D&D 5E a wizards week in the playtest?

[GMforPowergamers]

in another thread this came up:

Spells no longer scale with level, the wizard class basically sucks at higher level from most accounts and testing and the new spells are basically refluffed 4E daily powers.

Its not like damage dealing spells were actually broken in 3.5 and most of the classics like lightning bolt, fireball etc were more or less unchanged with d6 damage/level. It is basically spitting in the face of anyone who liked D&D before 2008 and also invalidates a lot of previous D&D material which was one reason 4E was rejected. 3.5 era shapechange magic and spell DCs were borked, direct damage not so much. Maybe with enough splat books and metamagic but that is more a problem of metamagic than ye olde magic missile, fireball etc.

I have not seen anyone complaining wizards were not doing well at high level before... has anyone yet run into this?

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

The complaint is weirdly written. Among other things, it references 4e even though that's not relevant to the complaint, and mentions things like 3.x shapechanging which isn't relevant to the core of the complaint.

The complainer is saying direct damage has been nerfed (eg not scaling) but the signal to noise ratio in the quote is very high.

As an example, Fireball (in October 2013) did 6d6 fire damage and does more damage if you devote a higher slot to it (kind of like 3.5 psionics damage scaling).

 

[Wulfgar76]

in another thread this came up:
I have not seen anyone complaining wizards were not doing well at high level before... has anyone yet run into this?

Not me. I think this person is likely looking at the 'non-scaling' Wizard in D&DNext without actually playing it. They see spells like fireball that doesn't automatically get better with level, and assume 'high level wizards suck'.

The wizard in our group is not high level (9th), but usually always has a potent spell ready to drop round 1. His spell most of the time is an "encounter-buster" that puts a tough fight into easy mode. For an easy fight, the spell ends the encounter. Right now monster HPs and save bonuses are quite low, so that might be inflating the Wizard's effectiveness.

Rarely does our 9th level wizard run out of effective spells to use, and I would say he probably has more influence on the encounter's outcome than any other single party member. 'Nova' potential is certainly there if he wants to pull the trigger.

Right now the wizard, like all classes, grows in power linearly, which is quite refreshing IMO.

 

[Gadget]

I would need the histrionics to rationality ratio of the complaint to be be improved before I could make sense of it. Fact: auto scaling of spells has been largely removed - this is supposedly a step to reduce the Linear Fighter Quadratic Wizard problem. Evidently the complainer quoted in the original post feels this gimps the wizard class too much at high levels, but does little to make an argument that this is so and degrades into raving about 4e. Evidently, scientists have discovered that 4e is responsible for all the world's ills since 2008 (possibly before, quantum mechanics are involved), film at eleven.

 

[Mistwell]

The person quoted also said that what he is describing is how 5e isn't Vancian magic (or "neo Vancian"). There is a change to the Vancian nature of the system, but none of the complaints he makes have anything to do with those changes and are purely about scaling damage (which has nothing to do with Vancian anything). Which is weird because as others have pointed out, damage does scale (you just need higher slots to cast it in) and spells at higher levels do more damage (like normal). And, that poster has admitted he's never played 5e, just read some of the playtest docs.

 

[Sage Genesis]

The complainer makes a classic error when evaluating 3e: ignoring context.

Yes, it is true that in 3e spells like Fireball and Lightning Bolt do 1d6/level just as they did in 2e. However, monster hp in 2e were far lower than they were in 3e due to the changes in how hit dice and Constitution worked. As a quick example, a Great Wyrm Red Dragon in 2e has ~100 hit points. In 3e the same creature has ~660 hit points. A more common creature like an ogre also increased in hp by nearly 50% (they were first ~20 hp and then had ~30 hp).

To claim that Fireball was "more or less unchanged" in 3e is misguided because there is no objective standard of what 1d6 damage means. In some games that could be instant death, in other games that could be unworthy of even bothering to write down. Fireball was (unintentionally?) nerfed in 3e, which lead to the proliferation of save-or-lose solutions that people started to exploit. Direct damage was just not as valuable anymore.

So how does Next fit into all this?

Well, the ogre we've seen has ~30 hit points again but the dragon has less than 200. Even Asmodeus, arguably a bona fide god, has 250 hp. Fireball and Lightning Bolt start with 6d6 damage and can end up doing 12d6. Meteor Swarm ends up doing the exact same damage for the same level spell slot, probably not by coincidence.

I'd say that Next isn't doing so badly in this area. The damage amounts are within reason. The lower amount of spell slots for casters is compensated for by scaling at-wills and a greater flexibility in terms of how spell prep works. Wizards are fine. And I say this as someone who dislikes Next, in case anyone wonders about my biases.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I wonder how many people would use the phrase "spitting in the face" if they'd ever had it happen to them. (I have -- it's a lot more dramatic than even the most dramatic of drama queens likely intend.)

 

[Ichneumon]

"I am the one who sucks ... all the difficulty out of your encounters" - Walter 'The Wizard' White.