Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 827669" data-attributes="member: 5171">Not to throw a wrench into things with yet another side discussion, but I thought it might be worth considering that spellcasting is already going to be a LOT different in 3.5 due to the revision of Haste.  Barring Quicken Spell, nobody will be casting two spells per round anymore. I've noticed while playing in higher-level campaigns that the fights get really short, barring exceptional circumstances.    Any fight that took more than one game-minute (10 rounds) was exceptionally long -- and many big nasty fights lasted three rounds or less, working along the lines of:Round 1:Wizard: Mass Haste, Biggest Damaging Spell or Monster-Ability-NeutralizerCleric: (hasted) Two Biggest Damaging Spells (Flame Strikes, Blade Barriers)Round 2:Wizard: Possible buff spell, Big Damaging SpellCleric: Possible cure spell, Big Damaging SpellAnd so forth.  Because of the "effectively goes twice" nature of Hasted spellcasters, the best way to win a fight was to throw all your biggest stuff at the monster before it had a chance to really react.  In that gaming system, a Clr/Wiz is normally at a good-sized disadvantage, since his biggest stuff is weaker than the biggest stuff of a straight wizard or cleric.  Around Round 7 of the combat, this character would start to get useful, as flexibility becomes more important and as the straight-classed characters begin to run out of their coolest stuff.Now consider 3.5 -- where spellcasters get one spell per round.  In THIS system, the biggest stuff takes longer to get into the field.  Your four biggest spells don't get cast until round four, instead of round two, and the monster has had extra rounds to react -- moving behind cover, moving in close to the spellcasters to make area-effect spells problematic, and so on.In 3.5, the straight-class wizard pulls somewhat further ahead of the wiz/clr.  The wiz/clr benefits slightly, because the fact that the monster gets more rounds to act before all the big spells have been cast at it means that things are likely to become more unpredictable -- and in unpredictable situations, flexibility is better than specialization.  But the straight-class wizard still has higher-level spells to work with, and now, the wizard and the wiz/clr don't become of equal utility until at least round 10 or 12.Because it now takes wizards and clerics longer to burn through their best spells, multiclass wiz/clrs are made effectively even weaker by comparison -- since they become more useful once the straight-class wizard has gotten rid of his best spells (while the multiclass character has more spells of lower level).In that light, 3.5 makes mutliclass spellcasters weaker than they already are.  Therefore, the Mystic Theurge, by making them more powerful, isn't overpowering things as much as bringing the power balance back to a better place.Probably used more words than I needed, but such is often the case in Internet discussion.-tacky</blockquote>

Verification