alt Tiers definition (?)

[awaken_D_M_golem]

Just connecting the numbers in the most obvious fashion.
Most likely this is combat only  though ...
Not sure what assumptions ought to be brought in.


Tier 6 would be a Less Than 60% failure rate, within 6 rounds.

Tier 5 would be a Less Than 50% failure rate, within 5 rounds.

Tier 4 would be a Less Than 40% failure rate, within 4 rounds.

Tier 3 would be a Less Than 30% failure rate, within 3 rounds.

Tier 2 would be a Less Than 20% failure rate, within 2 rounds.


PC Commoner 1 and 2 would be even a Tier 7, by this scale.
Explicitly successful Tiers 1s would be much rarer.
idk if this scale works for Social non-combat stuff, hmm.

I think the Same Game Test idea can fit into this rather easily.
(don't know if it's originators would want that)
I presume the supposed game maths, would assume Tier 5 to be normal.


Hard maths based, but no easier to prove.
What do you think 

[Power]

Considering that it is a hallmark of better players to swiftly reduce the enemy into a pile of suck where the combat becomes a mop-up during the subsequent rounds, this list wouldn't work well. This tiering leans heavily towards promoting minmaxed blasting and save or die abilities to end combat as soon as possible.

[eggynack]

Yeah, this doesn't make much sense to me. A moderately optimized wizard is often going to slowly destroy the enemy over the course of a pile of rounds, and find inevitable success in their encounters with that strategy. A barbarian is going to kill anything it kills just about immediately, but will have a number of enemies which it just fails against. Beyond that, the tier system is somewhat exponential, at least in terms of the gap between tier three and tier two, and your purely linear system doesn't capture that.

[faeryn]

I never put much stock in the whole tiers system in the first place... reason being, what one person may think makes a class  uber powerful or utter suckage, may not be the same to someone else who plays the game in a different direction...

For example:
Player A thinks the Warmage is utterly useless since all it does is blasting spells but the Beguiler is a god class to them since it can control the battlefield.
Player B thinks the Beguiler is utterly useless since it has a limited supply of strong damaging abilities but the Warmage is a god class to them since it has strong Blasting powers and gets an added damage bonus.
Player C thinks both are useless since they rely on a limited daily resource to do their thing but sees the Fighter as a god class since it can do damage or control the battle field an unlimited number of times per day depending on their feat choices.
Player D on the otherhand thinks all of those are fine options but a Bard is a true god class since it can be a jack of all trades.

No matter what criteria you base it on your going to inevitably rank classes in higher or lower tiers than others believe they deserve due to different views and playstyles. An accurate tier system would have to rank each class for each individual aspect of play... and you could theoretically provide an "overall" by averaging their ranking in each aspect but odds are the "overall" would put just about every class at Tier4 (which if it does then that's actually a good thing honestly)... Ideally all classes should rank T4 overall, anything that ranks under T4 overall needs improvements ad anything that ranks over T5 overall is overpowered.

[eggynack]

I never put much stock in the whole tiers system in the first place... reason being, what one person may think makes a class  uber powerful or utter suckage, may not be the same to someone else who plays the game in a different direction...

For example:
Player A thinks the Warmage is utterly useless since all it does is blasting spells but the Beguiler is a god class to them since it can control the battlefield.
Player B thinks the Beguiler is utterly useless since it has a limited supply of strong damaging abilities but the Warmage is a god class to them since it has strong Blasting powers and gets an added damage bonus.
Player C thinks both are useless since they rely on a limited daily resource to do their thing but sees the Fighter as a god class since it can do damage or control the battle field an unlimited number of times per day depending on their feat choices.
Player D on the otherhand thinks all of those are fine options but a Bard is a true god class since it can be a jack of all trades.

