I remembered a good brainfart of mine and wondered if anyone else had one to share.
Mine is this: I couldn’t figure out how to parry attacks in MGR: Revengence all the way up to Monsoon. I just jumped around a lot and played ultra aggressively and it worked! …Kind of! I just had to make sure I NEVER used heavy attacks. Blade Wolf was a nightmare but I was able to muscle through, but Monsoon? No way in hell.
I still blame the combat tutorial though. “To parry, push the control stick toward the enemy and press the light attack button!” I interpreted that as “just make sure you’re facing the enemy and time the button press right.” when they meant “Push the stick in the direction of the enemy and press attack AT THE SAME TIME.”
Heroes of the Storm: Alexstrasza in dragon form actually isn’t any tankier at all (even if she looks it) and wins fights by aggressively backlining no matter what
DnD (yeah the tabletop): The game really gets broken by Spellcasters once you understand that even if their damage is better than martial characters, the most powerful spells are generally AoE crowd control (Entangle, Web and Hypnotic Pattern) or story-warping RP spells. Also of note: the martial builds for Bard and Warlock are full casters that can still do almost everything a regular martial can do. An important part of mastering the game is realising how horrendously imbalanced it is
Dwarf Fortress: This is literally the core gameplay loop for the first 200 hours
I mean, you’re just wrong here. The ability grants a flat +500 health. That’s more tankier than not having 500 health. She also gains lifesteal from her melee attacks, adding even more health while attacking. And she gains reduced slow/root/stun duration, which also indirectly makes you more tanky by preventing damage you might otherwise have taken.
Sure, she doesn’t become a frontliner, but saying “she isn’t any tankier” is categorically false.
Slight exagguration, true, but I wouldn’t want to overexplain things to random guys without being invited. (Also the lifesteal on her attacks is only if you took both the Inner Fire and Ancient Flame talents at their respective levels)
Took me a couple hundred hours in Baldur’s Gate 3 to realize this. Crowd control is so stupidly over powered. Twin spelled hold person gives me free crits? Don’t mind if I do.
Welcome to DnD, where the martial/caster disparity is a feature, not a bug.
We’re actually really, really bad about balancing our content, please buy our overpriced rulebooks that offer very little guidance on how to actually use them.Tbh I didn’t truly realize how deeply fucked the class balance was until I started making a really really big homebrew that required me to build and balance eight classes (operating on the personal principle that since it’s a team game, all the classes should have roughly equal impact).
This philosophy right here is the fucking devil when it comes to designing co-op games
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LinearWarriorsQuadraticWizards
(I can link you my big homebrew if you like to play DnD 5e, by the way)
Yeah, I’m just convinced that the designers actively hate the martials classes. Even in the playtest for the new edition, after 10 years of people pointing out the martial/caster disparity, it took them over a year to write a somewhat decent skill set for martials.
(Link away! I’m always interested in homebrews for DnD. You should also consider posting it in the c/dndhomebrew community if you want more visibility. I still don’t know how to link Lemmy communities to users from different instances, but you should be able to access it from my post history.)
Martials are “balanced” its just that they’re balanced around like 8 encounters a day with multiple short rests so that casters actually have to conserve their slots. Which is of course a stupid goddamn way to balance the game because no ones going to play it that way.
From personal experience, by the time casters have depleted all their spell slots, martials are low on health as well, making the balance finicky at best even if you’re having multiple encounters per long rest. The game is balanced in a way that makes it impossible for martials to shine: you either play with few combat encounters, thus allowing the casters to shotgun their infinite spell slots at the enemy, or play with multiple combat encounters per long rest, which has martials on death’s door because their HP drop faster than the casters’ slots.
It’s also difficult, from a narrative perspective, to fit so many combat encounters in a single day, to the point that I honestly don’t think it’s possible unless you subscribe to some form of gritty realism ruleset (7-day long rests, long rests in safe zones, long rests at the end of a narrative arc, etc…).
I’m surprised the issues with D&D arent more commonly known. It’s a fine beginning system but, me and my friends literally couldn’t wait to move on to new systems once balance fell apart past level 10. Now we just play Savage Worlds, Pathfinder 2e and Call of Cthulhu.