Arcanist playtest

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't fully understand where this "striker" damage thing is coming from. Wizards have never been crossing over into the striker territory. The Wizard plays it role to the "T", you don't need to change something for the sake of change and that is what was done.

It's pure and simple:

Before: Initial damage + more damage(monsters turn) then monster decides what to do.

After: Initial damage + no damage + monster can do anything it wants + avoids any effects due to simple movement.

Using the Flaming Sphere example. Let's say your Wizard drops the Flaming Sphere on a group of enemies. If you use the nerf the goblins take initial damage and most likely no damage at the end of their next turn because they move. Okay your Wizard uses a minor action to sustain it and a move action to move it towards the enemies that moved. Well their next turn comes around and they move again before the end of their turn and they take no damage. All you are doing is just causing them to use a move action that they would normally take anyway.

The old way. Same as above but each time their turn came up they would take damage.

Yes, you are correct, but you are committing a fundamental error. You are theorycrafting. The situation you describe is a BLANK SLATE battlefield where there is no terrain, no circumstances which might make the goblins desire to be HERE instead of THERE, etc. This is simply not a useful line of reasoning. All you'll end up with is the conclusion that all controllers are crap and everyone should just play a striker instead. Again, this is correct for your 'marble world' theorycrafting scenario. No wizard will be worth squat compared to a striker who can just lay in the damage that has to be done anyway. (actually even in marble world this isn't ENTIRELY true, and some powers will still work relatively well, but they aren't generally movable zones).

The point is that in the real world when the goblins are trying to crowd through the door that lets them flank the fighter in his covered position then dropping a flaming sphere in that area and chasing the goblins away ain't a bad idea and can be VASTLY more tactically advantageous than just trying to kill them outright.

Now, consider a situation where a bunch of artillery monsters are bombing the party from a position you cannot get to. The old Flaming Sphere really does nothing here. The DM is going to just leave the monsters in their relatively secure location knowing that moving them is pointless. With the NEW Flaming Sphere the DM has a meaningful choice, stand around in the inaccessible location and take damage or move and risk being engaged by the party melee characters. In this case the NEW FS may actually perform better. It won't be much worse in any case.

Notice that this also conforms with what Balesir is saying too, if you move damage to EOT and you WANT to keep the power at the same level then you'd be advised to increase the damage or add some other effect. In truth FS was rather awesome and a bit of a nerf probably won't hurt it. However the 2nd consideration still exists, the damage may simply not be enough to ever motivate the enemy to move at all, but there's no general way to determine that. FS is unlikely to exert much control at higher levels as 1d4+int damage may be trivial (even with some boosts), but then again it is a level 1 daily and isn't intended to be a go-to spell at higher levels. Chances are you'll swap it out at the first power swap and may even retrain it sooner than that.

 

[Riastlin]

I'm going to go ahead and call this the Voltron Theory. What that means is you have one individual per part in order to make Voltron work and I think this is the direction the game is going. I don't want this to happen. Sure I like teamwork but I don't each role to be locked into one exact specific thing.

No offense, but it really sounds like you should be playing 3.x or an even earlier edition of D&D. 4ed was designed as a "Voltron Theory" from the get go. That was always the intent. Its why players who had long played wizards bitched about the wizard class at 4ed's release. The wizard was no longer able to "solo" the encounters. They were no longer the gods that they used to be. Their powers were greatly reduced in power from previous editions.

The idea in 4ed is that each PC plays his or her own little part in making the entire unit much more effective. My runepriest for instance loves it when the Mage or the Warden moves a creature into a burst three zone with the rest of the monsters so that his level 1 daily is more effective. Conversely, when I played a bard, the fighter loved it when I pushed a monster into him and allowed the fighter a swing (and thus another mark). Those movement powers may not look as sexy as an extra die of damage, but overall they made the party much more effective -- which was the point. Each class has a primary role and at least one secondary role, and the damage on the wizard spells makes sense since their secondary role is striker. But they still should be more about control than about damage.

The old FS was a great DAMAGE power, but as is being pointed out, rarely introduced much control. SOMETIMES, it worked as control, but usually not. It was essentially ongoing damage (albeit quite a bit of it). The monster was going to continue to take the damage whether it moved or not. The only real exception was if there was one specific area that you did not want the monsters to be. Sure, there will be occasions like that, but not real often (at least not if your DM knows what she is doing).

So going back to your Voltron Theory, its true, that is how the game is designed. Its also how the game has been since the beginning of 4ed. Wizards were long thought to have the best dailies, but their encounters were often deemed a bit weak. Well guess what, their encounters got beefed up a bit with half damage on misses on most of them. Before, the great dailies with meh encounters was a balancing factor. Now that the encounters are better though, the dailies were due for an adjustment. I think its fair to argue whether or not FS does enough now to encourage a monster to move, but at least now it will ALWAYS be a consideration for the monster(s) since the damage is EOT. Before, it was RARELY a consideration on whether to move or not since the sphere would just follow them around. The thing is though, the wizard is supposed to rely on the rest of the party, just as the ranger needs the rest of the party, and the fighter needs the rest, etc. Parties that work as a team will do much better than those that go for individual glory.

Don't get me wrong, there's nothing inherently wrong with the earlier edition design style, it just didn't promote teamwork as much because most classes were able to hold up on their own -- at least past the first few levels anyway. I loved 2ed and 3.x, but I also love 4ed and its really great when you start to see PC abilities tying together amongst the different PCs. PC A does X because she knows PC B will then do Y, etc. To me, its far more interesting than everyone going "Let's see how much damage I can do this time!" However, this approach is not for everyone, which is perfectly fine.

