D&D 5E Increasing the power of spells?

[Plane Sailing]

Hmm.. I guess it is a sign of a rather well balanced ruleset, when the number of forum posts claiming that non-caster classes are under-powered, more or less equal the number of forum posts, that claim casters need more power...

This argument never makes sense to me. I often hear people use it, but if it were well balanced, then people would be on roughly the same page. If peoples views are polarised then that means that almost by definition it isn't well balanced.

The number series 1, 2, 9, 10 and 4,5,6,7 both have the same arithmetic mean, but if it is damage against something with 8 hit points the first series will kill it half the time, the second series can't kill it in one go. More Swingy suggests less balanced to me.

If there are equal number of posts saying that a class is under-powered and over-powered, that only really suggests that people have had different play experiences - which are more likely to be down to the DM or the player or the luck of the dice on that night than any intrinsic capability of the dice.

Cheers

 

[Plane Sailing]

How exactly? Can you provide concrete examples?

Not to put words into his mouth, but for example I've seen posters in this forum illustrate that at moderate levels a Fighter going nova with multiple attacks and extra attack actions quickly does much more damage than the wizards in the party were able to do when facing the single big foe (e.g. dragon).

That might be the kind of issue which he has in mind?

 

[Mouseferatu]

"Swingy" =/= "unbalanced," though.

A fight between two characters where a coin toss decides who dies in the first round is about as perfectly balanced as you get, but it's swingy as all heck.

 

[SilverfireSage]

Not to put words into his mouth, but for example I've seen posters in this forum illustrate that at moderate levels a Fighter going nova with multiple attacks and extra attack actions quickly does much more damage than the wizards in the party were able to do when facing the single big foe (e.g. dragon).

That might be the kind of issue which he has in mind?

That's a problem with conflating balance and niche protection. A perfectly balanced class by that standard would be a tautaulogy of that same class, with no differences down to the word. Niche protection is how balance is really handled in d and d, with people having their own abilities that don't overlap with anyone else's. Of course fighters can do a ton more damage, that's their thing. A wizard should not be able to replicate a fighter or barbarian on strict damage terms, because the fighter cannot do many of the things a wizard can, like fly or turn invisible.

On the "threads about balance" issue, I think it's valid in that it shows many people don't have much experience with the game yet. There used to be so many threads on the ranger beast master being very underpowered and I had to fight long and hard to show the math that people just hadn't looked at it carefully enough. I imagine the same thing is true of the wizard.

 

[Plane Sailing]

That's a problem with conflating balance and niche protection. A perfectly balanced class by that standard would be a tautaulogy of that same class, with no differences down to the word. Niche protection is how balance is really handled in d and d, with people having their own abilities that don't overlap with anyone else's. Of course fighters can do a ton more damage, that's their thing. A wizard should not be able to replicate a fighter or barbarian on strict damage terms, because the fighter cannot do many of the things a wizard can, like fly or turn invisible.

On the "threads about balance" issue, I think it's valid in that it shows many people don't have much experience with the game yet. There used to be so many threads on the ranger beast master being very underpowered and I had to fight long and hard to show the math that people just hadn't looked at it carefully enough. I imagine the same thing is true of the wizard.

I don't think it is quite as simple as that though.

The wizardly complaint was that if they've got a high level spell they can cast once per day, they would rather expect that to do something pretty significant to the combat - and in some peoples experience it wasn't. In other words, it is OK that my cantrips do less damage than the fighter round in, round out, because once a day I get to be whoop-ass in the same way that the fighter gets to be whoop-ass once or twice a day.

Personally I've always hated the idea of niche protection as it is commonly expressed - because it typically looked at in a pretty one dimensional fashion. In D&D the idea of 'doing damage' is probably the least worthy of niche protection, because it is the most fundamental thing that *everyone* has to do!

 

[Plane Sailing]

BTW, the response that you were quoting was to do with perceived lack of power of the wizard, nothing to do with the question of balance or otherwise. There are kind of more than one conversation in this thread!

 

[SilverfireSage]

I don't think it is quite as simple as that though.

The wizardly complaint was that if they've got a high level spell they can cast once per day, they would rather expect that to do something pretty significant to the combat - and in some peoples experience it wasn't. In other words, it is OK that my cantrips do less damage than the fighter round in, round out, because once a day I get to be whoop-ass in the same way that the fighter gets to be whoop-ass once or twice a day.

Personally I've always hated the idea of niche protection as it is commonly expressed - because it typically looked at in a pretty one dimensional fashion. In D&D the idea of 'doing damage' is probably the least worthy of niche protection, because it is the most fundamental thing that *everyone* has to do!

Damage is only the most fundamental thing when the DM makes it so. For me, and probably for a lot of people, much of D&D consists of the other two tenants shown in 5th edition, namely, Exploration and Social Interaction. Combat is simply the most scrutinized and elaborated of the three, as it has more immediate life or death consequences. The other two however, can have just the same impact, and is where this is drawn from.

In essence, while it may seem unfair to the wizard that they cannot do as much damage as the fighter (which is ridiculous anyway, as 5E already enhanced the majority of spells [case in point, 40d10 Meteor Swarm anyone?]), but it would seem far more unfair to the fighter if the wizard could deal as much damage while also having far more utility than a fighter. This isn't to say that Wizards shouldn't deal any damage at all, or that fighters shouldn't have any utility, it's that they both should have things that they are far better than the other at. Without this niche, everyone might as well be Bards since they can do nearly everything!

 

[SilverfireSage]

BTW, the response that you were quoting was to do with perceived lack of power of the wizard, nothing to do with the question of balance or otherwise. There are kind of more than one conversation in this thread!

I apologize, I was typing on my phone at work and thought it would be easier to type all in one rather than having to split between. I apologize if I broke any ENWorld rules.

 

[Cernor]

For the most part spells don't need to be more powerful: for example, a level 3 druid using moonbeam can utterly annihilate most swarming enemies (such as kobolds or rabid badgers). 2d10 for 10 turns is a hefty chunk of damage even against higher-level enemies as well, especially since it only uses a 2nd-level slot.

One way to slightly improve spells would be to add the caster's ability modifier to the damage dealt: it would make their cantrips only slightly less powerful than a fighter's attacks at low levels (8 [1d10 + 3] for fire bolt compared to 9 [1d12 + 3] for a greataxe attack) and scale to become even more powerful at higher levels (27 [4d10 + 5] compared to 4 attacks at 11 [1d12 + 5] each).

IME, caster damage is relatively similar to martial damage at low levels, but they have the added utility of spells which can either control (i.e. entangle) or dominate (i.e. fireball) the battlefield.

 

[Minigiant]

Personally I've always hated the idea of niche protection as it is commonly expressed - because it typically looked at in a pretty one dimensional fashion. In D&D the idea of 'doing damage' is probably the least worthy of niche protection, because it is the most fundamental thing that *everyone* has to do!

I think that more has to do with the fanbase only agreeing that certain classes have access to certain things, mainly everyone is okay with fighters and rogues can deal a lot of damage. So the designers were stuck with giving class X the Y niche as the Y niches is the only thing the fanbase can agree on.