As
a powerful wizard proponent, I do agree with having serious drawbacks and risks to using such power. Fireball was something that would often kill you and your own party if you had a DM that actually followed the rules (e.g., it was volumetric in earlier editions, meaning if you cast it down a corridor it might engulf you, way down, if you weren't savvy enough to do some mental calculations). Same thing for lightning bolt, you could kill a number of enemies outright with it, but if it bounces back and hits you, you're toast. Count the range, be careful. Look at the surroundings.
This is one aspect of balancing of the wizard : risky spells. Even teleport in AD&D was taking your entire party's lives at risk. You become 7th level, get access to 4th level spells so you can cast teleport, but wait, there's a good chance you will die unless you scry the location or know it beforehand. So you save up for a magic mirror, or cast it while in the palace bathroom. If you're in the middle of combat, you will likely only have time to cast it towards somewhere you are intimately familiar with. One trick I learned was to cast fly or feather fall on the whole party (or people strong enough to carry the others, or take the falling damage), and TP to a few tens of feet in the air, so even if the spell target is too low, you won't end up in the floor.
But of course we can go further. If the game is meant to be flatter in terms of power progression, but not make wizards just completely bored /useless while still keeping them physical weaklings that must avoid melee combat like the plague (please, no more of this 4e stuff where the wizard never spends any surges because he's unafraid of death. insane defenses and medium HP make him more than capable of avoiding death, much, much, much more so and in AD&D for example), then let's find good ways to do it. I love that they're adding magic missile as an option for an at-will for wizards. I would have loved that in AD&D, I rarely used MM because I was usually better off casting wall of stone or fire or lightning bolt when I needed something dead. I only cast fireball twice in 5 years. Blowing up the countryside and setting the whole forest on fire is not something you do as a lawful good noble court wizard, even an evoker. But in a dungeon...? oh wait, not even there. I cast it once in the desert against an advancing army, but it turned out they would become our allies and I had a lot of service to do to help make up for it.
So yeah, an at-will signature spell, maybe less spells per day, maybe some type of workable dynamic metamagic ala Arcana Unearthed rules (a cool system by Monte Cook, IMO), maybe spells of a certain level don't go up in damage unless you empower them, all these things together could really balance the wizard a bit and still allow us smart players, to play a class where our wits are not only needed, but essential for basic survival. You don't survive in a D&D world as a weakling, even with powerful magic, unless you are lucky, cunning, smart, and plan ahead.
a powerful wizard proponent, I do agree with having serious drawbacks and risks to using such power. Fireball was something that would often kill you and your own party if you had a DM that actually followed the rules (e.g., it was volumetric in earlier editions, meaning if you cast it down a corridor it might engulf you, way down, if you weren't savvy enough to do some mental calculations). Same thing for lightning bolt, you could kill a number of enemies outright with it, but if it bounces back and hits you, you're toast. Count the range, be careful. Look at the surroundings.
This is one aspect of balancing of the wizard : risky spells. Even teleport in AD&D was taking your entire party's lives at risk. You become 7th level, get access to 4th level spells so you can cast teleport, but wait, there's a good chance you will die unless you scry the location or know it beforehand. So you save up for a magic mirror, or cast it while in the palace bathroom. If you're in the middle of combat, you will likely only have time to cast it towards somewhere you are intimately familiar with. One trick I learned was to cast fly or feather fall on the whole party (or people strong enough to carry the others, or take the falling damage), and TP to a few tens of feet in the air, so even if the spell target is too low, you won't end up in the floor.
But of course we can go further. If the game is meant to be flatter in terms of power progression, but not make wizards just completely bored /useless while still keeping them physical weaklings that must avoid melee combat like the plague (please, no more of this 4e stuff where the wizard never spends any surges because he's unafraid of death. insane defenses and medium HP make him more than capable of avoiding death, much, much, much more so and in AD&D for example), then let's find good ways to do it. I love that they're adding magic missile as an option for an at-will for wizards. I would have loved that in AD&D, I rarely used MM because I was usually better off casting wall of stone or fire or lightning bolt when I needed something dead. I only cast fireball twice in 5 years. Blowing up the countryside and setting the whole forest on fire is not something you do as a lawful good noble court wizard, even an evoker. But in a dungeon...? oh wait, not even there. I cast it once in the desert against an advancing army, but it turned out they would become our allies and I had a lot of service to do to help make up for it.
So yeah, an at-will signature spell, maybe less spells per day, maybe some type of workable dynamic metamagic ala Arcana Unearthed rules (a cool system by Monte Cook, IMO), maybe spells of a certain level don't go up in damage unless you empower them, all these things together could really balance the wizard a bit and still allow us smart players, to play a class where our wits are not only needed, but essential for basic survival. You don't survive in a D&D world as a weakling, even with powerful magic, unless you are lucky, cunning, smart, and plan ahead.
