Reaching tier 4

Tyler Dunn said:

Side question: How many people have had, or heard of, a wizard character reaching tier 4? It just seems that with the wizard's low hp and AC, it would be hard for them to survive that long.

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It's true that the bulk of Tier 4 PCs I've seen have been Barbarians, plus a Moon Druid.

My current Runelords game has 4 PCs at Tier 4:

Shieldbiter, Dragonborn Totem Barbarian-20 (from 10th)
Claw, Goliath Totem Barbarian-18 (from I think 8th)
Sandor, Human Totem Barbarian-17 (from 1st, but skipped level 16)
Quillax, Human Moon Druid-18 (from 1st)

The only other PC I've seen reach Tier IV is

Hakeem, Human (Altanian) Berserker Barbarian-20 (from 1st)

Yeah, so bit of a pattern there.

When players play 5e Wizards I ask them to be sure to pay attention to survivability - Mage Armour + Shield are pretty much no-brainers.

jgsugden said:

Some are campaigns where the DM only wants to run for a finite period, and ends the game when the DM is no longer willing to continue.

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With other editions I sometimes experience rules-side burnout. Running Pathfinder 'Curse of the Crimson Throne', we finished the entire AP (at level 14) but by the end I was thoroughly sick of it and swearing never to use Pathfinder again, at any rate not above level 5.

I don't find rules burnout an issue at all in 5e. Battles can be slow when your party has 3 totem barbarians and a druid who spends all her time in elemental form... but since Quillax hit 18th and can now spellcast while Wildshaped, that looks like being less of an issue.

In 25 years of gaming this has never happened to me. All campaigns ended around level 10, one started at tier 3 and stayed there for a bit until collapsing.

My first campaign went from level 3 to level 18 (they didn't get to play level 18, but I may run a one-shot with them at a later point). It took about 18 months, playing about twice a month. I ran a mix of XP and milestone leveling, where they could gain levels quicker, but at certain points they had to reach a certain level to keep them on track for the custom AP.

My Age of Worms 5e campaign ran from level 1 to 20+ where the heroes gained a level at certain points in the story. It took roughly 400 hours of play time. I was very fortunate to have a dedicated group form early on (during the end of the 5e play test) at a good FLGS (At Ease Games in San Diego, California). When I moved to New York City before we started the final chapter, I moved the game to Roll20 and we finished the story there.

I am now at level 8 with 5e War of the Burning Sky, a 3 to 20+ campaign. It includes 3 people from my original group, 2 from New York City, and me in Switzerland.

Tyler Dunn said:

Side question: How many people have had, or heard of, a wizard character reaching tier 4? It just seems that with the wizard's low hp and AC, it would be hard for them to survive that long.

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It really depends on party composition. A smart wizard (or sorcerer) will have a number of tricks up their sleeve to avoid even getting attacked, like misty step and greater invisibility and dimension door. And if you've got good tanks and even halfway-decent healing, they party can usually pull the wizard out of a tight jam.

I recently DMed a campaign from 1-20, and during that time, only two characters died, and one was a wizard. At around level 14, the kenku wizard was killed when he was polymorphed into a bird, and the beholder cleric pointed its anti-magic cone at him, and he fell into a disintegration field (like a force field, but it disintegrates you). In contrast, the cleric got slammed into the disintegration field by telekinesis, and the barbarian voluntarily ran across the field to rescue the cleric, and neither died because they both had enough hit points to absorb 10d6 + 40 force damage. The wizard was already hurt, though, and got dusted. In that encounter, the beholder was targeting magic-users, and the sorcerer would have probably died if the beholder had lived another round.

My current campaign should go to level 20, and then some. The plan was to be level 17 when they reach the turning point, where they'll decide if its them that end the world or not. If they fail, well, they'll have one final fight with a creature that I know for a fact they can't win against; if they succeed, the campaign won't end and they'll have to figure out what to do next. That could take quite a few more sessions, which will hopefully get them to level 20 by the time they figure everything out.

They keep doing side-quests, too, so they're actually a little ahead of where I'd planned they would be. My biggest worry, actually, is players missing sessions. I'm a decent enough DM to head-drag the character so the group isn't short, but my policy--and I've had this since I started gaming ages ago--is that if you the player aren't there, your character doesn't get XP. Its not fair to the other players who have been there through almost all the sessions.

This means I've got two characters almost level 15, and one--the wizard, of course--barely level 13. There are opportunities to get training from NPCs to catch up, but unfortunately there's no NPCs, save one, that are above level 16 (not counting bad guys); the one that's above level 16 is an ancient gold dragon who's 7,000 or so years old. Getting her to wake up, and then convincing her to train a puny elf wizard, will not be in any way easy.

What I want to know is if any one has, or has heard of, a wizard reaching tier 4. So far all I see is people saying "its possible" with no actual proof.

As a DM, I had a group simply want to start another campaign when they reached level 8. There was always the option to go back later but we haven't yet.

The same group had too many life circumstances which prevented the 2nd campaign from continuing past level 5.

As a player, I had all kinds of freaky reasons for campaigns to stop prematurely. One stopped because a member was discovered to be a recent released felon and was reported to the hobby store where we played simultaneous to husband and wife players having a baby and then not being able to find childcare allowing them to play regularly.

Tyler Dunn said:

What I want to know is if any one has, or has heard of, a wizard reaching tier 4. So far all I see is people saying "its possible" with no actual proof.

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Statistically, it's no more or less likely than any other class to reach Tier 4. However, I've yet to have a player playing a wizard reach that high.