D&D 5E Low Level Wizards Really Do Suck in 5E

[chriton227]

You wasted a 3rd level slot that can be used for something else on 15 points of damage. That's why not. You don't do it unless you have no choice. You think it's smart when a dragon breathes on you for 59, 29 on a save, you launch a 3rd level spell for 15 points in return? You don't do that. Not smart at all.

Okay, looking at the numbers, Fireball will average 28 damage, but with the automatic save will be knocked down to 14. Fire Bolt, giving you the benefit of the doubt that you are a L11 caster, will average 16.5 damage on a hit and 33 damage on a crit. Against something legendary, a 50% hit chance wouldn't be unreasonable, netting an average of 9 damage. So Fireball will do on average 55% more damage. If you are only a 10th level caster, the average for Fire Bolt drops to 6, with Fireball doing 133% more damage on average. You didn't ask if Fireball was smart, you asked why someone would use it. If someone's primary concern was doing damage as fast as possible without regards to burning through their resources, Fireball is better than a cantrip. After all, what good is having a level 3 spell slot left if you get killed by a dragon that has 5 hit points left?

Fireball isn't a smart overall choice in this situation though; it is a spell optimized for use against groups, not single hardened targets. Then again, any wizard that thinks going toe-to-toe with a dragon by trading poorly chosen spells against the dragon's most fearsome attack is a good idea isn't very smart either. And this isn't a wizard problem, I can't think of any class that would fare well in that situation.

No. You don't make a choice. You cast fly to get the martials into battle. Period. Concentration getting broken? Tell me how you make a concentration check when you just took 60 points of damage and the DC is 30 and you get a +3 to +5 on the roll (if you took Resilient? Tell me again about worrying? No, it's going to get broken. Improving your defenses? How? I have a staff of power, bracers of defense, and Mage Armor. That is a wizard's defenses. My AC is 19. Tell me how I can improve them? I cast shield when I need to. AC 19 is nothing to high level creatures. Easy to hit.

You're completely missing the point. It's about choosing between my having fun or the martial having fun. Our strategies are effective. That's why we're still alive. Sorry, it's not fun as a player to cast fly and then launch a cantrip a bunch of times. It's not fun at all as a wizard. Those are my options otherwise the martials sit on the ground throwing javelins with disadvantage.

Defenses are more than just AC. You shouldn't be standing in the middle of an open field engaging a dragon, that is a battlefield so heavily slanted in favor of the dragon's capabilities that it should eat you for lunch. Cover is your friend. Partial cover will get you +2 or +5 on your AC and reflex saves, and stacks with your shield if you cast it. Full cover is even better. With the change in movement rules in 5e, you can come out of full cover, cast a spell at the dragon, and then go back into cover before it can act. If it is something like a cave opening or doorway, it may even have to come down to the ground to be able to attack you at all. If it can't attack you, there is no need to make a concentration check. If you can find some narrow areas (clumps of trees, narrow alleys, tight crevices), you might be able to force it to land to engage you with attacks other than the breath weapon (it can't fly if it can't spread its wings), in which case the situation will be better for the martials to engage to draw attention away from you. Spread the party out so that it can't get the majority in a single breath. If you cast fly on a martial to let them get into melee with the dragon, why and how is the dragon breathing on you instead of dealing with the martial that is in their face (the breath weapons are usually much shorter range than your spells)? Or it may be the time to retreat and reengage at a later time in a location that is better or when you are better prepared.

The martial's player is using you as a crutch to cover their PC's shortcoming at the expense of your fun instead of finding a way to deal with it themselves. This is a problem with the player of the martial character, not a problem with the system or the spell. No rule in the system says you have to put the fun of the martial's player ahead of your own fun, and in my view the martial's player is being pretty selfish with that expectation. There is no excuse for a L10 martial to not have a better ranged weapon than a javelin. Even if they used Dex as a dump stat, they have a decent proficiency bonus and a bow or crossbow will have a long enough range to avoid disadvantage. Maybe the martial should look into acquiring a potions of flying or winged boots (either through purchase or through questing), a trained griffon as a mount (expensive, but what else are they spending gold on), or picking up an ability score increase or feat that could improve their ranged capabilities. Character design involves tradeoffs, but in this case it sounds like the martial sacrificed ranged ability in favor of melee ability, but then expect you to suffer the negative consequences of the tradeoff instead of dealing with it themselves.

