D&D 5E Is the imbalance between classes in 5e accidental or by design?

[Umbran]

You in? Or do I win by default?

Mods Note:
This is a bit far back in the thread, but bears mention...

If this is about "winning" a friendly discussion, it is well past time for you to stop.

Anyone else here trying to "win"? It is also past time for you to stop.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

There is a chart in the DMG that describes the damage or helping expectations of a Spell by what Level it is. That's a window into the game math, which yes, balances how Tasha's Hideous Laughter or Counterspell equate to a Fighter hitting real hard.

Don't let your "work has already been done in the DMG" ruin my chances to utterly fail a test scenario!

Besides, no one reads the DMG. You should know better!

 

[Parmandur]

Don't let your "work has already been done in the DMG" ruin my chances to utterly fail a test scenario!

Besides, no one reads the DMG. You should know better!

Mea culpa...

 

[EzekielRaiden]

@ECMO3

Re: limited by spells prepared, this ignores the power and utility of rituals. Comprehend languages, for example, might not absolutely slam-dunk resolve a "negotiate with gnolls" situation, but it will absolutely solve a huge amount of it for ten minutes' effort.

Further, you mention the "flexibility" (not meaning scare quotes, just using your term) of the Ranger class, adapting to a campaign across several levels, rather than all at once. For a game where things like "negotiate with gnolls" becomes an important occurrence, even an Evoker Wizard can adapt to suit the campaign better just by picking better spells: they don't need to be Batman Wizard, they just need to exploit the fundamental flexibility of "being a full spellcaster" to acquire a couple useful non-combat spells per spell level, especially if any of those spells are also rituals and thus don't need slots.

E.g., say you start off intending to go Evoker, max specialized in pumping out the phat deeps, only to learn that combats happen about once every three adventuring days and you mostly are doing survivalist stuff, exploration, investigations, and frequent (albeit not every day) diplomatic talks. You took only damage cantrips (firebolt, sword burst, and frostbite, say) and combat-related spells at 1st level (chromatic orb, grease, magic missile, shield, sleep, Tasha's hideous laughter.) By the time you reach 2nd level you realize oh, this isn't that kind of campaign, you need utility options and combat options shouldn't be your focus. Your 2nd level spell choices are comprehend languages and find familiar, and you pick Divination instead of Evocation. These are extremely excellent utility spells for this kind of campaign (social/exploration/investigation-heavy) and also rituals, so you don't even have to sacrifice your damage capacity in order to benefit from them. At 3rd level, pick up scorching ray and borrowed knowledge (and swap out sword burst and frostbite for light and prestidigitation with your next two long rests), and at 4th level mind spike and enhance ability (or invisibility if stealth is more valuable) while grabbing mage hand as your fourth cantrip.

Purely through built-in spell gains and changing up your intended subclass (as you did in your example), this character that started out intending to be a blaster has become an excellent support-utility caster well-tailored to the specific campaign. THAT is the problem here. It's not that the Wizard is being presumed to have every single spell on their spell list. It's that they can have a massive focus on combat at level 1 and then pivot to being excellent in social and investigatory situations, or vice-versa. It's not a magical "I can have every spell at all times!" It's that with Wizard Level + Int mod prepared spells--starting at 4/6 spells at level 1 and rising to 8/12 spells at level 4 (assuming you start with 16 Int and take +2 Int at level 4, which...why wouldn't you?) is huge and quite able to prepare for two or even three different distinct campaign foci.* Prepare everything but comprehend languages, find familiar, grease, and sleep, and you still have an excellent spell kit. You still have several excellent combat spells (shield, scorching ray, chromatic orb), while having several excellent generalist pure-utility spells. If the DM is nice to you and lets you swap out some spells, you might try dropping grease for silvery barbs (and thus probably leave Tasha's hideous laughter not-prepared), but frankly you don't really need to give up terribly many of the spells you have on hand.

Now. What can the (non-spellcasting) Fighter do that is even remotely equivalent to that? Switch from planning to be a Champion to planning to be a Battle Master?

*And because you have Arcane Recovery, you actually get ceiling(Wizard Level/2) levels' worth extra spell slots, albeit no higher than 5th level. So a 4th level Wizard has essentially eight spell slots (or nine, I guess, if you really need two 1st-level spells more than one 2nd-level spell.) Once you get your second Divination feature, you get even more effective slots, since casting a divination spell...such as mind spike...allows you to recover a slot of up to 1 level lower than the one you just used.

 

[ECMO3]

@ECMO3

Re: limited by spells prepared, this ignores the power and utility of rituals. Comprehend languages, for example, might not absolutely slam-dunk resolve a "negotiate with gnolls" situation, but it will absolutely solve a huge amount of it for ten minutes' effort.

It helps, but only if you don't have to talk, and only if someone else doesn't already speak Gnoll.

I am not debating that Wizards can dominate the game, they can, I am saying that rarely Happens. Actually, IME it has never happened in play in 5E with a Wizard or a player who was predominantly a Wizard. I have had players dominate the game and overshadow other players, but to date they not been Wizards. They could have been better at it if they were Wizards, and often they are flat BAD at many of the things they don't let other players do better.

The worst offender IME was an 8 Charisma Barbarian Pirate I played with who wanted to intimidate everyone. I am not sure he even had the intimidate skill, but he wanted to role play his mean Pirate character. So in session 1, level 1, we needed to find out about the house on the hill we were hired to investigate. We walked into the bar in town to gather some information from townspeople and he stole a glass of beer from a patron's table and then broke it on the bar and told the bartender he better tell us everything about the house or he was going to tear the place apart. Didn't matter that literally any other party member and frankly a number of different approaches would have worked better, "that is how my character would act" and he felt like the Pirate reputation feature from his background should make this sort of behavior effective and warranted. He did similar at the town church. The game dissolved after 3 sessions of this kind of stuff.

