One episode simply wasn’t enough to say everything on our minds about the mechanics for D&D’s new quasi-edition, so we’re back for part two. This time, we’re focusing on the honestly baffling ways that WotC has chosen to increase or decrease different classes’ power levels, including a huge boost for the wizard, which was already D&D’s strongest class. Guess that’s why it’s not called Fighters of the Coast.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Maddie. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant Podcast with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi, Wes Matlock, and Chris Winkle. [Intro Music]
Oren: Hey everyone, Oren from the future here for a final time. This is the conclusion of our D&D discussion that we had to pause in the middle because it went for an entire hour. Enjoy!
It has been hard to take seeing with each new class release a whole bunch of nerfs, just tons of nerfs on various classes, many of which were not that strong to begin with. The Rogue is the most obvious example. And the classes that did get buffs were very small, like someone did the math, and sure, Champion Fighter does a little more damage now than they did before, even with the nerfs to all the important Martial feats, but it’s not much. And then here comes the Wizard –
Ari, Oren: [Laugh]
Oren: – and the Wizard, who was already the most powerful class, gets this amazing spell modification ability, which is just, my god. Like I love it, but it is so busted.
Ari: I want to talk about that a little bit, actually. The buffs and nerfs, specifically with that Champion Fighter, that series of videos that came out about this from some of the D&D content creators that I follow, there’s a couple of thoughts on this. So they were correct that at some levels, with some assumptions, the new Champion Fighter does more damage than an old 5e Champion Fighter doing the same build. But there’s a couple problems with that.
One, it has certain assumptions, specifically what your accuracy is, and that matters a lot because the 5e version is using the minus 5 to hit plus 10 damage. So the more accurate you are, the stronger those abilities get. And they’re also assuming that the old Fighter would be doing the same build as the new one, when, if you were really optimizing a Champion Fighter, you would be doing a ranged crossbow build, which you cannot do with the current 5.5 version. So there’s a couple of things wrong with that. But let’s just assume that those problems, whatever, we’ll put those to the side.
But one of the ways that it’s doing more average damage now is the weapon mastery that says when you miss, you do your stat modifier and damage, even if you miss. And that obviously brings up your damage floor from 0, to 3 to 5. That’s going to increase your average a lot because 0 is gone. You can’t do 0 damage anymore. That increases the floor and the average, but it actually decreases the ceiling because you’re no longer getting that plus 10 to damage. And, that’s fun.
Most players that I see and the way I hear it talked about, doing 50 damage in one hit is more fun than doing 50 damage across a bunch of other hits. Even if your damage is the same in the round, I’m doing 50 damage either way, but I hit five times for 10 damage each is less fun. Increasing your damage floor and average with a consolation prize mechanic of “you missed, but you still do a little damage” isn’t fun. It’s good. And I’m glad it’s in there. I think it should be. But they removed the big numbers. We know players love big numbers because they keep loving crits, even though crits are statistically very small damage boost. Crit fishing builds are popular. People enjoy them even though their damage is bad because people like seeing big numbers.
Oren: Numbers big, okay. Big numbers make big brain chemicals.
Ari: I like big number too. And so I want more big numbers. And so when they removed all the ways to do big number, that’s not, even if it’s not a nerf, there are still arguments to be made that the new version is worse. Even if you consider it a buff, it’s a buff in a way that’s less fun for the players. And that’s not good. That’s for the Martial side of things. We still haven’t seen the Monk, so we have no idea what that’s doing.
But talking about what you were mentioning with the casters, it’s so weird because I mentioned earlier in our discussion, why do you release something when you know the answer? The wizard spell crafting system. I cannot imagine the designers of the game looked at that and thought it was balanced, because anyone who understands how D&D works looks at that and says, “This is broken”. Even if you don’t try to exploit it, which some people are coming up with ways you could break it, just using it as intended. It is way too powerful. What response do you think you’re going to get when you ask players about it? So there’s that.
And then there is the Sorcerer can wish and break your campaign once they hit 18th level. Those were the two mechanics that stood out to me as “Why do this? Why are we doing this?” It’s making casters stronger, which isn’t in itself a bad thing. But when you look at what they’ve done in the rest of the game, generally keeping power pretty similar or lower than what it was before, why are casters the only one getting this treatment when they were the ones who needed it the least?
