Okay, let me preface this with saying this ISNT an edition wars thread . I have simply run across people that dont understand how broken the 3.x era d20 games are. I want concise examples of casters and what they can do that simply makes melee / non casters irrelevant. Not just that they can cast crazy spells, but examples of what they can cast, and why it makes others irrelevant. I hear bits and pieces , but I would love a sort of list saying this is why the game is broken. Feel free to sort your answers into core books, then supplements , or whatever. Also it would be nice to list things that pathfinder did or didnt do to fix the game. Thanks !
This would be a lot easier if I had a full character sheet with me
My own 3.x "invincible" wizard build (which is by
no means optimized) had the following traits:
1) A small race. (I want +1 or +2 touch AC. Take Escape Artist cross-class, and assume you'll fail all grapple checks anyway.)
2) Core rules only. (One took an Eberron-only feat, something about switching spells, that he literally never used.)
3) Avoided the most egregiously broken spells. I found that (like my 2e psion) many non-broken spells ... were still overpowered.
Wizards have it rough at low levels. You don't have enough spells being the main drawback. At all levels, wizards have low hit points, AC and saving throws.
In 3.x, WotC gave wizards the tools to bypass these weaknesses to varying extents. Some of these tools were weak. Some ... not.
An example of a weak defense spell was Fire Shield. It does 1d6 + x fire damage if you get hit. I don't recall if it did back damage per hit, or just once per round. However, I do know that it sucked. We saw an NPC wizard use it, and a fighter just moved up to him, hit him, absorbed the damage and killed him.
Other weak spells include Mage Armor and Shield. (Yes, Shield!) Your AC is weak, and slapping spells to boost it will only boost your AC to "decent". It's a waste of actions. (The 4e "emergency stop a hit" power is pretty neat, by contrast. It helps that 4e wizards don't have entirely terrible AC scores.)
Slightly better was False Life. Wizards have low hit points, and boosting your hit point total doesn't do much,
but False Life lasts an hour per level, so your wizard can at least survive a round of being attacked by a dire tiger (literally happened to my PC); useful, as wizards tend to crumple when attacked by surprise.
Better and better defensive spells.
Displacement is a nice one. Who doesn't want a 50% miss chance? This bypasses a fighter's greatest advantage, a high attack bonus. Displacement is also balanced, because the fighter is not helpless against it. The fighter can simply accept that half of his attacks will miss, and he must expend twice as much effort. Certain creatures have sensory abilities that bypass this.
Mirror Image was my favorite. It has the same benefits as Displacement, only better, because it can stop (or waste) an enemy wizard's save-or-suffer spells, without running the risks of Spell Turning. Also, it's only 2nd-level. My wizard used this spell so often I thought the level should be raised. Every battle, I'd spend one round casting it, then feel invincible for the rest of the fight (barring bad luck, or creatures with Scent... the Scent rules are not well-written, BTW.) Fighters can still bypass the spell, as long as they're willing to accept it'll take longer to kill the mage. Which IMO is
perfectly fine, because wizards have such weak defenses they need spells like this.
Fly. Getting into extra-powerful territory here. This makes some sorts of hazards pointless. Some monsters can't make ranged attacks, and some monsters and some classes make very weak ranged attacks. Even if you're, say, a paladin who has a high BAB, so your ranged attack bonus isn't weak, you're putting out some weak damage. Note that some wizard spells have ranges of over 400 feet, with no attack penalties, so you can really do a number on giants who throw rocks with low attack bonuses with short range increments. It's situationally very powerful. It can also on occasion shaft a wizard; one who flies apart from his party can be ambushed by an invisible stalker while the rest are too busy dealing with their opponents. At higher levels, it's a cliche that the whole party can fly or is supposed to be able to fly, which makes certain encounters (tarrasque, anyone?) cakewalks.
Polymorph Self - I don't recall how much this was nerfed between 3.0 and 3.5. My own PC never used this spell. The duration was lengthy, it could give you fly, unspecified AC bonuses, unspecified Dexterity bonuses, even powerful melee attacks. Shapechange was even worse, since it could give abilities such as regeneration. Pathfinder's fix to this line of spells was desperately needed.
Greater Invisibility - BROKEN. In 4e, invisibility works like Hide in Plain Sight. You make a Stealth check, with no bonuses, and if your opponent fails their Perception check, they don't see you. They can make a Perception check every round as a minor action, and if someone sees the invisible creature, they can point them out to friends. If they succeed, they can see you until you make another Perception check. (Invisibility in 4e is basically "almost invisible", just like blind is basically "really murky vision".) A hidden wizard might not have the Stealth skill, but then again their opponent might not have the Perception skill. The hidden condition in 4e is very powerful, but also fragile. Any PC can be trained in Perception thanks to the Skill Training (and multiclass, I suppose) feats. Of course, even if you're spotted, you still have total concealment, which is an effective +5 to all defenses against ranged and melee attacks. The Invisibility spell is available at 6th-level and is very weak (standard action to sustain), but the greater version (I think it's 16th-level) can be sustained as a minor action. Yes, your wizard can have +5 to most defenses and can sometimes disappear too.
In 3.x, it works the same way only you get a bonus of +20. Wizards generally don't take Hide and Move Silently, but then a lot of opponents don't have Listen or Spot. Fighters, for instance, do not. At lower levels, opponents who are likely to have these skills (eg rangers, maybe druids and barbarians) cannot realistically make this check. There are ways to find an invisible opponent, however, they take lots of actions (you can "grope" two squares to try to find a wizard; needless to say, that's a melee range ability, and what wizard gets close up) or guesswork. There's so much dice-rolling involved that the player or DM just throws up their hands and tries to get the game going. Furthermore, any dice-rolling is almost pointless, since finding the invisible creature is next to impossible anyway.
So a wizard using Greater Invisibility can, every round, hurl an attack spell, them move (possibly with Fly) so they're not easily located. Opponents have to spend actions trying to find them, which is generally a pointless waste of time since they're all-but-guaranteed to fail their skill checks.
There's only two good ways of finding an invisible opponent - magic and magic. (Well, if you're the DM, you can just abuse special sensory abilities on opponents. PCs don't have that option.)
You can use an AoE spell like Web in order to try to stop your opponent. This still requires guesswork. (Fighter options like throwing a net or tossing flour cover a much smaller area.)
You can use a spell to see them. See Invisibility/True Seeing, or Invisibility Purge. I don't like the first option. The caster (and it must be a caster, or a fighter using an expensive item) only gets to see their opponent for themself, and they just spent a standard action. Invisibility Purge is much nicer, since it helps the whole party. Too bad the range is less than what a wizard can dish out. Far less.
So as soon as my PC wizard reached 7th-level, I could force the DM to react solely to my spells. The DM would have to constantly have NPCs with Potions of See Invisibility, and I'd counteract with Nondetection, etc. It creates an arms race that favors whoever uses invisibility, since the counters are expensive and not "normal". Of course, not wanting to break the game, I avoided using it. I just used Glitterdust to make opponents blind instead, ignoring SR
That's just a sample. I could go into other breakerage, I just need to look at the SRD wizard spell list and cherrypick the non-lame spells.