You're level 3. Get back to me at level 10. I was having fun at level 3 when sleep was effective, saves were low, and the yard trash wasn't hitting you for 25 points an attack, while having 50 to 70 hit points each while you're still launching 8d6 fireballs. Legendary Creatures are an entirely other matter. It's not real fun when the dragon breathes on the party for 60 points and a Con save, follows it up with a legendary action tail slap for another 10 to 15, then drops a lair action on your for another 10 damage doing anywhere 55 to 85 points of damage in a single round. Then he gets to start hammering you with physical attacks.

The gods help you if he gets lucky on a breath weapon recharge and gets to breathe twice on the party in two rounds. You might as well prepare to make a new character.

I'd like to get some context for your experiences here. What legendary creatures have you been encountering? I've gone through the MM and I didn't see a single creature with Legendary Resistance below CR13. Only about half of the creatures that are CR13+ have legendary resistance. I assume that this is so casters won't be having to deal with Legendary Resistance until they have a reasonable number of spell slots available. If your party is fighting legendaries that are 3+ CR above the average party level, and fighting them on their home turf (where they get lair actions), it should be brutally difficult. Assuming 5 PCs and a CR13 legendary this is between a hard and deadly encounter to start, and beyond deadly once you take into account the situational advantage of the lair. This is the sort of fight that if all possible you only want to go into if you are well prepared and have a good plan of action, and if you aren't there is no shame in making a tactical withdraw. If your DM is adding Legendary Resistance to creatures that don't normally have it, or creating lower CR legendary creatures and giving them Legendary Resistance, this is an issue with the DM, not with the game. Why is it that the dragon is focusing so much attention on your wizard? And have you talked to your DM about how you don't find getting steamrolled by a higher level legendary to be much fun?

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Of course it is. That's one problem. Even with all of its warts, the scenario where you put it between the PCs and the NPCs and the NPCs do not have ranged attacks, the PCs win. A lot. In this scenario that you devised, it can be really nice. Course, you decided that the NPCs were, on those few occasions when a troll in the web saved, not going to run away. Not going to grapple and pull a PC into the web, not going to move to the sides of the room where the PCs would have a hard time attacking them outside of the web.

Nope, you're wrong about this. Troll #1 ran away at the very first opportunity he had, which was on round #5. (Round #2 was when Web was cast, he failed his save; on rounds #3 and #4 he was still caught; on round #5 he broke free and fell back.) You're very persuaded that grappling would have been a killer strategy, so much so that my not having employed it is, in your mind, enough to render the entire exercise irrelevant. I'm less persuaded. Trolls are fairly poor at grappling PCs already, and then when you add in difficult terrain and Web spells they become even worse at it. Grappling is not a hard or soft counter in this situation--the smartest thing the trolls could have done was break and run at the first glimpse of the adventurers, and I'm sure you would have loved it if I had had them do that--but that won't happen without metagaming. A whole band of five hungry, fearless trolls simply does not run without a good reason, which definitely involves taking one or more casualties or facing fire.

YMMV obviously. Maybe you like to play trolls more like kobolds than like carnivorous omni-killing machines.

I'd much rather have a second level explosion spell that does some minor damage like 2D6 or so, hurls opponents through the air and knocks them down. That's fun. That's exciting.

Wow. YM obviously does V, because that sounds incredibly boring to me. As a cantrip it would be meh, might as well, but as a 2nd level spell it's just terrible, not even slightly cool. I really don't think the 5E wizard class was designed for you at all.

 

[Celtavian]

Okay, looking at the numbers, Fireball will average 28 damage, but with the automatic save will be knocked down to 14. Fire Bolt, giving you the benefit of the doubt that you are a L11 caster, will average 16.5 damage on a hit and 33 damage on a crit. Against something legendary, a 50% hit chance wouldn't be unreasonable, netting an average of 9 damage. So Fireball will do on average 55% more damage. If you are only a 10th level caster, the average for Fire Bolt drops to 6, with Fireball doing 133% more damage on average. You didn't ask if Fireball was smart, you asked why someone would use it. If someone's primary concern was doing damage as fast as possible without regards to burning through their resources, Fireball is better than a cantrip. After all, what good is having a level 3 spell slot left if you get killed by a dragon that has 5 hit points left?

Legendary Creature ACs are not that high. Bless is often in effect against such creatures. Your average chance to hit is +4 or 5 stat +4 proficiency at level 10 and +2 on average bless. If you have a magic item that boosts hit bonus, and I do, that also.

My hit roll is +4 proficiency +4 intel +2 staff =+10 with bless +12.

Generally against AC 18 to 19 for Legendary Creatures my level or slightly above.

That means I hit 70 to 75% of the time. So yes, it is unreasonable to assume 50% to hit chance.

