Your data is misleading.
Look at first level through fourth level. Take out the Cantrips (which are rarely used in combat) and it's 0% of the spells used are combat. Including the cantrips is extremely misleading.
Just because you don't like the spells, doesn't mean they don't count. Just because you can't think of goos uses for these spells, doesn't mean they don't exist. Are you doing to use them as much as Magic Missile? No. But there are good uses for them in and out of combat.
And I'm not sure how you can say I was misleading when I included a column that removes the cantrips from the calculations, and in the very next sentence after the one you quoted said that if you don't count the cantrips then yes you start with 0% non-damaging skills but that it increases to 33.% at level 30.
Oh and just to be clear, when making up my chart I assumed that a player would always select a damaging spell over a non-damaging spell. Meaning the only non-damaging spells in the chart are Utilities and Cantrips.
5th level, 1 out of 6 spells available is non-damaging. But with 5 encounters of 6 rounds each, that's either 1 spell in 30 cast that is non-damaging or 5 spells (if all used) in 30 cast. A lower percentage if combat averages more rounds per encounter.
Well, if we're going game day suggested in the book, than 1-2 of those encounters should be non-combat encounters anyway. Hmm, not sure what my point was here.. oh, that its only 18-24 casts.
Also during that day, you may have likely had Light at least say for an hour. With a 5 min duration, that means you would have cast it 12 times. But hopefully doing this is "off-screen", so we won't count it.
There is a major difference between which spells are on the list and how often they can be cast.
And there is a difference between how often they are cast, and how much they effect a combat. You may cast Wall of Fog once in a combat, then spent the rest of the fight sustaining it and casting Magic Missile or Scorching Burst. Which has more effect on the encounter?
Its really too situational and subjective to give a definite answer. But then again so it how many times you would cast X type of spell in a gaming day, since the length of a gaming day depends on many things.
With so few Encounter Utility spells (2 max per day), it really means that an extremely high percentage of
spells cast per day will be damaging ones, even if the Wizard takes every possible Utility spell and casts it as often as possible.
Really this whole damaging vs non-damaging spells it kinda a pointless argument, and maybe I started it with how I defined things in my post above.
From your older posts, the question really should be does the wizard have a -variety- of things he can do. Should it matter if the spell does damage? For this argument, not really. Should it matter if there are spells that do something other than pure damage? Yes. What should matter is if there are a variety of things that spells can do, irregardless of whether they also do damage.
So, lets look at some of the things a wizard can do in combat:
Level 1
At-will, he can slow someone down for a turn
At-will, he can push up to 9 enemies away
Once per encounter, he can daze someone for a turn
Once per encounter, he can make a 3x3 area difficult terrain, this also knocks enemies down
Once per encounter, he can weaken an enemy for a turn
Once a day, he can summon a ball of fire
Once a day, he can create a freezing cloud to control the battlefield for a turn
Once a day, he can slow everyone in a 5 by 5 area, and possibly make them unconscious, both effects require saves to end
Ok, gonna jump around alot more now:
Lvl 2: He can run fast, jump far, fall slowly, or defend himself
Lvl 5: he can summon a big icy hand and grab people with it, he can then drag them around or hold them in place
Lvl 6: He can open a Dimensional door, or disguise himself, or turn himself invisible, or dispel a magical zone, or float around, or create that wall of fog I mentioned above.
I'm gonna stop here, because really most spells that the wizard gets does something other than just damage. Do they last an infinite amount of time? No. But when most of your spells are applying an effect of some kind, you really don't need for them to last a long time to be effective.
No, the wizard doesn't have as much versatility as he did in 3.x. But I don't think that is a bad thing either. Every character has a role to play in the party, no one character should be able to fill every role.
