D&D 5E Sorcerer spell list - why so short?

Plane Sailing · Nov 23, 2014

I've been looking to see whether my 3.5e sorcerer characters could be moved across to 5e, and it turns out to be quite difficult because a number of spells which were important to them are no longer on the sorcerer spell list!

I can see that they have given the sorcerer some of the damaging spells from other class lists (e.g. firestorm), but find it rather odd if they are supposed to only concentrate on being blasters. Without Magic Circle my demonologist sorcerer is a bit stuck, for instance!

Losing the possibility of Shapechange is a bit of a blow for future plans too.

What are poor sorcerers to do? Is there particular rhyme and reason for these changes that you can see?

Cheers

Tormyr · Nov 23, 2014

This is the "Balanced in its Imbalancedness" nature of 5e. Classes are not balanced by all doing the same things. They are balanced because each contributes something different. The sorcerer is now more focused on damaging magic and the metamagic ability. It pays for the metamagic in a reduced spell list. The spell list is also reduced to things that would work well with metamagic.

So the sorcerer contributes by blasting stuff. And having a beard of feathers.

SilverfireSage · Nov 23, 2014

As Tormyr said, this edition is about finding a niche for each class. Having the sorcerer able to hve every spell that the wizard had would have either made the sorcerer too powerful with meta magic or would have made the wizard obsolete, as all of its spells have been replicated. Instead, they took the flavor of the sorcerer being a blasting attacking machine and amplified it, lowering their versatility in favor of making them the spell casting attack class. This gives them their own niche and let's the wizard keep theirs as well.
My advice would be to simply make your sorcerer into a wizard. The pseudo vancian magic is a lot more similar to sorcerers in the past, and they will get to keep their versatility!

The Myopic Sniper · Nov 23, 2014

I don't think that anything would be horribly unbalanced if you and your DM got together and worked up a completely new and different spell list for your sorcerer (especially if it didn't step on any other player's niche). For one thing, the current sorcerer list is pretty much optimized for the metamagic choices that they have so any custom spell list is probably actually less optimized to the class features than what is out there. (I probably wouldn't allow hunter's mark and the paladin smite spells just because of niche-protection, but the Bard can already grab those if they want and I don't think it would actually break anything.)

MoonSong · Nov 23, 2014

Plane Sailing said:
I've been looking to see whether my 3.5e sorcerer characters could be moved across to 5e, and it turns out to be quite difficult because a number of spells which were important to them are no longer on the sorcerer spell list!

I can see that they have given the sorcerer some of the damaging spells from other class lists (e.g. firestorm), but find it rather odd if they are supposed to only concentrate on being blasters. Without Magic Circle my demonologist sorcerer is a bit stuck, for instance!

Losing the possibility of Shapechange is a bit of a blow for future plans too.

What are poor sorcerers to do? Is there particular rhyme and reason for these changes that you can see?

Cheers

I can only think on two reasons:

The designers have a very narrow view of sorcerers, this wouldn't be the first time. the original sorcerer got playtested as a blaster only and was balanced accordingly, it seems this was the case again. Externally it is very easy to say "well they are given a niche by being blasters", but if that was the case there would be no evoker wizard, which is even more useful at low levels. (And giving sorcerers free reign over the wizard list wouldn't make wizards irrelevant, they can still have more spells available at any time, more spell slots per day, and ritual casting)
The sorcerer being left out of the open playtest. I would say this is the key issue with the class, they never asked openly for feedback, instead only going for where they left things in 4e and the OP forums -since the 3.5 sorcerer was very breakable for blasting-. By never asking if it was important for sorcerer players to do more than just blasting, they never got to notice it. But hey we should be grateful sorcerers exist at all so they can play second fiddle yet again.

ZombieRoboNinja · Nov 23, 2014

SilverfireSage said:
As Tormyr said, this edition is about finding a niche for each class. Having the sorcerer able to hve every spell that the wizard had would have either made the sorcerer too powerful with meta magic or would have made the wizard obsolete, as all of its spells have been replicated. Instead, they took the flavor of the sorcerer being a blasting attacking machine and amplified it, lowering their versatility in favor of making them the spell casting attack class. This gives them their own niche and let's the wizard keep theirs as well.

I don't really buy this logic. Evocation is still a wizard spell school - are evokers supposed to be okay sucking compared to sorcerers? (Not that they do.)

Honestly I think they just screwed the pooch on sorcerers. Meh, 12/13 (I think?) core classes being awesome is a decent record.

Mouseferatu · Nov 23, 2014

SilverfireSage said:
My advice would be to simply make your sorcerer into a wizard. The pseudo vancian magic is a lot more similar to sorcerers in the past, and they will get to keep their versatility!

This. Given the way spells work now, there's no need for sorcerers to be as flexible as wizards. A huge portion of earlier-edition sorcerers can be constructed as wizards now, with little changing.

Saeviomagy · Nov 23, 2014

Personally I think that magic circle is missing the ritual tag, adding it would let your demonologist sorcerer pick it up with a feat.

AmerginLiath · Nov 23, 2014

Tormyr's point about looking at whether changing the 3.5 Sorcerer to a 5e Wizard is an apt one, given the changes in the magic system. Also, while there's a lot of talk about "blasting," I think that the bigger issue in terms of niche is that the Sorcerer in this edition is the single class with metamagic. Where the Wizard has a larger spell list to work from for his slots, the Sorcerer differs in having a smaller spell list that he can modulate with his metamagic and sorcery points to shape into various ways. That gives the each a versatility, but on a macro versus micro scale. There's also specialization, where it's somewhat helpful to think of the Sorcerer's subclasses being like Elemental and Wild Magic specialist mages roughly comparable to the Wizard specialities – they play differently since there's that metamagic focus that I mention, but still one can look at the two classes from a broad look when converting.

For a demonologist, I don't know whether a Conjurer Wizard or something may actually be a better option, or whether you could/should multiclass something, since spell slots stack (there's a lot of talk of Sor 2/Wiz 18 as an interesting one that still gets 9th-evel spells, for example). Likewise, depending on the story, I don't know if any Warlock or even Cleric works (given some of the pacts and domains) as even good for a part of a character-build.