D&D (2024) Can A Spell Caster Out Damage a Martial Consistently?

[EzekielRaiden]

The concern I have with crunching numbers like that is the assumption that everyone takes a long rest just because the spell casters want to take a long rest. I think that's a silly assumption.

Not at all. Because if the party has a healer, 99% of the time that healer is also a spellcaster, because Mearls & co. danced on the Warlord's grave. Meaning the party has every reason to stop fighting once the spell slots run out and they're functionally out of resources to prevent catastrophic failure.

If the party can ignore the better part of the 24 hour cycle required to benefit from 8 hours of long resting then other classes can fit in as many short rests as they want within that time frame until they also need to take a long rest.

It's not about ignoring the 24-hour cycle. It's about packing it in. Waiting for a new day rather than taking on new challenges when the biggest resources are already used up...most importantly the healing resources, which are the ones the martial characters need the most because they're in the line of fire for the nastiest attacks.

Spellcasters waiting out the day until they can long rest again are doing zero damage in the meantime.

So are martials. That changes nothing.

Not waiting out the day and continuing to adventure because other classes can keep playing is continuing to do damage. Resting to recover spell slots is not something we can label as consistent damage if it's based on nova casting over shorter time frames.

Why not? It's amount of damage per day. Only one set of classes is dependent on having a bazillion combat rounds each day. The other can burn through all of their resources and then present a very strong argument that we will be stronger if we pack it in.

In the groups I played with we played through the adventuring day.

Great! You have groups intentionally playing suboptimally. That's totally fine. It's not what the game actually gives mechanical rewards to.

Spellcasters were cautious using spells in case they ran out of slots; and if they did then they used cantrip, rituals, and magic items. The adventure didn't pause for them. The only place I've every experienced 5MWD is in online discussions.

I have personally seen it be a direct problem. Does that make you happy? To know that this is real, and you've just had a gentleperson's agreement not to let it be an issue?

I appreciate concentration. It was a step in the right direction to keep spellcasters more reasonable than 3.x casters along with removing caster level from most spells and less spell slots with which to cast. Monster hit point inflation also curbed casters a bit from a different angle.

3ed did favor casters a lot more.

Concentration helps, but it should be far more widespread. There are far too many spells that should require it but don't. You are correct that 3.x/PF1e favored casters "a lot more", but that's kind of damning with faint praise. Because 3.x was so massively, horrifically broken, and nearly every possible mechanic favored spellcasters or punished martials or both.

To be better than literally the single worst D&D for martial/spellcaster balance isn't saying much!

I don't know how ECOM3 has time to play all those characters to those levels.

I've played short campaigns that start at higher levels and the luxury of skipping lower level grown pains makes building the character different from having to play through those levels as well. When I play a long term campaign from 1st level it usually takes well over a year and closer to two years to get to 20th level playing weekly. I play to those levels but it takes a long time to get there.

A person would have to level up almost every session to get to 20th level in six months playing weekly.

Six months is 26-27 weeks. Only requires that you get the first handful of levels rapid-fire, or start at a slightly higher level, to work out as about one level every other session. E.g. if you start at level 5, you'd only need back-to-back levelling twice in that six-month period. Of course, it could also be that they were slightly exaggerating in both directions, e.g. not quite 20 but maybe 18 or 19 and not a mere six months but seven or eight. Going from level ~4 to level ~18 in just over seven months is ~14 levels gained in ~31 weeks, or about 2.2 weeks per level (meaning, most of the time it's 2 weeks, but occasionally it's 3).

It's certainly fast, if ECMO3's group isn't starting at a higher level. But this just proves a point I've made many, many times on this forum and which people always deny, despite all evidence to the contrary: People presume absolutely every group starts at level 1 and never starts higher. Further, note the pace at which you say your levels come: closer to two years than one year. Call it 20 months, 86.96 weeks, call it 87 for simplicity. Given you have 19 levels to gain in that span (since you start at 1), that's more than four and a half weeks for each level, including level 2 and 3, which WotC has explicitly designed to take only one and two sessions apiece before settling at about 4 sessions apiece from there on out. And if we tweak it to assume you do get level 2 by the end of the first session and level 3 by the end of the third, that just makes all the others even slower, taking nearly five weeks every time (4.94).

And people say my experience of DMs dragging out the XP rate is somehow weird and divergent!

