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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GreyICE" data-source="post: 5857474" data-attributes="member: 6684526">I wanted to start this thread because I see too many people doing the false Wizard/Fighter dichotomy.  The fact of the matter is the Wizard is a pure Vancian construct.  Anything he does is within the Vancian framework.  That means he is limited until the framework goes strictly quadratic.The real design flaws of 3.5 were the Cleric and the Druid.  Both were full Vancian spellcasters with extra options.In the Cleric's case, that made him a melee combatant equal to the fighter as well as a caster who could stand nearly toe to toe with the Wizard.  The combination of Vancian class features with non-Vancian class features lead to a power growth that was beyond quadratic - the Cleric could do all those 'party helping' maneuvers on himself, growing his own power beyond any lesser ken.In the Druid's case, well, the ability to hijack any monster stat block as well as the weird stacking it provided, combined with buffs, broke open the game.  The animal companion was a nice little addon that ensured he was broken at all levels, but he was typically no better than cute about when Wildshape was really gaining its teeth (9-12 levels).  Sooooo... what's planned here?  I see full Vancian is back in for Clerics, and apparently this is melting down the design team (they've had about 5 polls in the forums asking what the iconic cleric is and whether or not it's a Priest, because they're clearly faced with making a Vancian caster with other features and flinching as hard as they can).  And they've straight out stated the Druid is up there with the Fighter in problem undesignable classes.As a side note, this is one of the reasons I hate full vancian systems.  You end up being able to do a very small number of things, and because that number is small, they have to be very powerful.  Then if you gain any other class features (so your standard action in combat isn't 'write bad poetry' inbetween breaking reality) you grow exponentially and break apart the system.  The only way to limit it appears to be to make the number of things you can do REALLY small (Factotem, Bard) which only leads to more frustration as you can once per day break apart the system and then you're basically useless, or you mete out your cool in painfully small increments (or if you're a Factotem, you run on proto-AEDU and thus sidestep the entire thing).  But we're apparently stuck with them, so what do people think they're doing with the Cleric/Druid?  Frankly I wouldn't be half surprised if the Druid resembled it's much more balanced 4E counterpart than it's broken and ridiculous 3E one, but the Cleric seems to have no 'make people happy' solution (besides adding a new core class, the Priest, that is a full Vancian caster, while the Cleric exists in some nether realm between a Paladin and a Priest).</blockquote>

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