Quote Originally Posted by nihil8r View Post
if tier 1 classes are so good, then why doesn't everyone just play a wizard? right? well, in my mind, the party of 4 wizards going up against a fighter, a rogue, a wizard, and a cleric is going to lose every time. any all-magic party is going to lose to a balanced party every time. right?
Playing the same thing over and over is boring. An all-magic party can steamroll a balanced party, but not if they are unoptimized.

Take care with the term "balanced" there though, as a balanced party Tier-wise would be closer to factotum, crusader, dread necromancer and binder or something of the sort. You mean to refer to a balanced party as one with all the roles filled. However, a wizard with well-picked spells could fill the roles of the fighter and rogue pretty easily. It is for this reason it is Tier 1.


Let me say the most important thing though that will get repeated here a lot: the Tier system was not made to say "this class is bad" or such things. It is to show the versatility of classes.

From your post it is clear your idea of spellcasters aren't as filling the roles of the fighter or rogue or pull out overpowered stuff like Polymorph or Gate or summon tons of creatures and break the action economy.


One important bit of your post I find ironic is this:
i'd prefer things simply being called balanced, overpowered or underpowered
Simply replace "Tier 1" "overpowered", "Tier 3" with "balanced", "Tier 5" and "Tier 6" with "underpowered" and decide for yourself if you think Tier 2 and Tier 4 are balanced or over/underpowered. Voila, now you got a Tier system in your own words, which is actually nothing better than what you started out with.

The point is, magic is just damn versatile and powerful and those classes that don't have access to it therefore fall behind unless the casters they adventure with or fight against aren't optimized.