Thank for the data. Those stats are always surprising, considering the unsatisfaction we see here about the fighter.
The new playtest have not change fighter that much on the major points of unsatistaction, but I guess that we will have the same stats in 2030.
so there is still a mystery to solve: “why fighter are so popular despite their underwhelming capacities”?
maybe a wizard with a powerful spell will answer that!
I imagine that in most games, casters are strong, but not pushing boundaries. Just going from my AL experience, players like damage, so most spells are ones that deal damage as opposed to hard crowd control effects; so everything synergizes. The Wizard fireballs a group, weakens them, the warrior types finish them off, everyone is happy.
As long as the DM isn't using problems that only magic can solve, everyone feels like they are contributing. If a game is just "go on this adventure, then go on that one", the narrative power of a spellcaster with spell slots to burn because they aren't adventuring doesn't really come up.
And I'm not discounting the concept of a social contract where players aren't attempting to warp the game around their characters, I've no doubt there are tables that run that way.
The crux of the caster/martial imbalance is that it's theoretical; casters have a higher ceiling than martial characters, but the floor isn't that much higher; the quality of choices and the skill of the player do matter.
If someone plays a Wizard and takes no damaging cantrips ("I have real spells for that, if I want to do damage, my crossbow does d8+3, that's way better than firebolt!") and thinks spellcasting consists of mage armor, magic missile, shield, flaming sphere, misty step, fireball, and counterspell (again, calling on my AL experience), there shouldn't be a problem- we know the game is balanced around damage and hit points, not anything else like accuracy, utility, or various forms of disadvantaging foes (since Jeremy so kindly told us).
This is why we see such disparate opinions on the caster/martial divide, because most of the time,
it doesn't seem to exist. And as a result, even if Wizards designed for it, you'd have people wondering why their character concept of "skilled strong guy" forces them to accept strange abilities like leaping into the air or cutting magic force fields in half- "This is D&D, not Exalted or Earthdawn!".
And remember, Wizards
has designed around fixing martial/caster disparity before, and the majority of their player base said "hard pass". As much as it would be nice for them to give us options to negate it, it's not going to happen until there is a larger percentage of players who actually see the problem.
Which means instead of arguing about whether or not this is a thing, the people who see a problem should be making "+" threads about brainstorming ways to fix it- the problem is real for these people, and they need solutions, not to be told "lol, the game is fine, I've never had this problem in 35 years of playing" endlessly.
