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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6434993" data-attributes="member: 4937">I never suggested that it did. However, one of this historical problems with D&D has been that even if spell-casters were balanced with non-casters in combat (which in many cases they have been), casters were far and away better problem solvers out of combat than non-casters.   I thick we'd also agree that 5e has tried to address this as well by ensuring all classes have more out of combat role as problem solvers - everyone can heal, everyone can identify items, everyone has useful skills, etc.   Also there has been a concerted effort to greatly weaken spells as out of combat solutions to keep spellcasters from stealing spotlight.  As such, we can no longer rely on the divide of, "Well, even though your character is slightly less useful in combat, it shines out of combat." to pick up the slack if the classes don't have nearly equal combat roles.   I've been looking at the spells and rules seriously for the 1st time now that KD as brought this up, and while I think it's possible to play the 1st level wizard as it currently exists with roughly equal balance to martial classes, but only by selecting a very narrow range of spells.   Overall balance between the existing low level spells is surprisingly low, leading I think to unnecessary system mastery testing and a rather surprising lack of diversity in wizard concepts.  All low level wizards are going to look very similar, and if they don't, the drop off in quality is steeper than it should be.  In a lot of ways, at low levels the class feels to me comparable to bards in 3e, in that they are in theory flexible and a little bit good at everything, but in practice only a couple of builds are really viable or they descend into 'master of no trades' territory.I mean, it's a pretty bad situation for a low level wizard when I'm looking at the spell list and being somewhat envious of the cleric's options in direct damage, and the druid's options in debuffing foes and controlling the battlefield.  The general design of "A wizard is his spells" from older editions seems to have been retained, but the advantage in spell quality that wizards traditionally enjoyed over other casters is at best reduced and arguably non-existent.  Again, I'm not agreeing with KD that the 5e Wizard is 'weak' per se, but I do think he's opened my eyes to just how narrow it is at low levels, and Ydars analysis rings true to me.For my part, I'm 4 years into probably an 8 year long 3.X campaign so I've no need of a new system anytime soon.  I still don't think 5e has a real chance to make it big in the market, but the rules are a lot better conceptually than anything I dared hope for and I'd like the system to succeed.  But while I'm not seeing 3e's complete brokenness, what I'm definitely not seeing is a system that I would feel completely polished and needs any less tweaking than I felt 3e did.  I'd probably have dozens of pages of house rules on day 1.  Still, thinking about 5e has been at least as informative for me as a designer as 4e was and some its ideals will probably creep into my game at some point, and unlike 4e, I think as a player or DM I'd be satisfied to be using the system and not wanting to abandon it entirely.</blockquote>

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