 

[Zardnaar]

The concern I have with crunching numbers like that is the assumption that everyone takes a long rest just because the spell casters want to take a long rest. I think that's a silly assumption.

If the party can ignore the better part of the 24 hour cycle required to benefit from 8 hours of long resting then other classes can fit in as many short rests as they want within that time frame until they also need to take a long rest.

Spellcasters waiting out the day until they can long rest again are doing zero damage in the meantime. Not waiting out the day and continuing to adventure because other classes can keep playing is continuing to do damage. Resting to recover spell slots is not something we can label as consistent damage if it's based on nova casting over shorter time frames.

In the groups I played with we played through the adventuring day. Spellcasters were cautious using spells in case they ran out of slots; and if they did then they used cantrip, rituals, and magic items. The adventure didn't pause for them. The only place I've every experienced 5MWD is in online discussions.



I appreciate concentration. It was a step in the right direction to keep spellcasters more reasonable than 3.x casters along with removing caster level from most spells and less spell slots with which to cast. Monster hit point inflation also curbed casters a bit from a different angle.

3ed did favor casters a lot more.



I don't know how ECOM3 has time to play all those characters to those levels.

I've played short campaigns that start at higher levels and the luxury of skipping lower level grown pains makes building the character different from having to play through those levels as well. When I play a long term campaign from 1st level it usually takes well over a year and closer to two years to get to 20th level playing weekly. I play to those levels but it takes a long time to get there.

A person would have to level up almost every session to get to 20th level in six months playing weekly.

Multiple sessions pee week. We play bi-weekly plus odd bonis session. We just hit 9.
Weekly probably add another 3 levels.

Also may level every two sessions. We do 3 or 4.

 

[Zardnaar]

Not at all. Because if the party has a healer, 99% of the time that healer is also a spellcaster, because Mearls & co. danced on the Warlord's grave. Meaning the party has every reason to stop fighting once the spell slots run out and they're functionally out of resources to prevent catastrophic failure.


It's not about ignoring the 24-hour cycle. It's about packing it in. Waiting for a new day rather than taking on new challenges when the biggest resources are already used up...most importantly the healing resources, which are the ones the martial characters need the most because they're in the line of fire for the nastiest attacks.


So are martials. That changes nothing.


Why not? It's amount of damage per day. Only one set of classes is dependent on having a bazillion combat rounds each day. The other can burn through all of their resources and then present a very strong argument that we will be stronger if we pack it in.


Great! You have groups intentionally playing suboptimally. That's totally fine. It's not what the game actually gives mechanical rewards to.


I have personally seen it be a direct problem. Does that make you happy? To know that this is real, and you've just had a gentleperson's agreement not to let it be an issue?


Concentration helps, but it should be far more widespread. There are far too many spells that should require it but don't. You are correct that 3.x/PF1e favored casters "a lot more", but that's kind of damning with faint praise. Because 3.x was so massively, horrifically broken, and nearly every possible mechanic favored spellcasters or punished martials or both.

To be better than literally the single worst D&D for martial/spellcaster balance isn't saying much!


Six months is 26-27 weeks. Only requires that you get the first handful of levels rapid-fire, or start at a slightly higher level, to work out as about one level every other session. E.g. if you start at level 5, you'd only need back-to-back levelling twice in that six-month period. Of course, it could also be that they were slightly exaggerating in both directions, e.g. not quite 20 but maybe 18 or 19 and not a mere six months but seven or eight. Going from level ~4 to level ~18 in just over seven months is ~14 levels gained in ~31 weeks, or about 2.2 weeks per level (meaning, most of the time it's 2 weeks, but occasionally it's 3).

It's certainly fast, if ECMO3's group isn't starting at a higher level. But this just proves a point I've made many, many times on this forum and which people always deny, despite all evidence to the contrary: People presume absolutely every group starts at level 1 and never starts higher. Further, note the pace at which you say your levels come: closer to two years than one year. Call it 20 months, 86.96 weeks, call it 87 for simplicity. Given you have 19 levels to gain in that span (since you start at 1), that's more than four and a half weeks for each level, including level 2 and 3, which WotC has explicitly designed to take only one and two sessions apiece before settling at about 4 sessions apiece from there on out. And if we tweak it to assume you do get level 2 by the end of the first session and level 3 by the end of the third, that just makes all the others even slower, taking nearly five weeks every time (4.94).

And people say my experience of DMs dragging out the XP rate is somehow weird and divergent!

