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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9892104" data-attributes="member: 6790260">The game is designed. All levels matter. Just because some are rarely reached doesn't make them irrelevant.This is half of why I say I don't care that these levels are rarely reached.The other half is: If the Wizard class is balanced around having to slog through a ton of intentionally boring crap before you gain PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWER....and then you openly admit that you'll never actually GET the phenomenal cosmic power...isn't that then an admission that the Wizard class is badly designed?It's a class you play to have no fun at all until you inevitably lose. That's...bad design.I don't understand. Why would official material be exclusively beneficial to the Fighter and never the Wizard?"dpkat"?Look. I'm not saying that Fighters like, somehow objectively suck under all conditions no matter what. That would be stupid. I'm saying that there is a good reason that the vast majority of characters we hear much about from early-D&D were spellcasters.Because spellcasters that survive? They take over. That's my point here.It doesn't matter if 99.9% of Wizards die, if the 0.1% that live become functional GODS.Sincerely: Why does it matter if it's common or not? This whole line of reasoning is utterly irrelevant to the topic, but people keep bringing it up as if it should have any relevance at all. I don't get it.The way I see it, we have a dilemma here. It is agreed fact--as far as I had understood it!--that the Wizard and Fighter are supposed to be balanced against each other because the Wizard is comparatively weak early and strong late, while the Fighter is comparatively strong early and weak late. At the very least, it seems all here agree that if a Wizard does reach max level, their power level completely blows the Fighter's out of the water. Hence why no one argues that a Wizard casting wish is irrelevant, and instead arguing that the Wizard never actually casts it at all, and thus it can't matter.But that leads straight to the horns of the dilemma.On the one hand: The design of early-edition D&D is supposed to be such that the Wizard metaphorically "pays for" their eventual enormous power by facing even more nearly-impossible odds at low level, aka, the lethality rate is even more near-guaranteed than it is for a Fighter or Cleric. Hence, the only way for the Wizard class to be balanced is for it to eventually get to actually USE that phenomenal cosmic power. But, by the admission (indeed, insistence) of several folks in this thread, that doesn't happen. So....the Wizard pays through the nose...in order to never actually get much of anything, except an awful lot of bookkeeping. That sounds like a frank and open admission that the Wizard is badly designed, because it just sucks to play and never pays off.On the other hand: Basically the arguments I've already made, that the design is what the design is, and it doesn't matter if people actually do play the levels, it's bad design to have something that utterly overwhelms every other option in the long-run. Hence, if we don't have the claim that Wizards never get to cast wish, then all a Wizard does is wait through some finite amount of tedium in order to gain grotesque levels of power, far outstripping anything anyone else can do or even attempt. Which...is bad design in a cooperative game where everyone is supposed to need other people.Unless you can find a third hand, it seems to me that whether or not the Wizard actually does cast wish much, it's a badly-designed class! Either it's paying out the nose for a benefit it functionally never receives, or it's just paying a finite (if horrendous) period of tedium and frustration in order to Win Forever.</blockquote>

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