My tinfoil theory for at least the wizard spell crafting is that they made that system and couldn’t come up with a good way to balance it, so they released it as-is to see what people came up with, to see if there was a better idea than what they had. And there are a lot of good designers out there in the third-party scene. So maybe one of them can come up with a good thing and we’ll put it in their feedback, or release a video about it or something.
Oren: It’s a pretty comfortable looking tinfoil hat you got there.
Wes: [Laughs]
Ari: It is! But I’m trying to imagine why I would release something like that. And that’s the reason I can think of. What am I gaining from releasing something that I know is overpowered and I know all the feedback is going to tell me it’s overpowered? And the answer is: Get some free feedback and testing on a possible fix. I’m not asking for feedback about the mechanic. I already know the answer about the mechanic. That’s my tinfoil hat theory on that one anyway.
Oren: So, coming to Mythcreant soon, how to balance the wizard’s spell modification ability? [Laughs]
Ari: The boring way is just to increase the spell slot level of whatever spell you modify. Someone’s probably come up with something more interesting, but looking at it off the top of my head, that’s what I would do with it. It’s very confusing what they’ve chosen to buff. But on the bright side, the spell casting is exciting. I think that’s cool. I want the spell crafting system to exist in the new edition. I hope it does. I hope they figure out a way to make it fair. And I hope they remove that new Sorcerer ability because it’s awful and I hate it. I hope they keep one of the cool things that I actually got excited about.
Oren: I would be very sad if the new Wizard came out and it was just the old Wizard and they were like, “You said the thing was overpowered, so we took it out”.
Ari, Oren, Wes: [Laughing]
Ari: I’m hoping that’s what happens with the Druid because boy howdy, did they not understand how to make the Druid properly.
Oren: What exactly happened with the Druid? Can you remind me?
Ari: So the Druid has the newest in a long line of mechanics that are moving towards, instead of a bespoke series of stat blocks you choose from, you instead get a stat block template that you then layer flavor over it. So instead of turning into a brown bear, I turn into a “Beast of the Land” or whatever they called it. But I can say it’s a brown bear, but I’m not a brown bear anymore. Doesn’t matter what I am. I’m an elephant. I’m a brown bear. I’m a saber-tooth tiger. I’m the same stat block. I personally find this a very bad approach to design. I think at best you have something decently powerful and flavorless, because now it is completely on the player to come up with flavor for their mechanic. At worst, you have something weak and flavorless, which is the worst of both worlds. And that’s what happened with the Druid. Its new forms had zero inherent flavor to them and they were also bad. Like bad enough that the Moon Druid was better off not using its shape shifting, which is really not where you want your Moon Druid to be.
Oren: The Moon Druid is literally a subclass for using shape shifting. That’s what the Moon Druid is for.
Ari: If your Moon Druid doesn’t want to shape shift, something happened, because they took away, one of the big things about Wild Shape was it gave you more health, especially as a Moon Druid. And that’s very useful when you have a really low AC because you’re having a 13 AC because you’re a bear. So they took that away. Now it’s just the Druid’s health. I think it gave some temp HP maybe if I remember correctly. If it gave HP, it was a pittance. Not only did you not gain a lot of bonus XP, but you actually got easier to hurt and you had to be in melee. And so now all of a sudden your caster who is squishy because Druids only have a D8 and your AC is bad and you didn’t get enough bonus HP from your class feature. So you are easier to hurt while you are shape shifted. And when they knock you out, you literally are knocked out. And also its damage was bad. Its damage was arguably worse than just a Druid using a quarterstaff and Shillelagh.
So it’s another one of those things is, what are we testing here? Everyone agreed this was bad. So I imagine the folks at Wizards also knew it was bad. So I don’t know what feedback they were looking for there. And I don’t have tinfoil for this one because the balance for this one is way easier. You just make the numbers better. So I don’t know what they were looking for in the Druid.
But I hope they walk it back because the advantage of templates, which they’ve said, is that it’s easier on new players, especially because you don’t have to look through a bunch of monsters to figure out which one you like. Which, I sympathize with, but I think it’s worth that because it keeps the flavor and the fantasy of your character alive without you having to do all the work yourself. ‘Cause I know a popular saying in the D&D community is “flavor is free”, but that has its limits because otherwise you could make a game that had no descriptive text. It just told you “This ability does X damage to a target”. I won’t tell you how. It doesn’t have a name. It is “damage spell one”.
