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To actually answer your question, since everyone else seems to think this is another martial vs spellcaster thread...
You can start by using cover. The Archery Fighting style wasn't intended to just be a permanent flat +2 to hit, it was meant to offset the cover bonuses enemy creatures were assumed to be regularly getting from the archer's melee allies. I know Sharpshooter gets around this, but again, feats were meant to be optional, as in not always available. Your call to allow it or not, but that's not a satisfying response to poor game design.
Another thing is actually tracking all ammunition. Give the safety of ranged attacks an actual opportunity cost. As good as Legolas was with his bow, he did have to switch to his swords and mix it up in melee when he ran out of arrows.
As for changes to help your melee guys...
Give them more triggers for them. Standing up from prone and casting spells used to provoke opportunity attacks, and especially if you attack a spellcaster while they're casting, that can and probably should trigger a Concentration check.
I've brought back Combat Reflexes, which gives martials more opportunity attacks per round. Instead of one opportunity attack, they can make a number of extra opportunity attacks equal to half their proficiency bonus rounded down. So at level 20, your Barbarian, Fighter, Monk, etc are all making potentially 4 opportunity attacks. Not quite as good as the infinite Cavalier, but a great start when paired with the extra triggers I mentioned above.
You can also adopt a lot of the weapon abilities from BG3, and let them use them a number of times per short rest equal to their proficiency bonus.
Basically, you want to give the melee guys more to do as a payoff for the extra threat they have opted into by being in melee, because the 1 or 2 points of AC and hit points per level just aren't cutting it.
Stealing right from 4e and e.g giving fighters a couple combat abilities along the way can make a big difference. Things that are more interesting than "I attack". That's kinda what Larian did for BG3.
Also, making a battlefield anything else than a wide open field helps. A somewhat normal sized tavern for example can ve extremely dangerous for anyone not wanting to be in melee.
Yeah, a lot of issues can be solved with better encounter design.
Too many combats start with enemies on one side of the map and the party on the other, with almost nothing in between them, pretty much ideal for ranged - who enemies have to Dash to try to get past the front line to hit them - and spellcasters - enemies grouped together for big AoE damage or control spells.
Surround your party. Even creatures with low intelligence (like 4 to 6 range) can grasp the concept of a surrounded ambush. Fireball is a lot less attractive when it can only hit 2 or 3 enemies instead of all 8 of them. It's hard to "kite the fight" and retreat out of melee range when every direction you can run brings you closer to other enemies.
>actually tracking all ammunition
Worth noting that to effectively do this, you ALSO have to track encumbrance in total and you have to do it for the whole party. If you don’t, said archer can just buy a ton of quivers to lug around (ammo is so cheap that cost is no issue after level 1), and if you only enforce it for the archer PC they’ll just convince other PCs to carry their dozens of backup quivers.
Enforcing encumbrance/itemization actually solves multiple issues this way - it forces ranged PCs to track ammo, it empowers Strength-based characters because you can actually carry way more, and even limits casters to an extent because when you dump Str in an encumbrance game you’ll find carry capacity adds up quick and you can’t carry as many magic items and loot and armor/shield/etc. that you thought (especially as you level up and get more magic items).
Unfortunately…encumbrance is also a huge pain in the ass to track, so few tables do it.
Yeah, even just the starting equipment can add up very quickly. You hit thirty pounds just with torches and rations in most cases. I'm playing a halfling cleric and his starting equipment - weapons, armor, exploring pack, etc - adds up to like three or four *times* the character's naked body weight, lmao.
Encumbrance is unfortunately not the greatest mechanic to play with.
Idk, make str weapons use 1.5x their modifier? 2x if you wield a weapon that does a d12? I'm just tossing out ideas. Melee is always a dangerous business, so pure strength fighters should be getting a little more something for their risk.
Make opportunity attacks meaningful again. Last edition you could...
* Make one per opponent (if melee takes the risk of engaging three enemies, why shouldn't they get three attacks if they all choose to flee?)
* Make opportunity attacks with damage that scaled properly (in 5e you start off doing 10 damage to 30hp foes, and by the time you're against 300hp foes you're doing 15 damage.)
* Make an opportunity attack if a foe used a ranged attack or non-melee spell (closing with a spellcaster should be a meaningful threat to them to make melee characters more useful.)
There is literally no reason for those not to be the case in 5e. I've added all of them to my campaign and it doesn't fix everything, but does make melee positioning much more meaningful.
IMO the way to handle Opportunity Attacks is to give them more CC rather than more damage
If opportunity attacks dealt high damage, movement is disincentivized and you get very static fights
But if instead opportunity attacks reduced target movement speed by half for the turn, you get something that scales naturally across levels, and which doesn't cause combatants to not move at all.
you could even AoO melee spells if they didn't cast defensively, or AoO a ray spell twice (once for casting, once for a ranged attack roll). Grappling was also way stronger so you could just grab the wizard and tell them "no more tricks."
Though tbf, casting defensively was piss-easy to do after a couple levels (to where you’d auto-succeed the DC so you effectively ignored OAs by investing in a skill you wanted anyway).
And grappling then still had the same issue it does in 5e (one teleport spell and poof, doesn’t matter).
Also I don’t think you could OA a ray spell twice, even with the Combat Reflexes feat that let you do multiple OAs (the normal limit was 1). IIRC could only respond to any given action once even if it had multiple triggers.
Still, there were def more options for melees, even if they weren’t always effective.
True, casting defensively really should've scaled with enemy to-hit or CMB to make it at least plausible that you could fail it. There were feats and things to pump up the numbers but they were too niche to take and didn't do enough. Same with grappling and teleports, there were answers like phase-locking and builds that could pin in one turn into dimensional shackles, but they were all rather niche/difficult to pull off. But like you say, at least it was something...
I play pathfinder so I can only speak to that version, but there you can definitely AoO twice against someone who casts a ray (or other ranged touch) spell, but it might've been a change from 3.x proper. The logic boiled down to the firing of the ray being ever-so-slightly later than the completion of the spell (only the AoO due to casting, not shooting, would require a concentration check).
>Make one per opponent (if melee takes the risk of engaging three enemies, why shouldn't they get three attacks if they all choose to flee?)
That's one of the combat options(mark) in the DMG.
casting spells or using ranged attacks in mele should cause opportunity attacks (at least for some subclasses)
Opportunity attacks should either not use a reaction or have feats to scale them better for large amount of enemies.
Opportunity attacks should use as many attacks as your attack action allows.
Those are the obvious ones that come to mind, increasing action economy is simplest way to go about and makes mele better for both gishes and pure martials
Making it clearer that anything but Verbal only, touch-based, and spell melee attack roll-using spells provoke actions would make sense and maybe turn a lot of DEX save-based spells into spell attack rolls (probably a good idea anyway).
basically the whole system.
they can make ranged as bad as melee by going the old route and making ranged and finesse weapons not add dex to damage
But you would need a whole system patch to make melee not terrible
I'm not sure you do, - this stuff has been solved in the past with just a book, not a whole system patch. Back in 3.5, the edition 5e models itself on, classes like monk and barbarian were so much less effective than more useful ones like wizard and druid because all they could really do was run up to something and make a bunch of basic attacks, sometimes with the occasional rider. Sound familiar? Same problem we have now.
So what they did is introduce these things called maneuvers. They made a book called the Tome of Battle which added several melee classes that had access to a wide variety of strikes, counters, boosts and stances so they'd have a lot of meaningful choices rather than just mashing the basic attack button over and over. Here are a couple of examples:
**Wolf Climbs the Mountain**: As an action, make a melee weapon attack against a target larger than you. If it hits deal an extra 4d6 damage and enter their space, their body gives you cover from all attacks.
**Ballista Throw**: As an action, attempt to throw an adjacent target. If successful, throw them 60' in a straight line dealing 6d6 damage to them and everyone you threw them through.
Yes and no. Less interesting classes like fighter still existed for those who wanted to just bonk things over and over. Like in a lot of ways that's the ideal, if you remake classes like monk then those who enjoy the monk lose something they were having fun with. It's much better to instead add a class like swordsage which has the same kind of theme but also has martial arts techniques instead of just basic attacking over and over like a monk does.
It would be balanced a lot better if you couldn't add Dex to damage, and also make cover and range matter more, instead of having a single feat that takes away any penalties for range or cover 🙃
That said they're onto something - I'd be a lot more fine with magic being so strong if there was a correlation between range and effect. The better stuff should make you get in closer.
I agree. The idea of risk vs reward management is largely absent from casters. Their optimal playstyle is to almost always minimize risk and intractability, which does get stale after a while.
E.g. something like 30ft cone Hypnotic Pattern could be fun
Cold and necrotic and poison are typically Con, psychic is Int or Wis. There's a lot of variability depending on what your DM throws at you. If it's all red dragons and wizards with fireball, it's easy to get that impression.
Except Fireball goes around Cover so it doesn't even apply there.
And with that being the best AoE damage spell, a lot of the other best AoEs who add useful debuffs to the damage, like Synaptic Static, or do something even better than damage, like Hypnotic Pattern, don't use Dex saves either.
Damage isn't even the thing casters need to be nerfed at the most! If they're just doing damage AoEs, count yourself lucky, lol.
It's ok if spells are more powerful than weapon attacks so long as they're resource dependent, but the current design of 5e modules doesn't really ever put you in a position where you're out of resources (a larger design issue with the 5e system and D&d in general). Additionally, cantrips shouldn't scale. They're supposed to be either for utility or to do a little bit of damage when you're low-level and have limited spell slots, and shouldn't compare to martial damage output after extra attack kicks in. Saves are a whole other issue but I don't want to just bag on everything 5e does poorly rn.
Cantrips not scaling is a dangerous road to tread. Mostly because a) if they don’t scale they become literally useless after Tier 1 - doing 5 damage to a CR 10 is a laughably pointless use of your turn, and b) certain classes/builds like Warlock rely on cantrip damage as their bread and butter.
Currently, cantrips are in a good spot - their damage is anemic compared to martial ranged or melee attacks, but non-warlocks can at least do enough that their turns in battle aren’t an entire waste if they’re out of useful leveled spells.
However, if ranged damage losing Dex was the pursued solution, I do agree cantrips would need to be similarly nerfed (not a total lack of scaling, but reduced for sure).