Defenses are more than just AC. You shouldn't be standing in the middle of an open field engaging a dragon, that is a battlefield so heavily slanted in favor of the dragon's capabilities that it should eat you for lunch. Cover is your friend. Partial cover will get you +2 or +5 on your AC and reflex saves, and stacks with your shield if you cast it. Full cover is even better. With the change in movement rules in 5e, you can come out of full cover, cast a spell at the dragon, and then go back into cover before it can act. If it is something like a cave opening or doorway, it may even have to come down to the ground to be able to attack you at all. If it can't attack you, there is no need to make a concentration check. If you can find some narrow areas (clumps of trees, narrow alleys, tight crevices), you might be able to force it to land to engage you with attacks other than the breath weapon (it can't fly if it can't spread its wings), in which case the situation will be better for the martials to engage to draw attention away from you. Spread the party out so that it can't get the majority in a single breath. If you cast fly on a martial to let them get into melee with the dragon, why and how is the dragon breathing on you instead of dealing with the martial that is in their face (the breath weapons are usually much shorter range than your spells)? Or it may be the time to retreat and reengage at a later time in a location that is better or when you are better prepared.

Cover does not work against a breath weapon or AoE attack requiring a Con Save. All cold and poison attacks are Con saves. That's why Rogue evasion is kind of dumb in this edition. Somehow you can evade fire and acid breath weapons, but cold and poison gas are too special to evade for reasons only the game designers can fathom.

If you take cover away from the party against a creature with 80 feet of movement, it moves to you, full attacks, and moves past you disallowing your martials from attacking it or allowing them to be sealed off by Legendary Actions that can do stuff like erect walls or create difficult terrain. As a caster you are almost forced to remain in relatively close proximity to the martials, so highly mobile creatures do not utilize their mobility to kill you off pieacemeal. Cover does not help against highly mobile creatures because they circumvent with their mobility, hit you, and move away all very quickly. Your AoO from reaction is meaningless to them unless they are very low on hit points.

The martial's player is using you as a crutch to cover their PC's shortcoming at the expense of your fun instead of finding a way to deal with it themselves. This is a problem with the player of the martial character, not a problem with the system or the spell. No rule in the system says you have to put the fun of the martial's player ahead of your own fun, and in my view the martial's player is being pretty selfish with that expectation. There is no excuse for a L10 martial to not have a better ranged weapon than a javelin. Even if they used Dex as a dump stat, they have a decent proficiency bonus and a bow or crossbow will have a long enough range to avoid disadvantage. Maybe the martial should look into acquiring a potions of flying or winged boots (either through purchase or through questing), a trained griffon as a mount (expensive, but what else are they spending gold on), or picking up an ability score increase or feat that could improve their ranged capabilities. Character design involves tradeoffs, but in this case it sounds like the martial sacrificed ranged ability in favor of melee ability, but then expect you to suffer the negative consequences of the tradeoff instead of dealing with it themselves.

He is not using me as a crutch. He wanted to play a strength-based sword wielder. He's supposed to be punished for that because of concentration, no ability to purchase magic items, and mobility playing an increased roll with every creature able to move their full speed and do a full attack at any point during the movement? Like I said, it's my fun or his fun and both of our deaths if I don't get him into action.

I'd like to get some context for your experiences here. What legendary creatures have you been encountering? I've gone through the MM and I didn't see a single creature with Legendary Resistance below CR13. Only about half of the creatures that are CR13+ have legendary resistance. I assume that this is so casters won't be having to deal with Legendary Resistance until they have a reasonable number of spell slots available. If your party is fighting legendaries that are 3+ CR above the average party level, and fighting them on their home turf (where they get lair actions), it should be brutally difficult. Assuming 5 PCs and a CR13 legendary this is between a hard and deadly encounter to start, and beyond deadly once you take into account the situational advantage of the lair. This is the sort of fight that if all possible you only want to go into if you are well prepared and have a good plan of action, and if you aren't there is no shame in making a tactical withdraw. If your DM is adding Legendary Resistance to creatures that don't normally have it, or creating lower CR legendary creatures and giving them Legendary Resistance, this is an issue with the DM, not with the game. Why is it that the dragon is focusing so much attention on your wizard? And have you talked to your DM about how you don't find getting steamrolled by a higher level legendary to be much fun?

Read Hoard of the Dragon Queen module series. See how the set up is. Imagine an intelligent DM taking full advantage of terrain and lair actions.

