Incenjucar
Legend
That's essentially what I was saying. In 3e (or 2e, for that matter), your typical hedge wizard/town priest/magic item crafter/etc. gains BAB and HP and saves slowly with levels, but otherwise may be a total noncombatant who memorizes no spells with offensive combat applications whatsoever.
As a player making a spellcaster, you choose across a wide spread of options. You can optimize for damage, pursue one of the more indirect combat foci, mix and match completely unrelated spells, or play a loremaster and devote your character to divinations spells. Combat is not built in, it is a choice.
Eh. There's no edition where your wizard can't obliterate people at all times. The ability to use wands is a non-optional class feature. For wizards which can actually cast spells, combat ability is built-in but can be voluntarily ignored but you can kind of get some compensation out of it. The only real difference between the 4E wizard and previous wizards in this regard is that the 4E wizard can't memorize Bubble Bath fifty times instead. That's a legit criticism! But it can be solved by just adding to the game.
The same is true for the rogue, to some extent, which is where this tangent started. Your SA is built in, but your ability score allocation, skill choices, and special abilities can be chosen for combat or completely noncombat applications.
You can do the same in 4E. Indeed, rogues can have a lower Dexterity in 4E than they did in 2E, and will becomes nigh-useless in combat if they do so. You absolutely will end up with damaging powers, but in 2E you just got zippo instead, and aren't losing anything. It's not like you could drop Backstab damage in exchange for a higher Listen percentage, and 3E gave you a bunch of dodgy powers which 4E made into purely optional feats. Indeed, in 4E, rogues can be much more skill-oriented than ever before. A 4E rogue could be proficient with every single skill in the game at the same time by level 18, and will still have 7 more feats throughout their career to use for Skill Focus or Rituals or Alchemy. Previous-edition rogues don't have squat on the 4E rogue when it comes to access to non-combat options.
If you think having all characters be roughly equal in combat effectiveness (for their level) is the definition of balance, and you want that kind of balance, this character creation flexibility is a bug. If you don't, it's a feature. My perspective on the issue is that I wish things like BAB and health would be more decoupled from level than they are, have combat effectiveness be less baked in.
It's the definition of combat balance. I believe that characters should be balanced in all pillars of the game, combat is just the one that D&D has spent the most time working on. Has the dev team even talked about Social Balance yet? Because traditionally D&D has freaking terrible social balance.