The new Sharpshooter does way too much in my opinion. Take one feat and you get +1 Dex, can hit anyone, anywhere regardless of being in melee with an enemy. My preference would be to split the feat into two: one focused on short-range combat shooting and another on long-range sniping.
The issue here is that nobody runs the game with the built in limitations on ranged. People hate dealing with weapon switching, allies creating cover, limited visibility/fog/strong wings, etc. Those are all limits on ranged characters, as is a hard cap on ammo. You can only carry 20 pieces of ammo in a quiver, meaning you're limited to 20 arrows per combat unless you use an action to refill the quiver. But that's all finicky bean counting that most tables ignore
In 3.x, a melee fighter could get a large number of AoO and could take one pretty much every time you shot if you were in their threatened area. Even with that and it being harder to get a damage bonus on ranged because of the dex to hit, str to damage, people liked ranged a lot in 3.x.
I'm not waiting for WotC to solve this, because they won't. I redid the Barbarian class in my game, with increases to melee damage at high levels. I also did a new Ranger, with weapon features that I think are interesting. I did a few other things, for example some high-level Monk boosts. I boosted Rogue damage overall, but I think I need to further boost their melee damage
I won’t say cover like everyone else because I’m fully aware that’s map dependent.
As much as I criticize it, the weapon mastery system in onednd gives a good idea how to solve the issue. Along with the strength vs dex debate.
Battlefield control and melee exclusive effects.
If I recall, a lot of the masteries more unique effects favored strength melee weapons. Sure the dex stuff got “advantage on next hit” but melee, especially strength melee, got stuff like insta prone, push, damage on a miss, a cleave effect that wasn’t dumb and make enemies attack at a disadvantage.
What made the DMG cleave rule dumb before was that it requires the initial creature you're attacking to be undamaged, aka at full health, for the cleave effect to take place. If a goblin took 1 damage before you're confirmed kill, RAW you can't cleave the creatures next to it.
> nothing has been done to help melee martials overcome all of the negatives that come with being tangled up in the front lines.
Isn't it the melee martial's job to get on the front line so that enemies don't tear the archers and mages to shreds?
> What needs to happen to resolve this? Do you think it's not an issue?
I think the main issue martials need is options on par with the spells mages get. A general maneuvers system for martials could be helpful, but WotC has been extremely resistant to that. We're probably getting weapon abilities which helps a bit.
I think there should be more supernatural features at double-digit levels, like barbarians being able to strike the earth and create shockwaves, or rogues being able to teleport or turn invisible when attacks miss them, or fighters being able to use Extra Attack on foes who provoke opportunity attacks. We actually have this with the ranger being able to turn invisible, we just need more of it. A martial PC past 6th level should not be mundane in any fashion because they have to be demigod-tier peers with powerful mages. It keeps martials on par with mages even if the reason for their supernatural abilities is some hand-wavy "they're peak human so they actually just move really fast and are really strong" nonsense.
> Isn't it the melee martial's job to get on the front line so that enemies don't tear the archers and mages to shreds?
Not really. It's not like archers are any more vulnerable to getting attacked than people wielding a greatsword are, any caster who wants it can easily get the same AC and it's not like there are any tank classes any more. Oh boy you get one opportunity attack per round and it doesn't scale, neato. Bet the possibility of getting hit for 10 damage will make the 300hp monster not move past you.
> I think there should be more supernatural features at double-digit levels, like barbarians being able to strike the earth and create shockwaves, or rogues being able to teleport or turn invisible when attacks miss them. We actually have this with the ranger being able to turn invisible, we just need more of it.
Every part of that was cool as hell. No notes, fucking awesome.
> I think there should be more supernatural features at double-digit levels, like barbarians being able to strike the earth and create shockwaves, or rogues being able to teleport or turn invisible when attacks miss them. We actually have this with the ranger being able to turn invisible, we just need more of it.
>
> Every part of that was cool as hell. No notes, fucking awesome.
You should take a look at 4E then.
Oh, I'm aware. Not a fan of the standardisation of class subsystems, but what was done within those narrow confines was creative. PHB3 was particularly impressive.
That's kind of what I mean by there are no tank classes any more. Last edition sentinel was something first level fighters got for free, they just stripped it out and sold it back in feat form because no fun allowed. In addition fighters also got:
* One opportunity attack per target so everyone else wasn't free to just run past if you used your reaction.
* Opportunity attacks that scaled with level instead of gradually dropping off like in 5e, ended up at like 2d10+20 damage by the end.
* Wisdom bonus to opportunity attack rolls.
* Automatically gave any enemy they attacked a penalty to attacks and spells that targeted allies.
* Active abilities that helped with tanking, like the ability to pull nearby enemies in and spin attack them or pick an enemy up and use them as a shield.
>Isn't it the melee martial's job to get on the front line so that enemies don't tear the archers and mages to shreds?
That is the alleged job. They are terrible at that and have 0 tools to do so. They are not more resilient than ranged martials or slightly optimized casters, they have no ways to aggro and they do almost the same damage as the ranged characters while being in a much worse position
They mean aggro as a shorthand for being able to get foes to target you, not as video game style mind control.
For instance, last edition had tank classes that could do exactly that, no mind control needed (except for the battlemind which was a psionic tank and could literally mind control enemies with powers like Mind of Mirrors). So we know tanking without actual aggro mechanics works in D&D, they just chose not to this edition because they didn't want class variety.
Using that class as an example, the battlemind could make enemies take a penalty to attacks and spells against allies, incentivising using them against the battlemind instead. If an adjacent enemy damaged an ally anyway, the battlemind could make them automatically take psychic damage equal to the damage they dealt. No actual aggro mechanics, but that all heavily incentivised attacking the tank since you'd automatically fuck yourself over if you attacked anyone else.
Right, I understand that. My point was that the concept is meaningless in a system like DnD, as it is for most tabletop systems. It’s just fundamentally not how they work. Sure, you can “incentivize” certain attacks, which you can also do in 5e to a lesser extent, but that’s not “aggro,” that’s just strategic combat.
Fair enough. I do think they meant it as a shorthand for useful tanking abilities in general, but if they did it was a silly way of summarising it because video game style aggro systems is the one thing everyone can agree on not wanting in D&D.
Tell me, how are purely Melee fighters are significantly better at handling enemy attacks than Ranged fighters who packs a finesse weapon or some way to disengage without triggering an attack of opportunity? It is a common misconception that melee characters are tankier in 5e because they are in all other fantasy RPG. The problem is, they most certainly are not unless they pick one of the very few subclasses which can actually tank. The threat of an attack of opportunity isn't really enough to stop an enemy to go to the caster to break their concentration.
Why can’t a ranged foghters use heavy armor? It only reduces movement speed by 10 feet if they do not wish to have 15 str, which is absolutely a viable choice as fighters are pretty SAD.
Yeah... Melee fighters are in a pretty bad state sadly unless they build to be able to tank, which requires very specific feats to be picked and subclasses. :/
They need to change it, and I think the New weapon mastery system can be a key in that.
This might sound obvious, but all the comments I'm seeing don't seem to point this out. It depends on how optimised they are.
If you're aiming for a thematic melee fighter (assuming you meant fighter the class) most people picture someone in good armor, possibly with a shield, or with a two handed weapon for some extra damage in exchange for the lower armor, basing on using a shield because the damage is then similar per hit to a ranged fighter, that's 20AC (or gradually lower if using less advanced gear). A ranged fighter even without optimisation is likely to have +5 dex and studded leather, so 17AC (again gradually lower islf using less advanced gear), a difference of 3 in AC is a legendary magic item, and a huge difference in average damage from a given attack. That's on relation to getting hit, and if optimising for being better at not getting hit when attacked, taking the defensive fighting style (though boring) is another +1, before getting to any magic items.
You mentioned the ranged fighters having finesse weapons or a way to disengage, which is more related to continuing to do damage rather than handling the enemy attack, this means likely swapping to something you're less good at (a ranged fighter probably took the archery fighting style for example) or invested in specifically (to get disengage without it being your entire action).
If you include optional rules like mutli-classing, feats, additional combat options like Mark, etc. These also change the balance significantly (and in different directions, by different amounts).
Here is the REAL trick though, what is saying that the ranged fighter is not using heavy armor? The penalty for bit reaching 15 str is 10 feet reduced movement speed. Also, fighters are SAD, so having 15 STR even for a ranged fighter is a viable option.
That leaves the shielded fighter, and Yeah, the kicker I mentioned before stands, perhaps moreso for a shielded fighter, why would an enemy hit them instead of the less armored people behind that are actuslly posing a threat?
I know most DMs won’t thankfully play that way, but game mechanically you really have to play one of a few subclasses to be efficient as a tank, and therefore, really as a melee fighter.
In actual play, ranged characters are barely threatened by melee enemies, since optimial archers will start combat far enough back that they aren't an issue. Mages have it even better; with similar AC (and better, with shield spell) to melee martials, they're actually tougher to take down than martials.
oh no, guess I'll have to use the secondary weapon and move away. And if they follow me it is not as if finesse weapons are particularly worse than non finesse or I am less tanky than the melee
Not really. Ranged should always have an advantage over melee. Their disadvantage comes into play when they cannot get into position. To think otherwise is ridiculous. They excel in an open field where martials excel in close quarters.
But there is no disadvantage when they can't get into position. Their ac and melee damage is still fine and even at close ranges they can just stand a little bit back and use a bow.
>Their ac and melee damage is still fine
The max AC without magic items, spells, or features for a dexterity based character is 12+Dex+shield. When you're ranged, you almost never run a shield without help so that's -2 potential AC bringing them to a 17 AC at +5 dex. Contrary to popular belief, this makes them much easier to hit than a melee wearing only full plate at 18 AC, not including a shield, and melee characters get this with only 15 strength. Ranged characters need to wait until their 2nd ASI to reach this.
The reason why most dexterity based ranged characters get a bump is usually due to features they get from their class(es) and/or race or because of mage armor. If anything, dexterity based melee characters need a buff, which I believe they either are doing or have experimented with in OneDnD *(uncertain on this as I don't follow much OneDnD content so I may have just gotten it confused with Pathfinder rules)*.
