D&D General Wizard vs Fighter - the math

[Minigiant]

All I said WOTC should do is make a 10-15 round class feature variant and a 40-50 round class feature variant.

A chart for fewer spells per day and a chart for more spells per day.

It can fit if you cut all those Planes stuff no one uses in the DMG.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Yes, I am saying that.

What is your source for warlords having been as popular as fighters in 4e?

 

[M_Natas]

The idea that defeat and/or retreat must be lethal isn't inherent to D&D in my view, though it is part of the "AD&D" approach.

There can be non-resource based strategic considerations, which can be made independently of the game's resource recovery framework.

Yes, but non resources based strategies are system agnostic. You don't need D&D 5e (or any game mechanic) for them.

Like, if I build an adventure Purley based on the game mechanics (Adventure Day, attrition model, 6 to 8 medium encounters) based solely on the mechanics I will have tension. I will have a game that works.
If I remove that, I would need to invent other (ingame) things that allow for strategic consideration.
That's like ... playing monopoly but giving every player infinite money.

 

[jgsugden]

Millions?
Over a billion people smoke, even tho it's killing them.

Millions of people exercising the same bad judgement isn't questionable, unusual or even expected - it's inevitable.

You're equating things that are not equal, here. We're talking about whether wizard is broken to the point that you can't enjoy playing a fighter. Millions of people enjoy playing a fighter - now, and for the past 40 years over all of the editions.

That really is rising to the level of fallacy there. It's one thing to assert popularity when talking markets or politics, it's another to assert it disproves ideas backed by objective analysis.

Analysis of what? Whether the wizard is broken? If it is broken, it has to ruin the experience of playing other classes. The only objective fact that matters in this situation is whether it ruins the enjoyment of playing a fighter - and it clearly - through the numbers - does NOT.

That's true, a simple analysis like that needs to narrow things down a great deal.
It happens those assumptions ignore the vast majority of what a wizard brings to the party to focus instead on the 5e fighter's primary (nearly only) function.

It also ignores that a 20th level fighter can deal 150 to 200 damage to a single target in a round very easily - every round. A wizard can't do it once.

A 5th level wizard can drop a 28 damage fireball. A 5th level great weapon fighter can deal two or three attacks at 20 damage a piece - maybe more - to a single target.

An 11th level wizard can disintegrate once for 75 damage. An 11th level fighter is attacking 3 or 4 times for 25 or so damage each every round.

And I was not even factoring the action surges there. Nor was I factoring in that the wizard usually has about 60% of the hp of the fighter. Nor was I factoring in that without the fighter tying up the front line, the wizard is often going down without the ability to cast spells.

The fighter role - when a damage dealing focused build - is to get in there and take on the big bad in a meaningful one on one combat. They deplete the hp of the enemy faster than the spellcasters.

I agree that fighters, barbarians and other 'martial' classes could benefit from more 'out of combat' options. You can still have fun in the social and exploration pillars without them, but they could use them. However, the idea that the damage dealing contribution of a well built fighter is lacking when compared to a wizard ... well, I just don't think we're playing the same game if you have not seen all of the melee classes (outside rogue) dominate that field.

 

[FrozenNorth]

Fighter has been shown to be not just popular, but THE MOST popular class in 5e (I included some data earlier in the thread). So WoTC would be foolish to seriously mess with that. As in, including a big change in the fighter class in the main books? Highly unlikely to happen, why would WoTC risk it!

But fighter has also been an immensely popular class in 3e, 4e, Pathfinder and Pathfinder 2. That seems to suggest that the takeaway is that you could pretty much do anything to the class and it would still be popular?

 

[Oofta]

My problem is, this "5e is a quality product" argument is then used to shut down every possible criticism. Fighters have problems? Sure as hell don't, otherwise people wouldn't play them! 5e's a quality product, it wouldn't do that wrong. Encounter math is messed up? Nah, can't be, 5e is a good product with good content.

The one and only concession I've ever been able to wrangle out of anyone on that front is the DMG. People used to defend it. Eventually, however, they recognized that yeah, okay, the 5e DMG is pretty bad. Of course, this then gets appended with "but everyone knows that" (or worse, "everyone always knew that"), which is incredibly frustrating considering no, actually, lots and lots of people defended it for years, even though nothing about it has changed!

