D&D 5E (2024) Mearls has some Interesting Ideals about how to fix high level wizards.

[SteveC]

If its another F&D game who cares. Its just another fantasy heartbreak.

I have really liked the design work Mike has done in the past. I am looking at my copy of Iron Heroes at the moment. But I think you're right. I just don't know if a former designer of the real rules can make a Heartbreaker.

I'll take a look at whatever Mike puts out because I think he always does interesting work.

 

[tetrasodium]

I'll preface this by saying most of my campaigns run up into low to mid teens and I just don't see the kind of 7±3 overload problems Mearls seems concerned about. The only time I ever see it is edge cases like a high level one shot where the group all needs to learn how to function as a group at the same time they are learning their PCs& usually even then it's only when someone decides to play a high level Spellcaster without past experience getting there with other characters

One of the core problems with high level wizards is that your bottom half of slot arent damage viable so you end up with a ton of slots for defense, debuffs, and dumb crap.

Completely agree, he seems to bring up damage comparisons alone a bit too often for a class like wizard where the spells in his last phb packet were a bit lacking when it came to the low level nondamage ones that make up so much of the wizard.

Looking at damage comparisons is not bad, but sometimes there needs to be questions about if that bold bit is functional enough or if it should be powered up at a cost like taking a damage hit so wizard no longer has comparable damage but gains elsewhere in ways that make it unimportant so that it can make that level 11 shift.

5 easily recharged slots doesn't fix that. 1 minutes is too short.

It's worth noting that he's not using stock 5e for this. The spells are different (but lacking). The class is totally redesigned. A good number of rules are also a little different.

A while back he posted that his groups are mainly martials and I think that to some degree he's trying to solve problems that exists when someone unfamiliar with what a class offers drops into trying to play a high level version of it for a one shot or starting level. I just don't see the sort of confusion or long hemming and hawwing he talks about from the players who advance through the levels to high level Spellcasters. Shifting from getting something like base 5e cantrip count+slots and spells 1-10 then needing to choose between not having cantrips or having to prepare one in the place of a leveled spell just feels bizarre. Move cantrips out of the class over to treating the focus as a weapon and they immediately became no more "overwhelming" than if a fighter should want to carry great sword and great axe and longbow and mace etc when doing that could lead to the kind of "which should I use" option overload he's talking about.


With that said though, I think that having a shift like this at level 11 is a good thing. I just don't think that this shift is the right one because it's trying to solve too many problems after too many levels and some of the things being solved were obscuring gaps that suddenly become a big problem with this shift.

Addressing the actual content of the post...

This feels like a half step toward the actual solution.

Essentially, he's 1) turning low level spells into cantrips, and 2) limiting the prepared spells to a reasonable number.

I'm down with that!

What feels off to me is that he introduces this at level 11, in one fell swoop.

How about making this a more gradual transition? For example, maybe at 7th level, 1st level spells become "cantrips" for you. Then at 10th, it's 2nd level spells. Then at 13th it's 3rd level spells. Etc.

Meanwhile, the number of prepared spells at any level--throughout all of character progression--is capped and/or grows much more slowly than 5E.

One of my biggest problems with 5E magic is not that casters are more powerful than martials, but that all casters start to feel the same after a while. Constraining some choices might help casters feel more differentiated.

Totally agree. It's such a sudden and drastic shift that the whole group would need to suddenly relearn how to function as a team. Fixing some of the things he wants to fix is reasonable, but ignoring the growing problem until level 11 with a laser rust removal style overhaul all at once just seems cross purposes

 

[Tigris]

I have really liked the design work Mike has done in the past.

Which work specifically? I am honest here because the things I can remember from him where all things which dint really work.

Keep on the shadowfell was so bad it was pulled from sale less than 1 year after release and then an updated version was handet out for free online.


The original assassin class is treasted as non functional with original rules by most 4e players. And as one of the worst designed classes.

Heroes of the fallen lands the first essential book made 4e fans stop buying 4e products and did confuse people because it was not clear what essentials even is, still today.

The book heroes of shadows is widely considered the worst 4e book. With binder as a almost non functional class.


Then original 5e released with an almost non functional ranger which needed several years to fix and with really not well working encounter building math. And overall reintroducing soo many problems which 4e did solve before.

 

[Zardnaar]

Which work specifically? I am honest here because the things I can remember from him where all things which dint really work.

Keep on the shadowfell was so bad it was pulled from sale less than 1 year after release and then an updated version was handet out for free online.


The original assassin class is treasted as non functional with original rules by most 4e players. And as one of the worst designed classes.

Heroes of the fallen lands the first essential book made 4e fans stop buying 4e products and did confuse people because it was not clear what essentials even is, still today.

The book heroes of shadows is widely considered the worst 4e book. With binder as a almost non functional class.


Then original 5e released with an almost non functional ranger which needed several years to fix and with really not well working encounter building math. And overall reintroducing soo many problems which 4e did solve before.

Team effort though why blame Mearls specifically?

4E had 70 odd pages of errata and rewrote their own MM. Mearls didnt write that solo.

And no one wrote a good 4E adventure with 1 maybe 2 exceptions.

They wrote an edition even the designers struggled with. Mearls wasnt even the head honcho.

Tweet, Heinsoo, Slavicsek all got fired.

