Morph Bark's Homebrew Tier Compendium

[Morph Bark]

But of course, I was simply reminding you not to dismiss the class to tier one offhand. I'd also bet that our personal definitions of tiers vary very slightly. Cool class though.

Good thing in the end I didn't, coming back to review the class fully, eh? One should never dismiss something easily like such, though I will if it is plainly badly made or the presentation sucks (for instance, if the whole class is bolded, has no table and is one giant merged block of text, to put it extremely).

I mainly try to stick to the "official" definition, so to say, hence why I often also compare classes to official ones and where those stand on the Tier list. Incarnum, for instance, is Borderline 3-4 if done well (Incarnate, Totemist), while ToB is generally Tier 3 and most spellcasting and psionics is Tier 3 and up.

Just one Tier request

The Wordsmith

Yes, it is based on one of the most fun games ever

Since it is a very new class, I will wait a while with Tiering it, so that you have time to get it reviewed and get suggestions to change it, update it, add to it, subtract from it and so on. The concept is a very cool one though, just like the game it comes from.

Hmm...while a majority of my Pyromancer class is setting things aflame(), I'd personally put it at tier 3, or borderline tier 3-4, because while what it does best involves fire, it can also heal and put itself on the front lines for a little while if need be. So, while its focus is damaging stuff with fire, it can do a few other things as well, albeit not as well as the classes that focus on that stuff. Still, in the end, I trust your judgmentmand just wanted to put out my opinion on the Pyromancer's tier placement.

It is a decent healer too, yeah, but healing isn't that big of a deal in 3.5 and damage is easy to do well with nearly all classes of Tier 4 and up. It can go into melee, but the abilities it gets for that seem to be more abilities that are useful to make sure you don't become a target if you accidentally end up in melee, not an incentive to actually go into melee. The feature that adds fire damage to a weapon also seems like it would be much better on a ranged weapon, especially since you're supposed to keep Dex your secondary high stat and Str is dump-worthy.

Limiting the feats to skill-related would either make work for the DM (if I left it to the DM to decide which feats were skill-related) or leave odd gaps (because a source I don’t have which the DM uses has skill-related feats). For example, by the wording you suggest (“feats that grant bonuses to skills (or feats that have such viable feats as prerequisites)”), Track wouldn’t be a Crackerjack bonus feat.

Hmmm, that's a good point. The problem with making all feats accessible though, is that you open up for cheese that will bump it up to Tier 2 in a heartbeat, putting the class all over the place. A different wording than the one I suggested previously might be much better though, so that'd it'd include feats like Track. (Although Track is way too easily reduced to a railroading tool, so that might be a bad example.)

If you ever have the time, I'd be interested to see where you think my Mythic Warrior class falls (I was shooting for a T3 Fighter, but I suspect it might fall into T4). Link is in sig.

It falls in Tier 4 territory pretty clearly. The abilities it gets at low-level are pretty weak, aside from Rage (which it can do more often than a Barbarian right off the bat, which is a good thing, but rather invalidates the entire Barbarian), which made me think it might end up falling into low Tier 4, relying mostly on Rage to pull it up. Dispelling Strike is good though, while Dismember can be overpowered, instantly getting rid of up to three worn magic items (ring, glove, bracer) and a held one, which might even completely invalidate them since two-handed fighting is the most common style in DnD. Furthermore, since "limb" is a loose definition, the ability might even allow the cutting off of heads, which in most cases is an instant kill (though since you have Behead as a capstone, one could infer you at least don't intend for the cutting off of heads with Dismember). The Ignore Force ability is likewise very powerful and might be better to instead be a dispel check like dispelling strike as a free action during movement, with perhaps allowing the expenditure of additional adrenaline to grant a large bonus on the dispel check (+6 or +8 or so). Overall, the class seems to have mainly some low bonuses to things with a few incredibly powerful abilities, making it hard to see the intended balance point had you not stated you mean to go for Tier 3. As a result, you instead end up with a Tier 4 with a few abilities that wouldn't look bad on a Tier 2.


Other classes to look over are currently on my to-do list, though it will be put on hold tomorrow evening through next Wednesday morning, as I'll be near-completely unavailable during that time.