My point is this problem does not happen because of class power, it happens because of other dynamics at play.

Further, you mention the "flexibility" (not meaning scare quotes, just using your term) of the Ranger class, adapting to a campaign across several levels, rather than all at once. For a game where things like "negotiate with gnolls" becomes an important occurrence, even an Evoker Wizard can adapt to suit the campaign better just by picking better spells: they don't need to be Batman Wizard, they just need to exploit the fundamental flexibility of "being a full spellcaster" to acquire a couple useful non-combat spells per spell level, especially if any of those spells are also rituals and thus don't need slots.

I think you misunderstood my point. That example was an example of why my initial build would have been overshadowed due to play style. You are absolutely right, I could have done the same thing with say a high-charisma enchantment Wizard who planned on taking things like tongues and friends but instead went with a combat focus and spells like fear. I probably could not have switched gears like that if I was playing a Bard that was built for roleplay though.

I could have done that with a fighter too because making a high-skill fighter is tough to start with and it is a combat -oriented class. What I couldn't do with a fighter is go the other way. If I built a fighter to play a combat-oriented game and it turned out we were playing WBW and not planning on any combat at all ..... well then I would be screwed where a combat-focused wizard or combat-focused ranger would probably be fine.

The point of that is building a character for a different game then you are playing can lead to you being overshadowed and not knowing the rules or not wanting to flex will make it a poor game even if you can flex your character. I like combat focused games, I like games with no combat, but I think a lot of players are not that broad. There are some players (thinking of one friend in particular) that hate everything except combat. It wouldn't matter if he "could" switch and play a more balanced character, he would still hate the game and be overshadowed.

The point is not knowing the game you are playing, or not playing the same game as the other players and DMs leads to being overshadowed.

 

[teitan]

I'd agree that the 6-8 encounter standard is the fault of buffs to the full casters.

Changing buffs to number of rounds instead of hours with 3.5 impacted casters and non-casters far, far more heavily than modern gamers realize because it 1: limited those spells usage 2: took power from non-casters who benefited from those spells and 3: because of 1 increased caster power because those buff spells slots were then shifted to other spells of more immediate impact because the limited time/low impact of the buff spells as nerfed.

 

[level2janitor]

Whether Wizards (and other full casters) seem overpowered comes down to a huge variety of factors & playstyle. Here's a few statements that, hopefully, aren't incredibly controversial.

• Casters and martials mostly occupy different niches. Most casual players won't notice much of an imbalance, if casters are played as the designers seem to have expected, that being sub-optimally to some degree. If an imbalance does exist, classes are distinct enough that you have to dig into the system at least a little for it to become really noticeable.
• Casters (besides Warlocks) are stronger during one-encounter days where combat ends faster than they can blow through their spell slots. Martial/caster disparity is much, much less of an issue during long days with multiple short rests in between. Most people, it turns out, don't prefer to play like this.
• Casters and martials are mostly equal when it comes to skill use (and rogue and bard also exist). Casters tend to get more significant non-combat abilities outside of this, such as rituals, utility cantrips, and of course lots of non-combat spells.
• Classes are generally well balanced in combat, from a perspective of raw power, at least at low levels, if you're running long days. Notably, casters with non-combat spells are also just as good in combat as martials, they just specialize at different aspects of it (i.e. not single-target damage).
• Casters do have to give up some combat power to use many non-combat abilities (excluding rituals & cantrips). Casting scrying leaves you with one less synaptic static later. However, this is still an option martials don't have - a wizard can choose to save their slot for a boss fight, but even a high-level fighter can't choose to burn both their action surges to, I dunno, crack a mountain in half or jump a 100-foot chasm. (Extensively houseruling that would probably fix 90% of the issue, honestly - I feel like most martial players would feel perfectly strong with good niche protection if they could, say, burn one of their rages to smash a castle wall.)
• Martial abilities rarely scale other than having higher numbers, while magic becomes exponentially greater in scope as you level. Wizards go from deciphering languages and summoning friendly little owls to stopping time, teleporting across the continent and predicting the future. Martials go from doing a lot of damage to CR 1 enemies, to doing a lot of damage to CR 20 enemies. Skills have a higher success chance but the stuff that can be accomplished with those skills mostly stays the same forever. Martials used to get castles and armies to compensate, but that stuff is gone now. Martials are always designed for dungeon crawls, from level 1 to 20, while casters slowly break away from dungeon crawling and move towards changing the world on a grand scale.

Most of this stuff won't be noticed in casual play for a lot of tables, because most casual play is sub-optimal, fizzles before reaching high level, and honestly usually ends up with most casters being worse than martials in combat due to poor spell choice and the drastically higher number of ways you can potentially screw up. This ends up forcing a sort of incidental balance where martials shine in combat, and casters shine out of it, but neither to a degree they're completely useless when out of their element, even if the DM is rarely running that many encounters a day.

Really push the system and it snaps in half like a twig, though, unless the DM is working really hard to fix it.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Mod Note

@level2janitor

Perhaps you missed this warnig to the thread (edited for brevity):

Mod Note:


(Edit)

2) We don’t usually moderate emoji button abuse, but it’s been on the rise lately. So, given the behavior in this thread, it’s time for exceptions.

We still noticed you emulating this same behavior days later. Don’t do it again.