No matter what criteria you base it on your going to inevitably rank classes in higher or lower tiers than others believe they deserve due to different views and playstyles. An accurate tier system would have to rank each class for each individual aspect of play... and you could theoretically provide an "overall" by averaging their ranking in each aspect but odds are the "overall" would put just about every class at Tier4 (which if it does then that's actually a good thing honestly)... Ideally all classes should rank T4 overall, anything that ranks under T4 overall needs improvements ad anything that ranks over T5 overall is overpowered.

I disagree. There are definitely classes that are more powerful than others. There are few to no ways, for example, that a monk is superior to a druid, and a massive number of ways that the inverse is true. And, beyond that, something like the same game test can prove rather conclusively whether one class is more capable than another. Sure, there can be some room around the edges for preference, and plenty of arguments have popped up because of that, but there are big gaps there that don't disappear even with those differences. Some might claim paladins as tier four or even three on the premise of A-game paladin style tricks, but they're still going to lack the problem solving capabilities of a cleric. Hell, they'll probably also lack the combat capabilities of a cleric, and the party helping abilities of a cleric, and the sneaking abilities of a cleric, and the everything else of a cleric.

In that vein, the system you discuss, where classes are measured on a number of criteria instead of by a single number, does exist. It's called the niche ranking system. While I don't think the system is flawless by any means (just look how closely the sorcerer ranks to the wizard, because the system doesn't account for how many niches a class can fill simultaneously), it does show well the thing I'm describing. That thing being that what makes tier one characters tier one is that they are often better than other characters in their core area of expertise. Again consider the comparison between the monk and druid, here laid bare by so many tiny comparisons. Note that, unless I'm mistaken, the druid ranks higher in every single possible niche. And, because the druid is prepared rather than spontaneous, the class doesn't have to ditch niches for other niches. And it can likely cover several niches simultaneously better, rather than worse. The class isn't even worse at endurance, due to its long duration wild shape, also frequently long duration spells, and infinite duration animal companion. While there may be a subjective element to tier grading (and Jaronk has been accused of that in the past with regard to classes like the factotum and the ToB classes), there is also a very strong objective element, because some classes are just better.

[SorO_Lost]

I never put much stock in the whole tiers system in the first place...

That'd be because the most famous post about tiers in D&D was making a rebuttal about how Factotums are the best class in the game. The presentation is purposely an argument with some very badly linked kettle logic as it's only consistency and it does a very poor job at describing things on top of asserting the fallacy that a new player running a Wizard will somehow match what generally any of us could do with a Fighter. It's best you just forget the entire thing and start new.

Ranking characters into a tier has been around for decades, you're probably more familiar with the concept through Smash Brothers's Metaknight & Roy or maybe even Mario Kart Wii's Funky Kong. Regardless of player skill or knowledge, some characters are just plain superior to others. And in D&D the only true way to quickly summarize a character's potential is their inherent access to magic since it is both a very common and very powerful resource that less than half the Classes & PrCs can even touch on. But it is just a Class summery and nothing more. Player, Campaign, DM adaption, and even the whims of everyone's character design and intent can greatly affect how things will end up happening on the table top. And the real key to a balanced game, as the BG would say, is don't be a douche bag.

[eggynack]

That'd be because the most famous post about tiers in D&D was making a rebuttal about how Factotums are the best class in the game. The presentation is purposely an argument with some very badly linked kettle logic as it's only consistency and it does a very poor job at describing things on top of asserting the fallacy that a new player running a Wizard will somehow match what generally any of us could do with a Fighter. It's best you just forget the entire thing and start new.

It's not a perfect system by any means, but I think it gets most things right. Even with the factotum, JaronK only placed the thing in tier three, which seems accurate placement-wise, which I think negates the weirdness with the personal factotum experiences section. Also, the system doesn't have that fallacy at all. It explicitly claims that player skill and optimization can elevate a class above its claimed tier, and vice versa. There are two flaws with the system though. First, there's something of an upper bound on how comprehensive the thing can be, as it assumes a book limited game and moderate optimization. The list is somewhat robust in reaction to changes of that form, but it's not infinitely flexible, and varying some factors will move tiers around somewhat. Second, I think that optimization has advanced somewhat since then. It's not like we of the present are insanely enlightened, but it feels like they overrated some classes, like the warblade, and underrated others, like the warlock. We're still only talking about something like a tier of movement, so it doesn't invalidate the tier system as a resource by any means, but it does mean that rankings should be taken with a grain of salt.