Oren, Wes: [Laughing]
Ari: If I designed that, people would be like, “That system sounds boring.” And then I said, “You can flavor it whatever you want. Flavor is free”. And they would rightfully call bullshit on that because that is a bad answer and you should have inherent flavor in your system and then you should let players modify it as they wish to fit their personal fantasy. That’s what you could do with shapeshifting.
It also is true with the Rangers’ companion when they change that to a template with familiars for Wizards and the like when they change that to a template, but especially for Druids because shapeshifting is such a core part of that class that you are now putting everything on the player. Whereas before, if I wanted to be like a Forest Druid, turning into a brown bear, totally fits with my character. But if I wanted to, and say I was from some other biome, I could be like “my brown bear is a little baby elephant”, instead. And I could reflavor it if I wanted to, but I didn’t have to because the game was giving me flavor to start with.
Oren: And it also just feels different. It feels like you have choices. In a perfect world, what it would be is you would turn into different animals for different situations. Now, of course, in reality, it doesn’t super work that way because D&D is not really a game where other things other than being the best in combat have huge value, but at least it gives you the feeling of that. Maybe I’m not always going to turn into a bear. Maybe sometimes I’ll be a wolf.
Ari: Honestly, I think there is a middle ground to be had here. So in my redesign for the Ranger, I made pets a central mechanic. One of the ways I controlled that a little bit was I offered several choices from an expanded pet table, a roster of options for the Ranger. And I tried to cover a wide variety of flavors. I tried to make sure all of them were roughly equal to each other in terms of damage output or tankiness or whatever. And you could do that too, because I understand when you have something like Wild Shape in the game, it makes producing new content difficult because anytime you make a new beast, you have to think about “is this broken if Druids turn into it”?
Oren: A player is going to be this thing, so be careful.
Ari: Same with Polymorph and stuff like that, those open-ended spells. I do think limiting them to some extent is good because it allows you to design other cool things that you don’t want players to turn into. But just turning it all into one template is just not the way to do it. I would understand if a solo designer did that because it’s hard to design a lot of options like that. But Wizards of the Coast is the best situated to have enough time and resources to actually come up with a reasonably good list of options.
If nothing else, you could just look at the popular picks people take, and then balance those beasts, rebalance them to make them more balanced against each other. Make the direwolf as good as the bear in some situations, or something like that. That’s totally a reasonable thing and offer just a selection of, I don’t know, five beasts or whatever. That doesn’t sound super hard. I could do that in a day of work maybe or even less, because I did it with the Ranger. I literally did that already. I know it’s possible. I hope they at least come up with a couple options for templates and I know they did come up with some options, real options, better options and make them good.
Oren: Weren’t the options originally just your actual beast and then the one that has a swim speed and the one with a flying speed?
Ari: Yeah, and you did a little bit less damage if you picked either of the other speeds. I don’t know why swim speed did less damage because swim speed is not generally very strong, but that was how they approached it. So, I hope they do more of a middle ground or they just walk it back. If we have to choose, I’ll take just the old Druid with no changes because Wild Shape is cool and I like having a ability that rewards you looking at the breadth of the game and looking in parts of the game you might not look at otherwise. Or you can just google good wild shapes and follow whatever the internet tells you.
Oren: Do we know much about what’s going on with the new Artificer? I missed out on that entirely.
Ari: We don’t talk about Artificers here.
Wes: [Laughing]
Ari: The playtests have, to my knowledge, made no real mention of them. I assume it’s not going to be in the new player’s handbook and maybe we’ll get it in an expansion book or something.
Oren: Oh really? Okay. I thought that was a joke. I thought there was an Artificer somewhere that I missed.
Ari: I don’t think so. I think the only class they’ve said they haven’t shown us yet is the Monks. I don’t think the Artificer is going to be there.
Oren: That would be hilarious. I thought, I was wondering about that because the Artificer was such a weird add-on to Fifth Edition. It was, for one thing, it was the only new class they ever released and it lacked a core identity. It has an identity flavor-wise but mechanically it lacks one. I was really hoping, I don’t know why I hoped this because I had no reason to think Wizards would do it, but I was really hoping that 5.5 would take what makes the Paladin work really well, which is a core mechanical identity with its smites and give that to the other half-caster classes. They did not do that. [Laughs]
Ari: There’s another major point I’d like to touch on.
Oren: Yes, please.
Ari: So another thing that I’ve seen in the new 5.5 design is “multi-classing is too good and we gotta fix that”.
