Maybe they should revamp the Specialist Wizard subclasses like they do the Eldritch Knight or the Arcane Trickster where you need to have a certain percentage of your spells from your specialist school. Or like how 3e did it, where you had to give up another school. Or both.
The problem is that right now, there aren't enough spells to make dedicated specialists. I mean, have you tried to make a caster who focuses on something like summons, necromancy, or fire magic? At best you get one spell per level and a lot of redundant effects. You'd have to add I'd say a good 50 to 100 more spells to the game to make that work. It is still a struggle to get simple concepts like elementalists or shadow mages to work without having to dip into the Top 20 Best Wizard spells to round them out.
The issue with dual-schools is that there would be a lot of people who disagree with the pairings. Some might thing Illusion and Necromancy pair, but just as many might say a it belongs with enchantment (mind magics). Evocation and Abjuration are offense and defense, but Conjuration and Evocation are complementary magic that brings things into being. You would never get people to agree on any set of pairings, and eventually you'd get 105 subclasses trying to make every combination of pairs to work.
Perhaps that might be a reason for 0, 1, 2, or 3 school specialists
They're definitely changing how the subclasses work. Each class in the next PHB will have 4 subclasses
Remathilis pretty much covered this but when i picked up 5e, the issue was that you literally couldn't kit your necromancer out with necromancy spells. 95%+ of your build was the exact same as every other wizard because there just wasn't enough to fill out the concept. There are a bunch of things like necromancer, elementalist, and summoner that deserve to get full class features instead of sharing the same spell list with every other wizard at the table.
I guess this goes to show that if you take 2 different DND players, you might get 2 completely diametrically opposed views on what is done well.
Didn't they do this, more or less, in 2e and 3e? What happened to that?
I have honestly never heard anyone express this opinion before.
They published a ton of new spells. Seriously. 2e had massive tomes of them. 3e had the Spell Compendium. 5e has Xanathar, a few in Tasha, and a handful elsewhere. Not nearly enough to cover most concepts.
It's been 20 years since i opened a 2e book but im pretty sure 3e is when the design became totally generalist. You had minor restrictions for schools but it was pretty much the same pile of mush for every wizard build.
1e had two "arcane" classes, magic-user and illusionist which had two different spell lists. 2e made illusionist a subclass of wizards and both spell lists were merged into one list, and remained that way. Technically the wizard had spells that the sorcerer didn't and vice versa, but they were only a handful in 3e.
Give the base Wizard class less spell, have the Subclass grants extra spell related to their theme. Same overall amount of spells, but your spells list is slightly more thematically appropriate and each Wizard can thus stand out from one another without being too boxed in either.
They work, but they’re boring as all Hell, there’s way too many of them for the PHB and they made additional Wizard subclass incredibly difficult to make because they’re not based on anything but that one weird classification of spells that, frankly, nobody else but the Wizard actually cares about.
I think there is a good chance that School Specialization might become a Feat tree likited to Mages: Choose School Specialty at Level 4 and choose a School (not repeatable) then choose a School Fest at 8th, on the same lines as the Planescape Feats from last years UA. So a Sorcerer, Warlock, or Wizard can all be a Necromancer or Illusionist or what have you for any Subclass. Allows the oldSpecialists to stay around, but frees up Wizard Subclass design space. Notably, the Wizard is one Class where the free SRD Subclass is never in the top 2 Subclass chocies.
