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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cognomen's Cassowary" data-source="post: 6706242" data-attributes="member: 6801445">D'aw shucks, I think I'm blushing. Thanks for all the support.Hemlock, thanks for going into depth with blade ward vs. dodge. I didn't want to take up too much space with the comparison, but it's great to have it in the comments. Though blade ward doesn't reduce falling damage, investiture of stone does. It is restricted to nonmagical B/P/S damage, so neither one of them works against the likes of insect plague and erupting earth.You've also got me reconsidering bend luck. I hadn't thought of it in the concentration context, mostly because the other caster in my group is a warlock mainly concerned with blasting everything with eldritch lasers. Stacking with heightened spell would be very potent on a save-or-die but also very expensive. I'll mull it over and probably adjust bend luck.I touched on a lot of the things you bring up, but I might go back and put more emphasis on them following your suggestions. For this thesis question, I'll give you three answers, starting with the one I think you are least likely to accept.1) Dungeons and Dragons is a role-playing game. Role-playing opportunities are mechanical benefits.2) If your DM likes the inspiration system, RP and combat are not entirely discrete.3) With respect, if class and sub-class are to you nothing but a lever by which to gain "mechanical benefits" and "force multipliers", it is a gross reduction to call either WMS as a whole or wild-magic surges "wacky role-playing". Think of surges more as wacky combat effects, and the positive far outweighs the negative (and the RP) on the table.I'm not familiar enough with evocation wizard to make that comparison, but as far as dragon sorc . . . I think that there is a common pitfall with the min/maxing mindset where people think that as long as they have fiddly little decisions to make for easily calcuated marginal gains, they're maximizing their output. Thus, they look at the elemental affinity sub-class feature, see it as an opportunity to optimize, and think that that makes it a good feature. My thinking is that elemental affinity pales in comparison to spell bombardment, because the former can only apply to spells of one type, with a limited pool of types. This leads to dragon sorcerers choosing spells by damage type, effectively maximizing one of the sorcerer class's greatest weaknesses, the limited spell selection. With spell bombardment, the WMS prefers spells with lots of large dice, spells with multiple opportunities to trigger spell bombardment, and AoE spells which multiply the added damage over many targets. The range of spells which play nicely with spell bombardment is much greater than for any draconic type, leading to fewer sub-optimal decisions made in the name of optimization. It's just a damn shame we get spell bombardment so late.For the other dragon perks, a little bit of HP and welfare armor are nice but not game-changing; no-concentration slow flight is great outside but of limited use indoors; and the dragon aura is powerful against a horde but comes at a big cost. Compare that to wild-magic surges (again, strongly combat positive on the whole and even better with controlled chaos); and tides of chaos and bend luck, both of which have a direct combat effect and can be used offensively or defensively. I honestly do not understand where the supposed big disparity between the two sub-classes is. . . . assuming the DM plays along with WMS.</blockquote>

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