Thus kinda shows how little you play. We barely use spell slots to heal. Mostly hit dice.

You don't need to heal if you take no damage. Kill stuff faster or disable them. Most efficient way is team effort. Spell casters paralyze or disable martials kill.

Seems only two of us are playing higher level . I think we know how to min max ECOM3 went further than I do with magic items.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Thus kinda shows how little you play. We barely use spell slots to heal. Mostly hit dice.

Given I have far more experience with the than I have with any other system...and I've played numerous PF1e and 3.5e games and multiple games with several other systems...

Respectfully, you don't know crap about my gaming experience, Zardnaar.

You don't need to heal if you take no damage.

I have never, not once ever in more than ten years of playing 5e, seen a combat where a martial character got out without taking damage. Never.

Now I genuinely wonder how much you play if you think that's even remotely common.

Kill stuff faster or disable them. Most efficient way is team effort. Spell casters paralyze or disable martials kill.

Which still means the casters are flexing on the noncasters....

Seems only two of us are playing higher level . I think we know how to min max ECOM3 went further than I do with magic items.

I will admit that I have never played past level...11 I think? Like we reached 12 but it was functionally no different from never playing 12. LMoP->PaB:TSO.

We played in a party where I was the only spellcaster and definitely the only healer (Celestial Bladelock, with a bit of Tome for fun). I could never reliably use more than 1 spell for combat purposes because I needed to hold onto them for saving lives, sometimes literally once I got revivify (which, yes, I needed to use twice, and could have used three times if I'd had it earlier than 5th level). I never had any Healing Light dice at the end of a day. We always burned through all of our HD and usually at least 2 healing potions apiece each day, which is the equivalent of at least one spell slot each on top of my warlock slots. And we took more short rests than is expected (like a LOT more), AND we often went multiple days without combat so we could always have all of our HD on hand, and we still barely made it through several adventuring days in that campaign.

So maybe instead of condescendingly telling me I have no idea what I'm talking about, maybe consider I might actually have a clue and my experience radically differs from yours.

I can say that an optimized Barbarian can be quite scary over a long combat, but 5e trends toward fast combats which actually punish the (pre-5.5e) Barb because they can't get Rages back by short rests. My character was using the "One D&D" playtest packet 7 rules, otherwise everyone was standard 5.0 because 5.5e was more than six months away when I joined...and I can 100% say that without that extra spell slot from the updated rules, I'm pretty sure at least one character would have died.

Just using flaming sphere (still kinda sad they took that out of Celestial, I thought it was very thematic and much better than getting two support spells for 2nd level), though, I could quite easily do respectable damage, and between blade and blast, I was dangerous at any range. Our Barbarian probably did out damage me...because I was trying to be mostly support with just a reliable backstop of damage, rather than to outdo them.

Sadly I never really got to make the most use out of my best damage spell. Sickening radiance. We just never found chances to lock people inside its area so we would avoid it and they'd just straight up die of either the damage or the exhaustion.

 

[tetrasodium]

Call me limited if you want but I think this is overengineering the problem and not something that will improve the game. I don't think it needs to be addressed at all. If one DM gives 20 short rests a day and another gives 1 long rest every 3 days, making characters get 2 levels of exhaustion, I don't see a problem with that.

IMO you are trying to fix something that isn't broken.

I have never had Bob voicing outrage at any of my tables and if he was I just wouldn't play with Bob.

I also have no problem with SR classes consistently out damaging everyone else. Every one of the tables I play at has the PC that outperforms everyone else and it is awesome.

I have played gritty realism and we found it less fun, but that is me (and my group).

I also played a ton of 1E in the 80s where you had to rest for weeks to be all better, and in play I like the 5E version where 1 night and you are all better, 1 hour and you are mostly better.

Your entire post seems to be various flavors of claiming that you are not convinced from your self granted position of authority over acceptable vrs badwrongfun play.. worse is that you do it while relying on a strongly implied "wotc did surveys and they know what's fun" in all of those bolded sections.