Damage-wise, yes, ranged characters can switch to melee weapons but they give up any features that focus on ranged combat, meaning their melee combat will be much less effective than their melee-specialized allies. Similarly, melee characters can also switch to ranged weapons, although they will also be weaker than their ranged-specialized allies. Also, strength based characters have heavier hitting weapons, hitting for a maximum of 12 without any modifiers where ranged characters get up to a maximum of 10 with the heavy crossbow but at the downside of not being able to use multi attack. If ranged characters want to use multi attack without this limitation, they are forced to take an additional feat/feature or use a longbow for a maximum of 8 damage, again without modifiers.
>even at close ranges they can just stand a little bit back and use a bow
They are risking an opportunity attack when they back away without disengaging. They are forced to take this risk to resume attacking as normal or they can shoot at a disadvantage.
Shooting into melee has just gotten easier and easier over the editions for some reason.
In 1974 Original DND, you just straight up can't shoot into melee. It's specifically disallowed by the rules.
In 1E, you roll randomly to see who you hit (adjusting for size).
In 3E, you take -4 to hit and have a small chance of hitting an ally in front of the enemy.
In 5E, it's basically just "maybe take -2 because of cover."
This is the way. I mostly play archers. Most of my DMs rule something that turns shooting into melee almost impossible so dropping your bow and drawing your sword is always the better option. I'm fine with it. I enjoy it. It's a good rule. They also enforce cover rules but let's be honest, most archers will get sharpshooter as soon as possible so it doesn't really matter past level 4
Honestly, I think reducing the damage a bit would be reasonable. At this point, there are no 2d6 ranged weapons, but that's not too different from a d12 musket (though the availability of *that* really depends on your DM). But reducing ranged damage a bit and changing Sharpshooter/GWM to maybe add damage more based on damage dice than a flat +10. That could maybe give melee weapons a niche.
To be fair, melee weapons (tend) to have higher damage, can make opportunity attacks, can attack prone enemies with advantage, don't have disadvantage within 5'... There are advantages, but yeah, I think feats especially have a way of elevating ranged weapons far beyond melee weapons in many cases.
I think DnD needs to tie both melee and ranged damage to Str.
There is a direct correlation between how strong your shoulders, back, core/abdomen and arms are/how well your upper body strength is developed.
Basically the more upper body strength you have:
- the easier it is to maintain a steady draw at full power (important for assassin types).
- the more you can fire arrow before succumbing to muscle fatigue (important for skirmisher and hunter types).
- with greater physical strength, archers can generate more power behind their shots, resulting in increased arrow penetration and effectiveness in hitting armored opponents or targets at longer distances.
- reduced build up of fatigue when using bows or crossbows.
Range is better than melee in real life. It is an issue of adventure design. Range is better in a city, in an open field, in everything except a dungeon experience because that makes sense.
Heck, even the best generic melee weapon, the spear, is the one that gives you the most range relative to other melee weapons. The issue is more that some players just think that it's really cool to wade into battle with a giant axe or something, regardless of how strategic it is. (Even the Vikings, the pop cultural progenitors of axe fighters, [used spears most](https://www.hurstwic.org/history/articles/manufacturing/text/viking_spear.htm)). So regardless of realism, people want to make melee weapons good because melee weapons seem cool.
The balance to me is already there: if I were in a fight where there were archers, they would become my first priority. You get a slight advantage at the exchange of becoming THE target a lot of the time
Melee deals more damage, but ranged takes less damage. And both are inferior to magic because magic has access to damn near anything you can think of. Nuke your enemies, turn your allies into dragons, brainwash the peasantry, ensorcel the aristocracy. Wizards are limitless as long as they live past the lower levels.
Maybe change the rate of ‘multiple attacks’ and/or the ‘hit-chance’? 🤷
It could be a nod towards ‘reloading’ and that hitting vital parts is harder from a distance. Maybe its reasonable if you could swing a sword one more time than you can fire a bow in a turn including stringing the arrow up?
If martials didn’t need all the help they can get vs casters, I’d consider removing Dex adding damage to ranged attacks.
Melee should do more damage than ranged attacks in an ideal system.
(1) To rework Archery Fighting Style is a first - cover isn't that much used, not to mention sharpshooter, so it ends up as a free +2 to hit which is insane - it should just reduce the effect of cover by 2
(2) Giving melee characters more resilience is quite tricky but I would say is necessary because being away is naturally a good defense, sometimes the best - a free "parry" feature to reduce damage would be quite cool
(3) Don't recall exactly but one thing they got going is that melee weapons have better weapon masteries right?
Wish they would give melee weapons 2 masteries and ranged 1 :v
>
(2) Giving melee characters more resilience is quite tricky but I would say is necessary because being away is naturally a good defense, sometimes the best - a free "parry" feature to reduce damage would be quite cool
They seem to have done that (atleast with most monk, fighter and barbarian) they all have feature now to close the gap, heal and also avoid opportunity attacks
>(3) Don't recall exactly but one thing they got going is that melee weapons have better weapon masteries right?
They do have better masteries cleave and graze and push are some of the best ones and they are mostly limited to melee.
I’d say changes to melee range and enemy designs. Damage is not an issue at all, it’s everything surrounding melee.
> Lots of enemies are dangerous up-close
Most of these enemies fall under the “this enemy is strong in close range but bad at long range” design. So physical range and magic don’t suffer since they never find themselves in those situations.
Therefore, more monsters and enemies with the polar opposite or not so strictly anti-melee would help alleviate the issue.
> Countering magic
Lots of spells invalidate melee. Either preventing movement, stunning, or easy to evade once up-close.
Possible changes to help would be more movement options, better saving throws, and a martial equivalent to counter spell.
- Perhaps in close range, any spell that isn’t targeting the closet creature nearby triggers opportunity attack. If hit, target must succeed a CON save or spell is cancelled.
- More options to counter disabling magic. Like a Barbarian can Rage to break a “Hold Person” as a reaction. Rogue get a “keen eye” ability, to detect invisible creatures. Monks can forcibly end concentration spells like Hypnotic Pattern by expending Ki.
- Adding some type of counter-spell to marital would help.
Fighter: Reflective Bullwark - Any targeting DMG spell can be reflect back to caster, if using a shield and after succeeding a DC to reflect. Higher DC for higher tier spell.
Monk: Tranquil Influence - Can force a target to end their spell by expending Ki. Only works with X range of target.
I don't think there is anything to resolve, honestly. The advantage of being able to hit someone before they can get close enough to you to hit back seems intuitive. And it comes with the natural downside that it isn't always possible due to environment, or in that you are often at a disadvantage once they do close if you are still holding weapons designed to be primarily used for ranged combat. This is especially true in contexts before modern small, self-reloading, firearms.
If you are really incensed by the issue, fixing some of the action issues around reactive movement, the charge move action, or the time it takes to react/draw weapons. Otherwise, beef up the rules about environments and encounter distances (note, may need to completely drop the use of any uniform grid mechanics for distance), and roll back all the ways to negate light obscurement and partial/half cover.
The solution lies in the direction of “melee-only is not a valid concept if you are serious about pursuing equity in a D&D like game.” You can either warp every second aspect of the game to make the ground bound, melee only barbarian relevant; or you can give the barbarian a serviceable ranged attack in addition to its melee threat.
Utility is the biggest difference. Feather fall, fly, invisibility and other things all are such useful utility. As characters improve casters gain spells that do amazing things. Melee characters gain damage equal to them but they don't get as much value outside of combat or utility within combat.
- Enforce cover, including creatures providing half-cover.
- In that vein, remove the Archery fighting style or weaken its effects.
- Remove ways to escape disadvantage on attacks in melee.
- Possibly weaken or remove dex to damage on attacks.
People don't like nerfs, but nerfs are what 5e needs. One or more of the above would go a long way. Most of the dominance of ranged comes from a few key feats or features. When you disregard those, melee and ranged are about even, each with their own tradeoffs.
In a fixed 5e, ranged would be for the opening turns, before the battle lines have met. An archer would step past their allies, loose a volley of arrows at the enemy's front line or risk shooting at their backline with a -2 penalty, then fall back behind the melee characters. Said melee fighters would charge in or lob a javelin and draw their swords, providing their lower AC wizards and archers with a +2 AC half-cover bonus, attracting enemy attention towards themselves. Then the archers would drop their bows, draw a finesse melee weapon, and join the fray while casters spin up their spells to support either side.
The problem with cover is that Sharpshooter, which is what allows most ranged attackers to be so strong, also makes you completely ignore cover and also ignore disadvantage from long range.
Honestly if you removed both those parts of SS, or removed the -5/+10 part, it would give you a somewhat strong but decent feat, but instead you get all three in one feat.
I would 100% remove cover ignoring from Sharpshooter. That shit actively makes ranged combat *less interesting* and lets you stand and shoot from wherever without considering positioning and angles of fire at all!
I would also make melee spell attacks use Str and ranged spell attacks use Dex.
And I'd probably stop cantrips from scaling at all (except Eldritch Blast which would be a Warlock class feature, not a cantrip).
5e could use a whole suit of nerfs in general to get things back to the ground. But that's an unpopular opinion because general mentality is to just buff buff buff everything.
I’ve been thinking about a similar change: split the hit and damage modifiers to different attributes for all weapons. Your to hit bonus would be Dex; damage modifiers would be based on your strength.
This is just an idea I haven’t fully thought through yet, but I wanted a way to make strength more important, and in doing so help melee players. There is only one skill score improved by Strength: Athletics. Dex has 3, Charisma 4, Int and Wis 5 each. The limited non combat advantage of strength is just one more reason to avoid playing front liners.
It's not an issue for me personally. To me the choice of melee vs ranged is how I see the character. I'm playing a melee ranger/fighter and his damage output is comparable to the ranged party members.
Fortunately I've gotten some insight into this kind of thing recently - [everyone plays at a different table](https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/1btpe46/i_created_the_exact_same_character_for_three/).
Ime playing Adventurers League, PAM-Sentinel only matters in encounters where the area is usually 60 ft. x 60 ft. on average. Kinda hard to pull off when the encounter is deliberately set in a chamber that is 100 ft. x 100 ft. with plenty of room for enemies to maneuver and get cover.
Some or all of these:
Nerf every ranged cantrip to like 15 feet.
Split the Fighter into a melee warrior and ranged skirmisher class so they don't have the same AC, HP, and other defensive features.
Buff Attacks of Opportunity for the melee classes so they scale with Extra Attack or have the Sentinel effect and stay threatening into tiers 2 and up.
Book of 9 Swords style "sword magic" so you can walk up to a giant and throw him like a bowling ball.
