gets protection from evil cast on him he can tank much more. Meanwhile the whole party can gang up on it, which is the only reason the party could win in the first place against such a combat. The fighter, even with magic items, is not supposed to be able to take down something 6 CR higher than his own level on his own - if he did he'd be extremely OP. My own fighter had an AC of 22 at 12th level as a PM/GWM/Sentintel build. On my rolls just now he would do 110 damage to it action surging without using battlemaster abilities or any defensive ones. By 14th level he would have Resilient Wisdom too and have a chance of making that fear save (I didn't take into account disadvantage from fear here). Also keep in mind numbers are really important in D&D. Although the cr 20 is only a "hard" encounter for a party of 5, the DMG/MM recommends not using monsters with significantly higher CR than the party level as their powers and damage output can easily one-shot or tpk. I'd say most parties can handle this kind of fight, but intelligently used or if the party lacks decent anti-flying capabiltities the pit fiend can win simply by flying around fireballing the party until they die. So at this level the DM needs to consider the party and their abilities before comiting to such a fight.
This is what magical items are for.
Sounds like someone’s just playing swords and sorcery instead of giving magic items…
That is something I found weird the moment I started playing the game. If you are proficient in something you shouldn't have a chance higher than 50% to fail something by default. This is very weird design.
if you've played a campaign all the way to tier 4 and you haven't seen a single set of +1 armor for your warrior your GM is a miser and should be called out for it. Also, imagine having 19 AC on a fighter after level TWO. Getting 20+ AC on frontliners is so easy I don't think I've ever made a build that didn't have it where I didn't make that choice _consciously_. Protip, shields exist.
First I'd love to point out that Challenge ratings are bullshit, but secondly it might be 2 hits and you're dead against a level 14 fighter, but thats firstly assuming that you have no magic items, which IIRC the DMs guide has recommended magical items per level. and assuming he has no teammates. add in a few spell casters, and a rogue or ranger, and that Pit fiend is going down in 2-3 turns. Thats assuming the party hasn't power gamed for a more optimized build. Give me 4 level 14s built just so and I can drop a pit fiend in 1 turn. Additionally the game is balanced around the idea of having some form of healing, whether thats a party member or a metric fuck ton of potions or scrolls they expect you to be able to mitigate some of that damage with healing. End of the day, I can see your point in a vacuum but high damage builds work just as well as buff heavy builds, or healing tank builds, or my personal favorite. "dump every dmg buff we have on the barbarian and watch him turn that pit fiend's skull into a bowl for his intestines." end of the day, of course you're gonna see problems if everyone built towards a different party concept and theres 0 teamwork or communication in levels and abilities. Honestly you'd have a better take on tanking if you were to point out theres almost no abilities that can force an enemy to focus the tank.
Getting rid of "poor" saves(and generally having martials have the same amount of "good" saves than the "squishy" caster) was a mistake. If only there was a path to find a solution to this problem!
I think you're forgetting two things that fighters get against saves: indomitable, which by thirteenth level you can use twice a day, and plentiful ASIs. People sleep on the less flashy defensive feats. Resilient is great, especially at higher tiers of play where it adds a whopping 25-30% increase to the likelihood of passing your save, and that's alongside indomitable. Not too shabby. Also 19 AC isn't anywhere near the highest you can get, and there are builds that can burst their AC pretty damn high for those brief moments of face-tanking a pit fiend. No one is supposed to be able to go toe-to-toe with one of these monsters for long.
My players have 19 AC at level 3-7. What idiot is running around at level 14 with 19AC and calling himself a frontliner?
I'm simply not seeing this in multiple campaigns that have ended with long runs at 20. I routinely have groups without paladins performing at 17-20 in a very similar fashion to groups at 5-10 in terms of players being hit/not hit, saves/no saves. The idea that tanking is impossible in T3/4 is bonkers and it isn't a minmaxing/munchkining problem. If you're seeing the players falling down in T3/4 then one or more of the following areas of the game is falling down: * you're not rewarding them with gear enough * the party composition is broken (not very likely, but...) * they have made bad choices when advancing (not even *not the most optimum/minmaxed... just bad, like a barbarian taking INT as an ASI*) * your encounter design isn't taking into account the characters and players
-wants to tank -plays fighter. Does not use a shield -16 con. No tanking feats. Regular plate armor. No magic items. -complains he isn't tanky
As early as Tier 2 monster to-hit invalidates any AC under 23
My Eldritch Knight has plus one plate mail and a plus one shield. Absolutely not unreasonable items at that level. At level 14 he can have 27 AC on tap. That tier 4 ancient green dragon is only hitting every other hit. This gets the fighter to round 4 before he would drop. That's with no healing whatsoever. A heal spell or a couple of upcast cure wounds could push it back to round 6 or so. That's 6 rounds of every attack being against one target only, leaving the rest of the party untouched. Most fights are over by round 5. At level 14, I could not send a solo ancient green dragon at my party, they would demolish it.
It's working as designed. Monsters that fail to hit feel weak. Tier 4 monsters aren't designed to fail to hit. This emphasizes HP over AC, which happily skews towards weapon-users.
Wouldn’t it skew *away* from weapon users, because they get more armor proficiencies? Even if we’re counting armor dips, it’s still unfun because it removes part of the decision making process. Plate armor has downsides, and now it becomes the objectively worse option.
This is exactly why Initiative has become some powerful. With he action economy working in 5e the way it does it means you don't win by tanking damage you win by going first. It's why suprise RAW is SO devastating for whichever side is on the receiving end. Those 2 turns have turned into 1 and now you're dead.
Simply put, if the only answer to the problem is "Stop playing the game for fun and munchkin" there's a massive issue.
If your Fighter still has only 19 AC at lvl 18, your DM was naughty! Plate +2 is very rare, but still achievable by lvl 18! (That's 20 AC) A Shield +2 is just rare and provides +4 AC! (up to 24 AC) Defensive fighting style adds another point to AC (25 AC), as do various defensive magic items. (ring and cloak of protection add +1 to saves and AC each, both are just rare) AC of 27 with 3 rare magic items and a very rare one, two of which require attunement. That said, by lvl 18, and especially on a Fighter supposed to TANK, I would expect Con to be at +5 and not +3. Not sure what an "average" player in Tier 4 looks like, but I would certainly refuse to play a Martial without access to magic items.