Class Imbalance?

[Crothian]

I'm currently playing a sorcerer and having a lot of fun with it. I get to choose spells that help define the character. I don't always get what's the best, I look for spells my character would develope. And I get a familiar. It's always fun role playing an intelligent animal.

 

[the Jester]

ime, sorcerers are balanced and just a teeny tiny bit towards overpowered.

 

[Epametheus]

Sorcerers are basically fine balance-wise; they're just boring. Their lack of skills can make meeting the pre-req for a prestige class fairly annoying, but there's no reason to actually stick with the class if you can get your spells through a prestige class.

I'm guessing that they don't get the social skills for one reason: so that they won't displace bards.

 

[Otterscrubber]

I play a sorcerer who just hit lvl 19 and I think they are great. They could use some tweaking though. I never understood why they made CHA their main stat and then did not give them access to hardly any of the CHA based skills. Big mistake. This also severly limits their access to any neat PrCs that require skills that a) are cross class and b) they dont have the extra skill points to join with anyway cuz the get the minimum allowed. With a class as limited in spell selection you'd think they could've tossed them a skill bone here to give them some interesting non-arcane abilities. Especially since they seem to tout sorcerers as having no book smarts. I really dont like that, everyone makes them out to be these powerful casters who have no clue about the energies they wield. Sure they dont read books all day, but you'd think they would come to some type of understanding about magic through whatever training process they used to control their magic in the first place.

As such I would recommend some changes:

1) Increase skillpoints to 4 + Int/level
2) access to more CHA skills or maybe some knowledge skills to make them viable for taking a PrC.
3) Give them an ability to swap their spells not based on level but based on the spell research rules. Instead of creating a new spell and adding it to their repetoire they would replace a spell already known. Still a zero sum game for the sorcerer but allows them to have some kind of flexibility. Takes them weeks to do something that a wizard can do in a few hours so the wizard still has the ace of flexibility up their sleeves but tosses a bone to sorcerers.

Maybe I wouldnt' give all of the above, but they are some ideas for helping make the sorcerer a little more flexible and hence more interesting/enjoyable.

 

[sdt]

Shouldn't Sorcerers get more skill points or feats? After all, they get their spells naturally and don't have to study old books for spells. At least give them Eschew Materials for free. I guess they spend all their time in the bars picking up women (or men).

 

[GoodKingJayIII]

Honestly, I'm not sensing a huge power discrepancy in the class... it just lacks anything exciting or any really "umph." It doesn't really feel like a spontaneous caster at all, even though its mechanics suggest that. What about perhaps a tweak in HD to a d6 (perhaps skill points as well), and a few flavorful abilities like "Detect Magic at will at 4th level." It doesn't have to be a whole helluva lot more powerful, but I would like to see it made more interesting.

AFAIK, this is DnD's first attempt at a spontaneous class that's also a core class. In 3.0 it was seriously lacking. 3.5 got slightly better. Hopefully they'll continue to work on it and improve it. It seems like a work in progress; hopefully wizards is reading the polls and threads over at their boards and looking at ways to improve the class, based on popular consensus and suggestions.

 

[Shard O'Glase]

There underpowered for spellcasting classes, but not underpowered. Spellcasting is a bit overpowered at uppermid to high levels.(basically about level 9 ish on) Of course in the case of the wizard and sorcerer its disurbingly underpowered at the start and slowly creeps up to balanced before it goes into overpowered mode. Clerics and druids are never weak they jsut eventually get overpowered.

Lots of it is campaign dependent the one encoutner a day folks have the wiz/sor types start off mildy underpowerd and quickly get balanced to overpowered.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

My main problem with the Sorceror is that it lack flavor. Its power level is reasonably balanced against the Wizard.

 

[Otterscrubber]

I play a sorcerer who just hit lvl 19 and I think they are great. They could use some tweaking though. I never understood why they made CHA their main stat and then did not give them access to hardly any of the CHA based skills. Big mistake. This also severly limits their access to any neat PrCs that require skills that a) are cross class and b) they dont have the extra skill points to join with anyway cuz the get the minimum allowed. With a class as limited in spell selection you'd think they could've tossed them a skill bone here to give them some interesting non-arcane abilities. Especially since they seem to tout sorcerers as having no book smarts. I really dont like that, everyone makes them out to be these powerful casters who have no clue about the energies they wield. Sure they dont read books all day, but you'd think they would come to some type of understanding about magic through whatever training process they used to control their magic in the first place.

As such I would recommend some changes:

1) Increase skillpoints to 4 + Int/level
2) access to more CHA skills or maybe some knowledge skills to make them viable for taking a PrC.
3) Give them an ability to swap their spells not based on level but based on the spell research rules. Instead of creating a new spell and adding it to their repetoire they would replace a spell already known. Still a zero sum game for the sorcerer but allows them to have some kind of flexibility. Takes them weeks to do something that a wizard can do in a few hours so the wizard still has the ace of flexibility up their sleeves but tosses a bone to sorcerers.

Maybe I wouldnt' give all of the above, but they are some ideas for helping make the sorcerer a little more flexible and hence more interesting/enjoyable.

 

[Ithilorien]

I'd rate the sorcerer as mildly underpowered.

In my campaign they get all social skills, four skill points a level, and the Eschew Materials and Spell Thematics feats for free (EM at 1st, ST at 5th).