I'm glad that we at least agree on that! Though perhaps not on how much feats and gear improve the situation (I'll try to math it out tomorrow).
I'd like to draw your attention to the bit I included on what a Wizard of the same level does in the same situation, though (immediately killing all the orcs with one spell even if they make their saves).
I'd also be very interested to hear your thoughts on the Fighter Design Goals article I quoted, which I feel is extremely important and relevant to the conversation at hand and the Fighter's role in the game in general.
It completely contradicts your view that it's only right and proper for the Wizard to be significantly more powerful than the Fighter, and that Fighter should take levels of caster class if they want to compete:
That's not my view at all, and if I gave that impression I miscommunicated. My view is that if something is magic it should admit that it is magic. A flying barbarian is magic and clearly labeled as such. Someone jumping 200 miles like the Hulk is magic whether they know it or not. Beowulf smimming an ice-filled fjord wearing chain mail and clenching a sword in his teeth is pretty much impossible but we might let it slide, swimming and fighting underwater for an hour on a single held breath? Magic.
Now to add something else which is probably going to hurt a lot of brains, there is no such thing an a magicless mundane person in D&D. At all. Ever. Every single person in every D&D world is a meat puppet inhabited by a supernatural spirit called a soul. More than one actually, according to the Speak with dead spell. The soul can be removed from the body and trapped in a jar, sent across the astral plane trailing a silver cord, or visited in it's afterlife. It is as real and important as anything in the world, and it is magic. Supernatural.
So, I don't actually have a problem leveling up into Beowulf and Herakles, because everyone was magic to begin with.
However, there is a significant portion of the population of D&D players who don't see that, or more importantly would rather play with Conan and Fafhrd than Kenshin Himura and Thor. And for them to be served, the high level fighter shouldn't do anything that would make you throw down your popcorn and walk out of an action movie. If they had made 5e such that a "fighter" was fighting at the level of an Exalted character WotC would have completely failed in their goal of bringing back and old school feel, or reuniting the split player base.
A high level Fighter without any magic might have chosen to be that way because their player read
the Fighter Design Goals article and thought it sounded awesome:
And most importantly..
...
that's the Fighter class I want to play.
Do you? Because here's the deal, even if we give the Fighter the ability to deal a no-save deathblow once a round, throw boulders for 10d6 in line-of-sight and to jump 7 leagues at a leap, he's still not in the Wizards, or Bards or Clerics league. He can't speak with the dead. He can't summon an angel. He can't use forcecage or reverse gravity. He can't heal a sick friend or visit his wife in her dreams. No matter how over the top he is, the Hulk is still a punk compared to Dr Strange. Hulk could crush him to a pulp, just like how a D&D fighter can drop a mage in a single round if he starts close and wins initiative, but he's still limited to what muscle and matter can achieve. The higher realms belong to the mage.
And that's exactly what you're both asking for and complaining about.
To be equal in all venues and for all pillars of the game either the fighter is magic and no different from the wizard or the wizard is limited to blowing stuff up and no different from the fighter. If you want both to exist and to be different then there must be differences and those differences must be meaningfull. The ability to fly, to teleport, conjure a wall are different in kind from the ability to smash stuff. They enable different approaches to problem solving, or they aren't really different at all. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
The fighter, with feats and gear really is a badass. As you yourself have pointed out numerous times a Mage who tries to out DPS a fighter is an idiot. Fireballs are not what win boss fights. When it comes to solving problems by killing them the fighter wins. But there are other solutions and they belong to the mage, or the skill system which everyone partakes of equally.
I don't have a problem with that, because when I look at 5e I see a system that will allow me and my friends to have fun playing a game we all love, and that's what matters to us.
