Quote Originally Posted by Skrum View Post
This is true on paper but as you note the in-game effectiveness of each of these abilities is pretty uneven.

Barbarians barely scale at all beyond level 5. Rogues suffer their entire career with only getting one attack (and being bonus action starved). Rangers get...well not a whole lot, as you note. Monks take way too long to get a ki pool that actually lets them function. Fighters and paladins have the best options, with paladins in particular benefiting enormously from the "not recommended but fairly common 5MWD."

Call me crazy but the classes should be updated to account for how they actually perform in game, and for how people actually play.

I find it wild that full casters follow a very specific formula, making those classes all very good and able to stack with each other, while each martial class is a "lets reinvent the wheel 5 times."
You can't re-design for the 5MWD or you screw all long rest classes when you do end up with a long day, and basically guarantee you only get 5MWDs, which just leads to a more bland game. Also, 5MWDs are one of those things that self propagate, if intelligent players believe they can get away with it, they will, if they they believe that it's going to be a long day then they act like it even if it ends up being a 5MWD. The better option is a lot of what is happening in 5.5. Reducing the ability to rapidly burn resources (Paladins only being able to smite once a round, which got a lot of hate on here when proposed) and ways for short rest classes to quickly get back resources so they fair better in short work days.

Rogues are an interesting beast. I haven't played one in a sit down game, my experience with them is mostly Solasta, BG3, and my own experimentations. They seem to preform really well when they can get advantage (which they can pretty easily generate through bonus action hiding in the video games), so I wonder how much them feeling bad is them either being played badly, or just having gaining advantage be much harder in a sit down game.

That thought leads nicely in to why Extra Attack feels so important. In general most attacks are going to be made with a 40% to 80%? hit chance? If you get 2 rolls of the dice (Extra Attack sans Adv., or one attack with Adv.), that's 64% to 96% chance of doing damage with a smaller chance of doing double damage with Extra Attack. Which means most turns the martial will have done something if they took the attack action. Which leads to another thought, seeing more (or even some, since I can't think of any non-spell example) abilities that can be used on a miss or near miss attack. They wouldn't add to peak output in a turn, but they reduce the odds of the turn overall being wasted. These would likely slot in nicely for the Fighter (at least if you assume their flavor as weapon master), but can easily make sense to some varying degree on most martials.

As a final note, full casters don't stack nearly as well as you would think with multi-classing. In practice the combined caster level for spell slots when multi-classing is actually a nerf on full casters. Without proper upcasting those additional higher level slots you don't have spells for aren't nearly as powerful as the many additional lower level slots you would logically get if you didn't have that multi-classing mechanic.