[Unbeliever]

I've long not thought the Tiers system is particularly helpful.  But, and related to the OP, my general complaint is that they seem to overprize flexibility.  Having a handful of good tricks, especially if we call "combat" a good trick, can make a perfectly awesome D&D character b/c that's such a big part of the game.

I've been sort of boggled when I've seen games that say "aiming for Tier 3" or something like that.

[eggynack]

I've long not thought the Tiers system is particularly helpful.  But, and related to the OP, my general complaint is that they seem to overprize flexibility.  Having a handful of good tricks, especially if we call "combat" a good trick, can make a perfectly awesome D&D character b/c that's such a big part of the game.

Well, leaving aside the question of in combat versus out of combat, flexibility frequently has applications even in a solely hack and slash campaign. An ubercharger can kill just about anyone they can hit, but plenty of enemies maintain their distance, or have anti-stabbing defenses (mirror image is a classic example), or comes in a group that makes stabbing individuals inefficient. A caster can often also kill enemies in one shot, but they can also hit a group, and bypass just about any defense you can put in front of them, and, from the other angle, have those selfsame defenses that make enemies worse at threatening them. And those kindsa discrepancies hold throughout the tier system. More comprehensive and robust offenses and defenses pop up when you move through the tiers, because that's just the way the game was designed.

As for focusing too much on flexibility, I don't see the problem. Some characters, like the aforementioned barbarian, have that handful of good tricks. A higher tier character, even something a bit higher up like a bard, has a larger handful of good tricks, and they hit that point without sacrificing the efficacy of the individual tricks. It'd be one thing if it were a question of barbarians with their one excellent trick versus bards with a few weaker tricks, but, in some respects, those bard tricks actually manage to be better. And a wizard trick is liable to be much better, even in a crowd of thousands of other tricks. What the tier system actually values is the ability to deal with any particular encounter, and the degree to which they'll be able to help, and that's effectively a measure of power and versatility simultaneously, even while it explicitly measures neither.

I've been sort of boggled when I've seen games that say "aiming for Tier 3" or something like that.

Well, there're a number of other reasons behind that. Tier three is notable because it's massive, and it has a massive number of subsystems. You can find just about any character type in tier three, and most of the subsystems in the game are likewise represented. Also, characters in that tier are obviously at least reasonably balanced, allowing for discrepancies in people's opinions of tiering. So, there's a lot of incentive to hang around tier three.

[Unbeliever]

I've been sort of boggled when I've seen games that say "aiming for Tier 3" or something like that.

Well, there're a number of other reasons behind that. Tier three is notable because it's massive, and it has a massive number of subsystems. You can find just about any character type in tier three, and most of the subsystems in the game are likewise represented. Also, characters in that tier are obviously at least reasonably balanced, allowing for discrepancies in people's opinions of tiering. So, there's a lot of incentive to hang around tier three.

I will bet you good money that if I show up to a game that is Tier 3 or below with a Barbarian that does an arbitrarily large amount of damage reliably, it will be considered gauche.  Likewise, pick your favorite blaster or other mid-tier character.  And, before you say it, such a character would be not a glass cannon, able to survive multiple encounters, deal with range on occasion, etc.  It doesn't take too much work to do all of that. 

This, among other things, is all the stuff that the Tiers system really wants to address but kind of glances off of it obliquely. 

