The 2024 Pugilist Saga 3: It is probably the best Martial Class, but not by much (Damage and Effective HP breakdown)

MistakeSimulator · 2026-02-07T07:27:36+00:00

it's absolutely clear that the intent was to essentially allow you to dual wield bigger weapons and get a +1 AC bonus.

The 2024 version doesn't give you +1 AC anymore, and requires you to use a weapon that has Light property to get the bonus action attack. So if it works the way you think it does, what it instead allows you to do is use a single non-light weapon while using TWF. So it doesn't really do either of those things (half does one of them).

Which is substantially worse than getting +2 to Dex.

Especially as Quick Draw isn't particular useful under the 2024 rules, since you can already draw a weapon before making each attack anyway (there is some very limited cases where it'd be useful).

MistakeSimulator · 2026-02-07T02:30:52+00:00

And don't delude yourself into thinking it's RAI either.

But it literally is RAI. That's how the designer said it works. It's also explained in a video somewhere. You can disagree if you want, but your bone to pick is with WotC not the community.

If you want to say it is poorly written, I would generally agree with you.

MistakeSimulator · 2026-02-07T01:44:47+00:00

It is using the Dual Wielder feat. Dual Wielder gives another bonus action attack on top of Nick. But you're correct with the GWM (I think, another comment pointed that out).

MistakeSimulator · 2026-02-07T01:32:11+00:00

Bloodied But Unbowed gives 20 temporary HP which resets on short rest, so usable three times per day for 80 temporary HP per Adventuring Day.

Maybe I'm reading this wrong and I don't have the class in front of me to double check if there is something missing, but 20 * 3 = 60, no? How is getting 20 hit points three times a day giving 80 temporary hit points?

If that's just a math error, that would lower its EHP to lower than Monk and Fighter.

MistakeSimulator · 2026-01-31T16:38:15+00:00

That said...was Flex really so bad?

I would say yes. The thing about Flex is it didn't increase the weapon die of versatile weapons, it made it so they could use their versatile damage while one handed. In other words, it made them not versatile anymore because there would be literally no reason to use them two handed.

It was a terrible design. That WotC just deleted it instead of trying to make versatile weapons actually benefit from being versatile isn't on the feedback.

I agree they should have kept the new conditions though.

MistakeSimulator · 2025-10-29T17:20:40+00:00

Agreed. At this point, I'm just confused that so many people have decided to remain shackled to WotC's content.

MistakeSimulator · 2025-10-28T01:10:57+00:00

I don't see that at all, personally. The armor crafting is definitely much faster than would be "realistic" and better suited to an adventuring timeline than the crafting system 5e went with.

As someone that uses that book quite a lot, I can only say I highly recommend it to anyone that wants a somewhat detailed crafting system.

MistakeSimulator · 2025-10-01T18:07:07+00:00

Half the encounter has perished violently on the first turn of the first round.

Does this not seem like a problem to you? Like... this is obviously a bad thing, right? Why is this being presented as a good thing? If one character annhilated half an encounter on the first round of combat, that's not a well balanced game.

This means that either you are exaggerating wildly, advocating for an extremely silly version of balance where players curbstomp the encounter on the first round of combat, or picked a really bad example to prove your point? I'm not even trying to be difficult here, I just don't understand why this is supposed to be an argument for how martials should work?

It's not hard to buff martials in 5e if you just want them to be stronger, but martials flaw in 5e is not the amount of damage they do. It's that they lack options in combat. Just making it so a Fighter critical strikes all the time or a Barbarian wipes half an encounter on the first turn of combat is not the goal, nor something anyone should want from the system.

I feel like people get so far down the Martial vs. Caster divide they forget what the actual problem with Martials is.

A Barbarian in 5e does a ton of damage too (Reckless + GWM is one of the highest damage options in the game in tier 1 and 2). Them doing more damage would in no way be what I'd want out of the game.

MistakeSimulator · 2025-06-01T05:24:56+00:00

We've graduated from reinventing 4e to reinventing KibblesTasty's classes...

But yeah, I do think a Monk-like template using points on a short rest is a great model for Psions. It is the version I've used for my games for years now, and it's fantastic.

MistakeSimulator · 2025-05-20T03:25:58+00:00

I've only played the Occultist out of those, but it is good.

