Most Over/Underrated Class?

[Chaosticket]

Bard is #1 underrated class. Its not just a street performer but a "Red Mage" that can combine supportive White Magic with offensive Black Magic, and modest equipment options. That is before subclasses and Multiclassing are taken into account.

Lore Bard is better with spells, skills, supporting powers.

Valor Bard can cover any warrior needs in a party.

[Bosh]

Underrated: barbarians because of their survivabililty. It's often easy to overlook how useful survivability is out of combat as it opens up a lot of options that'll hurt you as well as a lot of Combat as War tactics that require just eating a lot of damage to pull off. Stuff like jumping off of tall buildings to escape from pursuit and just eating the falling damage. Wolf totem can be ludicrously powerful in a melee heavy party as well, if often did pretty decent DSP just from that even if I missed all of my own attacks.

Overrated: any characters that can't nova well. In my experience you get in less combats per rest than the game expects so being able to nova well counts for a lot. Even if you do get in a lot of combats, being able to blast a big climactic battle to pieces counts for a lot more than being able to keep trucking all day. Of course the contradicts what I said about barbarians above but the way I played my bard (extreme recklessness, eating huge buckets of damage) I couldn't keep on trucking all day but did fine in single big smashy combats.

[stoutstien]

Underrated: barbarians because of their survivabililty. It's often easy to overlook how useful survivability is out of combat as it opens up a lot of options that'll hurt you as well as a lot of Combat as War tactics that require just eating a lot of damage to pull off. Stuff like jumping off of tall buildings to escape from pursuit and just eating the falling damage. Wolf totem can be ludicrously powerful in a melee heavy party as well, if often did pretty decent DSP just from that even if I missed all of my own attacks.

Overrated: any characters that can't nova well. In my experience you get in less combats per rest than the game expects so being able to nova well counts for a lot. Even if you do get in a lot of combats, being able to blast a big climactic battle to pieces counts for a lot more than being able to keep trucking all day. Of course the contradicts what I said about barbarians above but the way I played my bard (extreme recklessness, eating huge buckets of damage) I couldn't keep on trucking all day but did fine in single big smashy combats.

Funny, I've always felt Nova capacity was over emphasized in importance. Sure a little is nice to have and most classes have some built-in but it is very high risk/high reward once you start stacking up resources into limited action economy.

[Eldariel]

Funny, I've always felt Nova capacity was over emphasized in importance. Sure a little is nice to have and most classes have some built-in but it is very high risk/high reward once you start stacking up resources into limited action economy.

If you wanna punch above your weight class, Nova capability is about the only way to do so. If the world is open/sandboxy, it thus opens up entirely different category of challenges you can tackle (and equally, reduces the number of encounters you will certainly die against if you fight - as there's no way to guarantee you won't run into something out of your normal level of power).

[diplomancer]

If you wanna punch above your weight class, Nova capability is about the only way to do so. If the world is open/sandboxy, it thus opens up entirely different category of challenges you can tackle (and equally, reduces the number of encounters you will certainly die against if you fight - as there's no way to guarantee you won't run into something out of your normal level of power).

Nova capacity is certainly a good thing, but it's dangerous for inexperienced players.

[Bosh]

Funny, I've always felt Nova capacity was over emphasized in importance. Sure a little is nice to have and most classes have some built-in but it is very high risk/high reward once you start stacking up resources into limited action economy.

Depends HIGHLY on your table. Mine has short sessions and so we often have sessions in which there is literally zero combat or just one fight. We usually (but not always) manage a long rest at the end of a session so we rarely get more than three fights per long rest. In that sort of environment noving becomes more important, especially if the DM ups the difficulty of fights to compensate for their infrequency. Sure other tables have more fights than us but I bet having just 1-2 fights between long rests is muuuuuuuch more common than having more than 6.

That's one reason I'm pushing for making long rests harder to come by next campaign to make attrition matter more.

[micahaphone]

Bosh it sounds like you'd enjoy playing with some type of Gritty Rest variant. In my experience it doesn't necessarily make the game grittier, it just makes the game and expected encounter rate slower. It's a godsend for game balance without making your world feel like it's full of deadly threats.