[eggynack]

I will bet you good money that if I show up to a game that is Tier 3 or below with a Barbarian that does an arbitrarily large amount of damage reliably, it will be considered gauche.  Likewise, pick your favorite blaster or other mid-tier character.  And, before you say it, such a character would be not a glass cannon, able to survive multiple encounters, deal with range on occasion, etc.  It doesn't take too much work to do all of that. 

This, among other things, is all the stuff that the Tiers system really wants to address but kind of glances off of it obliquely.

I mean, I'm pretty sure I could also design a tier three character that would outshine that barbarian, in spite of its increased capabilities. Optimization differential can count for a tier or two, and the system makes no secret of that. And, sure, you can probably attack at range, but it seems doubtful that you'd be able to do it really effectively, or overcome all of the weird defenses that aren't purely distance oriented.

[TC X0 Lt 0X]

The Tier system really works best in the vacuum where feats, equipment, and such aren't really considered unless those options are explicitly apart of the class chassis like the fighter feats or otherwise is exclusive to the class, and even then those options are taken with a grain of salt. When you bring all the other character options then of course the system that tiers CLASSES will break down.

Hell a commoner with a custom magic item of At-Will Miracle is probably outperforming all the non 9 level casters simply by being able to duplicate a good majority of their effects with his magic item. Some feats and Items make some classes obsolete despite those classes otherwise being decent.

[TiaC]

I will bet you good money that if I show up to a game that is Tier 3 or below with a Barbarian that does an arbitrarily large amount of damage reliably, it will be considered gauche.  Likewise, pick your favorite blaster or other mid-tier character.  And, before you say it, such a character would be not a glass cannon, able to survive multiple encounters, deal with range on occasion, etc.  It doesn't take too much work to do all of that. 

It is my experience that an Ubercharger is far more disruptive than a Buffs and BFC Wizard, despite being a few tiers lower. Every combat has to be set up so the charger can contribute but doesn't trivialize the fight, while avoiding the appearance of metagaming. It really limits encounter design. Meanwhile, for the wizard, the DM can generally just make fights a bit harder without much worry.

[Unbeliever]

Like I said, I don't think the Tiers system is entirely useless.  But, it puts a thumb on the scale for versatility, and from a game balance or intraparty parity perspective, that's not as important.  Or, that's my contention. 

More or less what TiaC said. 

So, as a heuristic I've always found it lacking.  Having 19 different ways of breaking the game or whatever (where "whatever" is the measure we're looking for) isn't a ton more important than having 5 ways of doing so.  A lot of this, I suspect, is driven by the fact that the most rules-laden and one of the most important aspects of D&D is combat.  Which is fine, it's an action game.  That's part of its appeal. 

And, this is all taking into account some roughly equal level of practical optimization.  I don't think an ubercharger is all that more esoteric and complex than somebody who reads the God Wizard guide.  And, I just picked that as a fairly straightforward low tier example.  A better one is a Warblade Ubercharger. 

All of which is just to say that I don't love the Tiers as a heuristic.

[SorO_Lost]

I like how the general feedback form the thread is it's not that helpful but Eggy feels the need to reply to nearly every single post to defend it because that's just great! 

Except the Tier thread was powered by circulatory logic and hindsight edited updates. It's core problem is that you can't throw stones on the ground to invent a measurement system off it and expect it to work. In it's original 339 post JK in a non-exaggerated way talks about being sick of vs threads and wanted to publish a guide/answer/final authority on the matter. By BG the introduction was revamped to stating five goals, one of which was providing houserules to handle tiering such as awarding higher Point Buy to lower ranked classes but that entire section was wiped when it got ported over to the MMX boards by JK him self to focus more on board arguments instead of educational discussion.

And that comes back to how it never had a grading rubric to determine things or even had a noble goal. Rather JK whom even admitted a limited knowledge of things arbitrarily picked things from limited forum feedback in order to provide the king of all vs threads. As such the concept of optimization changes things and subsequently book counts & ACF exceptions were added as rankings were challenged and proven erroneous. Things even went so far as color codes for top/bottom being added when a class was proven beyond a doubt to be better than any of it's equally ranked classes. This is mostly because JK typically refused to actually move a class and instead favored "being right" caulking any findings proving his list otherwise as special exceptions.