BTW, for the record, I would have preferred it if the Wizard were a striker and the warlock or sorceror had been the controller (realizing of course the sorceror would have had to be put in PHB1 to be the controller if the warlock remained a striker). That was just my personal opinion though. Given that its not a striker though, its powers should definitely be much more about controlling the battlefield than about simply damaging the opponent.

 

[MrMyth]

Indeed, that's one of its selling points. It does a bit less damage than the Sphere in Heroic (I admit, this gulf gets higher in Paragon, but why are you still using level 1 Dailies in Paragon?) to enemies, but it does much less damage to allies (that is to say, 0 damage), which is where the balance is.

In other words, sure, Flaming Sphere does more damage... but to who?

Targetting enemies only is a big boon. I'm of the (personal, private, subjective) opinion that this places Fountain of Flame ahead of the (current, End of Turn) Flaming Sphere.

I'm not sure if they are really comparable, though. The ongoing zone of Fountain of Flame doesn't move and does almost no damage - it does establish some small battlefield control, but in a very different fashion than flaming sphere (whose mobility and significant damage makes it much more likely to influence enemy behavior - but whose damage to allies makes it influence the party behavior more as well.)

Fountain of Flame gives you a solid, enemy only, area attack. Flaming Sphere gives you a single target attack you can use throughout the combat, and a battlefield obstacle you can use to influence enemies.

One can certainly prefer one over another, but I don't see Fountain of Flame as any more directly comparable with Flaming Sphere than any of the other level 1 Wizard daily AoE spells.

 

[Balesir]

Now that Flaming Sphere is end-of-turn damage, but remains party unfriendly, it is (in my opinion, at least) the strictly inferior option. I know I'll personally be retraining FS for Fountain of Flame as soon as possible. Flaming Sphere is not, and never was, the perfect level 1 Daily. Sure, with good positionining, or versus a solo, it added up to encounter-long auto-damage, which is nice. But there were just so many ways around it... simplest involving stunnning or dazing the caster. Now, I think the fact that it's still ally-unfriendly damage will really hurt it. It'll be way too easy for monsters to use that to their advantage, shifting adjacent to a bunch of your allies and forcing you to choose between moving the FS next to your friends and endangering everybody, or just letting it go.

Anyway, I once considered Flaming Sphere and Fountain of Flame to be neck-and-neck, with different things going for each of them. Now, though, Fountain of Flame has pulled pretty firmly into the lead, at least in my opinion.

I roughly agree with your analysis, but disagree with your conclusion. The remedy, to me, is to boost FS's end of turn effect - maybe by adding some ongoing fire damage to the end-of-turn effect only.

This gives the enemy next to the sphere more incentive to move away - and punishes not doing so. You might say "a move action - so what", but if used in conjunction with a fighter that will mean getting targetted by a bonus attack - and risking an attack of its own if it has to actually move (i.e. go more than one square) to get away could mean taking the fighter's OA and the flaming sphere EOT damage. How this sort of thing can be seen as less controllery baffles me.

 

[BobTheNob]

Just to clarify since we cant seem to resolve this.

Just for arguments sake, lets call The Flaming sphere a flaming ball. Now lets say, for some reason, you are able to cast it twice...now you have flaming balls. Well that hurts no natter what, so you call out in pain "MY balls are on fire!"

So you try moving them around and someone comes into contact with your balls.

Now THATS battlefield control!

 

[The Human Target]

The solution to wands is to print good wands. wands are subpar for every class that uses them, except maybe bards. Maybe.

That is partially true, but the advantage of gaining a bonus once an encounter before you make the attack roll is still pretty lame in comparison to the others.

 

[keterys]

It's _after_ you make the attack roll. And it's extremely solid, likely turning a miss into a hit once every couple encounters (depends a bit on your Dex), or more often.

 

[FireLance]

I'm in favor of end of turn damage, but I do agree that the currently planned approach for flaming sphere seems rather lackluster. Perhaps a compromise? Retain the end of turn damage, but improve the initial and repeated attack as follows: attacks all creatures in a Close burst 1 (Intelligence vs. Reflex for 2d6 + Intelligence modifier fire damage) OR deals automatic 1d4 + Intelligence modifier fire damage to one creature adjacent to the sphere.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

That is partially true, but the advantage of gaining a bonus once an encounter before you make the attack roll is still pretty lame in comparison to the others.

I gotta agree, there's no reason why this one very common implement should have a sucky mastery. Just make it a free action and give it a trigger. You can still play around with better wands, but you won't need them so much.

 

[Aegeri]

Personally I am for the Flaming Sphere change having tried it for myself. Flaming Sphere is arguably the only spell in 4E I've seen in every single campaign since I started playing the game. It's so efficient that I don't recall ever not seeing it being used. With the damage at the end of the turn, it's no longer an automatic choice and actually DOES change the way I think about it. I would usually ignore flaming sphere half the time or kamikaze monsters into the Wizard. There was simply no reason to actually bother trying to avoid the damage, because it was not possible (other than spreading out, but again its the important targets you want dead). Now I actually consider moving monsters away from the sphere more regularly because it's actually worth doing.

Overall this is a change I rather like and I wish I had thought about doing this myself a lot earlier.