James McMurray
First Post
Not even the utility spells that are non-combative and cost nothing to cast?
D&D 4E Some Thoughts on 4e
- Thread starter ronin
- Start date
Not even the utility spells that are non-combative and cost nothing to cast?
Such as? Your few spells that can typically be cast once per day each? You call that significant options?
Plane Sailing
Astral Admin - Mwahahaha!
You've probably accounted for this in your 'virtually', but one thing that I think has been done right with 4e wizards is at-will cantrips - and some of those could be very useful in combat for the canny e.g. a wizard fighting in the dark:
minor action "light"
standard action "attack"
free action "dismiss light"
move action "shift"
I could imagine some fun with mage hand or ghost sound in combat too.
(however, there is still a big lack IMO of decent utility spells for use in combat. Far too many of the utility spells are daily when they would have been better as encounter IMO)
Cheers
Agreed. In 7 levels of play, I once was able to use Mage Hand to move a Light on a rock down a rat tunnel so that I could see to do Scorching Burst.
I hadn't thought about the option you mention just because nearly all of the encounters in the 4E H adventure modules (the ones our DM is using) have lit rooms. I haven't seen so many torches since the great torch burnoff of '13.
Well, I'm sure we can argue this back and forth all day. But, like I said, I had Craft Wonderous Item, and the opportunity to use it, so I had pearls of power to regenerate my offensive capability between combats. And it wasn't really half my spells devoted to survival. I only listed about 4 that were explicitly devoted to defense (sorry about Protection from Evil, I forgot that I had that from a unique item--substitute Magic Circle against Evil). Spells like haste, dimension door, and circle of invisibility, although spells that help the wizard in a pinch, are also good for the whole party.
Yes, there's certainly a section at the beginning of a wizard's career where he isn't particularly effective. I'd personally say that ends at around 5-6th level.
But, you yourself are saying that the wizard is a problem past around 11th level (and again, I'd say it starts at 5-7th), and then say that it wasn't a big deal in your campaigns since you played a lot at low level. That is an example of what I would call a self-imposed limitation on the power of wizards that is neither part of the rules of the game or necessarily typical to all groups.
I think it is typical of many groups and not just because high level is skewed towards PC spell casters.
High level combat in 3.5 is difficult for a DM as well. Instead of the high level bad guys having 2 to 6 abilities like most foes in 4E, some of the bad guys, especially spell casters, have 30 or 40 abilities each in 3E. That's a heavy DM workload during encounter design and during combat.
When you add the fact that the DM then also has to consider which magic items to hand out, which spells to hand out, etc. for PCs, it becomes even more problematic.
Our group played one 20th level campaign and it was a royal pain in the butt for both the players and the DM to juggle all of the options. I really do not think that most groups played at those types of levels on a significantly frequent basis.
And, I really do not see that 3E 5th Wizard level as uber is an issue at all though and I doubt most people did. People did not complain about 9 spells per day. It's just too darn easy to go through most of them in 2 encounters and have little left over. Memorizing two Fireballs is all well and fine, but it really handcuffs the Wizard's options.
Don't get me wrong. 4E is great for the DM. It organizes his workload a lot. But, it also handcuffs the spell casting players in the process.
WalterKovacs
First Post
Summary:
High level 3.5 - too many options, so few people played it, and that was bad
Low level 3.5 - still have a lot of options, but with so few spells you are able to cast per day you are basically handcuffed to having a list you use constantly which you may change for non-fighting days or if you have knowledge of the enemy in which case you may swap some spells to not have damage types they are immune/resistant to. If you need to do a specific rarely useful type of magical effect that you'd need to use on the fly, but really isn't worth preparing, you can have a scroll for that. If you know about ahead of time, you can prepare a time consuming spell the day you need it and go back to not needing it.
4e - You have fewer options, although over time more options are introduced. Even the newer options are limited because you only have a limited number of daily/encounter/at-will/utility slots available. So you have a standard set you prepare on a "normal" adventuring day, but you have the option to swap your utilities and dailies each morning if you have foreknowledge that indicates one may be more useful than the other, such as creatures being resistant to an energy type, or vulnerable to another. You have a ritual book for long and costly spells, and they don't eat into your prepared spell resources. You can also buy scrolls which allow you to perform the ritual slightly quicker [half the time] if need be.
So ... 4e is a lot like lower levels of 3.5, where you have more castings per day but less spells known [so, more like a sorceror] and your rituals give you access to the time + resource consuming spells [and crafting feats] that would come up on occaision in 3.5 games. Some of the rituals take longer than they would have in the older edition, however others are much faster [make just about any magic item in about an hour? Instead of DAYS? Yes please].
You had a lot of options to fit into a small number of slots. You still do but the things they have changed are:
Splitting up spells into powers and rituals, some of the powers being utilities.
And
Splitting up the wizards spell list so other spellcasting types in the future can have their own flavor, instead of every caster type borrowing from the sorceror/wizard's spell list [or a divine spell list, etc].