And similar to the loss of suggested houserules, the post devolved from education to outright trolling hundreds of vs threads because nothing spreads faster than hate and wanting to correct wrongness. The tier thread is ultimately our greatest bane, a GitP style troll thread infecting our board. There has been dozens of better alternatives, both before and after JK's thread, and while it's probably narcissistic of me the best one out there is mine and it's understood in one sentence: The more magic you have the better you are. Which is pretty much #1 & #5 of Caelic's entertaining post on optimization. And that's all that needs to be said on tier ranking, the question is will someone ever add an actual usage to it or will they continue to bitch about rankings?

As this thread proves, that day won't be coming soon.

[eggynack]

I mostly just think it's a useful tool. I'm somewhat beyond it now, because you're tier lists generally become less useful when you know a lot about the overall gaming system, but, especially starting out, the notion of grading classes in terms of their ability to contribute to things, in a way that balances out power and versatility while eschewing more easy to come by tests of power, really informed the way I understood and approached the game. Also important to my understanding was the notion that game balance isn't about character versus world, but about character versus character. Imbalance in D&D is not a thing in a vacuum, with a wizard and a monk being equally balanced given parties that match their power, and the tier system is where I first learned that. And, while you can speak of newer and more robust, accurate, and flexible tier systems in the here and now (your tier system mostly hits the second of those criteria, but misses the first and third, I think), those systems owe a debt to the first one to come out, as they're largely patterned after the original and use it as a baseline of understanding. Moreover, I find it helpful in terms of the way it adds to our shared language within the game. I've found that "Tier three", for example, has a lot of conveyance to it. If the system doesn't seem to have that much value now, it's because we're so far removed from it that the things there just seem obvious and understood.

So, yes, I do reply to posts on this topic, because I think the system, on these bases and others, is one worth defending. If you honestly consider this sort of discussion an infection, then it'd likely behoove you to stop contributing to that infection, because you and faeryn were the ones who actually started up this debate. It seems rather hypocritical to make a big deal about something that you're pushing towards with your own actions. And, again, I agree that the tier system is flawed. Many arguments in the past have been rather convincing as to the placement of individual classes, occasionally even with the requirement that you stay within that book limited setting (with the warlock and warblade as two that seem plausibly misplaced). But, for its imperfections, the tier system also has a lot that it's right about, both the general placement (rather than precise and specific placement) of classes, and the underlying philosophy.

[awaken_D_M_golem]

Respondng to the first few ...

Power, I was thinking builds more like i.p.proofing with slight conservatism, say perhaps like the dreamscarred series late at 339 detuned to suit.

Eggy, of course I'm spit-balling a little, while it isn't exponential, it is above geometric.  It looks like a 1/x S curve.  Tier 6 eats resources to stay alive, unlike Tier 5. Tier 4 is 1.5* > Tier 5 speed of success rate.  Tier 3 is 1.75* > Tier 4.  Tier 2 is 2* > Tier 3.  A hypothetical Tier 1 is 4* > Tier 2 (proof necessary for that grade).

Faeryn "Ideally all classes should rank T4 overall" ... hmm I don't think that is solidly agreed upon.  Common campaigns.  Some of the c.o. pbp games around here. 

SorO mentions the 2 Caelic's Commandments, verily I say unto ye ...
I think a group could grade the likelyhood that a given CoDzilla build minus a few CLs, will succeed along the scale I posted.
(I'm not saying it's a good idea, I don't know that yet)


Still have no idea what assumptions should be brought to the table.

