Majoru Oakheart
Adventurer
He cast it before hand, of course. But he can only cast it twice, so he decided to put it on the 2 most important party members. I know, since my 14th level cleric did this as standard procedure before going into each battle that we suspected would use that type of spell. They were on their way to destroy it, so it was a precaution.
I apologize, I missed a step and estimated instead of calcluating the numbers. This happened in a game we played(not all of it in the same combat, but the pieces happened separately and were put together to prove a point). The exact sequence was: Quickened True Strike, Sudden Maximized Disintegrate. It did "only" 168 damage. Still killed the enemy in one hit though.
As for the Fighter, there's a number of things causing the imbalance. He had +22 to hit with his primary attack. Most enemies were floating around AC 30. That means that he hit with with his second attack less than 50% of of the time and his third attack his around 15% of the time. On an average round he'd hit 0-1 times. Especially against harder enemies. The second and third attacks were often just a waste of the time it took to roll them.
When he did hit, he was doing 1d8+12 damage. Or 16.4 damage on average. If he hit with all his attacks miraculously, he'd need 3.4 rounds of attacking before he could equal the ONE spell cast by the Wizard(or 2, given that be made sure he hit with the True Strike). Including chance to hit, he'd need closer to 10 rounds to equal that damage.
During the day in question, there were 3 battles. Each one of them lasted between 1 and 2 rounds. So, that's no more than 6 rounds of combat in the day. The Wizard used lesser tricks in the rest of the combats. But most of them were way more powerful than whatever the fighter did as well.
Because his players were complaining that the game was too easy. Everything dies on round one or two. Nothing seemed like an epic fight. They laughed at how this one really powerful Wizard who apparently had lived for hundreds of years and was 3 levels above them died before he even got to cast a spell.
Also, because portions of that were no fun for the DM. The DM wanted the PCs to every once in a while be scared of the enemies. He wanted combat to be something other than watching the PCs laugh at how easy his game was. To show a bit of healthy concerned for their own lives.
But they never did. Because they rightfully believed that they were nearly indestructible. The cleric could cast heal 4 times a day and that was enough to restore someone from empty to full. Plus he had enough other spells to restore another 4 or 5 more people from empty to full. If the worst happened, he could Raise Dead and always kept the money to do so. In between combat he had enough wands to restore the entire party from empty to full 5 or 6 times.
The Wizard had enough offensive ability to kill most enemies on round 1 or 2 for 3-4 combats a day. And if it took longer than that, he had the ability to teleport out and possibly fail their mission, but keep all of them alive.
The DM was just sick of combat being exactly the same each time: Roll initiative, either PCs go first and the enemies die or the enemies go first and do negligible damage to one of them and then die on the PCs turn.
