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Message: <blockquote data-quote="rangda" data-source="post: 4985885" data-attributes="member: 86125">Hmmm. Interesting.  My experience in LFR and in two campaigns (one that ran to L11 and one that is currently at L14) and a few epic one shots contradicts your observations.It's been my experience that the wizard is pretty gimp (playing one up through L11), largely because WotC has overvalued controller abilities and undervalued damage dealing.  The most common wizard controller effect is to deny terrain to both sides of the battle which has had limited effectiveness in the modules I ran him in (H1-H3, some of P1).  The controller role has been greatly devalued in the game because there are too many classes that do high damage (ranger, avenger, barbarian, storm sorcerer) and too many classes /w powers that assist the damage dealers in dealing catastrophic damage (bard, cleric, and others I'm sure we haven't tried yet).As an example, consider the current L14 party I'm running through Scales of War:Fighter /w ex-axeAvenger /w fullbladeWar Chanter Bard /w bastard sword (notice the trend) Storm Sorcerer"pacifist" ClericThis party is capable of turning pretty much any of the boss fights into 2-3 round affairs (maybe 4 or 5 if they fight a dragon that manages to stun most of them for a round), and has been since they went paragon (go go War Chanter).In the last boss fight (Telicanthus/Pennel from SoW 9) it went like this:round 1 got into positionround 2 (death & destruction)bard spends action point, party is now +CON hit/dam (5) until EoNT,  uses a power that lets party do +CON damage party is now +5/+10cleric uses Remorse hands baddies vulnerability 10 (party is now effectively +5/+20)storm sorcerer uses primordial storm, action points for thunder leap, uses timeless lockett for 3rd attack with another random encounter power.  Manages to roll a 1 once, but does 219hp damage to Pennel and 176 to Telicanthus (I remember those ugly numbers)avenger attacks with CA using 4w daily with tempus channel divinity for +crit dice on hit, Pennel dies with massive overkill damage, action points to use random 3w daily on TelicanthusFighter uses (I think 2 encounters on Telicanthus, who has now gone from ~325 hp to 50 or so)round 3 Telicanthus dies before he gets to go and it's time to clean up the 1-2 random monsters left.This same group of players ran through a L25 one shot and managed to kill a ~1,000hp solo dragon in less than 3 rounds (bloodied him in round 1).  With that sort of damage output dazing the monsters is useless, it makes more sense for the party to just take them out and not waste time on silly controller powers.Now obviously they can't do this every fight but they have a huge can of whoop-ass in their pocket, and it's somewhat repeatable every other fight.With this sort of combat compression ANY power that does not do damage is greatly devalued, and that genie is already out of the bottle if the party wants it.  The only way to avoid it is to intentionally detune the party.My experiences in LFR locally & at Gen-Con have echoed this, characters are generally pretty tuned for high damage output and combats get greatly compressed.  I had a warden /w longsword at a recent LFR game and half of the table snickered.As for implement users, I do think the warlock is way down on damage output, as a single target striker his damage needs to be much higher.  The sorcerer as a single target striker lags a bit behind the melee strikers, but the storm sorcerer compares favorably as they do less damage to a single target but can do a more damage overall if they can make effective use of areas (donuts and growing the bursts/blasts help there).  Wizard damage is gimp but it's not the role (IMO the controller role is currently broken and needs to be fixed as I stated above).  Haven't played with the other PHB 2/3 implement users so cannot comment on those.</blockquote>

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