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Firbolg in the Playground
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Re: Morph Bark's Homebrew Tier Compendium
Spoilered for file sizes. Be sure to click this before opening the spoiler.
Spoiler
“...
...th-this... is an outrage! The defendant does not know his place, frankly we should move to remove him from court immediately and have the punishment inflicted right away!"
"Excuse me, could somebody please explain to me why the Honourable Prosecutor is sitting in my chair?"
"Wh-what? What is this?! National Outrage Day?!"
"No, just the real Justice in this case. Bailiff, kindly remove this man from the stand."
"No! NO! Get your... curse you all! My lawyer will hear of this! And your lawyers will hear from mine! And you from your lawyers! I'll be back, you hear me? I'LL BE BACK!"
Point #1: The Monk
Due to the surfacing of new evidence in the form of Exhibit B, re-examination of the Monk shall have to be post-poned to another date yet to be determined. The court accepts that the prosecution investigated the wrong evidence and moves to have the Retooled Monk stricken from it and replaced with the Monk Lite.
Point #2: Unchecked Homebrew
As our capable officers have informed me that they had to work off a list of possibilities submitted by the defendant himself. Due to its apparent incompleteness, further investigation may be necessary, as suggested by the defendant, Mr. Oskar. Cursory investigation into the Zealot suggests that is at least on-par with the official Totemist, which would suggest that the class falls in the Borderline Tier 3-4 range.
Point #3: The Ranger
The court accepts the defendants plea to re-examination of the Retooled Ranger. While the change in spell list does not influence the class in any major way, nor does the addition of Improved Evasion on account of the class having a good Reflex save and a likely Dexterity focus, ensuring the save will have a high chance of succeeding and thus negating all the damage with normal Evasion, nor does the boost to Combat Styles prove enough to boost it a Tier despite being a very good change and allowing greater flexibility in builds, the court accepts that the additional skills and Trapfinding--normally only accessible as an Alternative Class Feature--add to the class' versatility, as well as the changeable Favoured Enemy, Favoured Terrain and Favoured Plane. On top of this, the court makes note of the large changes in playstyle these additions and changes bring, as well including the addition of Uncanny Dodge and its Improved version and the boost to the Animal Companion, which the court agrees the Ranger deserves. As such, the court makes note of the defendant's concerns and moves to up its Tier.
Point #4: Project Heretica
Examining the files of the prosecution, they seem have noted that they deemed the other classes mentioned by Mr. Oskar 'similar enough to not warrant further individual investigation'. This is clearly laziness and investigation of the Paladin should not immediately count as investigation of the other classes as well, even though the prosecution did only present their case for the Paladin as not counting for the entire Project. As such, the court makes note to include the other parts of Project Heretica in further investigations.
Now, the court would like Mr. Oskar to know that his concerns regarding the Tiering process will be taken into regard. However, the court would like to inform Mr. Oskar that due to the presence of too few half-casters in official publications it becomes harder to place similar classes, especially since half-casting is usually not really a major feature and tends not to be capitalized on. Of the official classes falling into Tier 3 only the Ranger is one of them and the reason he falls into Tier 3 is because of his Wildshape ability, not his half-casting or other abilities. The others make use of greater-than-half-casting, martial maneuvers or other subsystems, the only true exception being the Duskblade, which falls into the lower end of Tier 3. The court would like to inform Mr. Oskar that it is for this reason that the Borderline Tier was created, which includes the Duskblade, the Totemist and others. Furthermore, the court does acknowledge that classes not using a subsystem can still fall into Tier 3, as the Chozo Warrior, Gambler and Olympian show, and which cursory investigation of the Retooled Monk (the non-Lite version) suggests it falls into.
The court would also like to inform all those present that it does not share the opinion of the prosecution that Wizards of the Coast is 'holy', 'wonderful' or 'illustrious'. The court could also really go for a cup of tea right now.
In any case, Mr. Oskar, I hope you enjoyed this examination and would like to see more of you in the future. As such, I am proud to say that...
tl;dr
OOC
Spoiler
To put this differently, after I chose T.G. Oskar for the purpose of this investigation (which I sincerely hope he liked and enjoyed to read and respond to), I realized that I might have chosen a person a little too... grand in his mechanations for a first investigation. Sure, it did allow me to kick this feature of the Homebrew Tier Compendium off with a blast, and sure, there will be more later on, just not yet, as I don't want to overdo this, but I experienced first-hand how Oskar (if I may call him that) can turn even a relatively simple class into a Big Read. And that's not even including everything in his spoiler boxes! It is for this reason that when I reached Project Heretica that I decided to only deal with the Paladin at the time (hence why I linked directly to the post the Paladin is in and not the first post of the thread) and I ended up skipping about a quarter of the links in his Extended Homebrew Signature entirely. I hope I did largely tackle his Retooled classes appropriately and his Warlock is prettymuch my go-to fix for the class if I wish to use a fix. I think my largest problems is, with regards to classes like his Ranger, that I simply am not familiar enough with the Druid's spell list of levels 1-4 to judge how much that would contribute to bringing the Ranger to a higher Tier. From Oskar's end, or any homebrewer's really, I think the problem is moreso not really a problem, but that a person is usually one of the most knowledgeable about their class and what they can do with it, which would automatically mean that by virtue of their mechanically prowess with the class alone they could bring it up a Tier. Sometimes though, a homebrewer overshoots or undershoots their intended goal, yet they cannot see it and think their class is Tier X, while in reality it is Tier X+2 or Tier X-1. In this particular case, I trust that Oskar has greater experience and knowledge about Druids and their spells and thus knows that they would genuinely help the Retooled Ranger to be better than the official Ranger, at least spellcasting-wise (though on part of Combat Style and Animal Companion it is flat-out better, no doubt about it) and that most of the time he certainly has his classes end up in the Tier he aimed for (I am guessing the fact that in his rebuttal he said nothing about the other classes of his that I Tiered means that he largely agrees with the Tiering for them).
Anyway, I had a lot of fun doing this and reading T.G. Oskar's reply.  I would like to thank him for his reply and thank Savannah for making the graphic, which will see more use in the future. The next full examination will not follow immediately, as it'd likely get old soon if I did them back-to-back and I'd burn out. I prefer to switch things up and keep it fresh, so the next one may not even go courtroom-style at all! In the meantime, stay tuned everybody, because there are a whole lot more classes waiting out there to be Tiered!
OOC tl;dr
Last edited by Morph Bark : 07-11-2012 at 02:27 PM.
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