 

[Celtavian]

You're overestimating damage output. Paladin is doing 10 to 15-ish points of damage per round (depending on build), wizard does about 7 points of damage per round, sharpshooter does 30 points of damage if heavily optimized w/ Crossbow Expert (cheesey interpretation to get 3 attacks per round) + Sharpshooter, druid does 14 points of damage... you'll be lucky to kill one troll per round even with the Crossbow Expert cheese, unless you use spells like Web/Faerie Fire to gain advantage.

Paladins are awesome. The ability to choose to smite after the roll is made is amazing. It leads to very little waste of resources and allow him to spend his biggest hits on the rare crits. They're ability to nova is as good as an action surging fighter. If you play a paladin, you will be happy. They are perhaps the best all around class I've seen in action to date. Good saves all around. Good defenses with heavy armor and shield. Good damage with smite. Lots of potential burst damage in key situations. Great special abilities from Oaths. Ability to heal yourself and clear poison or disease, both very dangerous in this game. Good spell selection.

Great class. Fun and powerful.

 

[Celtavian]

I don't know of any edition of D&D where familiars were particularly useful in combat except in situations of desperation. As far as the familiar getting spotted when scouting, why pick a familiar that the enemies will care about if they see it? In 5e you can change your familiar by recasting Find Familiar. The wizard in my game has been careful to pick useful forms that won't attract undue attention. For example, they were travelling at night, an owl or bat is a perfect choice. During the day in wilderness, a hawk, raven, spider, of snake would not appear out of place. In many urban areas, a rat, raven, or spider would blend in well. In natural caves, a spider, rat, or bat are all reasonable. Something like a pseudodragon is just going to draw attention as a scout.

Monsters eat small creatures. A loan rat wandering in a dungeon is no longer safe. Intelligent enemies accustomed to fighting wizards and the like, kill small creatures wandering in areas. That is how our DM plays it. Sure, scouting is still useful when the familiar can fit into areas where he won't be noticed amongst similar creatures. It happens less often at higher levels. The enemies we're fighting kill little spying familiars in one hit and notice them very easily. They aren't dumb enough to go, "Look, it's just an owl sitting in tree outside my window. I'll let it watch me while I do evil things." Wish it were that easy. Our DM plays enemies as ruthlessly protecting their stronghold and not taking chances with little wandering creatures.

 

[Celtavian]

You and KarinsDad are arguing two different things. You are saying you are still a key part of your group, critical in fact, as without you it sounds like your fighters would be "on the ground throwing javelins with disadvantage."

To your point, I agree with you to some extent that they may have gone overboard on the concentration. I have no problem with buffs requiring concentration, but Wall of Stone? Web? Cloudkill? Those are just a few examples. Forcing a wizard to choose only one of those severely restricts tactical options, and fewer options usually means less fun.

Glad you understand. I don't want to give the wrong impression that wizards are ineffective. I'd be lying. I'm extremely useful and necessary to my group. I'm not having fun being a buff bot in major fights where nothing I cast works due to the combination of factors I already stated and I can't pull out fun spells like Bigby's Hand or Sunbeam to do some damage dealing of my own due to concentration. Buffing the martials so they can action surge, smite, and sneak attack while I launch cantrips is not too fun.

I'm starting to launch scorching ray. That should help a bit. I need more spell books out and fast, so I have more options for attack spells that allow me to throw in some effective offense.

 

[Celtavian]

I thought we were talking about low-level wizards in this thread. Of course a 10th-level wizard isn't going to get a ton of use out of 1st-level rituals. You have bigger spells now.

I don't have bigger rituals though. Find Familiar and the occasional Detect Magic is all I ever use. Don't feel like risking Contact Other Plane and going insane for mostly useless information. There are no rituals for utility, defense, or combat at higher level that I have found worth using.

 

[KarinsDad]

Wow. YM obviously does V, because that sounds incredibly boring to me. As a cantrip it would be meh, might as well, but as a 2nd level spell it's just terrible, not even slightly cool. I really don't think the 5E wizard class was designed for you at all.

Now I know that you are either arguing just to argue, or that you just don't understand at all why some people play casters. Some people play casters to have versatile fun, not to spam the same old lock down spell adventuring day after adventuring day.

Locking down some foes, sure. It can be effective. But when one does it over and over again, adventuring day in and adventuring day out? Meh. But, there are no second level fun spells like the explosion one I just described.


I'll give you an example of fun from 4E last year. As DM, I had a scenario where every living creature that died in the local area immediately rose from the dead as a zombie. PC, NPC, it didn't matter. So, the PCs were in a room with a pit trap in it. They were outnumbered greatly, but managed to knock a few foes into the pit where they died. The lieutenant NPC had a spell that could knock creatures around and she tried to use it to knock PCs into the pit. This could have been really bad for the party, but somehow, only one PC got knocked into the pit early on and managed to climb back out. Everyone else knocked into the pit (by either the lieutenant, or by a PC) was an NPC and as more and more fell into the pit, the undead in the pit started killing more and more NPCs which resulted in more and more undead.