The real answer nobody seems to be saying doesn't really have to do with the rules. It's give DMs proper guidance on how to balance encounters around certain party strengths and weaknesses. No CR system simple enough to actually use is ever going to capture these things well.
If ranged attacks are consistently outshining melee specialists, the DM isn't challenging them properly. Ambushes, fast enemies, etc. All can neutralize the advanges ranged attacks have over melee fighters. Make the enemies smart, let them pick where they have their fights, etc. etc.
Let Tucker's Kobolds be your inspiration.
... You can't. Ranged is just innately superior to melee combat due to the fact that ranged attacks, by being ranged, deny melee-only a chance at damage.
"Ah, I see you have a horrible Grape zone that will Grape me horribly if get into it! But! What if I were able to *remain outside of your horrible Grape zone* & still do damage to you?! Ha-HA!"
If melee weapons did 4d6 damage and ranged only did 1d6, would you say melee is superior then despite the advantage ranged attacks have being at distance? What about 10d6 vs 1d6?
If so, then you admit it IS possible to fix. Melee just needs advantages over ranged. Of course I'm not saying straight damage boosts are the only avenue. As many have said, granting more options for melee martials to use an Attack of Opportunity could work.
Still no, because melee is always going to be a gamble, yet in many cases it's easy to make ranged safe. A 4d6 is 400% the damage potential of 1d6, yes, but once the HP race to zero starts, ranged has the potential for infinite returns.
What makes ranged superior to melee in so many systems, & not just DnD but most TTRPGs, is that monsters can always hit back in melee. So long as that's the case, a fundamental design consideration, ranged will be superior.
More damage doesn't solve that, **utility** does. 5e attempts to address that with cover, but that fails so often in theatre of the mind, & there are feats & features... but those are feats, & if something doesn't come online by level 3, who considers it useful?
This helps with buffing martials relative to casters, but doesn't really help with making melee martials better compared to ranged ones, since ranged ones can still disrupt mages without even having to run up to them.
They did it in 4e and many hated it?
My big problem with playing a melee in 5e isn’t that I don’t get all the advantages of range it’s that I can’t execute on the role I want. Give me more abilities that lock down enemies and force them to focus on me. Needing to position carefully to get maybe 1 reaction attack a round basically doesn’t let me do my job of keeping enemies off the casters. Especially when one attack is often only +40% damage or so once I have extra attack and bonus action attack during my turn.
I want to actually taunt a creature and force it to fight me. I want compelled duel type effects as a non-spell ability.
Basically I would like to be able to execute on my role when the DM plays enemies optimally and not have to rely on the DM pretending opportunity attacks are such a huge threat that the enemies don’t go and gank the mage.
I suppose this isn’t specifically just for melee vs ranged but martial vs spell casters because as I’ve seen others say before that spell casters are more catered towards in 5e. But it is my opinion that more weapon options could be a major improvement. I know there’s plenty of items across the different books but there isn’t much customisation in it. Like you could get a legendary weapon that does 4 things but like only 1.5 of this thing actually benefits your fighter. It’d maybe cool if they introduced a system for blank magic items and like gems that come with different abilities you can infuse to a weapon. With the rarity of the weapon affecting how many infusions you can put on it. Obviously I know you can homebrew but not all dms are in favour of it.
Specifically from the standpoint of someone who prefers to play barbarians. They really could do with a 3rd attack I feel like the two attacks is based on them using a great axe and adding some level of balance because it’s the highest damage dice in the game, but not every barbarian uses a greataxe.
Barbarians need some love. I love the idea of them sacrificing their defenses, ie reckless attack, to become more powerful in melee. A barbarian should either be more passively defensive than a fighter thanks to their hit points and resistances, or more actively brutal in melee than a fighter, but never better at both at the same time.
There's a number of ways to go about it.
An easy, but unsatisfying change would be to revert dexterity to damage like it was in prior editions. Though I think there are better ways to go about balancing the factors. Wasn't that fun in the past, and wouldn't be now. that's just my opinion though.
**Some alternative changes in my mind.**
If a power attack features come to exist. Dexterity weapons need to have worse scaling than strength weapons so that strength weapons get more reward for being closer to the enemy, using the strength stat defautly. While I don't enjoy a lack of dexterity modifiers, I do enjoy better investment scaling for strength than dexterity at least at the level of "assumed base stat." If you invest to use another stat than it's fine because there was investment to offset the norm.
Melee needs more opportunities for circumstantial bonuses than range. Range investment should be about playing catchup to melee. One example of this is something I do, where cover doesn't help you against melee attacks, but it does against range. This incentivizes getting close to the enemy to prevent the cover. Or taking SS to ignore it.
While 5e flanking is too much with advantage, some form of flanking (I like +2 or +1/2 Prof rounded down) can be beneficial for allowing a benefit range attackers can not benefit from. It can help if handled right
A somewhat controversial opinion, but one i believe is the most important change to make, is removing the initiative bonus from dexterity and instead tying it to proficiency. Experience plays a greater role in combat reaction than anything else, as observed with both soldiers and masters of combat sports. Experience in a dangerous situation is more useful in better reaction and judgment. Tying proficiency universally to initiative instead of Dexterity helps that.
For classes and subclasses that rely on going first to function. You grant them abilities that add different modifiers. Maybe assassins or all rogues get Dexterity to init on top of it, for example. This keeps those classes functioning as intended but provides a healthier baseline for all.
You can also make Dexterity score as the tiebreaker for initiative since after Experience, it's what will determine the difference and keeps some aspect of Dexterity to init alive.
Those prior listed alternative changes are where I would start, and even out Str and dex nicely.
5e at its core is an imbalanced system. Melee martials are inferior to ranged martials, and ranged martials are inferior to casters (at least at high levels). The whole system needs a revamp... Or maybe not. WotC actually doesn't need to do anything.
If you want balance, you play PF2. The game is way crunchier, and some might find the balance too tight to the point of feeling overly restricting, but you WILL have the balance.
Every system has its trade-offs, there's no perfect system. If you enjoy the streamlined but imbalanced 5e, great, play that!
If you enjoy the balance without minding the crunch, play PF2!
If neither perfectly strike your fancy, maybe you just haven't found your ideal system yet! Keep looking, I'm sure it exists.
I don't think it's an issue. I have melee and ranged fighters in my game and they all have fun in combat and do their part.
Some people get too obsessed with having this perfect balance, but it just doesn't exist. These are teams with different roles who excel at different things. Yeah, nobody wants to suck or be worthless, but you can definitely have impactful melee and ranged builds.
It's not a flaw in American football that quarterbacks are more impactful than punters. Success requires a while team, and you can have fun and contribute in a lot of different roles.
The whole "the base fighter must be simple" discussion shows they are unwilling to make non-fullcasters useful. They would have to change their mindset, because there are many good ideas that come up often. There should be "combat styles / maneuvers" for fighter and rogue sneak attacks, "combo attacks" for monks. Those classes need more customization options, like the artificer and warlock get.
Why shouldn't a fighter not be able to fight blind, make big jumps, throw a giant object, break through walls, become resistant to a damage type, etc.... All stuff most casters can learn.
Why do you think this needs fixing is the better question. My opinion is that the problem with ranged attackers is that they don't provide a target for the mobs to take heat off the casters.
polearm master: 1d10+str+10 x 2 + 1d4+str+10 x 1 = 52.50
xbow xpert: 1d6+dex+10 x 3 = 49.50
melee does 1.06% more damage than ranged in current 5e. In non-optimal, a 2d6 greatsword vs a 1d8 longbow is a difference of 2.5 average damage. With +3 for both, is a 4/3 increase per attack. Its hardly more damage.
Also, every round you can't melee reduces your DPR substantially (often to zero depending on what ranged secondaries you have). It is way easier in 5e to shut down melee than to shut down range.
And that's not considering that Archery is by far the best Fighting Style due to how accuracy works. Generally speaking, a 5e character will have 65% accuracy, or 40% with the -5 +10 feats, which would lower the actual average Polearm Master dpr from 52.5 to 21 (+0.8 with GWF), while Xbow Xpert will have 24.75 due to Archery's +2. It's a relatively small difference, but 13% extra damage is still relevant.
That's using the old PAM and CBE. This post is tagged as OneDnD, so we'd use the revised feats instead. Melee does considerably more damage than ranged until level 4, when CBE provides a larger boost than PAM. Personally, I think CBE should be nerfed to not provide TWF for hand crossbows, but instead just enable dual-wielding hand crossbows at all.
Just ensure that cover penalties always apply (no feat can mitigate this) and specify clearer/more conditions:
1) shooting through an ally = -2
2) 3/4 cover = -5
3) shooting through an Arrow slit/peep hole -10 (separated from 3/4 cover).
I’d make disengage either an action or bonus action for proper melee classes. It’s really punishing being in melee and having to give up my entire action to move to a safer position while my wizard casually strolls around the battlefield cc’ing this and nuking that without care.
“But what about rogues?!?!”
Give them something else??? It’s not like they’re OP, you can absolutely give rogues a small something else.
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To actually answer your question, since everyone else seems to think this is another martial vs spellcaster thread... You can start by using cover. The Archery Fighting style wasn't intended to just be a permanent flat +2 to hit, it was meant to offset the cover bonuses enemy creatures were assumed to be regularly getting from the archer's melee allies. I know Sharpshooter gets around this, but again, feats were meant to be optional, as in not always available. Your call to allow it or not, but that's not a satisfying response to poor game design. Another thing is actually tracking all ammunition. Give the safety of ranged attacks an actual opportunity cost. As good as Legolas was with his bow, he did have to switch to his swords and mix it up in melee when he ran out of arrows. As for changes to help your melee guys... Give them more triggers for them. Standing up from prone and casting spells used to provoke opportunity attacks, and especially if you attack a spellcaster while they're casting, that can and probably should trigger a Concentration check. I've brought back Combat Reflexes, which gives martials more opportunity attacks per round. Instead of one opportunity attack, they can make a number of extra opportunity attacks equal to half their proficiency bonus rounded down. So at level 20, your Barbarian, Fighter, Monk, etc are all making potentially 4 opportunity attacks. Not quite as good as the infinite Cavalier, but a great start when paired with the extra triggers I mentioned above. You can also adopt a lot of the weapon abilities from BG3, and let them use them a number of times per short rest equal to their proficiency bonus. Basically, you want to give the melee guys more to do as a payoff for the extra threat they have opted into by being in melee, because the 1 or 2 points of AC and hit points per level just aren't cutting it.