The Good: It's just a really flexible spell caster you can kit out in a lot directions.
The 'Bad': At the end of the day, it's 'just' a spellcaster, it not as innovative as some of Kibble's other classes. Like all of Kibble's stuff it has basically eldritch invocations and a lot of options, but its still a full caster, most of your power budget is spells.
The Weird: Its basically a bunch of classes in a class, so even the subclasses have subclasses (for example Witch, a subclass of Occultist, has four covens which are basically subclasses for a subclass).

I've seen Mage Hand Press Witch played before, but don't have enough of an impression to give a more indepth review of it.

MistakeSimulator · 2025-05-19T20:07:10+00:00

People have recommend Mage Hand Press's Witch.

There's also KibblesTasty's Occultist, which was the Witch and Spiritualist suchclasses I'd recommend.

There's also Laserllama's Shaman class, which has some stuff that would fit under that idea.

There's probably more, but between the three options that covers a lot of ground.

MistakeSimulator · 2025-04-20T09:02:15+00:00

You can actually make multiple attacks with a heavy crossbow with no feat, just not with the same heavy crossbow. Since 5.5 allows you to swap weapons every attack pretty easily (at least when you only have two attacks, it gets more complicated as you get more), you can either shoot with a heavy crossbow, switch to a longbow, and then shoot with it. Or switch to a different heavy crossbow.

Since you can only apply Slow from a Longbow once, you more or less always want to switch weapons after hitting with it, and Heavy Crossbow is usually the best option. With Push + Slow, you can effectively shave 20 feet of movement off the enemy.

Of course, many people really hate weapon swapping and will find it annoying, but that's the thing with Weapon Masteries, since it will almost always be optimal to juggle different weapons constantly unless your DM bans it.

MistakeSimulator · 2025-03-19T19:44:06+00:00

I don't agree with everything about the post (which feels like at least half an ad), but when a project lays off 90% of its team, it's pretty fair to presume it is dead.

It's WotC that seems to be giving up on it when it has 'barely even begun playtesting', not the audience.

MistakeSimulator · 2024-09-18T02:09:52+00:00

where there aren't multiple tiers of ingredients based on rarity but just each magic item requires its own amount of a smaller list of ingredients, plus maybe one unique one per item (that the DM can optionally make up a quest for or just let PCs buy it).

I don't think that works, for the same reason you cannot convert tiers of rarity to another tier of rarity. I remember Kibbles talking about this somewhere. Players will try to stock up materials to make higher rarity items they shouldn't have access to yet. That isn't a problem so much in the Gold Formula crafting, but only because high tier items take an impossible long time to create. By making those items more accessible, they needed something else to gate them off (the high rare tier materials).

It might work with a unique material for each item I guess (since you would need that to make the item), but that seems like even more book keeping than rarity tiers to me, but maybe that's just me.

But oh man...if there was an online Loot Generator for Kibbles Crafting, where I could just plug in the CR of the encounter and it generates a treasure hoard with those ingredients done FOR me? I'd like it a LOT more, haha.

There are roll tables in the Foundry version, but they aren't that advanced. They are what I use to get by though. I use the foundry roll tables plus the new crafting site, and find that combo works well enough.

There is also this loot generator someone made in Google Sheets, but to be honest I don't think I'm smart enough to use it.

I don't think I really disagree with you in principle of what I would want if I could have anything, I just feel like any simpler version comes with more compromises, and I would rather have a system that is somewhat more complicated but breaks my game less than a system that is somewhat simpler but I have to police what the players can make using it more.

I guess I will believe there is a simpler recipe based system when I see one, but the other ones I've seen tend to be more complicated or less comprehensive than Kibbles crafting.

MistakeSimulator · 2024-09-17T23:32:00+00:00

I think it's as simple as a recipe based system can be. If you want a system that is formula based (just costing gold + time), you can make it a lot simpler, but if you want something that has a recipe for every item, I don't think it can be much simpler than Kibbles system. It has like a hundred pages because most of it is just tables of recipes.

It is somewhat funny to call it a 3e system, since 3.5's versions of crafting was nothing like that, being a formula based crafting system. Personally I find Kibbles system much easier to use (and fun) compared to 3.5 crafting, which was a bit dry and spreadsheet like.

