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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8825638" data-attributes="member: 6790260">One of the few trends that has held true across all editions of D&D: The Wizard is emblematic of several problems in the game's design.Pre-3e, the Wizard was supposed to be the "hard mode" class which gave great power only to those who really, really worked for it. What it actually ended up being was a relatively trivial exercise in character optimization, doubly so if the player was creative and the DM as permissive with new spell creation as the early D&D DMs were (seriously, Gygax let through some insane stuff as spells!) The "hard mode" aspect barely matters, because all classes are fragile and survival all too often depends on luck of the draw regardless.3e, the Wizard was the quintessential demonstration of how stupidly overpowered spellcasting had become. A well-played Wizard is the plausible equal of a well-played Druid, and Druids are three classes stapled together. With an even slightly permissive DM and a solid grasp of not-quite-cheesy charop, you can make a Wizard who laughs at anything the DM throws at the party. There had been problems with Wizards being overpowered even back when Fighters still became landed nobility; 3e just amped this up to 11^11.4e the Wizard was also flawed...but, for once, in the opposite direction. The designers had a solid grasp of what they wanted the other three kinds of classes to do: support classes had their "Healing Word" equivalent and handed out buffs/saves/attacks, defensive ones had Marking and punishments and "stickiness," offensive ones had the path of beef ("tanky bruiser," to use the MOBA term) or the path of speed. But controllers, sadly, did not have a well-defined feature or principle around which they were built. This isn't too surprising, control is necessarily a more tricksy thing, but it ended up making controllers feel unfocused and incomplete (and introduced mild balance issues if their powers somehow got out to other classes, due to them needing to carry the load that baseline class features would often cover.) This made Wizard weird at launch and not well-received. It got much better over time, but frankly I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that at least a portion of the negative response to 4e is because Wizards felt weak even though they weren't that weak.Which brings us to 5e. I consider the Wizard the second-greatest failing of 5e, after the Fighter. Both of them are painfully bland, fail to meaningfully support their core class fantasy/"flavor," offer flawed "basic" versions that are an outright punishment to anyone who wants to just play the game without overthinking things,* and deviate significantly from the overall "balance" (even in the incredibly loose sense that that term is used in 5e) of the game. The subclasses are bad; the base class features are practically nonexistent until level friggin' level 18; and the one good feature is borderline OP (here, just have ~20% more slot-levels!**)*To be extremely clear: simple options are good IF THEY ARE WELL-MADE. A simple meal well-made is wonderful. The Champion Fighter and, to a lesser extent, the Evocation Wizard are not well-made. They do a disservice to people wanting a straightforward, no-frills, low-engagement experience.**Mathematically, this holds true only somewhat roughly. It's ironically higher at early levels, because your "bank" of slot-levels grows linearly with level (x/2), while your number of slots scales almost perfectly quadratically (really, really close to x^2/4), meaning your proportional "bonus slot-levels per character level" ends up being 2 divided by your level. At level 10, this is 2/10 = 0.2 = 20%; after that it drops, but not quite to the same degree, because you get fewer high-level slots.</blockquote>

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