Are there quality things in 5e? Yes. I thought that was a sufficient truism to never actually need to be spelled out, but here we are.

Does that mean 5e made no mistakes?

Because I'm getting quite sick of being told that things can't have mistakes while being widely used, or frequently purchased, or whatever else. And that's exactly what people have told me, for years and years, on this very subject.

I want to fix what I see as mistakes. Some of them can't be fixed--there's nothing you can do to fix 5e's CR system, you'd have to nuke things to the ground and start over and that's far too dramatic a change for anything short of a new edition, which would be a very bad idea right now. Some of them, however, can. Mearls recognized that the Fighter has no identity years ago. Crawford recognizes that Warlocks and Fighters were designed with mechanical expectations that simply don't work with the way actual people usually play 5e. 5.5e is, in part, the result of those and other recognized mistakes in 5e's design.

For another example, one rather more personal for me, dragonborn. You don't rewrite a race three times if it was well-made the first time. It's been known since the first year or so of 5e that dragonborn were massively under-powered compared to most other races, and yet dragonborn are quite popular (IIRC, topping out at 4th most popular non-human race, behind half-elf, elf, and tiefling). But trying to get anyone to recognize that there could maybe, possibly, be an issue with the design of the 5e dragonborn race was like pulling teeth.

So if someone happens to like the game as is, if there's abundant proof that a whole lot of people seem to like the game as is, then maybe just maybe it means you just something other people do not want. Your "mistakes" are "a game I enjoy". I'm not going to stop saying I enjoy the game or that for me and everyone I play with it's a decent quality game just because you go all grump-ass on it.

There are simply things that you see as mistakes that I do not. Things that, based on what people choose to play, are not mistakes to them either. Continuously complaining about how we claim the game is perfect (which nobody does) is not going to change anything. I have several small things I change, others that I just live with because it's the way the game works.

 

[Mort]

But fighter has also been an immensely popular class in 3e, 4e, Pathfinder and Pathfinder 2. That seems to suggest that the takeaway is that you could pretty much do anything to the class and it would still be popular?

Perhaps, but the fighter also seems to be the least tinkered with between editions.

Even in 4e, which was by far the most divergent edition. And when they do tinker, it's the class that seems complained about the loudest. In, 4e for example, the loudest complaints where about how the fighter seemed to much like the wizard, damage on a miss would ruin the game, the powers where too much like spells etc.

 

[overgeeked]

Perhaps, but the fighter also seems to be the least tinkered with between editions.

Even in 4e, which was by far the most divergent edition. And when they do tinker, it's the class that seems complained about the loudest. In, 4e for example, the loudest complaints in remember where about how the fighter seemed to much like the wizard, damage on a miss would ruin the game, the powers where too much like spells etc.

Yep. Those complaints came from both sides. The people who liked the simple hack & slash fighter didn't want to deal with powers and the people who wanted the wizard to be the dominant class didn't like that everyone else was given cool stuff to do while most of their toys were taken away.

But I don't think it needs to be either, or. You can buff fighters (and other martials) without resorting to spell or spell like abilities.

Even something simple like the battlemaster's maneuvers is embraced by a wide swath of players, including those who want a simple fighter.

So add to that. Give them more uses per short rest. It's a pure boost in power that will bring up the fighter's numbers.

But it's also in non-combat areas that the fighter is lacking.

 

[FrogReaver]

Which means the quality of the design is in the eye of the beholder (not Xanathar). If you actually think Fighters tapping into the Speed Force is cool, you really could see more uses of Action Surge as good design!

But this observation brings us full ciricle

If ‘good design’ is simply in the eye of the beholder - something I think is accurate - then the objective measure of good design is something like the percentage of people that view the game as well designed. And guess what - that closely correlates to popularity.

Very few people like something that they think is badly designed. They may like something they find adequately designed over something they find better designed depending on a number of other subjective factors.

 

[Minigiant]

Just chiming in.

WOTC said before Tasha they polled fighter as a high popularity but low satisfaction class along with the ranger and barbarian.