 

[AnotherGuy]

Interestingly an idea similar to this was being discussed on Enworld 2-3 weeks earlier.

Now I have not read through the thread but actively having a wizard being able to cast spells of level 5 or lower (swapping them out or not) doesn't lessen the 7-8 pages of one's character sheet because they would still have that list of spells in their spellbook.
So I really do not get the critique that character sheet is longer than most rulebooks for boardgames bit if you STILL want to include the possibility of casting those spells.

However, the idea is quite neat.
You simplify one's list of available spells in the moment.
It provides better focus, less long rest admin clutter and it accentuates a bookish wizard with having that necessary minute (or whatever time period you prefer) to swap out spells. I like it.

 

[Retros_x]

Outclassed at control and blasting.

Outclassed at control? what? wizards are THE control class. They should be outclassed at blasting, because damage dealing should be done by other classes, but control (and utility) is their bread and butter.

I would agree that spell levels are unnecessary complex. Have one resource without the levels, just spellpoints, mana, whatever. Higher spells cost more. Maybe give spells character level requirements.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Isn't that good? Realizing your mistakes and fixing them? I'm very confused by this post.

Well, there are three factors here.

One, Mearls spent a VERY long time blaming nearly all of D&D's problems on stuff 4e did. So to....reinvent the wheel, after 15+ years of being at the helm and treating 4e like rotten flaming garbage, isn't exactly a great look. You're correct that it is good to recognize your mistakes. It's just that that isn't what this appears to be, at least at a superficial glance.

Two, perhaps you are not familiar with some of the things that happened along the road to 5e's publication. One of those things was Mr. Dancey's article where he floated the idea "What about what I call 'passive perception'?" Except...there was a game that had invented that term, and used it extensively. That game was 4th edition D&D. So, a lot of 4e fans are kinda sensitive about designers going on about having "fixed" some problem or "found" some solution....when that solution is functionally just D&D 4e. And you'll note that Mearls does not, even once, mention 4e--even though he's essentially reinvented 4e powers right from the jump.

Three, it seems clear that Mearls' primary goal is to leave the Wizard's total power functionally untouched, which likely isn't going to sit well with 4e fans, since there's still quite a gap between an optimized Wizard and an optimized Fighter, even if we presume that his proposal worked perfectly as proposed. That opens up reasonable questions about whether he has in fact "realized his mistakes", or is just pivoting from focusing on one mistake to focusing on a different mistake (at least in some folks' eyes; obviously there are people who disagree).

 

[Tigris]

Team effort though why blame Mearls specifically?

4E had 70 odd pages of errata and rewrote their own MM. Mearls didnt write that solo.

And no one wrote a good 4E adventure with 1 maybe 2 exceptions.

They wrote an edition even the designers struggled with. Mearls wasnt even the head honcho.

Tweet, Heinsoo, Slavicsek all got fired.

Because mearls was responsible for all the worst books/releases of 4e. What I mentioned here are the books mearls was in charge of.


Errata is not bad per se. It just shows that people cared about updating things which dont work as well as expected. 5e did not update the non functional ranger gor several years thats worse. 5e could have used a lot of errata, correcting errors/overlooks is not as bad as leaving them be.


Also the "MM rewrote" was mostly a marketing tool. Monsters below level 11 wete not rrally changed and monsters above it not that much. (10-24% from level 11 to 30). This move was mostly made to correct the bad initial impression people had from 4e about "the combat dragging". And guess whrre this initial impression came from?


Correct the initial really bad adventure by mearls was what gave a bad impression of 4e to many people. And no other 4e adventure was so bad it got removed from sale. There is a difgerence between "ok the adventurers are not hood" and "naughty word thid is so bad we need to remove it from sale and release online a fixed version for free."



And about errata for his almost non functional assassin in 4e there was never an errata released after mearls took over.




Then his "online only" class which should promote the DDI subscription left a bad first impression about online only material.


His first essential book made a really bad first impression of essentials (of which he was the head honcho), which made essentials become a disaster.


4e was a team effort of course and it has many great books, but the worst books are pretty much all by the same lead designer.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Mike has been saying all around the internet and in threads here recently that their heuristic in designing and evaluating the survey responses were “bias towards making it more like 3.5.” Now that time has passed, both WOTC proper and him are able to look at 4e’s design space and seeing how its paradigm can remedy 5e’s gaps while still keeping to some of the core 5e ethos in terms of basic math and stuff.

Which is pretty frustrating, because that's literally a self-fulfilling prophecy.

"Our heuristic with all feedback was 'make it more like 3e'", and then claiming that "well things that we made like 3e did better, so we made things even more like 3e". That, right there, is openly admitting that they designed what they wanted to design and listened only to feedback that reinforced their choice.

Real treat, that.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

At a minimum, don't publish any subclasses where the mechanics can't support the flavor. Shadow magic is awesome, but it requires, yeah, having actual shadow magic available.

I fear this would mean very few subclasses...

Which, given the extreme paucity of option flexibility in 5e as it is, axing that many subclasses would probably kill the game. Not even I want that.

I don't say this because I disagree with your core point. More that this reveals one of the faults of 5e--which, as with a lot of things in 5e (and 3e!), took years of people playing the game to realize "oh, that's...not actually super great, is it?"