Wizards are going to have fewer options because of this. The first part means that stuff which was done during combat [that really was mostly useful out of combat] is no longer possible, and the latter just means that wizards aren't as good at enchantment and illussions as say a psionic controller would be.
Part of the problems in 3e wasn't a balance one per se, but that, in the PHB, they had a huge section dedicated to individual classes [spells for wizards, spells for clerics, etc]. The sorceror was added so that at least 2 classes could share all the stuff that was there just for the wizard. The problem got worse though. As they released more products ... it was a bit hard to do new spellcasting classes. They had to make them different than just specialist wizards ... although a lot were just that [warmage and beguiler had some cool special abilities, but basically they were sorcerors that knew a lot of spells from a couple schools of magic]. Most spellcasting classes were basically reflavored wizards, with some variations on how many spells they knew/could cast per day from the warlock who knew very little but could do it at will, so pseudo sorceror's that had what they knew predetermined and could cast it a lot, to a wizard or wu-jen that could concievably have every spell available, so long as they prepared it, with less spells per day available to them, and needing to prepare them in advance.
This time, they didn't want it to be "different ways to do the same thing" but instead "the same way to do different things" in terms of future spell casting classes. The wizard's spelllist is no longer exhaustive right off the bat [also note: no "specialist wizard" sub-classes] so they can give other spellcasters their niches, allowing them to do stuff no one else can do [without needing to learn a new way to play this kind of effect].
You forgot to mention that there is no way to memorize multiple utility spells of the same type (or same level) or to use scrolls in combat in 4E. Need 2 Dimension Door spells today. Sorry. You are stuck doing damage buddy.
The difference, at least to me, is that instead of having the option to swap out any spell you want and to use scrolls for rarely used spells, the game now is all about a small core of spells (and it's worse for non-Wizards that cannot even swap spells or powers except when leveling). Not dissimilar to the At Will spell called a Light Crossbow for low level 3.5 Wizards and Sorcerers.
The core of spells in 3.5 was player self imposed. The player had choices on a daily basis. The core of spells in 4E is game imposed. The player has some small choices when leveling up, but is still stuck for the most part with his core spells.
WalterKovacs
First Post
You forgot to mention that there is no way to memorize multiple utility spells of the same type (or same level) or to use scrolls in combat in 4E. Need 2 Dimension Door spells today. Sorry. You are stuck doing damage buddy.
At paragon, you can pull a spell out of the spellstorm, and thus, once per day reuse dim door. At epic you can spend action points to get back daily powers, so that's every other encounter. Not to mention you can flat out pick a power that goes from daily to encounter.
And if you really want more teleportation you can use always multiclass.
Ultimately though ... being "stuck doing damage" ... well, you could use your second dim door to get away and ... let the rest of your party die while you run away? Hide while the rest of the party beats the monsters by "doing damage buddy"?
You do get to choose your core spells though, and over time there will be more of them. Through multiclassing, paragon paths, epic destinies, magic items [note: wands are the new scrolls] you are able to get a combination of options available to you. You have only a small ammount of options to choose from, but in the long run, you never have to replace your utilities, but you have to replace your daily/encounters. So your "just damage buddy" spells change, and you only have so many, but you keep accumulating the non-damage utility powers.
The scroll/wand thing in 3e made it extremely easy to, limited only by money, expand your number of spells per day to a nigh infinite ammount. That just isn't a good idea. The milestone/tier limit for daily powers is a way of keeping the ammount of "other" powers you can do. But, you still have magic items to give you some extra powers every other encounter.
So, if you could "retrain" your encounter/daily/utility powers every day, would you still feel that this part of 4e is not right for you? Or is it more than that? Ultimately, even if you had a lot of options, you only have so many slots to fill [3 class encounter attacks, 3 class dailies and 5 class utility] since paragon path/epic destiny is different.
Well, the last 3e campaign I DMed went from 1st to 20th level, so I speak of the wizards' dominance firsthand. We did play with the Book of Nine Swords, so it wasn't like the fighting classes were just "power attack, power attack" while the wizards did "force orb, dimension door, feeblemind", but there was still a power imbalance.
But, to address your point, the 5th level wizard certainly isn't at the peak of his dominance, but it's where it starts. Yes, the wizard can blow all his spells and then have very little left over, but what is left over is fairly comparable to what all the other classes have. Sure, when all the spells are gone, the wizard is stuck dinking around with crossbows, but that's what everybody's doing at 5th level. The wizard's attack bonus is only one point lower than the cleric or rogue. Hit points can be made up for with spells like false life, or class features like the toad familiar. So the wizard isn't much worse off than any other party member, except that he can cast fireball. Plus, starting past 5th level, the wizard begins qualifying for full spellcasting prestige classes that add a bunch of new powers at next to no cost.
Really I guess I can just encourage you, KarinsDad, to play 4e more creatively. You're obviously a creative, intelligent player, which is why all the negativity seems somehow inconsistent. I can say that for me 4e took about two months to get used to all the new rules, and the new paradigms in play. Past that, it's been amazing smooth, fun, and creative. It's to the point where the one time I've gone back and played 3.5, the system I used to really love, I spent a lot of time wishing it was more like 4e.
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