Quote Originally Posted by Psyren View Post
To quote Tippy, high-level casters get that way by being paranoid, ignoble cusses. They might even be like you, willing to fire your friends at the drop of a hat because they don't measure up to standards of utmost efficiency. Trusting someone like that to watch your back seems like a good way to end up trapped in a gem/mindraped to devotion and all your powerful magic items powering up the guy who was ruthless enough to reach even higher still.
As I've said, I'm just going to not hire the guy in the first place. They literally reduce my ability to contribute by eating into my wealth by level. It's not about trust. It's about characters necessarily having their tiers written on their forehead, and the lower tier characters having extra negative effects in addition to their usual low usefulness.

Of course, you could go it alone. And then the wizard who is equal to you in power but also has a fighter in tow can counter all your magic while his buddy rearranges your limbs. (Your actual limbs, mind, not those of your astral duplicate.)
I don't even know that you're right on that account, given that the wizard is presumably running less than half the cash that I am.

When was that precisely? Last time I checked, even a T5 class can handle CR-appropriate challenges. Hell, there's a thread floating around about optimizing commoners to T1 levels somewhere.
It happened when I started giving cash to weaker party members on the basis of their weakness. If the tier five class can handle themselves, then I don't need to give them money. As I noted above, I don't need to argue about whether imbalance exists in the game, because imbalance is a stated and obvious premise of this fix.