Gradine
The Elephant in the Room (she/her)
We also need to address the flavor problem. See, I actually think 5e's Sorcerer is the best the class has ever been, flavor-wise. WotC just sucked at selling it. 5e has the same origin for the big three arcane classes as 4e: wizards are book nerds, warlocks take the quick and easy route to power, and sorcerers are born magical. I like the bloodline origin idea, the story behind it, the fact that it doesn't need to be actually literal heredity, but it's a solid idea for natural born magical talent. The actual archetype class features they created are either dull or interesting but hard to track. The UA archetypes are interesting in some ways and much closer in line to the type of bloodlines I wish they would have added in the first place. Bloodline-specific spells to add to your spells known for every archetype would go a long way towards fixing the spells known vs. spells prepared imbalance.
I'm going to both defend metamagic as a Sorcerer function, despite the fact that WotC didn't sell it well. The problem isn't the effects of metamagic; these should absolutely be the domain of the Sorcerer, for reasons I'll explain shortly. The problem is the historical baggage associated with metamagic. See, metamagic started life in 3rd edition as feats, which were a thing Wizards got more of than Sorcerers. Metamagic feats weren't necessarily written to be more scientific than normal spell-casting, but they were easier to use for preparation casters than spontaneous casting (who had to spend a full round to use the feat), because remember thatWotC Monte reasons. Because of this metamagic feats were mostly associated with preparation casters (clerics probably moreso than wizards, mostly because of the supreme cheesiness that was divine metamagic).
But here's why metamagic belongs with the Sorcerer. Let's talk about artists and architects. Both of these professions are capable of drawing pictures of buildings. Architecture has rules, and specific tools to use. Ask fifty architects to draw up a specific building, and provided they are all similarly competent you will get fifty nearly identical floorplans. Get fifty artists together and ask them the same thing, and you'll get fifty completely different drawings. What's more, pick just one architect and one artist and ask them to draw fifty drawings of the house, one drawing each day for fifty days. The architect will again draft fifty nearly-identical (if not entirely identical) floorplans. The artist's drawings will probably all be similar, but you'll see a lot more variation drawing to drawing.
The obvious metaphor here is that wizards are architects and sorcerers are artists, and that's a metaphor that I don't think WotC leans on enough. They're too focused on the origin piece (Sorcs and their bloodlines; Wizards and their spellbooks) that they haven't created a strong enough picture regarding the different ways these two classes do magic. Yet this is entirely the crux of why Sorcerers have metamagic. So you've got something like Sculpt Spell, which seems like this precise application of spell power that seems suited to the Wizard, but the point is that the Wizard is meant to be this rigid, by-the-book caster, while the Sorcerer is always tweaking, experimenting, casting from insight and instinct. Their Fireball is always going to look a little different; maybe they make it a little bigger, fly a little farther, burn a little hotter. Maybe they try casting it without speaking, or moving. And yeah, maybe they try reshaping it so it has a few blind-spots here or there. I love that meta-magic is the domain of the Sorcerer in this edition. That, and the way that Sorcery points interact with Spell Slots, sells me as the Sorcerer as the magical artist of 5th edition.
Of course, that takes away the "meta-magic is scientific" aspect from 3.5 that other folks might have preferred. But it was the one mechanical concession made to the Sorcerer that strengthens it as a class without, I feel, weakening Wizards conceptually much at all.
Overall, then, the flavor problem with the Sorcerer is that it suffers from twin concepts: spell-casting as bloodline and spell-casting as artistry, and that what we delivered leaned too heavily on the former at the expense of the latter, creating mechanics that fit the spell-casting as artistry mold perfectly but, lacking that strong flavor, feels only like more book-keeping, from a mechanical perspective, then the class that casts spells from a freaking book.
I'm going to both defend metamagic as a Sorcerer function, despite the fact that WotC didn't sell it well. The problem isn't the effects of metamagic; these should absolutely be the domain of the Sorcerer, for reasons I'll explain shortly. The problem is the historical baggage associated with metamagic. See, metamagic started life in 3rd edition as feats, which were a thing Wizards got more of than Sorcerers. Metamagic feats weren't necessarily written to be more scientific than normal spell-casting, but they were easier to use for preparation casters than spontaneous casting (who had to spend a full round to use the feat), because remember that
But here's why metamagic belongs with the Sorcerer. Let's talk about artists and architects. Both of these professions are capable of drawing pictures of buildings. Architecture has rules, and specific tools to use. Ask fifty architects to draw up a specific building, and provided they are all similarly competent you will get fifty nearly identical floorplans. Get fifty artists together and ask them the same thing, and you'll get fifty completely different drawings. What's more, pick just one architect and one artist and ask them to draw fifty drawings of the house, one drawing each day for fifty days. The architect will again draft fifty nearly-identical (if not entirely identical) floorplans. The artist's drawings will probably all be similar, but you'll see a lot more variation drawing to drawing.
The obvious metaphor here is that wizards are architects and sorcerers are artists, and that's a metaphor that I don't think WotC leans on enough. They're too focused on the origin piece (Sorcs and their bloodlines; Wizards and their spellbooks) that they haven't created a strong enough picture regarding the different ways these two classes do magic. Yet this is entirely the crux of why Sorcerers have metamagic. So you've got something like Sculpt Spell, which seems like this precise application of spell power that seems suited to the Wizard, but the point is that the Wizard is meant to be this rigid, by-the-book caster, while the Sorcerer is always tweaking, experimenting, casting from insight and instinct. Their Fireball is always going to look a little different; maybe they make it a little bigger, fly a little farther, burn a little hotter. Maybe they try casting it without speaking, or moving. And yeah, maybe they try reshaping it so it has a few blind-spots here or there. I love that meta-magic is the domain of the Sorcerer in this edition. That, and the way that Sorcery points interact with Spell Slots, sells me as the Sorcerer as the magical artist of 5th edition.
Of course, that takes away the "meta-magic is scientific" aspect from 3.5 that other folks might have preferred. But it was the one mechanical concession made to the Sorcerer that strengthens it as a class without, I feel, weakening Wizards conceptually much at all.
Overall, then, the flavor problem with the Sorcerer is that it suffers from twin concepts: spell-casting as bloodline and spell-casting as artistry, and that what we delivered leaned too heavily on the former at the expense of the latter, creating mechanics that fit the spell-casting as artistry mold perfectly but, lacking that strong flavor, feels only like more book-keeping, from a mechanical perspective, then the class that casts spells from a freaking book.
