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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 7694508" data-attributes="member: 5143">But I'm not comparing with non damaging spells for a reason.  If you are a blaster mage, then you want blaster spells.  And you want more than one of them.  Fireball makes that impossible by making all choices but one completely suboptimal.  No one takes lightning bolt because it has to start from you and shoot forward.  It only affects people in a line and, most of the time, when you enter a room the enemy is not standing in one.  Casters also like to stay at the back of the party and that often means lightning bolt will hit ALL of your allies if you cast it(or you have to move to the front, putting yourself in danger).  It wasn't even a consideration for most people in our group because its disadvantages outweigh its damage.  Which is why I didn't lower its damage when I houseruled fireball.Fireball doesn't have JUST damage going for it.  It also has a huge area and it has a huge range.  Both of which are things that should be considered when balancing a spell.  A spell with huge area and huge range should actually do LESS damage than equivalent spells at its level to make up the difference.It creates difficult terrain...for one round....which is a VERY minor benefit.  Over 80% of the time the enemy doesn't care about moving at all or still has enough movement to get where they want to go.  If I'm using a 4th level slot up, then it should do as much damage as a fireball increased to 4th level.  Because when I get a new spell for going up a level, it should be BETTER than the spells that came before it.  And it IS better than magic missile, scorching ray, burning hands and shatter and probably better than lightning bolt(its versatility makes up for the lower damage).  But it isn't better than fireball because of the inexplicable raising of its damage at the last minute.You are using that term poorly.  Magic: The Gathering works because they avoid outliers like crazy.  They have a VERY detailed spreadsheet they use when creating their cards that give points for certain benefits.  For the first couple of sets they didn't have the formula worked out yet.  Which is why the first couple of sets contain cards that are worth hundreds(or thousands) of dollars because they are CLEARLY better than all other cards that do similar things.  It was bad enough for the game that WOTC had to invent a tournament format that said "You can't play with old cards" because those people with the old cards were winning 95% of the time.The reason Magic is a game where every card breaks the rules is because each of them is an exception to the normal rules:  For example, the normal rule is you can only attack once.  But there is a card that lets you attack twice.  Which breaks the rules.  However, you can be assured that the cost of that card was carefully balanced against all the other cards in the game to be sure that it wasn't more powerful.Every once in a while a card slips through the cracks and is way too powerful.  The formula doesn't cover certain things.  But WOTC quickly works to remove the offending cards from tournament play in order to make sure the game stays fun for everyone.The point is that spells in D&D already break the rules.  They let you do things you can't normally do(like shoot fireballs).  That's great and that's what their role should be.  But they need to be balanced against each other.  Otherwise you end up in a situation like existed before WOTC created "Type 2" tournaments in Magic:  Those with the fireballs win.  Everyone else loses.When comparing power, you must always compare like to like.  Cleric spells do different things than Wizard spells.  Clerics heal, bring people back to life, and cure bad effects on people.  Wizards don't generally get those abilities(to preserve class uniqueness).  Hussar does some good analysis above, but Revivify is a perfect reasonable spell at 3rd level compared to the levels of other spells that bring people back to life in the cleric list.</blockquote>

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