>>96397253

The final draft of 13th Age 2e actually addressed most, if not all, of my balance criticisms, and then some. It is a "balance patch" that actually works, and that I like very much.

Last year, I playtested the 13th Age 2e gamma: https://docs.google.com/document/d/176GRa7xitZAmNqfW49mp7qu_M-g6a5WllBzdO4ZuCr0/edit

It was very rough. It was trivial to snap apart the combat metagame by building characters towards the optimization ceiling and going all-in on offense. The worst offenders were paladins with Evil Way, rangers with Twin Arrows, clerics with the Strength domain adventurer feat (at 1st and 2nd level specifically), wizards with Evocation and VPV (at 3rd level and above), and clerics with the Turn Undead type expansion feats. Lethal was the single best kin power for its reroll, and there were so, so many magic items that helped the party go nova and instantly explode enemies.

At the same time, some character options were simply bad. Rogues were the single worst class around, and barbarians and melee fighters were shabby, too.

All this has changed in the final draft. They actually took the time to rebalance the game, and that is incredible. I very much appreciate the writers' and editors' efforts.

Evil Way has been significantly curtailed (and possibly overcorrected, since it requires a rather stringent condition), Twin Arrows no longer works with Lethal Hunter and seems to have been downgraded (though I cannot be sure, since the wording is ambiguous; do both d20s apply to a single target?), the Strength domain adventurer feat is escalation-die-gated, wizard spell damage has been significantly toned down, Evocation and VPV have been rewritten, and Turn Undead has been overhauled. Lethal is ED-gated, and magic items for raw accuracy and offense have been revamped (e.g. ED-gating), replaced, or removed outright.