Hi there!  I'm going to talk about some of the simplest classes in the original 13th Age - Barbarian, Ranger, and Paladin - and how they changed.

The Original Barbarian

Barbarian was one of the most dirt-simple classes possible in the original. You had Rage, which was a Recharge 16+ ability, and aside from that you mostly just did basic attacks. The unique thing it had was tiered talents, which was just that some unlocked at high tiers. It was kind of effective when it popped off, but boring most of the time. So my goal was to make it more interesting on average.

The Remade Barbarian, version 1

In my initial attempt, Rage was a 1 Prowess/turn spend that added 1d4 to the natural result of your attack rolls. Talents were basically the same. They also had Frenzy, which let them be perma-Softened in exchange for Prowess back. That was fine, but not terribly interesting in the other direction: instead of very effective when it went off and kind of whatever when it didn't, it was just uniformly ok. And it didn't have room for multiple distinct builds, either, and that's been a requirement for every class I redesign. So very late in development (like a year after designing it) I came back to it with the intent of fixing both.

The Remade Barbarian, current version

Rage and Frenzy both got scrapped. Rage now gives 1 Advantage on attacks and 3x crits when activated until it's ended, but gives all enemies 1 Advantage to hit you. Simple, but always effective. Frenzy is their equivalent of 13th Age Rage: it's a Daily (and can be Recharge) spike. When you Frenzy, instead of attack roll Advantage being "take the highest 3", it's "add all of them" - so if you have 2 Advantage, you're rolling 5d6 to hit. It has two drawbacks: one, you lose 1 Recovery at the end of every turn, and two, you can't turn it off until the encounter is over. You're either bringing the temple down or yourself, but someone's going down hard.

Original Barbarian talents (which were largely inherited for the rewrite) were either "be better at recoveries" or "do more offense", which is fine but not very distinct. I added three Talents that added more dimensions: Heedless Advance, Bloody Wake, and Cold Fury.

One category I wanted them to be able to be good at was mobility. Heedless Advance gives them a new quick action At-Will/Spend 1 Prowess: You move immediately, halving any OA damage. Feats do things like make this an Interrupt and prevent interception. On a related note, Bloody Wake lets them deal damage to anyone they approach or go away from - it encourages a Barbarian to crash around the battlefield. Combos well with Heedless Advance, as you might guess, but also works just fine as an offensive talent.

The secondary thing I wanted them to be good at was being Defensive - taking hits for others. Barbarian's always been good at bouncing back with recoveries so I wanted them to be able to leverage that. Cold Fury is a new Talent that lets them make Rage more defensive. They don't give enemies Advantage while Raging, but their Advantage on attacks only counts against enemies who have attacked them in the last round - so they want to be intercepting a lot. This goes well with mobility options as well as their "make recoveries/defenses better" talents. So now Barbarian has three major focus areas: pure offense, high mobility, and survival/defense. A lot going on. And it still keeps its signature Tiered Talents.

The Original Ranger

Ranger's next, and it was also originally very, very simple. The original 13th Age Ranger literally had no non-Talent class features! Most of its talents were either double attacking, minor bonuses, crit bonuses, or Animal Companion which was terrible and boring.

The Remade Ranger, version 1

When redesigning Ranger, I was struck with a weird question: What even is a Ranger supposed to be? Two weapons and/or a bow I guess?

Something about the wilderness? Sure. So that was the basic conceit for my original remake.

It had two main class features. One was Double Strike, which was an At-Will that did two attacks with reduced damage. The other was Hunter's Instinct, which added advantage to some things in the wilderness. Talents were for the most part either variations on the original ones or variations on Double Strike, with each providing a daily ability in Feats. Simple enough. Too simple, even. So later on, I went back to the drawing board.

Many classes had abilities to gain other classes' spells. I got rid of these because I felt they distracted from the core concept. Also "grab a caster's class feature" was usually the best and most interesting Talent you could take, which is a bad sign!

The Remade Ranger, current version

As alluded to above, I didn't feel like "attacks twice" is something worth hanging a class around. So my second attempt was focused on survivalism and hunting, and would be an attempt to add a few more dimensions to it.  

I used a design pattern more similar to Fighter with its Maneuvers: a pool of abilities that you can pick, but you get more at subsequent tiers. Ranger's are called Hunting Styles. Unlike Fighter, though, each of these came with both an At-Will and a Daily ability. Double Strike got put here, as did all its Variation Talents. They also got a few built-in class features that make them better at leading expeditions.

This opened up more interesting Ranger builds. You can focus on melee, ranged, or both (one Hunting Style encourages mixing the two) and they'll play out differently. In most cases they're focused on direct offense, but they can easily dip their toes into defense or control.

The Original Paladin

Finally, Paladin. Original Paladin was weird, in that it wasn't a lot to write home about on paper, but it kinda worked anyway. Its main class feature was Smite, which was a fantastic offensive move. (Maybe a little too fantastic - Paladin probably worked better for offense than defense.) It didn't have much in the way of defensive abilities baked in, but a few Talents helped with that - Bastion, Paladin's Challenge, etc. It also had the aforementioned "grab a Cleric thing" abilities which, boo, hiss, most interesting ability they could take, etc.

The Remade Paladin, version 1

My original design was to take that happy accident of Smite being pretty good for pure-offense and maintain that while giving it a bit more of a baked in focus. Its design pattern was this: two Spend 1 Prowess class features and 3-5 Talents that would provide daily abilities. The features in question were Smite, which was pretty similar to the original, and Bastion, which got upgraded from Talent. Speaking of Talents, I upgraded a gimmick it had (two Talents that were exclusive) to a class feature: Oath Talents, of which you could take one at first.

The Remade Paladin, current version

This design worked on paper, but just wasn't very interesting. So I went with a different approach closer to how Fighter works.

Paladin has a pool of abilities called Devotions that were kind of like Maneuvers, but were each Spend 1 Prowess abilities - so closer to some Fighter Talents than Maneuvers. These range from things that used to be Talents (Challenge, Lay on Hands) to new debuff abilities.They also gained a feature that was very Fightery: Exalt. This is like Showstopper with two major changes: one, it's 11+ Recharge but you only get extra Recharge rolls when a bad thing happens to you or an ally. Two, instead of Talents getting Exalt abilities, Devotions do. Oath Talents were expanded based on this, and a few talents were added to replace ones that got promoted to Devotion.

So at the end of the day, Paladin is way more interesting to play for pure-offense, pure-defense, the combination of the two, or one of those plus support.

And that's all! Keep an eye out for the release coming very soon! I'll keep doing these afterwards as well until I've gone over the whole thing. Next is probably Sorcerer and Bard. 

Until next time!