[eggynack]

I just really don't think that speed of enemy disposal is a valid metric. No one actually cares about whether the enemy is killed in two rounds or five outside of weird scenarios, so if that number matches up with an accurate power ranking, it seems like that'd happen by pure chance. For the sake of argument, one could easily imagine a class that defeats enemies in ten rounds 100% of the time, and a  second that defeats enemies in one round 10% of the time, and the former would be clearly superior. Success rate is closer to valid, but it loses something when you consider that PC's are expected to win against the majority of foes, and that what happens more often than not is success with some resource depletion.

With that in mind, it doesn't seem like either metric works all that well. If you really want a purely numerical metric, then how about, I dunno, the highest CR against which the class wins 50% of the time. Do that at each level, or every five levels, and use the difference between the level and the CR as the tier, so you get good and comprehensive data. Then maybe normalize the data such that numbers at different levels look pretty much the same. And, if you want the actual tier of a class, you can just average the sub-tier at each level. That is just for fights though, so if you want, you could do some adventures of varying CR's for the same general effect. That, and not this weird percent success over time system, is the kind of thing you'd need to do to get a solid mathematical model for tiering.

[SorO_Lost]

Still have no idea what assumptions should be brought to the table.

The ones that actually matter.

Don't be a douchebag and disrupt the game for funizies otherwise people leave and stop inviting you. Don't try to overshadow players and sometimes even if you have the better tool hanging back for someone else to have their moment is a good thing. And you need to openly converse with people to address something that does actually matter: are the required party roles covered?

D&D assumes the party will be built with a minimum four man team comprised of a priest, arcanist, thief, and meatshield. Outside of extreme examples like Eggy whose only reason for being here is to jerk off over how a fully rested & buffed Cleric can beat a Rogue in a open combat, no one really gives a flying squirrel's nuts about some retarded king all vs threads that fails in every possible way. What matters is giving people a head's up that those rules are assumed to the point where their typical traits such as healing and battlefield control are often requirements to successfully run a published adventure.

Likewise there is very little value in knowing if the player to your left is a Barbarian or not. An ubercharger can break the game just as easily as a Common who paid attention to the Crafting Skill entry and neither one of these things are a Wizard. What matters is you know the guy is trying to fill the meatshield role and you would like to have some kind of idea of how well he is going to do it so you won't end up being douchebag that, whether indirectly or not, that made superior meatshield to overshadow them. And this is where the gentleman's agreement, king of all relevant points that actually deserve to be discussed, comes in.

But I digress far to far really. I've held onto the stubborn stance that someone else needs to write about this and really it should apply to any long post too. We both know I'd lace way to much hate and bashing into it for it to actually be presentable.

[eggynack]

Outside of extreme examples like Eggy whose only reason for being here is to jerk off over how a fully rested & buffed Cleric can beat a Rogue in a open combat, no one really gives a flying squirrel's nuts about some retarded king all vs threads that fails in every possible way.

Now you're just strawmanning. Versus threads have nothing to do with the tier system, and I've asserted nothing even close to what you're saying here. Yes, sometimes tier discussions lead to versus threads, but I tend to agree that those are silly. They're really only relevant when testing really specific facets of a character, and even then, sending classes at various encounters is just better. The ultimate goal of the tier system is about the underlying functioning of your four man team. The ideal party is one where an encounter can be presented that both challenges the strongest party member, and doesn't steamroll the weakest party member. You say that the players should work not to overshadow each other, and hold back, right? But who is supposed to hold back in the party with a wizard and a monk, and who is supposed to go all out? When a DM wants to nerf the strongest party member, which class should be nerfed? Around which classes should caution be exercised, lest they accidentally cause harm to the game? Those, and not questions of direct character on character combat, are the problems that the tier system seeks to address.

Also, it's worth note that, while you go around hurling invective about the tier system, and at its proponents, I was the one making actual suggestions about this idea. I think you're the one obsessed with these tier system arguments, rather than me, or at least you're far more deeply invested, given that I've somehow managed to have this conversation without being pointlessly insulting.