D&D 5E Are Wizards really all that?

[FrogReaver]

The wizard’s killer app in surviving traps is purchasing a lot of incense before the dungeon and having their familiar trigger the trap instead. They can do this without spending slots.

All this focus on higher level slots have made me forget to call out the most basic techniques.

 

[Cadence]

So is a dog that you've trained to play fetch.

P.S. for the PETA folks I kid. Probably.

Is there a cantrip that makes a red dot of movable light? No reason to leave cats out!

 

[Oofta]

Is there a cantrips that makes a red dot of movable light? No reason to leave cats out!

Ooh! Cats have 9 lives, saves trips to the pet store!

 

[FrozenNorth]

With expertise, a high dex and reliable talent, the rogue is going to be far, far better at stealth.

How often is that level of Stealth going to be necessary? Our Rogue went all in on Stealth. At level 11, she had the +13. Of course, most of the enemies had passive Perception between 12 and 14.

The wizard’s +7 with advantage is going to succeed just fine.

 

[Mort]

All this focus on higher level slots have made me forget to call out the most basic techniques.

Yes, find familiar is an AMAZING exploration tier utility and is available to the wizard from the beginning and very little resource cost.

All this talk of wizards needing to be high level to pull off exploration/social ignores that they get VERY good utility early and that much of that utility is low resource cost.

 

[Maxperson]

I see. I would think that the combination of shield, absorb elements, counterspell, dispel magic, polymorph would make the wizard just as survivable is not moreso vs traps.

Shield isn't that useful unless you have mage armor on and have a dex bonus. Mage armor is 8 hours, so you're casting it 3x day to keep it on constantly. Since I have been forced by bad design to go to one long rest per 6-8 encounters which is usually 3-14 days in game time, the wizard doesn't have enough slots to maintain mage armor 24/7, let alone keep it up and use shield more than once in a while.

So let's assume a 6-8 encounter day in a 24 hour period. To have mage armor up the entire time is 3 of the 4 1st level spells a wizard has, which still leaves only 1 casting of shield which will 99.9% of the time be used in combat, not on a trap. Asborb elements? Do you want to give rid of AC from mage armor or shield? Because you are out of 1st level spells already. Or you can upcast it and be using up higher level slots that could be used on invisibility or something else to cast absorb elements. Boy this wizard is chewing through his spells and he hasn't even attacked yet!

Counterspell and dispel magic are highly situational and useful in combat only. They don't do anything at all for a trap. Traps generate effects, but don't cast spells that can be countered and dispel magic only works on spells that are on objects(such as a light spell on a stone), not traps that generate effects. By RAW it's useless on a trap. Now I would personally let it work to suppress a magical trap, but house rules are house rules and don't really have a place in discussing RAW wizards.

Polymorph isn't going to do much. It might let you turn into something to fly out of a pit trap, if it doesn't cover back up. If you have it on in advance, the trap is going to be a concentration roll, which has a good chance of causing the loss of the spell. It's not like you can be a t-rex or anything that size and be walking down most dungeon hallways.

With retries the wizard will eventually get through up to a 22 DC as well. Retries benefit the Wizard more than the Rogue.

How do retries up to 22 benefit the wizard more than retries up to 30 benefit a rogue?

Late tier 2 I think he has enough slots. At level 5 he has 4,3,3,2,1 slots and the ability to recover up to 5 levels worth of slots, which might look something like 9,3,3,2,1 or 5,5,3,2,1. Use the higher level slots mostly for combat encounters, use the lower level slots more for out of combat and defense. There's plenty of slots to go around.

A few things. First, the first number is cantrips which will be mostly useless and don't actually go down. Actually, thinking about it I think you typoed the first number and are thinking level 9, which makes sense for the 5 levels of recovery Okay, going with level 9 the wizard is still using up 3 1st level spells just to keep mage armor up so that he has a halfway decent AC. He's still going to get hit a LOT, though, so he will need those other 6 1st level spells for shield and absorb elements in combat.

That leaves 0, 3, 3, 2, 1 to cover combat attacks for 6-8 encounters, which means that if he wants to even try to match the rogue, he's throwing primarily cantrips all day long with maybe 1 or 2 attack spells of higher level. So the rogue can sneak and hide all 24 hours that day. The wizard on the other hand has 3 invisibility spells to cover 3 hours. Less if he gets into combat and gets hit, and he loses out on mirror image by doing so, which is very helpful in keep squishy wizards alive in battle. And knock? It opens one door at the risk of a TPK and uses up a precious invisibility or mirror image slot.

Now we are at 0, 0, 3, 2, 1 and other than some invisibilities to be 1/8 as good as the rogue(3 hours vs. 24), the wizard hasn't done much to match the rogue. Third level gets chewed through using counterspell on enemies usually and maybe a fireball, which means that there aren't a lot of, or even any spells left for things like fly to get up to the places the rogue is climbing to or gaseous form to get past a door.

Now we are at 0, 0, 0, 2, 1 and the wizard has MAYBE cast one spell higher than a cantrip in the 6-8 encounters, and failed miserably so far to match the rogue. He's been sneaky for 1/8 of the time available to the rogue OR for 1/12 of the time and knocked open 1 door. And let's be honest with ourselves here, the last 3 slots are going to be used on offensive combat spells, because the wizard wants to do something other than just spam firebolt.

IMO the defensive tools of a wizard are stronger than the defensive tools of a rogue. The spell capabilities of a tier 3/4 wizard + the wizard's skills will often outperform the rogue at the rogues traditional roles. We can go into a list there but I suspect you know most of them.

 

[FrozenNorth]

I've never had to tell the wizard that or have it be an issue. The wizard can't prep the spells to be a sage AND the spells to be the investigator AND the spells to be the face AND the spells to be a bad face AND spells to be good at utility AND spells to be good in combat all at once and expect to be able to do well at any of them.

Once again, it seems like your criterion for “wizard is overpowered” is literally “do their job and replace three other party members at the same time”.

This is not a reasonable metric to determine if a class is overpowered.

 

[FrozenNorth]

Yes, find familiar is an AMAZING exploration tier utility and is available to the wizard from the beginning and very little resource cost.

All this talk of wizards needing to be high level to pull off exploration/social ignores that they get VERY good utility early and that much of that utility is low resource cost.

Yup, don’t forget the owl familiar with flyby is auto-advantage once per turn and difficult for melee opponents to retaliate against.

 

[Maxperson]

Since you have Candlekeep, check it out. From memory, I don’t think there is a single adventure that has 6-8 combat encounters. Same thing for Citadel.

So, WotC does not act like wizards are balanced around a 6-8 combat encounter day.

I'll take a peek at Candle Keep, but I don't think adventures are really the place to look at for matching the rules. Magic items are optional, but not only do the adventures have them, but they have more of them than you would find if you went by the rules. It's as if they don't bother with the rules when making adventures, which is another reason I don't like using the campaign versions. Also, WotC making unbalanced adventures in favor of the PCs doesn't mean that we should.

 

[Mort]

Yup, don’t forget the owl familiar with flyby is auto-advantage once per turn and difficult for melee opponents to retaliate against.

AND provides a nice extra target/HP sink when the baddie gets sick of it.

Basically a much lower resource cost mirror image, guaranteed to work at least once.