Cryomancer
Arcane
Balance is like equality in "politics". More equality means that everyone will be eqqualy poor, uneducated and suffer eqqualy. There no way to have eqquality or balance without appealing to the lowest common denominator and forcing the lowest common denominator into everyone
I am surprised by you optimism in believing that the best people get to the top. In reality it's the worst of humankind that gets to the top. The more cynical the person is the more likely they are to succeed. The more moral the person is, the more likely they are to fail. Compare EA to Troika.
Is not the best who get to the top, the world is not just or fair, however, if the state tries to make things "balanced", the result is always worse, look to the countries which tried to "end" the racial inequality. Affirmative action programs only lead to awful consequences and destroyed the education in those countries. In white majority countries like USA and in white minority countries like Brazil/South Africa. Or the countries suffering with mass starvation after they tried to have equality in land ownership. The result is mass starvation. In USSR, in Zimbabwe, everywhere. And this will happens in South Africa soon. You can believe that someone being born into a noble family is "not fair, he din't deserved the noble title", however, you can't argue that a lot of countries was better when they are monarchy. That the empire of Brazil was far better than modern Brazil. Cuba, Cuba before the revolution had more Europeans living in Cuba than Cubans living in any European country. Now is a complete shithole. Haiti too. Once the most prosperous colony in Americas is now the poorest country in Americas. Argentina before Peron also was extremely rich. Venezuela, before socialism was extremely rich. And the unique developed country left in Central/South America is Chile, thanks to Pinochet which salved the country from becoming like Cuba.
EA is an example of cynical company doing amazingly well, but D&D 4e is an example of a cynical company receiving what they deserve. Pathfinder become the most popular TT game on 4e times. D&D which was the most popular TT game ever, lose the spotlight to Pathfinder. And Paizo now decided to make a lot of mistakes of "muh balance" "muh accessibility", with pathfinder 2e. Lets hope that Pathfinder 3e will be more like D&D 2e or PF1e...
And lets hope that Paizo will not force Pf2e into OwlCat.
accessibility
fuck colorblind people
I an talking about other type of accessibility IE - "lets appeal to a wide audience"
cause you don't want player to figure out the best build 1 hour into the game.
Having "the best build" is a bad idea in the first place. The ideal should be "the best build for A in situation B with the tradeoffs C and costs D"