Challenge Rating (CR) as it stands, is not a useful tool for GMs. At the very least, it’s much less useful than the difficulty calculations in PF2e. Those who defend CR1 will be quick to point out that it’s decent at determining if you have a fight that can down a player or not. However, CR should be able to calibrate a challenge, and at the moment it isn’t great at that. So why is that?
The ability for CR to accurately create a threat to downing a player means that the system IS working in having monsters generally do enough damage. What’s missing here is that Monster statblocks die too quickly, and thus don’t actually stand up against optimized players who make use of optional rules, such as feats and multiclassing… And monoclass Paladins.2
So what has WotC done so far?
Damage boosts are now once a turn.
Every single place that a feature can deal damage, WotC has reduced the number of times it can deal that damage to once per turn/round. This can be seen in the following changes so far:
- Paladins can only smite, or cast a spell, once a turn. And never both.
- Rogue change was targeted at making sure they couldn’t double-stack sneak attack in a single round.3
- Twinned Spell no longer gives an advantage of two actions worth of spellcasting in a single round.
- Action surge can no longer cast spells, or perform any action outside of specifically straightforward ‘martial’ actions.
- All damage boosting features and spells are limited to 1 attack/Turn.
- Great Weapon Master & Sharp Shooter no longer give big boosts to damage per attack will not incentivize burst damage by stacking as many attacks as can be managed into a single turn.4
The Forest for the Trees.
I see so many posts looking at each one of those changes above, and state ‘how dare they nerf this class!’ I think those commenters are not seeing these changes as necessary for the health of the game. More specifically, this will patch the biggest weakness and challenge for GMs: Setting up well calibrated fights.5 That’s good for the game!
Tl;dr - The promised changes to higher level CR creatures combined with the changes to limit player damage output will result in the necessary conditions that allows WotC to make CR much more accurate. These nerfs aren’t aimed at individual classes, but are part of a system-wide revision to fix CR, which everyone should keep in mind when they see a class or spell nerf.
1 I am one of these people!
2 3 smites in one turn without any min-maxing? Seems legit.
3 Jeremy Crawford said this was to ‘speed up the game’ as things that occur while off your turn slow down the game. This is also true, but I don’t think that was the only reason for the change. I expect this to be rolled back due to the poor reception in its current UA form, but altered to become a ‘once per round’ ability while they add more damage and utility in other rogue features.
4“My level 11 Gloomstalker-EchoKnight-Assassin just autocrit on their 9 attacks on their first turn… Why is CR so busted?!?”
5 But if that gets fixed, what will PF2e players bang on about?
Too bad many of those changes make the game more boring. Obviously it will be easier to make a balanced CR the more static and predictable the game is made to be, unfortunately for me that makes for a boring game.
CR is a tool to help a DM build encounters that are interesting for the players (and themselves) to play. If one sacrifice fun and interesting for the sake of making a system that is easy to balance I think that achieves nothing. I would much rather see the guidance to the DM improved to account for certain aspect like high burst damage, summons, ability to remove x monsters from the equation, level of equipment, etc.
Tabletop RPs strength is its dynamic nature.
There are two notable exceptions to damage boosts all being limited to once per turn in OneD&D. Both of which are on the Warlock.
The Agonizing Blast Eldritch Invocation and the Cantrip Upgrade section in the Book of Shadows cantrip.
Both allow you to add your spellcasting modifier to the damage rolls (plural) of Eldritch blast. Thankfully they don’t stack but you can easily get up to 4 instances of that damage boost within a Warlock’s turn or 8 instances if that Warlock multiclassed Sorcerer or took a feat that allows them to use Quickened Spell.