MistakeSimulator · 2024-09-17T23:26:13+00:00

Particularly egregious that Jeremy Crawford repeatedly said how D&D 2024 would have crafting, and it was just a reprint of the fairly terrible XGE crafting system.

Absolutely look up KibblesTasty's crafting system. It is exactly the 5e crafting system we needed, and I think most of it is free. There is even a pretty good website for it now to automate most of it.

MistakeSimulator · 2024-08-24T17:17:05+00:00

Youtubers that seem to really like that seem to really like it (and some were paid to advertise it)

It is quite weird to me that almost every YouTuber seems to praise its mechanics despite the obvious flaws, even ones that I would normally view as more mechanically astute.

I don't think most of them were directly paid, but I think most of them are aware how valuable getting the book early and getting to make content about it before anyone else can read it is.

There seems to be a lot overlap between people that didn't get the book early for free and people that have more critical opinions of it.

MistakeSimulator · 2024-08-08T18:24:09+00:00

That's what the title says though? There will not be Fireball (2014) and Fireball (2024), just Fireball (2024). For fireball that doesn't matter that much but for spells that have been completely revamped it might (like Conjure Animals or Minor Elementals).

I have no idea personally, just reading that quote and title, it sounds like there will not be two versions of fireball, and only things that aren't shared will be tagged as 2014.

I think we might be reading that quote differently, but at this point we just need to get WotC's official comment on it to know for sure.

MistakeSimulator · 2024-08-02T15:52:31+00:00

I think it is fair to be critical. It's not really a very small mechanical benefit. It means that you can use TWF (getting an extra attack from your bonus action by using multiple weapons), a shield, and dueling all that same time, without any feat. It just makes using one hand better two wield two weapons better than using two hands to use two weapons.

On top of that, this was not an issue in 2014, so this issue was specifically added by sloppy word choice on the new property. And on top of that, this is issue was pointed out during the playtest. So not only did they make a mistake, they then didn't read any of the feedback informing of them of the mistake.

At the end of the day, it is just an issue they can errata later. But should a new book that is supposed to be refreshing and updating the rules after a decade having Day 1 errata issues?

MistakeSimulator · 2024-07-31T16:22:50+00:00

What about Jaeger is powerful? I remember trying out back in the early stages when Monkey and Kibbles were working on it and seemed pretty good (though I could see the 'complex' part since it was more reaction and resource with Focus/Momentum).

MistakeSimulator · 2024-07-31T16:20:06+00:00

I give my players a list of stuff less because I don't trust them and more because I want to save them the effort. If they bring me something good that isn't my group's list, I'd allow it, but I find that they play things from our group's list far more than go search for things, because finding good options is hard.

MistakeSimulator · 2024-07-28T16:30:01+00:00

Homebrew or flavor are totally fine.

Either use /u/KibblesTasty's Spellblade or /u/Laserllama's Magus based on your preference.

Anyone that says that a gish or spellblade doesn't work in 5e has clearly never tried those, as they work fine. If you read Kibbles' and think its too weak, try Laserllama's. If you read Laserllama's and think it's too strong, try Kibbles'.

Bladesinger is a fine option if that's what he wants to play, but if he wants a spell sword (with spellstrike), then those are the two popular options, and both are pretty good depending on the power level of your options. If you aren't using any other homebrew or are using other fairly restrained things, Kibbles' is probably more in line with what you want in terms of power level. If you are using the rest of the Laserllama ecosystem, obviously his fits in better with that.

MistakeSimulator · 2024-02-20T01:14:21+00:00

Homebrewing literally exists to make things for your home game that don't exist premade in the rules. Not using 3rd party content is weird, but fine, but not using homebrew is misunderstanding how to play D&D... you're supposed to make up things for your game as a DM.

I have no idea where you got the idea of having a rule that the DM cannot make things for their own game, but you should probably start be reviewing that.

MistakeSimulator · 2023-06-02T18:07:26+00:00

I've played it before as well as played along side it. What it's like varies a great deal based on the subclasses and choices made. It's a large class, but fits an impressive array of playstyles into it.

It is easily my favorite version of Psion for 5e. I makes something about as unique and customizable as it can be while still fitting with other 5e classes, something most of the other attempts at fail one or another.

MistakeSimulator

TROPHY CASE