Is Spell Blasting Doomed to Suck Even More in Next than it did in 3.x?

[keterys]

The Fighter can do his average 15 damage per round (assuming a 60% chance to hit) every round for an hour. How many times a day can the Wizard manage his comparable per target damage?

For most campaigns, I believe the answer is "All Of Them", as in, every round of combat that remotely matters.

 

[JRRNeiklot]

Not in any campaign I want to play in, nor have ever played in.

 

[keterys]

Really? That's the way I've seen it through six editions of D&D (though only after about 4th level in three of them), dozens of different groups, over a hundred campaigns, scores of sessions at conventions, etc.

Hence, my anecdotal use of the word "Most", with the caveat "that matter". Since, yeah, if there's a single goblin then the wizard's output can not matter.

 

[Zaruthustran]

The Fighter can do his average 15 damage per round (assuming a 60% chance to hit) every round for an hour. How many times a day can the Wizard manage his comparable per target damage?
I don't consider "the wizard gets an autowin 10% of the time and is useless 80% of the time" to be balance.

I don't think "balance" is a top design goal of 5e. At least, not the round-by-round balance that you seem to be advocating. Again, I think that designed-for imbalance is a good thing. My group complained that 4e classes were--after all the expansions--the same. Remove the goofy power names, and everybody could do the same thing, no one was unique. Which is fine for 4E, but this is supposed to be a new, different edition.

 

[Dannager]

The Fighter can do his average 15 damage per round (assuming a 60% chance to hit) every round for an hour.

I've never encountered any game - or, indeed, anyone who has ever played in any game - where the fighter was given cause to deal 9000 points of damage over the course of an hour by swinging his sword every round. Theoretically, yes, that is his damage output, and there is no mechanical limit on it. Practically, however, this never comes up because encounters do not last an hour. Encounters last a few rounds. And adventuring days don't involve 600 rounds of combat. They usually involve around 20 or 30 rounds of combat.

 

[dd.stevenson]

Back in AD&D, blasting spells like fireball were very powerful, and were just as useful overall as save-or-suck and control effects. This was because the hit points of both characters and monsters were kept tightly in check. Only warriors could get more than +2 hp/level from a high Constitution score, and that bonus ended after 10th level. Likewise, characters didn't roll their hit dice after 10th level, either, they got a small bonus like +1-3 hit points per level instead. Monsters had much lower hp as well, so doing an average of 35 damage with a 10th+ level fireball was actually pretty impressive.

I think a huge caveat is warranted here, at least so far as 2nd ed goes. (Didn't play earlier editions, so I'm going to keep my trap shut about them.)

Just like with 3E, magic resistance was very common (at least IMC) at the higher levels in 2nd ed. However, high magic resistance was very effective back then--as you probably know, it was a flat percentage chance unmodified by the caster--so a lot of high level monsters were in practice immune to direct damage spells unless they had been somehow debuffed first.

The upshot: in my experience with 2E, there is a band between about fifth level and tenth level where spell damage in general is extremely good. And then? It sort of falls off, to the point where it's not really worth spending your action doing direct damage in the big fights.

***

Personally, I'm happy to see DDN make direct damage a great choice for evokers, and a very situational choice for everybody else.

 

[Falling Icicle]

Just to be clear, I wasn't trying to say that the way blasting spells were handled in 2e was perfect, by any means. I was just pointing out how the ratio between damage and hit points changed considerably between then and 3e, and how the effectiveness of blasting decreased as a result.

 

[Ahnehnois]

[MENTION=6683099]dd.stevenson[/MENTION]
Also worth noting that in 2e, IIRC, saving throws improved slowly with level but there was no concept of DCs per se. Meaning that high level characters virtually never failed saves.
(Whereas in 3e saves scale faster than DCs, but this depends largely on items and defending characters will sometimes fail saves at almost all levels).

 

[Meatboy]

That only holds true for very low level monsters. What if we're talking about a 20th level mage fighting a bunch of 7th level creatures? Many level 7 monsters have well over 100 hp. A fireball that does on average 21 damage isn't going to help much. Even a 9th level meteor swarm only does 42 on average. See the problem? Yeah, a 5th+ level wizard can wipe out a bunch of 1st level kobolds, which are 4 levels below him. But the same is not at all true of higher level wizards fighting creatures with far greater level gaps. This is because the scaling of hp far outpaces the scaling of spell damage.

The game goes from one extreme to the other. At 1st level, even a level 1 spell is incredibly deadly. When characters often have single digit hp, or low teens at the most, a 3d4 +3 damage magic missile or 4d8 sleep is very likely to one-shot just about any character. But then, as you go up in level, the situation quickly reverses itself, as hp quickly multiply but spell damage increases very little. I just want things to be consistent, and for blasting spells to not become far less useful than save-or-suck spells.

Sure fireballs might not end a combat. But I find that they, along with most blaster type spells, are a great way to start combat. Dropping a fireball or two before engaging your foes is a great way to make sure fights go well.

 

[N'raac]

I've never encountered any game - or, indeed, anyone who has ever played in any game - where the fighter was given cause to deal 9000 points of damage over the course of an hour by swinging his sword every round. Theoretically, yes, that is his damage output, and there is no mechanical limit on it. Practically, however, this never comes up because encounters do not last an hour. Encounters last a few rounds. And adventuring days don't involve 600 rounds of combat. They usually involve around 20 or 30 rounds of combat.

600 rounds of combat? Agreed - an extreme. Inability to rest after each encounter? Much more common in the games I've played. The concept of having a single encounter, blasting off everything, then retreating to rest and coming back tomorrow hasn't been present in any game I've played in. This forced the spellcasters to be a bit more conservative in spellcasting, not let loose with full power at the outset of each encounter.

I think a huge caveat is warranted here, at least so far as 2nd ed goes. (Didn't play earlier editions, so I'm going to keep my trap shut about them.)

Just like with 3E, magic resistance was very common (at least IMC) at the higher levels in 2nd ed. However, high magic resistance was very effective back then--as you probably know, it was a flat percentage chance unmodified by the caster--so a lot of high level monsters were in practice immune to direct damage spells unless they had been somehow debuffed first.

The upshot: in my experience with 2E, there is a band between about fifth level and tenth level where spell damage in general is extremely good. And then? It sort of falls off, to the point where it's not really worth spending your action doing direct damage in the big fights.

Also worth noting that in 2e, IIRC, saving throws improved slowly with level but there was no concept of DCs per se. Meaning that high level characters virtually never failed saves.
(Whereas in 3e saves scale faster than DCs, but this depends largely on items and defending characters will sometimes fail saves at almost all levels).

The bottom line in 2e and prior is that wizards tended to look for spells with no saves (or that had at least some effect if the enemy saved) since, as time went on, the odds of an opponent failing a save became lower and lower. Magic Resistance was definitely a thing spellcasters feared. 3e+ has improved that considerably.

That said, why would I Fireball that group of CR 7 opponents with 100 hp to do less damage than the fighter can do in a round (a strike if they save) when I can instead Slow them, for example, effectively cutting down the number of "rounds" they get in the time it takes the fighters to cut them down? All spells are situational to some extent, but when selecting spells, I want the ones that will be useful regularly over the ones that may be handy once in a blue moon. If the intent is that only evokers will use blast-spells, since only they can make them powerful enough to be meaningful, then I would hope other choices for wizards are equally narrow, and that the Evoker can't get more benefit from other choices than an Enchanter, Illusionist, Summoner or Necromancer gets from evocation spells. This would make individual Wizards much more specialized than prior editions, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.