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

[Tigris]

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).

That is one of my points. Its really easy to "fix" one problem, by introducing other ones. Thats why I prefer people to fix problems which did not create them in the first place because in gamedesign you see sooo often this "I can fix this problem (lets ignore others)" mentality.


Especially when people try to do something similar to 4e but not completly, and by not understanding 4es gamedesign introduce new problems.


Like people using ressource points instead of encounter problems which lead too just spamming the same ability all day. (Psionics in 4e already had this problem).


Or trying to solve the "alphastrike problem" by just only allowing people to use their "dailies" aftet you gained X ressources. Which makes people just use it now again as soon as they can its jusz they only can use it later. (So the "no choice" problem which is the actual one, not that the burst is in turn 1 stays the same). Only that you now dont have the nice added effect of encounter long unique effects most dailies had (which helps to make different combats feel different).


When you try to make a wizard after level 11 into a better warlock, then maybe the wizard has no problem anymore, but now the warlock does because he is now just a worse wizard.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

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

D&D is somewhat locked in design wise. Sacred cows etc.

Who's gonna buy it woukd br the issue.

Fortunately, re: the bolded, the crowd of people who play D&D, and the crowd of people who demand that D&D be what it has so-called "always" been (read: what it was in 3rd edition), grow ever more distant from one another as the years pass and repeated attempts to re-do 3e "right" peel off further segments of the 3e-fan crowd.

Some stuck with 3.x (hell, some stuck with 3.0!) Some stuck with PF1e. Some went to PF2e. Some will--almost surely--stick with various versions of 5.x, or the myriad of 5e-with-serial-numbers-filed-off games, whether original or spurred by the OGL-invalidation debacle.

By comparison, the people for whom 5e is the only game they've ever known--and thus they have no special attachment to anything predating 5e's design--are a growing bloc, and a lot of them recognize issues in the design. I think your confidence that D&D is so "locked in design wise" is, if not misplaced precisely, then at least reflecting design trends from over a decade ago--pushing two. By the time 6e rolls around, because you KNOW a 6e will eventually roll around, the vast majority of D&D players will be those who started with 5e and know the problems 5e deals with. They're going to want things which address that, not things which address "tradition" that started before they were even alive, by anywhere between three and thirty years.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

not to mention there's no real proper dedicated damage types for wind and earth (or nature), for a game that leans so often on the four elements themeing the fact that they have to cludge whatever damage types they have on hand whenever they do that feels like something they really ought to of considered.

I remember Arcana Evolved actually had elemental damage in the form of fire, air, water and earth, but it also had the regular acid, electricity, fire and sonic damage types. IIRC, there were also Resist Energy and Resist Element spells, and it all feels a bit tacked on and incohesive to me.
For my 4E based redux I am probably not going to retain that. There wasn't really many features that hinged on these elements.

I think Earth, Water, Fire and Air "elementalists" should really be considered more like 4 seperate classes than 4 subclasses in DnD 5 terms. You don't really want the Earth Elementalist lobbing Earthballs.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

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).

I haven't read the post itself, but someone mentioned that the Wizard aspect also is combined with changes to the martial classes at Level 11+, where they'd kinda want to loosen them from the grid and allow them to make attacks against multiple opponents across the battlefield during their turn with their higher level abilities. So he might have other solutions to closing the gap in the works.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I haven't read the post itself, but someone mentioned that the Wizard aspect also is combined with changes to the martial classes at Level 11+, where they'd kinda want to loosen them from the grid and allow them to make attacks against multiple opponents across the battlefield during their turn with their higher level abilities. So he might have other solutions to closing the gap in the works.

All I will say, then, is that I have a very high degree of skepticism that such fixes would actually make a difference, when the stated goal is to leave a Wizard's power functionally unchanged.

Fighters are already pretty good at fighting. They aren't the absolute megabeast BEST ATTACKERS EVAR that we were promised*†‡, but they can do some good damage. Getting to do good damage...from a few paces away? Not exactly going to address the gap between "I can attack four times with the Attack action" and "I can rewrite reality once per day."

