NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CardinalXimenes" data-source="post: 4531519" data-attributes="member: 58259">I have to take exception to this. If I drop a Scorching Burst with my 1st level wizard and catch two monsters in the radius, I'm doing potentially 2d6+8 damage, which compares very respectably with a dual bastard-sword ranger Twin Striking. Put three monsters inside the burst, and my damage potential with at-wills blows away any other class. Wizards do plenty of damage, they just don't do it all to one monster.With regard to your other examples....1) Want to appear to be an orc? Put on a hood, use Prestidigitation to make a few coloring changes, Ghost Sound to mimic an orc's voice, and then _roll Bluff_. Spells that serve as zero-effort problem solvers are no longer thick on the ground. Some people insist that prior editions provided the clever wizard player with endless opportunities for cunning usage of his spells to overcome challenges. This belief makes little room for the idiot wizard's player, who could also succeed just by using the spells exactly as they were written. Magic should not be the optimal solution to every problem, and 3.x was a particularly grievous offender in making this the case.2) Want to summon a skeleton to fight for you for five minutes? All right- undead bones erupt from the earth beneath your foes to rend them to pieces, the spectral arms impervious to the flailing of their victims. Just use the power block for Cloud of Daggers and refluff. You don't even have to change the damage type if you apply a little creativity- maybe Scorching Burst is a brief gate to Hell through which you drag the burning spirits of the damned to claw at your enemies. Or you want your servant to move things and manipulate objects for you? Mage Hand is your at-will cantrip.3) Dominate your foes? That's not what a wizard does. Check in when the psion turns up; I'm sure he'll have something along these lines. Magic goodness has been parceled out now, and just as the psion is not likely to have at-will mini-fireballs to throw around, neither does the wizard get fine-tuned mental control of other people. This is a drastic break from former editions. They gave the wizard "all magic" as his baliwick, and then produced subclasses that could be as good as the wizard in their specialty and inferior in just about every other way. Look at the poor 1e Illusionist- he doesn't even _get_ 8th or 9th level spells.4) Make your foes flee from your fearful illusion? See above.I liked wizards a lot in earlier editions, and I tended to play more of them than any other class. In part, this was because martial characters were so enormously tedious in combat. In another part, it was because magical characters were so good outside of combat. Despite this, I have to agree that wizards desperately needed the nerfbat, and I've got no regrets that WotC applied it in 4e. The wizard is, in general, more limited, weaker-powered, and less capable than in 3.x. And this is a Good  Thing to me.</blockquote>

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