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Message: <blockquote data-quote="WalterKovacs" data-source="post: 4512555" data-attributes="member: 63763">Summary: High level 3.5 - too many options, so few people played it, and that was bad Low level 3.5 - still have a lot of options, but with so few spells you are able to cast per day you are basically handcuffed to having a list you use constantly which you may change for non-fighting days or if you have knowledge of the enemy in which case you may swap some spells to not have damage types they are immune/resistant to. If you need to do a specific rarely useful type of magical effect that you'd need to use on the fly, but really isn't worth preparing, you can have a scroll for that. If you know about ahead of time, you can prepare a time consuming spell the day you need it and go back to not needing it. 4e - You have fewer options, although over time more options are introduced. Even the newer options are limited because you only have a limited number of daily/encounter/at-will/utility slots available. So you have a standard set you prepare on a "normal" adventuring day, but you have the option to swap your utilities and dailies each morning if you have foreknowledge that indicates one may be more useful than the other, such as creatures being resistant to an energy type, or vulnerable to another. You have a ritual book for long and costly spells, and they don't eat into your prepared spell resources. You can also buy scrolls which allow you to perform the ritual slightly quicker [half the time] if need be.  So ... 4e is a lot like lower levels of 3.5, where you have more castings per day but less spells known [so, more like a sorceror] and your rituals give you access to the time + resource consuming spells [and crafting feats] that would come up on occaision in 3.5 games. Some of the rituals take longer than they would have in the older edition, however others are much faster [make just about any magic item in about an hour? Instead of DAYS? Yes please]. You had a lot of options to fit into a small number of slots. You still do but the things they have changed are: Splitting up spells into powers and rituals, some of the powers being utilities. And Splitting up the wizards spell list so other spellcasting types in the future can have their own flavor, instead of every caster type borrowing from the sorceror/wizard's spell list [or a divine spell list, etc]. Wizards are going to have fewer options because of this. The first part means that stuff which was done during combat [that really was mostly useful out of combat] is no longer possible, and the latter just means that wizards aren't as good at enchantment and illussions as say a psionic controller would be.  Part of the problems in 3e wasn't a balance one per se, but that, in the PHB, they had a huge section dedicated to individual classes [spells for wizards, spells for clerics, etc]. The sorceror was added so that at least 2 classes could share all the stuff that was there just for the wizard. The problem got worse though. As they released more products ... it was a bit hard to do new spellcasting classes. They had to make them different than just specialist wizards ... although a lot were just that [warmage and beguiler had some cool special abilities, but basically they were sorcerors that knew a lot of spells from a couple schools of magic]. Most spellcasting classes were basically reflavored wizards, with some variations on how many spells they knew/could cast per day from the warlock who knew very little but could do it at will, so pseudo sorceror's that had what they knew predetermined and could cast it a lot, to a wizard or wu-jen that could concievably have every spell available, so long as they prepared it, with less spells per day available to them, and needing to prepare them in advance. This time, they didn't want it to be "different ways to do the same thing" but instead "the same way to do different things" in terms of future spell casting classes. The wizard's spelllist is no longer exhaustive right off the bat [also note: no "specialist wizard" sub-classes] so they can give other spellcasters their niches, allowing them to do stuff no one else can do [without needing to learn a new way to play this kind of effect].</blockquote>

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