This, on the surface, might not sound especially entertaining to you as a player. At my table, the players were cheering and laughing, in fact, some players were laughing to the point that tears were coming out of their eyes as yet another NPC went into the pit and got attacked by his former allies. In just a few rounds, the combat went from extremely deadly to the PCs to a meat grinder of the NPCs. The game actually came to a halt the players were laughing so hard.

I've never seen this type of reaction with a web spell. I see it when cool things like a mini-explosion that knocks some NPCs over a cliff occurs. Cheers occur when the wizard does something cool. Locking down a few foes? Meh. Effective maybe, but boring, especially if it is the one trick pony that the wizard has to keep going back to.


5E spells are like that to me. Maybe it's because there were more riders in 4E spells, but 5E spells for a low level wizard just seem like spamming the same cantrip over and over until the caster gets to cast his megaspell. And then, that spell often fizzles. To prevent this from happening, the caster starts doing spells like Fog Cloud and Web which tend not to fizzle and modify which PCs get attacked and how many NPCs attacks occur, combined with the occasional Magic Missile or Burning Hands or Scorching Ray or some such in order to do as much damage as the martial types do every encounter.

I'm actually glad that all of the watering down and restrictions of 5E spells works for your game, but if you cannot understand that it might not work at every table, then we really do not have anything else to discuss. It's fine for you, it's boring and repetitive to me. C'est la via.


Wizards only get a few highest level spells. When a wizard pulls out one of those, he should be more badass than when the fighter does his extra attack every single round. That's not necessarily (and usually isn't) the case. That's the problem with 5E spells. They watered them down so much that the spell caster doesn't often shine, even when he pulls out his best spells.

As an example, Silence is no longer mobile. Hence, Silence is next to worthless except in the most limited of circumstances. It used to have three main functions. Take out a caster, allow the party to move and sneak silently, and allow the party to prevent sound from going into an area (like through a door or down a hallway). The first function can sometimes, maybe, once in a blue moon happen, and the second never happens. So, only the third function works like it used to and that's the function that Silence, at least IME, was used the least for. So the spell has gone from one of the best spells for when it was useful to an extremely situational so so spell.

Yes, it CAN work in 5E if a different PC locks down the caster that a PC wants to Silence, but with concentration and all of the other limitations imposed in 5E, the PC cannot just cast the spell and shine himself. He's forced to do it in either relatively tight quarters, or he has to have some other PC lock his target down first (which can happen if you have another PC in the group designed for grappling). Yeah, I get the whole teamwork thing, but whenever a PC caster's shining relies on teamwork, the first casualty of any battle is the plan. Seen it happen over and over again. And having the Cleric or Ranger prep Silence day after day after adventuring day on the off chance that the PCs both a) run into a spell caster that they cannot just handle without Silence, and b) have the perfect storm of lockdown which allows their Silence to actually work, to then watch either the lockdown not work, or the Silence get disrupted with a failed Con save, just seems like the opposite of fun to me.

It might be fun for your PC to prep Silence for gaming months on end and have it not work for one reason or another (or worse yet, you cast it on the wimpy NPC mage who couldn't do much of anything in the first place), but that does not sound like fun to me. Sorry. Different preferences for a PC spell caster.

 

[KarinsDad]

Read Hoard of the Dragon Queen module series. See how the set up is. Imagine an intelligent DM taking full advantage of terrain and lair actions.

It doesn't even have to be full advantage. Even a modicum of preparation on the part of the DM for a legendary monster with lair actions can result in all kinds of difficulties for a party used to coming in and mopping up fights in 2 to 5 rounds. Some difficult terrain, some walls, a few NPC minion types. All of that sounds easy, but not with lair actions from a DM who prepped ahead of time. As a DM, I am already salivating for our first such fight and that probably will not be until this summer.

 

[Pickles JG]

d) they are expected to spam cantrips (which basically suck pre-level 5), it's not as much fun.

You are exhibiting a lack of understanding (? ) of the rules. Cantrips suck just as much at level 5 as all the martial classes double their at will attacks too. (except rogue who is on a slightly different progression).

I dont think they really suck, just do 60% of the damage of Martial at wills. Or a bit less with a rider.

And we alll know that's fine IF wizard daily burst effects are enough to compensate, which appears to be a matter of some contention.