Tiers?

[eggs]

Do anyone actually played a Tier 4 character in a party of Tier 1/2 where mechanics are indeed used?
If you did you should understand that it is not an empty problem.

Yes. Which is why I say class is not the problem that needs a tool to address.

One of the games when I was still figuring stuff out for the Divine Mind handbook, the rest of the party consisted of a Wilder, a control wizard and an Unseen Seer. The Divine Mind's astral constructs, debuffs, enchantments, tactical teleports and eventual metamorphic transferred abilities were plenty for it to keep up. If anyone was out of place, it was the Wilder, who was too miserly with his PP to ever make a major impact.

That's not to say character build-based imbalance isn't a problem, but this notion that balance problems will occur if tiers are mixed is just untrue.

I think the Tier system did sprout out one useful idea, despite my objections to its initial premise: gauging performance with a set gauntlet of challenges, such as the ones Frank&K referred to in their class design discussions (ie. Directly examining how well a character would perform in a social scenario, a stealth scenario, a trap scenario, mass combat, single-opponent combat, overcoming mobility obstacles, etc.). But those gauntlets are much more informative when applied to specific character builds than they are to classes as a whole.