Wes: [Laughs]
Ari: And I could not agree less. I enjoy optimization. I enjoy seeing what characters can do and it is true, at this moment, pretty much every optimized build uses multi-classing in some form. It is stronger than mono-classing. However, I don’t think the answer to that is to make multi-classing a lot worse, which seems to be what they’re doing. It should instead be to make mono-classing better, and this also solves a problem that D&D has where a lot of classes feel bad at higher levels, especially Martial ones.
If you make Martial stronger at high levels, not only does that make, “Hey, the Martial is more fun to play, that’s cool, we like that”, but it also means, “Hey, I am no longer being so heavily incentivized to drop this Martial character post-level 5” because now all of a sudden if playing a 14th level mono-classed Fighter feels really good, I might just do that instead of playing a Fighter–Ranger–Barbarian multi-class or some garbage.
Oren: Legend of the Five Rings actually did that between editions because back in the very first edition of Legend of the Five Rings, all of the various samurai schools, their first rank techniques were really powerful and everyone wanted to go around taking the first rank technique of each school, and I don’t even remember if that was officially allowed in the rules at that point –
Ari, Wes: [Chuckling]
Oren: – But it was a thing everyone did, both because it was cool in character, this idea of, “Yes, I have studied at every school in the land and I have learned their secrets”. That sounded like something that was perfect in a samurai story, but it was also just mechanically so tempting. So, in the later editions, and not every change in the later editions was good, but one of the things they changed that they were consistent about and that was great was that they made the later ranks of each school significantly better than the lower ranks and you could still make some pretty sick multi-school builds, especially in third edition, which got weird. You could do it and it was fun, but you also felt rewarded if you stuck with a single school up into the high ranks.
Ari: I would 100% agree, but instead for 5.5, they’ve made it better a little bit, like high-level Barbarian from what I’ve seen, mono, just the base class because we don’t have a lot of the subclasses, but both Fighter and Barbarians feel a little better at high levels than they did before, but they’re still not good enough and even with all the nerfs to multi-class, I’m still multi-classing a lot of the time from what I’ve seen of 5.5. One of their other solutions to this was to un-frontload some classes and to me, that is just not the way to go because low level is already boring in D&D and they’re making it more boring.
Wes: [Chuckles]
Ari: One of the things they did is standardize when all the classes get subclass features in an attempt to A, kind of standardize things, make it a little easier, but B, to nerf one level dips into Warlock or Sorcerer or Cleric. And I get the reasoning, but the end result is now every class is boring at level one, instead of most of the classes are boring at level one.
Oren: I think they did walk that back.
Ari: No, they’re keeping that.
Oren: Are they really?
Wes: Oh. [Laughs]
Ari: That’s one of the things, they’re walking back the “every class gets their class features at the same level”, but every class is still getting their subclass at the same level. So they’re walking some of it back. Some people are philosophically against it, the flavor of the character. I honestly don’t care that much about that. I can believe my Sorcerer doesn’t unlock the heart of their power until third level. That’s fine. It’s just for me, it’s a fun thing. I don’t want to wait till third level for every character before I get the cool stuff. I think every character should get the cool stuff at first level and just make your higher levels more appealing. And that’s how you get people to stick to your class.
Oren: Ari’s hot take is that first level shouldn’t suck to play.
Wes: [Laughs]
Ari: It shouldn’t. I did that, just recently in my Avernus game. For the first time in Fifth Edition, I started a campaign at level one because we had so many new players. I’m like, “Okay, this is the campaign. If it’s going to be useful, it’ll be useful in this one”. And, even the new players were bored. It wasn’t just my two veteran players who were bored at first level. 5.5 does not seem poised to fix that problem. If anything, they are making it worse by trying to un-frontload the class. You just got to backload the classes too. And then people will stick with them because people already want to stick with them. And if your goal is to fix complaints with nerfs to multi-classing, that’s never going to happen. Because if mono-classing is the best, people are going to complain about that. If multi-classing is the best, people will complain about that. Let’s say level 20 Champion Fighter was the best build in the game.
Oren, Wes: [Laughing]
Ari: Outperformed everyone else. It just did the most damage. It somehow could lock down entire fights. Whatever. It’s the best thing. People would complain so much. They would say, “This build is so simple. All you do is take 20 levels of Champion Fighter. It sucks. There’s no creativity. There’s no skill expression” or whatever. People would complain about it. Because I’ve seen those complaints about mono-class builds that are actually good. That’s what people level at them is that they’re not fun because you don’t think that much about them. You just take 20 levels of the class.
