Originally Posted by SorcererVictor
Originally Posted by kanisatha
(...) fighters are unbalanced in the opposite way towards being ridiculously under-powered and useless. So the game is engaging in favoriticism towards players who love wizards/spellcasting while screwing over players who love fighters/melee combat. How is that "fun" for me?


Tome of battle give a lot of cool stuff to fighter.

And is not just fighters vs wizards. Fighters are a boring class. Clerics are good. Druids are good. Psions are good(...) having no supernatural power in a high fantasy setting is a huge drawback. Like indigenous people of Americas when they faced the "conquistador" with cavalry and firearms.

What is the best solution?

A ) Make every class(druids, clerics, paladins, mages, wizards, psions, etc) like the most boring class with the less amount of options AKA everyone equally boring to play
B ) Give more cool stuff for fighters.

Spoiler : The solution B involves changing an single class. Not all other classes.

And note : You can use magic on melee. Magus on pathfinder 1e, pact of the blade warlock on D&D 5e and a eldritch glaive focused warlock on 3.5e can be amazing on melee. Shapeshift druids too.

Yes, so option B would be best. But D&D refuses to do this (though I will grant that 5e does a better job of it than previous editions). By contrast, PoE does make the fighter pretty good, with lots of good, cool abilities. And as such, in PoE, playing a fighter is not only as fun as any spellcaster class but also a class that can rival a spellcaster class in how much damage it generates. And the credit for all this goes to balancing. So, to repeat, balancing does have value, so long as it is not taken to an extreme where all classes become either equally watered down or else blandly the same.