*Not literally promised§
†"best" is technically true, From A Certain Point Of View
‡every class needs to be balanced§, but some need to be more balanced§ than others
§This is an Official Term Of Art From The Wizards Of The Coast. Definitions will vary.

 

[Horwath]

since when is having too many prepared spells a problem?

When I play caster I have too few preparation slots. Always need 10 or so more....

Spell slots are another thing, they are power check. But spell preparation? why is 30+ too much at higher levels?

if you cannot follow that many spells, focus on 10 or so spells and have rest written somewhere for just in case.

 

[Tigris]

Creating the equivalent of prestige classes seems like a great idea to me, especially because it allows you to explicitly break from what people expect of the core PHB classes and do whatever is right/fun for those higher levels.

You mean like paragon classes in 4e? Which you got at level 11 and which could depend on your class, but also could have different requirements (like just race or even broader like spellcasting etc.)

Or if it needs to be more epic then like epic destinies from 4E? Where you get one way to be immortal. Allowing you to do high level things like being resurect once per day. Or be permanently in stealth even without any cover.

 

[tetrasodium]

since when is having too many prepared spells a problem?

When I play caster I have too few preparation slots. Always need 10 or so more....

Spell slots are another thing, they are power check. But spell preparation? why is 30+ too much at higher levels?

if you cannot follow that many spells, focus on 10 or so spells and have rest written somewhere for just in case.

My experience is similar. The only time I ever see it in players is when someone who hasn't played a spellcaster much decides s tier4/tier5 spellcaster is a good time to change that with a PC where they don't even grasp the team function of. Ecmo made a great post about black diamond ski trails earlier that I fully agree with, the plight of a high level newbie in a one off is not a concern deserving much focus simply because it's not the norm for campaigns.

I haven't read the post itself, but someone mentioned that the Wizard aspect also is combined with changes to the martial classes at Level 11+, where they'd kinda want to loosen them from the grid and allow them to make attacks against multiple opponents across the battlefield during their turn with their higher level abilities. So he might have other solutions to closing the gap in the works.

Yea it's not 11+ for the base 5e classes, the patreon thing fully rebuilds the classes with a level1-10 base and then shifts to a new progression 11+. I'm not going to go back and double check, but think that the fighter 11+ we saw was mostly new stuff I didn't do much in the way of retroactive rebuilding of the earlier 10 levels.

With that said, the arcane classes have seen some pretty significant changes right down to how they prepare and recover spells between fights and rounds in some cases.. in skeptical about some of the problems like the 7±3 complexity one actually being problems outside of high level newbies sitting down to a PC starting at high levels and think that he's letting bigger redesign needs fall on the back burner with so much focus on the high level newbie problems but I don't have any reason to doubt his earlier comment a couple pages back about the final version being likely very different than this spitball

 

[EzekielRaiden]

since when is having too many prepared spells a problem?

When I play caster I have too few preparation slots. Always need 10 or so more....

Spell slots are another thing, they are power check. But spell preparation? why is 30+ too much at higher levels?

if you cannot follow that many spells, focus on 10 or so spells and have rest written somewhere for just in case.

The most likely reply you would get from Mr. Mearls (or anyone who more or less agrees with his preferences here) is that that means you're part of the 20% who are already happy with the situation at hand, and he's interested in expanding that percentage to, say, 30% or 40%--even if that means actually dropping a few percentage points' worth of people who prefer it the way it is.

Any time you tinker with an existing thing--class, race/species, subclass, feat, spell, anything--you are always making these kinds of evaluations. Whether it is better to make 20% really REALLY REALLY happy, or 25% merely really REALLY happy, or 40% merely really happy, or 60% merely mostly happy, etc.

 

[kigmatzomat]

A simpler solution would be to just end the game at level 10. Especially when almost no campaign reaches above level 10 anyway.

As apparently the only person on earth who has had a campaign go 1st to 20 (or higher) in 2e*, 3e, and 5e, I pity the rest of you who do not know the glory of high level play.

*One 2e campaign started at 20ish and went to upper demigod using the original WotC ttrpg product "The Primal Order".