That is one of the complaints people had about Twilight Cleric. That you just take Twilight Cleric and you’re OP. If mono-classes are better, that’s the complaints you’re going to hear. No amount of balancing will fix complaining. People are just going to complain about whatever is good. Whether it’s mono or multi-classing. And I think it is very misguided to try and nerf them to fix them. You should just make mono-classing feel better to play. And the way you do that is by making it powerful.
Oren: I have actually recently encountered, that there is a philosophical argument against multi-classing because people don’t like the idea that a Warlock could make a deal with a patron and then also worship a god or something.
Ari: Oh yeah. I’ve seen people be like, “Yeah I don’t like it when my players multi-class when they’re just trying to be powerful”. I’m like, “Why? Why don’t you want your players to feel powerful?” That’s cool.
Wes: [Chuckles]
Ari: I want my players to feel powerful. If they think that the best way to do that is some cool multi-class, great. In my game, I’ve seen some GMs say, “I only allow multi-classing if they come up with an in-character reason that I accept”. And I find that so silly. To me, if they come up with a reason, cool. That’s great. I like it when my players come up with cool reasons for why their character does stuff. I’m never going to require it. If my player just says, “I want to multi-class into Warlock because Warlocks will make me OP”, I’ll be like, “Great”.
Wes: [Laughs]
Ari: Awesome. I want you to feel OP. Everyone should feel OP in my game if I can help it. It’s just so weird to me when I hear GMs be like, “My players are having too much fun and I had to put a stop to that”.
Oren: [Laughs]
Wes: Wizards was clearly listening to those GMs.
Ari: I’ve heard that. When a lot of these nerfs were announced, there were people like, “Yeah, this was a problem and it was too good and whatever”. But it was fun. We want that. We want things to be powerful. Being powerful is fun. There’s a limit to that idea. You don’t want things to be so powerful they’re not fun for other people. But a lot of this stuff people complained, weren’t too powerful. It wasn’t ruining other people’s fun at the table. People see powerful stuff and they want it to be nerfed and they don’t think too much about the consequences and what that might mean overall. They’re just like, “Yeah, this is gone. This is going to replace it. And is it going to be more fun than what came before?” And so far, the answer I’ve seen is no.
Oren: Yeah, I get it. I get that you’ve had your game ruined by an optimizer and the GM didn’t take steps to balance things out for everyone else. I get that the urge is to be like, “I wish Wizards would come down from the heavens and nerf that optimizer’s build”. But I don’t think that’s the productive way to look at this. Now, we are coming to the end of our two-part discussion on the rules. But before we go, I just want to ask both of you, since you guys play D&D more than me, and Wes, we’ll start with you, are you imagining that you’re actually going to use 5.5 or are you just going to stick with the existing 5.0?
Wes: [Laughs] Am I going to use 5e 2024?
Ari, Oren: [Laughing]
Wes: Can I get it for free? Yes. Am I not going to get it for free? No. Is someone else going to buy it and then I can take the time to learn the ins and outs and run a campaign that I can just play in? Sure. Am I going to make that effort? No. Pretty cut and dry.
Oren: Ari?
Ari: I will probably, in my own games, play some horrendous Frankenstein’s monster of 5 and 5.5. I will probably end up cherry-picking the rules that I like and I will put them as available to my group and then I will just leave the rest because a lot of the rules-tightening is stuff I do already and I’m just going to leave all the stuff I don’t care about. And I’ll be fine playing in one, whatever, if that’s what’s on the table. But for my own game, I’ll just continue making modifications and trying to amalgamate them into something fun.
Oren: Ari’s going to be running 5.25 over there.
Wes: [Laughs]
Ari: Yep, exactly.
Oren: All right, Ari, thanks so much for coming to complain about D&D with us.
Wes: Yeah, thanks Ari.
Ari: Of course. I love complaining about D&D. This was so much easier than writing articles.
Oren, Wes: [Laughing]
Oren: Next week, Chris will return and we will be back to our storytelling roots, but we just had to complain about D&D for a few weeks, so now you’ve all heard it. So, if you would like us to keep releasing one podcast at a time instead of all at once, the way that Wizards does its playtesting, you can join us on Patreon where we complain about D&D full-time. Just go to Patreon.com slash Mythcreants. And before we go, I want to thank a few of our existing patrons. First there’s Callie MacLeod. Next we have Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And finally, we have Kathy Ferguson, a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you all next week.
[Outro Music]Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.
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