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.”
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…).
Shoutout to Brutal Critical being the worst feature in the entire game for having minimal mechanical impact (sure it hits hard when you crit, but you have no way to boost crit rate outside Reckless Attack and the chances are still dreadful) and taking up no less than THREE levels on the core barbarian template.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eFc2qQTY9P3ym9fyMNYHC_mIogpt9kNrOdm5n_yj1cs/edit
Anyway, try this on for size! It’s a pretty big homebrew, but so long as you take it one step at a time it should all be balanced and make good sense
This is a 3rd party upgraded version of the that a lot of folks recommend. They put a lot of effort into balancing out different classes for the reasons mentioned above.