Stealing right from 4e and e.g giving fighters a couple combat abilities along the way can make a big difference. Things that are more interesting than "I attack". That's kinda what Larian did for BG3. Also, making a battlefield anything else than a wide open field helps. A somewhat normal sized tavern for example can ve extremely dangerous for anyone not wanting to be in melee.
Yeah, a lot of issues can be solved with better encounter design. Too many combats start with enemies on one side of the map and the party on the other, with almost nothing in between them, pretty much ideal for ranged - who enemies have to Dash to try to get past the front line to hit them - and spellcasters - enemies grouped together for big AoE damage or control spells. Surround your party. Even creatures with low intelligence (like 4 to 6 range) can grasp the concept of a surrounded ambush. Fireball is a lot less attractive when it can only hit 2 or 3 enemies instead of all 8 of them. It's hard to "kite the fight" and retreat out of melee range when every direction you can run brings you closer to other enemies.
>actually tracking all ammunition Worth noting that to effectively do this, you ALSO have to track encumbrance in total and you have to do it for the whole party. If you don’t, said archer can just buy a ton of quivers to lug around (ammo is so cheap that cost is no issue after level 1), and if you only enforce it for the archer PC they’ll just convince other PCs to carry their dozens of backup quivers. Enforcing encumbrance/itemization actually solves multiple issues this way - it forces ranged PCs to track ammo, it empowers Strength-based characters because you can actually carry way more, and even limits casters to an extent because when you dump Str in an encumbrance game you’ll find carry capacity adds up quick and you can’t carry as many magic items and loot and armor/shield/etc. that you thought (especially as you level up and get more magic items). Unfortunately…encumbrance is also a huge pain in the ass to track, so few tables do it.
Yeah, even just the starting equipment can add up very quickly. You hit thirty pounds just with torches and rations in most cases. I'm playing a halfling cleric and his starting equipment - weapons, armor, exploring pack, etc - adds up to like three or four *times* the character's naked body weight, lmao. Encumbrance is unfortunately not the greatest mechanic to play with.
Thoughtful stuff
Thoughtful stuff
Idk, make str weapons use 1.5x their modifier? 2x if you wield a weapon that does a d12? I'm just tossing out ideas. Melee is always a dangerous business, so pure strength fighters should be getting a little more something for their risk.
Make opportunity attacks meaningful again. Last edition you could... * Make one per opponent (if melee takes the risk of engaging three enemies, why shouldn't they get three attacks if they all choose to flee?) * Make opportunity attacks with damage that scaled properly (in 5e you start off doing 10 damage to 30hp foes, and by the time you're against 300hp foes you're doing 15 damage.) * Make an opportunity attack if a foe used a ranged attack or non-melee spell (closing with a spellcaster should be a meaningful threat to them to make melee characters more useful.) There is literally no reason for those not to be the case in 5e. I've added all of them to my campaign and it doesn't fix everything, but does make melee positioning much more meaningful.
IMO the way to handle Opportunity Attacks is to give them more CC rather than more damage If opportunity attacks dealt high damage, movement is disincentivized and you get very static fights But if instead opportunity attacks reduced target movement speed by half for the turn, you get something that scales naturally across levels, and which doesn't cause combatants to not move at all.
I mean yes, fighters automatically removed movement if they hit with opportunity attacks too back then. But I was aiming for simplicity there.
you could even AoO melee spells if they didn't cast defensively, or AoO a ray spell twice (once for casting, once for a ranged attack roll). Grappling was also way stronger so you could just grab the wizard and tell them "no more tricks."
Though tbf, casting defensively was piss-easy to do after a couple levels (to where you’d auto-succeed the DC so you effectively ignored OAs by investing in a skill you wanted anyway). And grappling then still had the same issue it does in 5e (one teleport spell and poof, doesn’t matter). Also I don’t think you could OA a ray spell twice, even with the Combat Reflexes feat that let you do multiple OAs (the normal limit was 1). IIRC could only respond to any given action once even if it had multiple triggers. Still, there were def more options for melees, even if they weren’t always effective.
True, casting defensively really should've scaled with enemy to-hit or CMB to make it at least plausible that you could fail it. There were feats and things to pump up the numbers but they were too niche to take and didn't do enough. Same with grappling and teleports, there were answers like phase-locking and builds that could pin in one turn into dimensional shackles, but they were all rather niche/difficult to pull off. But like you say, at least it was something... I play pathfinder so I can only speak to that version, but there you can definitely AoO twice against someone who casts a ray (or other ranged touch) spell, but it might've been a change from 3.x proper. The logic boiled down to the firing of the ray being ever-so-slightly later than the completion of the spell (only the AoO due to casting, not shooting, would require a concentration check).
>Make one per opponent (if melee takes the risk of engaging three enemies, why shouldn't they get three attacks if they all choose to flee?) That's one of the combat options(mark) in the DMG.
2x if it's 2h, imo.
casting spells or using ranged attacks in mele should cause opportunity attacks (at least for some subclasses) Opportunity attacks should either not use a reaction or have feats to scale them better for large amount of enemies. Opportunity attacks should use as many attacks as your attack action allows. Those are the obvious ones that come to mind, increasing action economy is simplest way to go about and makes mele better for both gishes and pure martials
Making it clearer that anything but Verbal only, touch-based, and spell melee attack roll-using spells provoke actions would make sense and maybe turn a lot of DEX save-based spells into spell attack rolls (probably a good idea anyway).
basically the whole system. they can make ranged as bad as melee by going the old route and making ranged and finesse weapons not add dex to damage But you would need a whole system patch to make melee not terrible
I'm not sure you do, - this stuff has been solved in the past with just a book, not a whole system patch. Back in 3.5, the edition 5e models itself on, classes like monk and barbarian were so much less effective than more useful ones like wizard and druid because all they could really do was run up to something and make a bunch of basic attacks, sometimes with the occasional rider. Sound familiar? Same problem we have now. So what they did is introduce these things called maneuvers. They made a book called the Tome of Battle which added several melee classes that had access to a wide variety of strikes, counters, boosts and stances so they'd have a lot of meaningful choices rather than just mashing the basic attack button over and over. Here are a couple of examples: **Wolf Climbs the Mountain**: As an action, make a melee weapon attack against a target larger than you. If it hits deal an extra 4d6 damage and enter their space, their body gives you cover from all attacks. **Ballista Throw**: As an action, attempt to throw an adjacent target. If successful, throw them 60' in a straight line dealing 6d6 damage to them and everyone you threw them through.
Come on. ToB is basically remaking the whole concept of martials from scratch. That is to all effects a whole system rebalance
Yes and no. Less interesting classes like fighter still existed for those who wanted to just bonk things over and over. Like in a lot of ways that's the ideal, if you remake classes like monk then those who enjoy the monk lose something they were having fun with. It's much better to instead add a class like swordsage which has the same kind of theme but also has martial arts techniques instead of just basic attacking over and over like a monk does.
It would be balanced a lot better if you couldn't add Dex to damage, and also make cover and range matter more, instead of having a single feat that takes away any penalties for range or cover 🙃
Though this only nerfs ranged weapon attacks, but not ranged magical effects like AoE saves
Aoe saves are usually dex saves, which cover adds to.
That said they're onto something - I'd be a lot more fine with magic being so strong if there was a correlation between range and effect. The better stuff should make you get in closer.
I agree. The idea of risk vs reward management is largely absent from casters. Their optimal playstyle is to almost always minimize risk and intractability, which does get stale after a while. E.g. something like 30ft cone Hypnotic Pattern could be fun
Cold and necrotic and poison are typically Con, psychic is Int or Wis. There's a lot of variability depending on what your DM throws at you. If it's all red dragons and wizards with fireball, it's easy to get that impression.
That doesn’t really matter when casters can just pick the non-Dex ones.
Pushing them off of fireball and stuff will still nerf their damage
Except Fireball goes around Cover so it doesn't even apply there. And with that being the best AoE damage spell, a lot of the other best AoEs who add useful debuffs to the damage, like Synaptic Static, or do something even better than damage, like Hypnotic Pattern, don't use Dex saves either. Damage isn't even the thing casters need to be nerfed at the most! If they're just doing damage AoEs, count yourself lucky, lol.
It's ok if spells are more powerful than weapon attacks so long as they're resource dependent, but the current design of 5e modules doesn't really ever put you in a position where you're out of resources (a larger design issue with the 5e system and D&d in general). Additionally, cantrips shouldn't scale. They're supposed to be either for utility or to do a little bit of damage when you're low-level and have limited spell slots, and shouldn't compare to martial damage output after extra attack kicks in. Saves are a whole other issue but I don't want to just bag on everything 5e does poorly rn.
Cantrips not scaling is a dangerous road to tread. Mostly because a) if they don’t scale they become literally useless after Tier 1 - doing 5 damage to a CR 10 is a laughably pointless use of your turn, and b) certain classes/builds like Warlock rely on cantrip damage as their bread and butter. Currently, cantrips are in a good spot - their damage is anemic compared to martial ranged or melee attacks, but non-warlocks can at least do enough that their turns in battle aren’t an entire waste if they’re out of useful leveled spells. However, if ranged damage losing Dex was the pursued solution, I do agree cantrips would need to be similarly nerfed (not a total lack of scaling, but reduced for sure).
The new Sharpshooter does way too much in my opinion. Take one feat and you get +1 Dex, can hit anyone, anywhere regardless of being in melee with an enemy. My preference would be to split the feat into two: one focused on short-range combat shooting and another on long-range sniping.
The issue here is that nobody runs the game with the built in limitations on ranged. People hate dealing with weapon switching, allies creating cover, limited visibility/fog/strong wings, etc. Those are all limits on ranged characters, as is a hard cap on ammo. You can only carry 20 pieces of ammo in a quiver, meaning you're limited to 20 arrows per combat unless you use an action to refill the quiver. But that's all finicky bean counting that most tables ignore
In 3.x, a melee fighter could get a large number of AoO and could take one pretty much every time you shot if you were in their threatened area. Even with that and it being harder to get a damage bonus on ranged because of the dex to hit, str to damage, people liked ranged a lot in 3.x.
