NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7027627" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, I'm not working on theorycraft. I played the character all the way through. Casting is POWERFUL, it grants you really extensive plot power, and the added advantage of ritual casting is pretty nice too. Again, its not really a matter of the isolated white box situation of "you're stuck in a room in combat with a battlemaster, too bad you're obviously not his equal in combat!" that matters to me, THAT is theory craft! What matters is the totality of play. OTOH, to be perfectly frank, my transmuter wizard, a mountain dwarf with a high con, ain't really afraid to mix it up in melee combat all that much. His AC is 18 to start with, and he's got a Staff of Defense, so he can pretty well cast Shield at will (certainly enough times a day that calling his AC22 is quite fair). Sure, he's not going to stand face-to-face in melee with a battlemaster, or even the rogue, but they aren't going to even hit him automatically by a long shot, and that's assuming they DO get face-to-face, which again is already tantamount to failure on my part. In the party he was part of all the characters did various memorable and interesting things in combat, and often it was the battlemaster, the EK, or the Rogue, that did the big stabby-stabby, but it was more often likely to be true that the wizard did a lot of damage and provided some key aspect of the situation with a spell that made victory possible, or animated an entire plan of action that allowed us to prevail over odds that weren't amenable to hacky-hacky. I think 5e doesn't do badly in terms of giving everyone a degree of capability in a fight, certainly FAR FAR more so than any version of classic D&D. It is still less true than it was in 4e, which is definitely a key aspect of the 'feelz' of 4e. In 4e it was likely that the Rogue might have a utility power or even a combat power that would change the equation (Hide in Plain Sight for instance is a good example of one that could really change things). 5e tends, more than 4e, to restrict those things to casting, though it does provide half-casting subclasses of fighter and rogue that get at least a limited amount of the fun stuff. Tellingly in our group we ended up with a cleric, a wizard, an EK, and an Arcane Trickster as our lineup, and the battlemaster, who actually was an elf and had access to a cantrip (fire bolt IIRC).</blockquote>

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