Why is it that people keep implying that since I don't fins wizards broken I must be playing with a hand tied behind my back that I am choosing not to take the best spells?
Because I've seen the extremely powergamed Wizards. I've seen how powerful they are. Anyone who has seen them in action agrees they are overpowered. I've found that those people who don't find them overpowered come from one of two camps:
1) I've never seen anyone try that before.
2) People have tried that before. But we're going for "realism" here, don't you think Wizards should be 10 times better than some guy with a sword?
People who come from group 1 rarely KNOW they are from group one. Their playstyle is such that it just REALLY never occurred to them to try some of the super broken things.
For instance, I was discussing this with a friend of mine recently that I mention in a post above who was animating the dead and making his party feel he was overpowered. He said "And I'm not even abusing my powers. I mean, I was thinking of keeping a bunch of monsters around who have recently died and keeping them in suspended animation so that I could use Death Knell on all of them to temporarily raise my caster level from 7 to 18. Then I'll be able to animate WAY better monsters."
I reminded him that there is a magic item that makes your caster level higher if you cast spells near it(it's a candle) and he could probably get his caster level even higher if he wanted.
But that kind of thing never occurs to me. I'm one of the people in the group who is always left behind when powergaming. I don't ever think of increasing my caster level to 18 from 7. That idea is just unthinkable to me. So I know where these groups come from. Left to my own devices, my table might never have noticed the broken power levels of Wizards/Clerics/Druids. But the internet exists, and as long as it does...my players will read message boards, find broken things and bring them into my game.
They've already started bringing broken things into our 4e games. They are far and few between, and luckily most of them rely on a fairly shady reading of the rules to accomplish. So, most of the time I'll say "So, if you interpret the rule one way, you do 20 damage and if you interpret it another way, you do 150? Yeah, I believe in my game we'll interpret it the first way."
And the interesting thing the people making these monster characters never use wizard at the base they use cleric, druids and classes from the splat books. They have muliclassing down to a science.
Now using the logic that I see so many wizards are broken people use this mean multiclassing is broken.
Here we get down to the real route of the problem. Multiclassing is the single most broken thing in 3.5e. Wizards(and often when I refer to Wizards, I also refer to ALL the casters) are my second biggest problem with the way 3.5e did things. Multiclassing is my first.
I once made a character, that due to careful multiclassing at 20th level was a Warmage with 3 or 4 different PrC. He had a BAB of +17, he had a 20 caster level and cast spells as if he was a 18th level Warmage. He had the ability to cast spells in full plate with 0% arcane spell failure. When he attacked, he used feats to drop his highest level spells for 9d4 damage added to his attacks.
When he finished casting all his spells, he had a better attack bonus and AC than anyone in the entire party. And our group had powergamed extensively.
It was the point where I finally realized HOW badly you could abuse multiclassing. Especially if you take the premise that a single class character should be the "default" power level for the game. I outshined any single class Warmage or Fighter.
I've said it before in other threads and I'll say it again. There is a spectrum between balanced and absolute character building freedom. The closer to get to balanced, the less freedom you'll have. I'm ok with this. There's still a line I don't want to cross where everyone is identical. But people being very close to the same is fine with me.
In the hands of a min maxer anything can be broken.
Not anything. If there was a system that had no classes, no races, no feats, no spells, and everyone got the same bonus to attack rolls and all weapons did the same damage...there's nothing for a min-maxer to break.
Now, I'm not suggesting that this is a good idea. But you need to start there and work forwards until you get a system that is varied enough to be interesting but not varied enough to be able to be broken TOO BADLY.
I don't mind a system where choosing Rogue means doing 10 damage but having less hitpoints, whereas being a fighter means doing 5 damage and having more. I DO mind when the difference between the most powerful class and the least powerful class is 10 or 100 times.
The problem I find with attempting to balance a 3.5e-like system is that you are starting with a 100 times difference in power and attempting to balance backwards...VERY slowly.