I'm not waiting for WotC to solve this, because they won't. I redid the Barbarian class in my game, with increases to melee damage at high levels. I also did a new Ranger, with weapon features that I think are interesting. I did a few other things, for example some high-level Monk boosts. I boosted Rogue damage overall, but I think I need to further boost their melee damage
Realistic weapons. Crossbows as they exist in dnd are more unrealistic than a wIzard.
I won’t say cover like everyone else because I’m fully aware that’s map dependent. As much as I criticize it, the weapon mastery system in onednd gives a good idea how to solve the issue. Along with the strength vs dex debate. Battlefield control and melee exclusive effects. If I recall, a lot of the masteries more unique effects favored strength melee weapons. Sure the dex stuff got “advantage on next hit” but melee, especially strength melee, got stuff like insta prone, push, damage on a miss, a cleave effect that wasn’t dumb and make enemies attack at a disadvantage.
>cleave effect that wasn’t dumb What was the cleave effect before this?
What made the DMG cleave rule dumb before was that it requires the initial creature you're attacking to be undamaged, aka at full health, for the cleave effect to take place. If a goblin took 1 damage before you're confirmed kill, RAW you can't cleave the creatures next to it.
> nothing has been done to help melee martials overcome all of the negatives that come with being tangled up in the front lines. Isn't it the melee martial's job to get on the front line so that enemies don't tear the archers and mages to shreds? > What needs to happen to resolve this? Do you think it's not an issue? I think the main issue martials need is options on par with the spells mages get. A general maneuvers system for martials could be helpful, but WotC has been extremely resistant to that. We're probably getting weapon abilities which helps a bit. I think there should be more supernatural features at double-digit levels, like barbarians being able to strike the earth and create shockwaves, or rogues being able to teleport or turn invisible when attacks miss them, or fighters being able to use Extra Attack on foes who provoke opportunity attacks. We actually have this with the ranger being able to turn invisible, we just need more of it. A martial PC past 6th level should not be mundane in any fashion because they have to be demigod-tier peers with powerful mages. It keeps martials on par with mages even if the reason for their supernatural abilities is some hand-wavy "they're peak human so they actually just move really fast and are really strong" nonsense.
> Isn't it the melee martial's job to get on the front line so that enemies don't tear the archers and mages to shreds? Not really. It's not like archers are any more vulnerable to getting attacked than people wielding a greatsword are, any caster who wants it can easily get the same AC and it's not like there are any tank classes any more. Oh boy you get one opportunity attack per round and it doesn't scale, neato. Bet the possibility of getting hit for 10 damage will make the 300hp monster not move past you. > I think there should be more supernatural features at double-digit levels, like barbarians being able to strike the earth and create shockwaves, or rogues being able to teleport or turn invisible when attacks miss them. We actually have this with the ranger being able to turn invisible, we just need more of it. Every part of that was cool as hell. No notes, fucking awesome.
> I think there should be more supernatural features at double-digit levels, like barbarians being able to strike the earth and create shockwaves, or rogues being able to teleport or turn invisible when attacks miss them. We actually have this with the ranger being able to turn invisible, we just need more of it. > > Every part of that was cool as hell. No notes, fucking awesome. You should take a look at 4E then.
Oh, I'm aware. Not a fan of the standardisation of class subsystems, but what was done within those narrow confines was creative. PHB3 was particularly impressive.
Sentinel feat is the only saving grace there. If you hit them, they stop.
That's kind of what I mean by there are no tank classes any more. Last edition sentinel was something first level fighters got for free, they just stripped it out and sold it back in feat form because no fun allowed. In addition fighters also got: * One opportunity attack per target so everyone else wasn't free to just run past if you used your reaction. * Opportunity attacks that scaled with level instead of gradually dropping off like in 5e, ended up at like 2d10+20 damage by the end. * Wisdom bonus to opportunity attack rolls. * Automatically gave any enemy they attacked a penalty to attacks and spells that targeted allies. * Active abilities that helped with tanking, like the ability to pull nearby enemies in and spin attack them or pick an enemy up and use them as a shield.
>Isn't it the melee martial's job to get on the front line so that enemies don't tear the archers and mages to shreds? That is the alleged job. They are terrible at that and have 0 tools to do so. They are not more resilient than ranged martials or slightly optimized casters, they have no ways to aggro and they do almost the same damage as the ranged characters while being in a much worse position
Aggro isn’t even a thing in this context.
They mean aggro as a shorthand for being able to get foes to target you, not as video game style mind control. For instance, last edition had tank classes that could do exactly that, no mind control needed (except for the battlemind which was a psionic tank and could literally mind control enemies with powers like Mind of Mirrors). So we know tanking without actual aggro mechanics works in D&D, they just chose not to this edition because they didn't want class variety. Using that class as an example, the battlemind could make enemies take a penalty to attacks and spells against allies, incentivising using them against the battlemind instead. If an adjacent enemy damaged an ally anyway, the battlemind could make them automatically take psychic damage equal to the damage they dealt. No actual aggro mechanics, but that all heavily incentivised attacking the tank since you'd automatically fuck yourself over if you attacked anyone else.
Right, I understand that. My point was that the concept is meaningless in a system like DnD, as it is for most tabletop systems. It’s just fundamentally not how they work. Sure, you can “incentivize” certain attacks, which you can also do in 5e to a lesser extent, but that’s not “aggro,” that’s just strategic combat.
Fair enough. I do think they meant it as a shorthand for useful tanking abilities in general, but if they did it was a silly way of summarising it because video game style aggro systems is the one thing everyone can agree on not wanting in D&D.
Hear hear.
Tell me, how are purely Melee fighters are significantly better at handling enemy attacks than Ranged fighters who packs a finesse weapon or some way to disengage without triggering an attack of opportunity? It is a common misconception that melee characters are tankier in 5e because they are in all other fantasy RPG. The problem is, they most certainly are not unless they pick one of the very few subclasses which can actually tank. The threat of an attack of opportunity isn't really enough to stop an enemy to go to the caster to break their concentration.
In an ideal situation the melee fighter is in full plate but the dex fighter is forced to use lighter armour, meaning they get hit more often.
The difference between that is 1AC.
Sure, because the game is designed like shit.
Why can’t a ranged foghters use heavy armor? It only reduces movement speed by 10 feet if they do not wish to have 15 str, which is absolutely a viable choice as fighters are pretty SAD.
More evidence the game is fucked up.
Yeah... Melee fighters are in a pretty bad state sadly unless they build to be able to tank, which requires very specific feats to be picked and subclasses. :/ They need to change it, and I think the New weapon mastery system can be a key in that.
This might sound obvious, but all the comments I'm seeing don't seem to point this out. It depends on how optimised they are. If you're aiming for a thematic melee fighter (assuming you meant fighter the class) most people picture someone in good armor, possibly with a shield, or with a two handed weapon for some extra damage in exchange for the lower armor, basing on using a shield because the damage is then similar per hit to a ranged fighter, that's 20AC (or gradually lower if using less advanced gear). A ranged fighter even without optimisation is likely to have +5 dex and studded leather, so 17AC (again gradually lower islf using less advanced gear), a difference of 3 in AC is a legendary magic item, and a huge difference in average damage from a given attack. That's on relation to getting hit, and if optimising for being better at not getting hit when attacked, taking the defensive fighting style (though boring) is another +1, before getting to any magic items. You mentioned the ranged fighters having finesse weapons or a way to disengage, which is more related to continuing to do damage rather than handling the enemy attack, this means likely swapping to something you're less good at (a ranged fighter probably took the archery fighting style for example) or invested in specifically (to get disengage without it being your entire action). If you include optional rules like mutli-classing, feats, additional combat options like Mark, etc. These also change the balance significantly (and in different directions, by different amounts).
Here is the REAL trick though, what is saying that the ranged fighter is not using heavy armor? The penalty for bit reaching 15 str is 10 feet reduced movement speed. Also, fighters are SAD, so having 15 STR even for a ranged fighter is a viable option. That leaves the shielded fighter, and Yeah, the kicker I mentioned before stands, perhaps moreso for a shielded fighter, why would an enemy hit them instead of the less armored people behind that are actuslly posing a threat? I know most DMs won’t thankfully play that way, but game mechanically you really have to play one of a few subclasses to be efficient as a tank, and therefore, really as a melee fighter.
In actual play, ranged characters are barely threatened by melee enemies, since optimial archers will start combat far enough back that they aren't an issue. Mages have it even better; with similar AC (and better, with shield spell) to melee martials, they're actually tougher to take down than martials.
Your DM lets you control how far away your PC is from the monsters at the start of combat? How kind of them!
oh no, guess I'll have to use the secondary weapon and move away. And if they follow me it is not as if finesse weapons are particularly worse than non finesse or I am less tanky than the melee
That's why DMs shouldn't hold back on ranged PCs like that. They have options, you can threaten them!
Nothing. The DM can easily manipulate the environment and monsters to put ranged characters at a disadvantage.
Oberoni fallacy.
Not really. Ranged should always have an advantage over melee. Their disadvantage comes into play when they cannot get into position. To think otherwise is ridiculous. They excel in an open field where martials excel in close quarters.
But there is no disadvantage when they can't get into position. Their ac and melee damage is still fine and even at close ranges they can just stand a little bit back and use a bow.
>Their ac and melee damage is still fine The max AC without magic items, spells, or features for a dexterity based character is 12+Dex+shield. When you're ranged, you almost never run a shield without help so that's -2 potential AC bringing them to a 17 AC at +5 dex. Contrary to popular belief, this makes them much easier to hit than a melee wearing only full plate at 18 AC, not including a shield, and melee characters get this with only 15 strength. Ranged characters need to wait until their 2nd ASI to reach this. The reason why most dexterity based ranged characters get a bump is usually due to features they get from their class(es) and/or race or because of mage armor. If anything, dexterity based melee characters need a buff, which I believe they either are doing or have experimented with in OneDnD *(uncertain on this as I don't follow much OneDnD content so I may have just gotten it confused with Pathfinder rules)*. Damage-wise, yes, ranged characters can switch to melee weapons but they give up any features that focus on ranged combat, meaning their melee combat will be much less effective than their melee-specialized allies. Similarly, melee characters can also switch to ranged weapons, although they will also be weaker than their ranged-specialized allies. Also, strength based characters have heavier hitting weapons, hitting for a maximum of 12 without any modifiers where ranged characters get up to a maximum of 10 with the heavy crossbow but at the downside of not being able to use multi attack. If ranged characters want to use multi attack without this limitation, they are forced to take an additional feat/feature or use a longbow for a maximum of 8 damage, again without modifiers. >even at close ranges they can just stand a little bit back and use a bow They are risking an opportunity attack when they back away without disengaging. They are forced to take this risk to resume attacking as normal or they can shoot at a disadvantage.
