IMO the real outliers are alchemist, barbarian, and maybe rogue for being too strong, rather than the other classes being too weak (let's just ignore farmer to keep things simple).
The fighter bonus is small, no doubt. But looking at battle mage, knight, and wizard, I'm not convinced it's worse than those. Leaving out energy/health distribution:
Battle mage: carrying capacity increase, which is meaningless in a game where you can drop items and come back to them later. Bare hand casting also becomes meaningless the instant you find a wand. That leaves the +10 protection/resall which is barely noticeable imo.
Knight: pretty much the same features as battle mage (slight defense bonus) except worse until high levels
Wizard: +10 energy and +4 resist cold (regeneration rate is pretty meaningless, especially the amount you get from 2 willpower)
I don't think faster special attacks are actually much worse than those. The four classes just do very little aside from health/energy distribution, for which fighter and knight are identical, battle mage gives -10/+20 at first level and -2/+2 at subsequent, wizard gives -25/+30 at first level and -4/+4 at subsequent. Again I don't see a clear winner there for a party with other characters.
But those other 3 classes? Alchemist gives you a ton of extra potions even without grinding, barbarian is +1 or +2 attack power and +10/+3 health/energy per level, and rogue, while it does have a minor starting health/energy penalty, has damage bonuses that keep scaling for the whole game. I contend that classes in Grimrock 2 have a much more pronounced high end than low end.
in most RPG-type games i've played certain classes tend to be better than others or otherwise exploitable. i think it's impossible for game designers to make every class equal even if they try.
for warriors, barb is probably best. i did choose the fighter on my last playthrough though because i wanted to use special attacks frequently and figured he might have an edge in that. i was planning to max crit and use the scythe, which is fast for 2h weapon and can do 10x crit damage on special. now i did max critical on that character, but ended up using the meteor hammer instead because the +20 accuracy and greater base damage just seemed to outpace the scythe for me. still i think it's interesting for the game creators to offer different classes so that players can try use their special abilities creatively, even though normally only a few of those classes rise to the top in the end.
the fighter might still shine in future mods if someone includes a custom weapon with a really good, low cost special that can be spammed.
minmay wrote:Battle mage: carrying capacity increase, which is meaningless in a game where you can drop items and come back to them later.
Not always so... This is a game where your PC can get injured in combat, or from falls... and suddenly paralyze your entire party for being overloaded. I've died too often for suddenly being unable to move in combat, and finding it impossible to unload the overburdened PC before getting killed; (like getting shot four or five times by a ratling boss; where the first shot crippled somebody's legs, making it impossible to avoid the rest of the canon fire). The same happens for casually picking something up and dropping it on one of the portraits, and suddenly becoming immobile. Higher carry limits are a good thing in this game.
Fighter and wizard both feel very lackluster if you asked me.
I rarely if at all use weapon specials. Even if you do, a fighter doesn't have the energy to spam specials anyways. The time spent charging a weapon is usually better spent hacking away with three other weapons.
It feels like the developers first ported the grimrock 1 classes without much thought and then spent all their time designed new cool classes.
minmay wrote:Bare hand casting also becomes meaningless the instant you find a wand.
To use a wand or orb points into Concentration skill are required while Bare Hand Casting requires nothing.
Given the number of spells that depend on it, nevermind the extra energy/regen, It's highly unlikely that someone is going to be building a caster character without any ranks in Concentration.
What? Fighters are amazing. They're the highest DPS class other than perhaps a late game dual-wielding Barbarian. (Which you would only have one of anyways, so you might as well have a Fighter too.)
Just don't think of a Fighter as a frontline tanky character. It's more of a caster really. Put him in your backrow and equip him with +energy items and the great +STR items that you normally can't equip because of their low protection values. Then give him Bane or the Scythe and spam the special ability every cooldown and watch the 1000+ damage crits roll in.
Nothing else compares to it really. You would need like 80 strength for dual-wielding DPS to finally overtake a fighter's special ability spamming.
I don't think the intended design of a Fighter is a glass cannon that melees from back row.
In fact I rather dislike the "reach" ability for enabling such odd builds. Making melee attacks from complete safety should be distinctly a Rogue trait... should it be allowed to exist at all.
It's fast enough to juggle characters between front row and back row anyway. A front liner who gets injured can switch to back row and start using a secondary ranged weapon. That's more dynamic and interesting than a min/maxed Fighter who hits hard and who enemies can't hit back.
I hope they get rid of the reach trait at some point. It's silly and completely overpowered.