Your don't play with someone like Bob who voices outrage isn't quite accurate though because of how the context is changed from the original quote of "the rules themselves actively sandbag the GM who cares to push back when a player like Bob starts voicing outrage about RAI surveys and fun". Given that your own post quite literally does the same just by continually bringing up how rules supporting the gm in pushing back against Bob are not needed and wouldn't improve the game you show why it was a failure for wotc to not bother with it. The rules bury the bar so far below ground for players that they only feel the need to dismiss any reasoning presented against excess in order to sandbag resistance to excess is deeply against RAI. Unfortunately for the GM attempting to push back against such a high bar, it becomes the gm who is immediately painted as the one derailing the game with toxic rules lawyering icalvinball style changes because with absolutely no bar for players to meet there is zero effort from the players to even consider the scenario before the gm feels the need to use fiat to block the rest with the scenario itself or troll the party with endless interruptions to the rest.


I too remember those ultra long rests still present in 2e, but you aren't quite reporting how it tended to work in play. When someone in the party felt they needed to rest there would be a comment about it and the party would express a desire to find a safe place to rest or go back to town so they could. While there were risks involved if the safe place/town was volatile enough that events could intrude, the important part was agreeing with the gm what needed to be done to safely rest or what fraction of a rest could be taken at some lesser area. Once that was worked out and PC actions were taken it was simply done at the speed of plot. The only time players were left slowly ticking off drips and drabs was when the gm and players disagree on what mata safe place to rest and the players decide to take one anyways knowing that there were real risks they couldn't shrug off consequence free simply by trying again until the gm gives up. By comparison the 5e rules for resting effectively assume that it should always be safe to rest here and now and that the gm is always going to be the one pushing things too far when the scenario of that rest suggest otherwise.

 

[Zardnaar]

Given I have far more experience with the than I have with any other system...and I've played numerous PF1e and 3.5e games and multiple games with several other systems...

Respectfully, you don't know crap about my gaming experience, Zardnaar.


I have never, not once ever in more than ten years of playing 5e, seen a combat where a martial character got out without taking damage. Never.

Now I genuinely wonder how much you play if you think that's even remotely common.


Which still means the casters are flexing on the noncasters....


I will admit that I have never played past level...11 I think? Like we reached 12 but it was functionally no different from never playing 12. LMoP->PaB:TSO.

We played in a party where I was the only spellcaster and definitely the only healer (Celestial Bladelock, with a bit of Tome for fun). I could never reliably use more than 1 spell for combat purposes because I needed to hold onto them for saving lives, sometimes literally once I got revivify (which, yes, I needed to use twice, and could have used three times if I'd had it earlier than 5th level). I never had any Healing Light dice at the end of a day. We always burned through all of our HD and usually at least 2 healing potions apiece each day, which is the equivalent of at least one spell slot each on top of my warlock slots. And we took more short rests than is expected (like a LOT more), AND we often went multiple days without combat so we could always have all of our HD on hand, and we still barely made it through several adventuring days in that campaign.

So maybe instead of condescendingly telling me I have no idea what I'm talking about, maybe consider I might actually have a clue and my experience radically differs from yours.

I can say that an optimized Barbarian can be quite scary over a long combat, but 5e trends toward fast combats which actually punish the (pre-5.5e) Barb because they can't get Rages back by short rests. My character was using the "One D&D" playtest packet 7 rules, otherwise everyone was standard 5.0 because 5.5e was more than six months away when I joined...and I can 100% say that without that extra spell slot from the updated rules, I'm pretty sure at least one character would have died.

Just using flaming sphere (still kinda sad they took that out of Celestial, I thought it was very thematic and much better than getting two support spells for 2nd level), though, I could quite easily do respectable damage, and between blade and blast, I was dangerous at any range. Our Barbarian probably did out damage me...because I was trying to be mostly support with just a reliable backstop of damage, rather than to outdo them.

Sadly I never really got to make the most use out of my best damage spell. Sickening radiance. We just never found chances to lock people inside its area so we would avoid it and they'd just straight up die of either the damage or the exhaustion.

You're not playing 5.5 was what I was referring to. You're making 3 5 assumptions.

5 5 the casters generally struggle to seal the deal. They suck at direct damage and lack the old save or dies generally.

They excel at support and control.Control spells generally have save ends every round.

You've also said in other posts you don't play as much. I've been doing weekly and up to 5 games a week for most of 5E (year off around 2018).

The most efficient meta as such is disable the foes and let martials mop up. Hit points are high mental saves are weak.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Not at all. Because if the party has a healer, 99% of the time that healer is also a spellcaster, because Mearls & co. danced on the Warlord's grave. Meaning the party has every reason to stop fighting once the spell slots run out and they're functionally out of resources to prevent catastrophic failure.