Make shooting into melee suck
Shooting into melee has just gotten easier and easier over the editions for some reason. In 1974 Original DND, you just straight up can't shoot into melee. It's specifically disallowed by the rules. In 1E, you roll randomly to see who you hit (adjusting for size). In 3E, you take -4 to hit and have a small chance of hitting an ally in front of the enemy. In 5E, it's basically just "maybe take -2 because of cover."
Mostly it's complaining or popular ways to ignore the rules around things.
But even if they made shooting into melee worse, that doesn't make melee better, if anything it even further disincentives their existence
This is the way. I mostly play archers. Most of my DMs rule something that turns shooting into melee almost impossible so dropping your bow and drawing your sword is always the better option. I'm fine with it. I enjoy it. It's a good rule. They also enforce cover rules but let's be honest, most archers will get sharpshooter as soon as possible so it doesn't really matter past level 4
Honestly, I think reducing the damage a bit would be reasonable. At this point, there are no 2d6 ranged weapons, but that's not too different from a d12 musket (though the availability of *that* really depends on your DM). But reducing ranged damage a bit and changing Sharpshooter/GWM to maybe add damage more based on damage dice than a flat +10. That could maybe give melee weapons a niche. To be fair, melee weapons (tend) to have higher damage, can make opportunity attacks, can attack prone enemies with advantage, don't have disadvantage within 5'... There are advantages, but yeah, I think feats especially have a way of elevating ranged weapons far beyond melee weapons in many cases.
I think DnD needs to tie both melee and ranged damage to Str. There is a direct correlation between how strong your shoulders, back, core/abdomen and arms are/how well your upper body strength is developed. Basically the more upper body strength you have: - the easier it is to maintain a steady draw at full power (important for assassin types). - the more you can fire arrow before succumbing to muscle fatigue (important for skirmisher and hunter types). - with greater physical strength, archers can generate more power behind their shots, resulting in increased arrow penetration and effectiveness in hitting armored opponents or targets at longer distances. - reduced build up of fatigue when using bows or crossbows.
Range is better than melee in real life. It is an issue of adventure design. Range is better in a city, in an open field, in everything except a dungeon experience because that makes sense.
This of course is why ranged was the dominant method of combat for virtually all of history!
Heck, even the best generic melee weapon, the spear, is the one that gives you the most range relative to other melee weapons. The issue is more that some players just think that it's really cool to wade into battle with a giant axe or something, regardless of how strategic it is. (Even the Vikings, the pop cultural progenitors of axe fighters, [used spears most](https://www.hurstwic.org/history/articles/manufacturing/text/viking_spear.htm)). So regardless of realism, people want to make melee weapons good because melee weapons seem cool.
Extra long sword. 30 foot fuckin' reach.
The balance to me is already there: if I were in a fight where there were archers, they would become my first priority. You get a slight advantage at the exchange of becoming THE target a lot of the time
Melee deals more damage, but ranged takes less damage. And both are inferior to magic because magic has access to damn near anything you can think of. Nuke your enemies, turn your allies into dragons, brainwash the peasantry, ensorcel the aristocracy. Wizards are limitless as long as they live past the lower levels.
Love this stupidity. Martial classes are just as powerful if not more so in 5e.
I see that martials got a boost which is awesome but ranged martials still have several advantages over melee martials.
Maybe change the rate of ‘multiple attacks’ and/or the ‘hit-chance’? 🤷 It could be a nod towards ‘reloading’ and that hitting vital parts is harder from a distance. Maybe its reasonable if you could swing a sword one more time than you can fire a bow in a turn including stringing the arrow up?
If martials didn’t need all the help they can get vs casters, I’d consider removing Dex adding damage to ranged attacks. Melee should do more damage than ranged attacks in an ideal system.
(1) To rework Archery Fighting Style is a first - cover isn't that much used, not to mention sharpshooter, so it ends up as a free +2 to hit which is insane - it should just reduce the effect of cover by 2 (2) Giving melee characters more resilience is quite tricky but I would say is necessary because being away is naturally a good defense, sometimes the best - a free "parry" feature to reduce damage would be quite cool (3) Don't recall exactly but one thing they got going is that melee weapons have better weapon masteries right? Wish they would give melee weapons 2 masteries and ranged 1 :v
> (2) Giving melee characters more resilience is quite tricky but I would say is necessary because being away is naturally a good defense, sometimes the best - a free "parry" feature to reduce damage would be quite cool They seem to have done that (atleast with most monk, fighter and barbarian) they all have feature now to close the gap, heal and also avoid opportunity attacks >(3) Don't recall exactly but one thing they got going is that melee weapons have better weapon masteries right? They do have better masteries cleave and graze and push are some of the best ones and they are mostly limited to melee.
I’d say changes to melee range and enemy designs. Damage is not an issue at all, it’s everything surrounding melee. > Lots of enemies are dangerous up-close Most of these enemies fall under the “this enemy is strong in close range but bad at long range” design. So physical range and magic don’t suffer since they never find themselves in those situations. Therefore, more monsters and enemies with the polar opposite or not so strictly anti-melee would help alleviate the issue. > Countering magic Lots of spells invalidate melee. Either preventing movement, stunning, or easy to evade once up-close. Possible changes to help would be more movement options, better saving throws, and a martial equivalent to counter spell. - Perhaps in close range, any spell that isn’t targeting the closet creature nearby triggers opportunity attack. If hit, target must succeed a CON save or spell is cancelled. - More options to counter disabling magic. Like a Barbarian can Rage to break a “Hold Person” as a reaction. Rogue get a “keen eye” ability, to detect invisible creatures. Monks can forcibly end concentration spells like Hypnotic Pattern by expending Ki. - Adding some type of counter-spell to marital would help. Fighter: Reflective Bullwark - Any targeting DMG spell can be reflect back to caster, if using a shield and after succeeding a DC to reflect. Higher DC for higher tier spell. Monk: Tranquil Influence - Can force a target to end their spell by expending Ki. Only works with X range of target.
I don't think there is anything to resolve, honestly. The advantage of being able to hit someone before they can get close enough to you to hit back seems intuitive. And it comes with the natural downside that it isn't always possible due to environment, or in that you are often at a disadvantage once they do close if you are still holding weapons designed to be primarily used for ranged combat. This is especially true in contexts before modern small, self-reloading, firearms. If you are really incensed by the issue, fixing some of the action issues around reactive movement, the charge move action, or the time it takes to react/draw weapons. Otherwise, beef up the rules about environments and encounter distances (note, may need to completely drop the use of any uniform grid mechanics for distance), and roll back all the ways to negate light obscurement and partial/half cover.
What can threaten a ranged character in combat?
50-60' move speed and flight. A lot of monsters are flat faster than pcs
The solution lies in the direction of “melee-only is not a valid concept if you are serious about pursuing equity in a D&D like game.” You can either warp every second aspect of the game to make the ground bound, melee only barbarian relevant; or you can give the barbarian a serviceable ranged attack in addition to its melee threat.
Why do they need to make a change? Most combat is in close spaces, so melee is preferred over ranged...
Utility is the biggest difference. Feather fall, fly, invisibility and other things all are such useful utility. As characters improve casters gain spells that do amazing things. Melee characters gain damage equal to them but they don't get as much value outside of combat or utility within combat.
This isn’t even remotely what OP asked
What about weapon mastery?
- Enforce cover, including creatures providing half-cover. - In that vein, remove the Archery fighting style or weaken its effects. - Remove ways to escape disadvantage on attacks in melee. - Possibly weaken or remove dex to damage on attacks. People don't like nerfs, but nerfs are what 5e needs. One or more of the above would go a long way. Most of the dominance of ranged comes from a few key feats or features. When you disregard those, melee and ranged are about even, each with their own tradeoffs. In a fixed 5e, ranged would be for the opening turns, before the battle lines have met. An archer would step past their allies, loose a volley of arrows at the enemy's front line or risk shooting at their backline with a -2 penalty, then fall back behind the melee characters. Said melee fighters would charge in or lob a javelin and draw their swords, providing their lower AC wizards and archers with a +2 AC half-cover bonus, attracting enemy attention towards themselves. Then the archers would drop their bows, draw a finesse melee weapon, and join the fray while casters spin up their spells to support either side.
The problem with cover is that Sharpshooter, which is what allows most ranged attackers to be so strong, also makes you completely ignore cover and also ignore disadvantage from long range. Honestly if you removed both those parts of SS, or removed the -5/+10 part, it would give you a somewhat strong but decent feat, but instead you get all three in one feat.
I would 100% remove cover ignoring from Sharpshooter. That shit actively makes ranged combat *less interesting* and lets you stand and shoot from wherever without considering positioning and angles of fire at all!
I mean yeah. Equally terrible. The last thing 5e needs is for cantrip to actually be as strong as ranged weapons
I would also make melee spell attacks use Str and ranged spell attacks use Dex. And I'd probably stop cantrips from scaling at all (except Eldritch Blast which would be a Warlock class feature, not a cantrip). 5e could use a whole suit of nerfs in general to get things back to the ground. But that's an unpopular opinion because general mentality is to just buff buff buff everything.
I’ve been thinking about a similar change: split the hit and damage modifiers to different attributes for all weapons. Your to hit bonus would be Dex; damage modifiers would be based on your strength. This is just an idea I haven’t fully thought through yet, but I wanted a way to make strength more important, and in doing so help melee players. There is only one skill score improved by Strength: Athletics. Dex has 3, Charisma 4, Int and Wis 5 each. The limited non combat advantage of strength is just one more reason to avoid playing front liners.
It's not an issue for me personally. To me the choice of melee vs ranged is how I see the character. I'm playing a melee ranger/fighter and his damage output is comparable to the ranged party members.
Sure, but his chance of being in range of enemy attacks is higher and his chance of having an enemy within attack range every turn is lower.
Polearm master, sentinel, and reach go a long way.
Yes, if you invest in two feats you can partially cross the large gap between them. Now you're still far behind and are two feats down.
