Apologies, this is a homebrew balance question.
So, I started tinkering with a Fighter subclass this evening about fighting with weapons that deal Fire damage. As part of this, they get a feature devoted to making torches viable improvised weapons (think Aragorn at Weathertop).
My instinct is always to undershoot with homebrew power, rather than overdo it, but I'm not sure if I've gone too far here.
At base, I've given torches 1d6 damage, and then they can either be bumped up to 1d8, given Finesse and Light, or given Reach and Versatile (1d8). At higher levels, in case they don't find a Flame Tongue or something, the damage dice all go up a step.
This seems broadly in-line with D&D 5e weapons. However, it seems like it might underwhelm if they use an entire subclass feature just to deal the same damage as anyone else can, but Fire (which is hardly a super-powerful damage type).
Obviously, it's hard to balance individual features in a vacuum, but I'm not going to ask people to go over the whole document, and nothing later on screams that it needs low weapon damage to keep it in-line.
Would it be worth bumping all of the damage dice up a step? It does make a torch best in-slot for a dual-wielding weapon, and the Reach version substantially better than a whip (and equivalent to a non-PAM halberd when two-handed). But is that probably what would be expected for the subclass's central use-case and in the absence of Manoeuvres, Psi Dice, Improved Crits, Giant's Might, etc.?
Let me know what you think, and thank you!
