Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-110.146.149.161-20150813074512/@comment-26397825-20150901203001

Perhaps you should meet some of the DnD players I have played with. Their entire reason for playing is so they can screw the rest of the party over. I once played a game where we went to fight Demigorgon. My brother played a Knight who was actually on Demigorgon's side, made his character super OP, and almost killed us through a simple spell - Heal Wounds.

All but two of the party (and it was an 5 player + DM game, though all the players had companions and/or mounts. One guy who played an assassin had a Knight companion who'd started as a human, got reincarnated as a centaur then reincarnated again as a Minotaur, all on random dice rolls, and managed to convince the DM to allow him to keep the bonuses from the previous race when the Knight was reincarnated) took a feat that lets them heal like the undead, which is that Wound spells heal and Heal spells hurt, because one of them played a necromancer with a literal army of undead. Because of this fact, my brother was able to exploit them by casting Mass Heal on the party constantly, and it was only the fact that the Ranger and Druid (myself and another player) didn't take that feat that we beat Demigorgon.

Now imagine if he, as a Knight, was not just limited to Healing/Wounding spells/Divine Magic? There's no way in hell the party would have survived. Especialy since he managed to wipe out the necromancer, the assassin, the assassin's companion and three quarters of the undead army within three rounds because of how much he'd OPed his character. Then add in that we were fighting a Prince of the Abyss plus this OP Knight and Mount with A Ranger and Druid/Assassin, who both had an animal companion each and that was it.

So yeah. He was OP, but only against the undead because he only had access to divine spells. If he'd had access to other classes of magic like you suggest, there's no way in hell we would have managed to avoid death, because he knew how to play with the rules well enough to be great at the other classes of magic as well as divine. So really, the current classification does a lot to balance the game as much as it can.