[MaxWilson]

but I bet having just 1-2 fights between long rests is muuuuuuuch more common than having more than 6.

Here's some data: https://www.enworld.org/threads/poll...ng-day.469801/

Click on the numbers to get more detail.

Short version: a 2-3 Hard/Deadly fights per day is more common than 6-8 Medium/Hard fights, but not by all that much.

[Fable Wright]

Here's some data: https://www.enworld.org/threads/poll...ng-day.469801/

Click on the numbers to get more detail.

Short version: a 2-3 Hard/Deadly fights per day is more common than 6-8 Medium/Hard fights, but not by all that much.

Eight percentage points is pretty huge; there is definitely a strong trend towards nova being better at a table, than nova not being better.

This is why I use "Gritty Realism" (with a few changes, like a long rest being on a specific day of the week for each player), which is admittedly neither gritty nor realism but does make for a world where Paladins have to think a little bit about whether or not to Smite with their highest level slot on a given day. But it does mean that if the paladin uses their highest level slots the first day after their long rest, it's up to six days before they get a refresh. While they might not have combat those days, that's still a lot of unknown time to worry about.

[MrStabby]

Eight percentage points is pretty huge; there is definitely a strong trend towards nova being better at a table, than nova not being better.

This is why I use "Gritty Realism" (with a few changes, like a long rest being on a specific day of the week for each player), which is admittedly neither gritty nor realism but does make for a world where Paladins have to think a little bit about whether or not to Smite with their highest level slot on a given day. But it does mean that if the paladin uses their highest level slots the first day after their long rest, it's up to six days before they get a refresh. While they might not have combat those days, that's still a lot of unknown time to worry about.

On the other hand that is 4 actual votes... don't read too much into a small sample survey.

[Bosh]

Bosh it sounds like you'd enjoy playing with some type of Gritty Rest variant. In my experience it doesn't necessarily make the game grittier, it just makes the game and expected encounter rate slower. It's a godsend for game balance without making your world feel like it's full of deadly threats.

Oh certainly. As a DM it'd be the very first thing I'd do. But not my turn to DM next, next up is a pirate campaign and I lobbied for a gritty realism rule and we agreed to have a "no long rests at sea" rule which I think is perfect.

[stoutstien]

Depends HIGHLY on your table. Mine has short sessions and so we often have sessions in which there is literally zero combat or just one fight. We usually (but not always) manage a long rest at the end of a session so we rarely get more than three fights per long rest. In that sort of environment noving becomes more important, especially if the DM ups the difficulty of fights to compensate for their infrequency. Sure other tables have more fights than us but I bet having just 1-2 fights between long rests is muuuuuuuch more common than having more than 6.

That's one reason I'm pushing for making long rests harder to come by next campaign to make attrition matter more.

Ah, isn't a little strange to base your views of over/underrated on a table that cutting the encounter per LR/SR down to 1 or 2? It's like if I say subtle metamagic is useless because my table allows slight of hand checks for sneaky casting.
*An easy trick is to remember that encounters ≠ combat all the time. The rogue sneaking past the guards, picking a lock, and grabbing the documents the party needed is potentially saving the party alot of resources in spell slots and so on.*

[Bosh]

Ah, isn't a little strange to base your views of over/underrated on a table that cutting the encounter per LR/SR down to 1 or 2? It's like if I say subtle metamagic is useless because my table allows slight of hand checks for sneaky casting.
*An easy trick is to remember that encounters ≠ combat all the time. The rogue sneaking past the guards, picking a lock, and grabbing the documents the party needed is potentially saving the party alot of resources in spell slots and so on.*

Good point about there being many non-combat encounters, but in my experience it's just far far far more common to have long RP-heavy tangents and then just a few encounters than long attrition death marches. Now I like sttrition feath marches a lot but haven't had one since I played TSR AD&D. Whatever else you can say about that game it ran FAST so you could really grind down players.

Also in general it's easier for more nova capable classes to adapt to death marches than less nova capable to adapt to a big smashy one-off fight.

[Petrocorus]

This post made me think about this DnDBeyond stats:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...haracter-rare/

Does anyone knows if there are more recent ones?