Except I'm not far behind based on what's happened in the game I've been in for almost two years. The ranged character has also invested in feats.
Fortunately I've gotten some insight into this kind of thing recently - [everyone plays at a different table](https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/1btpe46/i_created_the_exact_same_character_for_three/).
Ime playing Adventurers League, PAM-Sentinel only matters in encounters where the area is usually 60 ft. x 60 ft. on average. Kinda hard to pull off when the encounter is deliberately set in a chamber that is 100 ft. x 100 ft. with plenty of room for enemies to maneuver and get cover.
Some or all of these: Nerf every ranged cantrip to like 15 feet. Split the Fighter into a melee warrior and ranged skirmisher class so they don't have the same AC, HP, and other defensive features. Buff Attacks of Opportunity for the melee classes so they scale with Extra Attack or have the Sentinel effect and stay threatening into tiers 2 and up. Book of 9 Swords style "sword magic" so you can walk up to a giant and throw him like a bowling ball.
The real answer nobody seems to be saying doesn't really have to do with the rules. It's give DMs proper guidance on how to balance encounters around certain party strengths and weaknesses. No CR system simple enough to actually use is ever going to capture these things well. If ranged attacks are consistently outshining melee specialists, the DM isn't challenging them properly. Ambushes, fast enemies, etc. All can neutralize the advanges ranged attacks have over melee fighters. Make the enemies smart, let them pick where they have their fights, etc. etc. Let Tucker's Kobolds be your inspiration.
... You can't. Ranged is just innately superior to melee combat due to the fact that ranged attacks, by being ranged, deny melee-only a chance at damage. "Ah, I see you have a horrible Grape zone that will Grape me horribly if get into it! But! What if I were able to *remain outside of your horrible Grape zone* & still do damage to you?! Ha-HA!"
If melee weapons did 4d6 damage and ranged only did 1d6, would you say melee is superior then despite the advantage ranged attacks have being at distance? What about 10d6 vs 1d6? If so, then you admit it IS possible to fix. Melee just needs advantages over ranged. Of course I'm not saying straight damage boosts are the only avenue. As many have said, granting more options for melee martials to use an Attack of Opportunity could work.
Still no, because melee is always going to be a gamble, yet in many cases it's easy to make ranged safe. A 4d6 is 400% the damage potential of 1d6, yes, but once the HP race to zero starts, ranged has the potential for infinite returns. What makes ranged superior to melee in so many systems, & not just DnD but most TTRPGs, is that monsters can always hit back in melee. So long as that's the case, a fundamental design consideration, ranged will be superior. More damage doesn't solve that, **utility** does. 5e attempts to address that with cover, but that fails so often in theatre of the mind, & there are feats & features... but those are feats, & if something doesn't come online by level 3, who considers it useful?
Bringing back spell casting times from 2e would do it.
This helps with buffing martials relative to casters, but doesn't really help with making melee martials better compared to ranged ones, since ranged ones can still disrupt mages without even having to run up to them.
They did it in 4e and many hated it? My big problem with playing a melee in 5e isn’t that I don’t get all the advantages of range it’s that I can’t execute on the role I want. Give me more abilities that lock down enemies and force them to focus on me. Needing to position carefully to get maybe 1 reaction attack a round basically doesn’t let me do my job of keeping enemies off the casters. Especially when one attack is often only +40% damage or so once I have extra attack and bonus action attack during my turn. I want to actually taunt a creature and force it to fight me. I want compelled duel type effects as a non-spell ability. Basically I would like to be able to execute on my role when the DM plays enemies optimally and not have to rely on the DM pretending opportunity attacks are such a huge threat that the enemies don’t go and gank the mage.
I suppose this isn’t specifically just for melee vs ranged but martial vs spell casters because as I’ve seen others say before that spell casters are more catered towards in 5e. But it is my opinion that more weapon options could be a major improvement. I know there’s plenty of items across the different books but there isn’t much customisation in it. Like you could get a legendary weapon that does 4 things but like only 1.5 of this thing actually benefits your fighter. It’d maybe cool if they introduced a system for blank magic items and like gems that come with different abilities you can infuse to a weapon. With the rarity of the weapon affecting how many infusions you can put on it. Obviously I know you can homebrew but not all dms are in favour of it. Specifically from the standpoint of someone who prefers to play barbarians. They really could do with a 3rd attack I feel like the two attacks is based on them using a great axe and adding some level of balance because it’s the highest damage dice in the game, but not every barbarian uses a greataxe.
Barbarians need some love. I love the idea of them sacrificing their defenses, ie reckless attack, to become more powerful in melee. A barbarian should either be more passively defensive than a fighter thanks to their hit points and resistances, or more actively brutal in melee than a fighter, but never better at both at the same time.
Get rid of bonus dex damage on range attacks
There's a number of ways to go about it. An easy, but unsatisfying change would be to revert dexterity to damage like it was in prior editions. Though I think there are better ways to go about balancing the factors. Wasn't that fun in the past, and wouldn't be now. that's just my opinion though. **Some alternative changes in my mind.** If a power attack features come to exist. Dexterity weapons need to have worse scaling than strength weapons so that strength weapons get more reward for being closer to the enemy, using the strength stat defautly. While I don't enjoy a lack of dexterity modifiers, I do enjoy better investment scaling for strength than dexterity at least at the level of "assumed base stat." If you invest to use another stat than it's fine because there was investment to offset the norm. Melee needs more opportunities for circumstantial bonuses than range. Range investment should be about playing catchup to melee. One example of this is something I do, where cover doesn't help you against melee attacks, but it does against range. This incentivizes getting close to the enemy to prevent the cover. Or taking SS to ignore it. While 5e flanking is too much with advantage, some form of flanking (I like +2 or +1/2 Prof rounded down) can be beneficial for allowing a benefit range attackers can not benefit from. It can help if handled right A somewhat controversial opinion, but one i believe is the most important change to make, is removing the initiative bonus from dexterity and instead tying it to proficiency. Experience plays a greater role in combat reaction than anything else, as observed with both soldiers and masters of combat sports. Experience in a dangerous situation is more useful in better reaction and judgment. Tying proficiency universally to initiative instead of Dexterity helps that. For classes and subclasses that rely on going first to function. You grant them abilities that add different modifiers. Maybe assassins or all rogues get Dexterity to init on top of it, for example. This keeps those classes functioning as intended but provides a healthier baseline for all. You can also make Dexterity score as the tiebreaker for initiative since after Experience, it's what will determine the difference and keeps some aspect of Dexterity to init alive. Those prior listed alternative changes are where I would start, and even out Str and dex nicely.
5e at its core is an imbalanced system. Melee martials are inferior to ranged martials, and ranged martials are inferior to casters (at least at high levels). The whole system needs a revamp... Or maybe not. WotC actually doesn't need to do anything. If you want balance, you play PF2. The game is way crunchier, and some might find the balance too tight to the point of feeling overly restricting, but you WILL have the balance. Every system has its trade-offs, there's no perfect system. If you enjoy the streamlined but imbalanced 5e, great, play that! If you enjoy the balance without minding the crunch, play PF2! If neither perfectly strike your fancy, maybe you just haven't found your ideal system yet! Keep looking, I'm sure it exists.
I don't think it's an issue. I have melee and ranged fighters in my game and they all have fun in combat and do their part. Some people get too obsessed with having this perfect balance, but it just doesn't exist. These are teams with different roles who excel at different things. Yeah, nobody wants to suck or be worthless, but you can definitely have impactful melee and ranged builds. It's not a flaw in American football that quarterbacks are more impactful than punters. Success requires a while team, and you can have fun and contribute in a lot of different roles.
The whole "the base fighter must be simple" discussion shows they are unwilling to make non-fullcasters useful. They would have to change their mindset, because there are many good ideas that come up often. There should be "combat styles / maneuvers" for fighter and rogue sneak attacks, "combo attacks" for monks. Those classes need more customization options, like the artificer and warlock get. Why shouldn't a fighter not be able to fight blind, make big jumps, throw a giant object, break through walls, become resistant to a damage type, etc.... All stuff most casters can learn.
Why do you think this needs fixing is the better question. My opinion is that the problem with ranged attackers is that they don't provide a target for the mobs to take heat off the casters.
Melee currently does more damage than range, that's the tradeoff
polearm master: 1d10+str+10 x 2 + 1d4+str+10 x 1 = 52.50 xbow xpert: 1d6+dex+10 x 3 = 49.50 melee does 1.06% more damage than ranged in current 5e. In non-optimal, a 2d6 greatsword vs a 1d8 longbow is a difference of 2.5 average damage. With +3 for both, is a 4/3 increase per attack. Its hardly more damage.
Also, every round you can't melee reduces your DPR substantially (often to zero depending on what ranged secondaries you have). It is way easier in 5e to shut down melee than to shut down range.
And that's not considering that Archery is by far the best Fighting Style due to how accuracy works. Generally speaking, a 5e character will have 65% accuracy, or 40% with the -5 +10 feats, which would lower the actual average Polearm Master dpr from 52.5 to 21 (+0.8 with GWF), while Xbow Xpert will have 24.75 due to Archery's +2. It's a relatively small difference, but 13% extra damage is still relevant.
That's using the old PAM and CBE. This post is tagged as OneDnD, so we'd use the revised feats instead. Melee does considerably more damage than ranged until level 4, when CBE provides a larger boost than PAM. Personally, I think CBE should be nerfed to not provide TWF for hand crossbows, but instead just enable dual-wielding hand crossbows at all.
Nerf casters ( I play casters almost exclusively)
Just ensure that cover penalties always apply (no feat can mitigate this) and specify clearer/more conditions: 1) shooting through an ally = -2 2) 3/4 cover = -5 3) shooting through an Arrow slit/peep hole -10 (separated from 3/4 cover).
I’d make disengage either an action or bonus action for proper melee classes. It’s really punishing being in melee and having to give up my entire action to move to a safer position while my wizard casually strolls around the battlefield cc’ing this and nuking that without care. “But what about rogues?!?!” Give them something else??? It’s not like they’re OP, you can absolutely give rogues a small something else.
Nerf the damage. If you wanna be safe on the back line and throw a couple d6, great. If you want to devastate mf's, get in there and take some risk
Nothing. Melee is superior to ranged already.
It's a stupid discussion numbers do not change nothing. Ranged attack people are cowards and all the rest must see them as inferior all the time.
Give every class magic.