Bad design doesn't always equal low power, and viceversa

Hello everyone! Ranger has a dead feature at level 1, therefore the class is bad! Awful! Don't play it or you will... Idk become marketable plushies or something.

Relatively big premise about how I came to want to talk about this, sorry for everyone bothered by these.

With the advent of the 2024 rules, multiple discussions appeared, but what sparked me to make this post was the talk about the Ranger. To summarize, 1st level feature of Ranger incentivizes the class to cast Hunter's Mark and concentrate on it, and from what we know the majority of good Ranger spells are concentration too. I've seen two sides of the argument which specifically made me confused:

• The argument which can be summed as "Ranger is bad because it has to concentrate on Hunter's Mark".
• The argument which can be summed as "Ranger has been boosted across the board".

Regardless of who is right in this talk, the fact that these arguments act in opposition to me is odd, because upon closer inspection... The two arguments touch upon two different things: how good the class design is and how strong the class is. So I wanted to make this discussion about that distinction a bit more.

Bad features don't make a class/subclass bad: lack of good ones do

Pack Tactics? No, I Draconic Cry!

Classes have multiple features which can give a bad impression. For example, Ranger's 1st level features in the PHB are bad. I won't even try to defend em as properly good design. But while it's bad, once you get to level 2, you get features which more than make up for the slow start. Spellcasting has powerful spells for Ranger (various of which ignores your spellcasting modifier!) and archery is archery. I shouldn't even explain why that fighting style is good. With that package, Ranger is actually quite powerful-it's just that some of the non-spellcasting features give a BAD first impression.

Similarly, Monk has some issues too. It has slightly less HP than half casters and fighter and less AC, and deals less damage. All of this make it the worst class to play... If you follow the 1st and 2nd level suggestions to play in melee with unarmed strikes. If you instead ignore it and focus on stuff like ranged weapons, you will do quote nicely, especially with the Tasha optional features which make ranged Monk more viable! You still aren't a fullcaster but, if played optimally, you are stronger than a primarily Fighter character, and I would argue that even a less optimized Monk (monoclassed) beats Barbarian and Rogue in terms of overall effectiveness.

Strong classes aren't necessarily well designed

The logic goes both ways of course. Ranger having to ignore their dead PHB features isn't cool, and neither is Monk doing that. But I also have a third example of such an issue happening: the Paladin.

Paladin, the funny smite class teheheh!... Except that outside of very short day nova, divine smite ultimately falls short of power in actuality, making it not be as powerful as it wants to be. There are many reasons for that, but I can't make a post about it within this post. If you search on google "Paladin as intended" the first result will have everything you need to know and more.

But if Paladin as intended doesn't work, then what is the best part of Paladin? Why, it's the auras! At 6th level, you get Aura of Protection, which is an amazing support feature! At the cost of having you all within the same 10 ft range, you give a solid boost to all saves to the party! Of course, this requires important party members to be close to you. Where will the party members that require most help be at? Well not within melee in a ton of cases, that's for sure, meaning that the optimal Paladin wants to be at range and thus be unable to bonk.

I also want to make a side note for bad design. Multiple classes, while not being inherently bad power wise, simply get diminishing returns after investing into a class long enough because features past a certain level aren't worth it. Barbarian, Ranger, Fighter, Monk, Artificer, Paladin, all of these classes are more or less victims of this. That doesn't inherently make the classes bad, it just makes em much worse designed.

Keep yourself on the same page when discussing classes, but remember to keep the two sides in mind

Whenever you discuss stuff like the Ranger or Monk or whatever, you should always try to focus and not mix intent and actual power into the same pot. It should also go without saying that my arguments can definetly also go the other way: something can be well designed while not being strong mechanically. For instance, Four Element has quite a lot of potential, as scaling wise it functionally is an half caster that is short rest based, but the major issue that makes it awful is that its "spell list" is not good ultimately.

This division helps channel discussion into the right place, allowing one to see the design and mechanics value of things without polluting the visions-there Is a different between something being bad because it's not tuned well or bad because its design itself doesn't work well within the fantasy or the rest of the game.