The warlord ran at the same resource schedule as the cleric. So I don´t see any reason to bring up the warlord into this discussion.

 

[ECMO3]

It's not a matter of "can't" per se. Just "didn't". All that is required to bias things in favor of spellcasters is an imbalance of long rest to short rest and of long rest to total number of combat rounds.

Fighters only get their damage from making attack rolls, Champions doubly so. It really isn't hard to exceed that--by a country mile!--if the party long rests too often and short rests infrequently, even if it wasn't "needed".

I've crunched numbers on this more than once, though admittedly not with the 5.5e tweaks in most cases.

A Champion Fighter was by far the highest damage 20th level PC I have seen played to date and it is not even close.

The problem with crunching the numbers is they don't account for magic items or other variables you see in play. You also can't account for weapon masteries or feats unless you bring a bunch of other variables and assumptions into it.

Because on those days, the people with spell slots just got the biggest possible windfall. They have an amount of resources designed to be spread out across a major swathe of challenges. Instead, they are able to ruthlessly exploit those resources over--what, two, maybe three encounters?

Yes, the rest of the PCs at the table got the biggest windfall and the Champion fighter still blew the doors off of us in terms of damage, and like I said it was not even close, even on 1-fight days.

You also are not considering saving throws which take away actions (stunned, incapacitated, paralyzed, banished ....). Casters fail these regularly and high level fighters never fail saves that matter, especially if you only fight one fight a day.

Under that situation, yes, spellcasters will almost guaranteed massively exceed the damage output of martial characters.

You say it is "almost guaranteed" yet I have seen it NOT happen a whole lot using the 2024 rules, in fact most of the time I would say it is the other way

Individual fights vary, but the only 2024 caster I have seen generally keep up with martials in the party to date is a Druid who has a wand of Fireballs and flys around as an owl with Conjure Woodland Beings up. He has done that from level 7 through 15 (current level) and he along with the Monk are the highest damage dealers in the party. I have not pulledout a calculator to see which one of them is highest, but they are comparable and well ahead of the Paladin, Ranger and Cleric in the party. The Ranger and arguably Monk have been the best controllers in play though (Monk depending on how you define control).

We are currently level 15 and the Druid has been one of the top two guys since level 7. I will add though that he is aided by the Monk who puts up darkness for the Druid-Owl to go into and avoid getting attacks after he does his dash-flyby thing. That would last a lot less time if not for that.

Even if they only use up (say) 2/3 of their slots.

A high-level caster can't use 2/3 of their slots in combat except in an extremely abnormal situation. A 20th level Wizard has 25 spell slots, casts one 1st and 2nd level spell at will and can get back another 10 levels worth through Arcane recovery.

At this level your average fight is 2-3 rounds so if they burn a slot every single turn it is going to take 7 fights to get through 2/3 of their slots

 

[ECMO3]

Not at all. Because if the party has a healer, 99% of the time that healer is also a spellcaster, because Mearls & co. danced on the Warlord's grave. Meaning the party has every reason to stop fighting once the spell slots run out and they're functionally out of resources to prevent catastrophic failure.

Having PCs who heal is useful, but playing a healer is not very effective in 2024 or even 5E for that matter. I consider this a roleplay choice.

You don't need a healer at all in 2024 and it is extremely rare for full casters, or even martials to be completely out of spells past 7th level or so.

It's not about ignoring the 24-hour cycle. It's about packing it in. Waiting for a new day rather than taking on new challenges when the biggest resources are already used up...most importantly the healing resources, which are the ones the martial characters need the most because they're in the line of fire for the nastiest attacks.

Usually rests, especially long rests are story/plot/situation driven. Sometimes they aren't, but "packing it in" often means giving up/losing the main plot.

If you are assaulting the bandit stronghold you really can't ask for a time out.

 

[ECMO3]

Your entire post seems to be various flavors of claiming that you are not convinced from your self granted position of authority over acceptable vrs badwrongfun play.. worse is that you do it while relying on a strongly implied "wotc did surveys and they know what's fun" in all of those bolded sections.

Yes my experience playing the game heavily influences my opinions on it and what I "think" will and will not improve the game.

Going beyond opinions though, I am the authority on what is fun for me and as far as people on this board go I think I am also the authority on what I have seen at tables I have played on and I articulated it as suchg in my posts.

My experiences in game are my experiences and underpin what I think would and would not be an improvement YMMV.