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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Amphytrion" data-source="post: 9408329" data-attributes="member: 7046181">I would like to add the perspective of someone who almost never plays a Wizard (I almost never play anything, I'm a DM 99.9% of the time). I run games quite often: I have a couple of weekly home games, and I run additional ones in the game store and for other friends fairly frequently.I am quite frustrated in the Wizard class design overall, and I think my players will be as well.The Wizard is a popular class: people like the fantasy of the wise old man with great power accumulated through the years. People love Gandalf and Merlin. I have rarely DMed a game in which there were no wizards. Most of the time, the wizard's subclass is either evocation, necromancy, or bladesinger, and I think that is because those are the most evocative subclasses theme-wise, regardless of their power differences. There is lots of talk online about how a Wizard, if played as a control caster, outpaces everyone else. I think this got started with a Treatmonk video about God-Wizard, and I've never actually watched it, so it might be true. That being said, I've never played with such a Wizard. It is not a popular choice in my experience, and it requires a certain player mastery and knowledge of spells that most players lack and aren't quite all that interested in achieving. I do not blame them for this -- memorizing scores of spells and their interplay is only fun for some of us.Many (most?) players come to the game, have fun, and go home, and that's perfectly legitimate. No one should be barred from playing Wizard effectively because he, the player, is not intimately familiar with the overlaps and combinations of a long spell list, or doesn't want to rely on making combos of trap-spells -- I don't require the Rogue player this amount of knowledge to do anything similar, and it's often just not part of the fantasy.If a player chose an Evocation Wizard as their subclass, that player expects to be very good at blasting, and I also think that's legitimate. I see no reason the Sorcerer should be better overall in combat than an Evocation Wizard, and I think the current power disparity between those casters will be frustrating at the table (if I ever switch). Rituals are nice, but they are also not often part of a class fantasy, and players use them well but fairly sparingly.Overall, I imagine it might be true that if someone played a Wizard as Treantmonk plays one, he could outshine his companions, even though I've never experienced this in the flesh. The issue is that, by buffing everyone else and not buffing the Wizard, the game has somewhat restricted the Wizard playstyle to what a Treantmonk would do, and that's at the expense of many other Wizard playstyles at the table.This approximates D&D to PF2e's design philosophy, in which there is a very clear but strict right way to play a class, and that's frankly the thing that I thought was most exhausting about that game, even beyond its rules being printed in small 8-sized font. When a class fantasy and its mechanics don't align, you get lots of frustration (as Wizard players always have been whenever I tried DMing PF2e, for good reason). I should not have to explain the meta of the game for a player to choose a class.</blockquote>

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