Tiers?

[Kelb_Panthera]

Truenamers, sir, would like a word with you about this statement.

You haven't actually crunched the numbers, he tells me.

Truenamer is perfectly capable of auto-hitting his target truename DC's at all but a couple levels around 17-19 with no cheese even by following the designers' assumption of building on the elite array. Even then he's hitting them fairly reliably, and at 20 he can produce several gates per day with no cost, before he even has to start making a check.

Since he -can- produce the effects he's supposed to, several times per day each, with no checks, he's perfectly useable. He's certainly not overwhelmingly poweful, but he belongs somewhere around T4.

@shneeky: The tier system doesn't assume highest level optimization. If it did it would be completely misorganized. Paladin should be somewhere around the low end of T2 just for example, and none of the martial adepts would belong in T3. Though honestly, I'm not entirely convinced that warblade and crusader belong in T3 even as the system stands, though that's a completely different discussion.

Noone's denying that the tier system can have some use. Well, most of us aren't anyway. What we are arguing is that its usefulness is far more limited than it's generally given credit for.

@ whoever said it: I have played a god wizard in a party with a druid a fighter and a monk. I let the druid take care of himself and I boosted the fighter and to a surprisingly (to most of the folks here it'd be surprising) lesser extent the monk. Everybody had a blast and noone felt useless. The key was in the DM talking over our characters with us and giving each of us a chance to shine. The fact that we were at opposite ends of the tier spectrum and my character was a bit more optimized than the others had zero impact on the game.

No amount of mechanical mastery can ever substitute for good communication and cooperation within the group.