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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6577761" data-attributes="member: 996">While I wasn't impressed with HotDQ, this report is the only thing I've heard of ToD's capstone scenario, and it doesn't sound that bad.  Maybe some aspects were (or were perceived as) heavy-handed, like the dragon-slaying sword and spell immunities.  But, they seemed to do the job. Of course.  It's all relative.  Relative to 3.5, when casters were at their most profoundly, game-breakingly overpowered, 5e is a major come down.  Compared to the other extreme, when casters were at their most nearly balanced, it's quite a leap forward.  Glass half full kinda thing. The comment about 4e was only for emphasis, but, yes, even taking into account moving the goalposts from "casters just had blasting and buffing" to "wizards just had blasting and battlefield control," your concern would have been unfounded, even in 4e.  I'll accept that you didn't 'see' it - such blindness was a common edition-war injury, I just hope you've recovered enough of your vision to see 5e for what it is, and potentially could be in your hands were you to DM it.  Any concern for casters in general or wizards in particular lacking for options, flexibility, versatility and/or power in 5e is unfounded.  Neo-Vanican casting combines the flexibility of 3.5 spontaneous & prepped casting in one package that the familiar-from-3e core Tier 1 full casters (Wizard, Cleric, Druid) all get.  Spell slots are fewer, but the added flexibility means fewer slots are wasted.  Spell damage scales with spell level instead of caster level, but save DCs scale with character level instead of spell level.  The details of the mechanics are different, the points at which classes and encounters might be balanced are different, but casters get many spells, can swap them out via preparation, and spells are powerful, described in natural language that leaves plenty of room for player creativity & DM interpretation, and should feel like they're really magical. Then you should have no problem with 5e.   You'll note that Celtavian's party succeeded, in spite of not jumping through said hoop.  So, apparently, it wasn't that bad. Concentration does change the way you'd play a wizard relative to 3.5 - you can't layer the 3 or 6 or 12 or more most-useful buff/protective/whatever spells on yourself and/or your party. You have to choose the best spell for the situation among the concentration spells you have prepared.  Spells without that limitation, you can still layer, of course.   The up-shot is that the selection of that spell is a more meaningful choice, and, that you are likely to expend fewer slots even when firing up a nova or combo of some sort.   Well, feats are optional, so even if you got 'em published, as a player, there's no guarantee you'd get to use 'em.  As far as relative customization options, though, there are 5 purely-martial archetypes and something like 30 for casters.  All classes have some sort of casting or magic-using archetype/sub-class.  So there are already a tremendous amount of customization options just in picking your class and domain/school/etc, not to mention known spells (when you don't just automatically get the know your whole spell list) and spells you choose to prepare and cast (if you allow yourself to consider RP as well as optimal effectiveness in those choices). It's not like it was easy in 3.5 - you had so many spells to choose from, so many slots, and so many potential combos to choose from, implement and track.  Concentration, fewer slots, and no item make/buy leaves you with less to track and manage, but more interesting and meaningful decisions to make.  Less difficult in the sense of tedious, more difficult in the sense of challenging. Again, to put the edition comparisons in perspective, 4e gave martial classes more and more varied abilities than any ed before or since, and 4e casters were only a little superior to them, while, in 3.5, casters were overpowered to and beyond the point of casually dominating play without even trying at all but the lowest levels.  5e could indeed, be said to be between those two extremes - to start.  It does, however, encourage an attitude of acceptance towards variants that leaves open the possibility that a DM open the floodgates to a more 3.5 style of play experience, or try to fix it up to a level of class and/or encounter balance closer to that of 4e, or tweak it a little further towards classic Gygaxian dungeon-crawling.  I had heard of the surprising relative effectiveness (due, apparently in part to Bounded Accuracy) of that classic spell in this edition.  Don't expect I'll get to try it anytime soon, but I'm glad you got to have some multi-attacking DPR type fun with it.</blockquote>

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