Tier Definitions (potentially redefining)

[AvatarVecna]

You mentioned it yourself, there is an issue with where power and versatility are not equal at all points:

• Something may be "Strong" power in one or two roles, while only "Average" power in others, and "Complex" versatility.
• Something else may be "Strong" power in all of its roles, and "Complex" versatility.

Are these two the same? I would suggest not, but the system proposed wont handle it.

Indeed, a similar issue crops up with Bard and Psychic Warrior:

• A Bard is "Strong" power in some of its roles (notably those revolving around buffing and bluffing), while only "Average" power in others. It is, however, "Complex" versatility.
• A Psychic Warrior is "Strong" in all of its roles, although it is only "Simple" versatility.

The Bard is either a full tier ahead or not at all, depending on whether you choose "Strong" or "Average" for power.

Another issue that could be highlighted here is that all of the Psychic Warrior's roles are combat-orientated, even if it is not a "One-Trick-Pony", while the Bard has roles in both social and combat situations. Lets suppose the overall number of roles covered by the two were the same/similar, the Bard would still be more versatile in my opinion for having covered both combat and social situations. The proposed system doesn't cover this facet of versatility.

Basically, I don't think a tiering system is that good at covering such a number of variables. Personman's Niche system was/is the best I've seen at truly getting into where the classes are, although it is a little too coarse-grained. This issue is probably best highlighted by looking at the chart for Monk and Barbarian and then noting the final score.

This is, in fact, the purpose of this thread: people either presenting their own proposed tier definitions, or pointing out potential flaws/problems in my own to be addressed. I'm currently figuring out a good way to use the existence of the Niche System mentioned upthread to make differences like this easier for the system to account for.

Weren't there like a dozen threads doing this like 6 months ago?

And that's my feedback. It bores me to... tiers.

Sort of. Those threads were about reassigning classes to the tiers as they were originally defined, but ran into a few problems on both premise and implementation. For starters, the existing tier "definitions" were more observations about similarities between classes that performed approximately as well as each other...which meant that right out of the gate, the original tier system had two definitions for every tier: "a class is tier X if it is about as powerful as these other classes (which all have this vague descriptor Y in common)" or "a class is tier X if has Y in common with these other classes". Secondly, the re-tiering of classes was based on an opinion-based voting system in which anybody could throw in their two cents, including their mechanical arguments for why they're opinion on where classes (instead of builds) fit into the vague, not-all-that-well-defined tier system. To make matters worse, the voting for particular classes was only open for a brief fraction of time that the thread as a whole was open. You go back and read those threads, and you'll see that most of it's just arguing that Beguiler was mis-tiered...which was one of the earlier classes in the thread.

The point of this thread is fixing the first problem - that the tiers aren't super-well defined in the first place. By getting a definition that's based on mechanics and benchmarks for competency ("this class fills these Niche System roles, and fills those roles this well" or "this class can fill any three of these ten roles at this level of performance, and can change between those three this easily" instead of "this class feels better than a bard but worse than a wizard" or "this class is a spontaneous caster that knows its whole list"), the intended follow-up re-tiering thread will have fewer problems.

It will also eliminate the other problems by being run differently: namely, rather than a direct voting system, I'll start the thread having figured out how my proto-tiering system in this thread will use the numbers in the Niche System thread to extract a new tier, and that will be the assigned tier for that class...at which point people can make arguments that such-and-such class fills so-and-so role better or worse than the Niche System thread gives it credit for, and that because of that change in how we know X class performs at Y role, the tier for class X should change based on the rules laid out in the OP of this retiering-thread-to-be. The people in the thread can then vote on whether they think the proposed change makes sense based on the rules put forth. Voting also won't ever really close.