VeryAngryFelid wrote:Only species are supposed to serve as difficulty levels, right?
"Challenge gods" are definitely a thing (Xom, Chei, Qazlal). Chaos Knight and maybe Wanderer are the only "challenge backgrounds," and Chaos Knight is challenge just because it worships challenge gods, but it still seems to me that all three major character choices are designed to not necessarilly be balanced, species is just the one most often treated as a difficulty setting. Personally, I think it's pretty silly to consider it perfectly okay to have gods and species be unbalanced, but then worry about balancing backgrounds.
That said, letting character choices be unbalanced to serve as difficulty levels doesn't mean there's no such thing as one being too strong, or that balance shouldn't be a major factor in deciding how to tune backgrounds. Be's existence mean's Ar wouldn't be the strongest class if given a weapon choice, that doesn't mean we actually want to give it that buff.