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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aenghus" data-source="post: 5858209" data-attributes="member: 2656">I'm not a fan either of the eggshell armed with a hammer style "balance" of 1e and 2e wizards or potential uberpower of 3e spellcasters.I know spellcasters gravitate towards the most broken spells, because I've done it myself, and many other players do so as well. As more content is produced for a particular edition, players who look for them will put together the most broken spells, get as many of them as possible approved by their referee, then exploit the hell out of them, including any unintended synergy from  combinations of various spells.All editions of D&D have rewarded players of spellcasters for hunting down and using the most effective spells in their edition. These rewards were often disproportionately large compared to non-spellcasters, who had much less content to search, especially as magic item selection  was more of a referee perogative prior to 3e.As a referee, one of the biggest advantages of 4e was that there were very few broken powers or combinations, and the brokenness that existed tended to be far less than in previous editions. Amongst the advantages of weakening the link between mechanics and flavour text  in 4e was that the effect of powers was clear and  transparent and much less subjective than in previous editions, where some spells (eg illusions) varied widely in usefulness from group to group (from completely useless to a one-spell victory in some cases, for the same spell).In previous editions I avoided subjective-power spells in favour of more reliable ones, at least till I learned the tastes of a particular referee and found out how he ruled on illusions, polymorph etc.The problem with laying the responsibility on balance on spell designers alone, is that this is obviously too much to load on them - there will be broken spells regardless of the class design used, but the design rules used can mitigate how broken they can end up being, and reduce referee workload. The class design has to look at the issue and see what they can do to mitigate spellcasting classes being too strong  or too weak. Personally I would prefer more specialised spellcasters such as enchanters, illusionists and evokers, with powerful magic in their own speciality but more limited access to general magic,. This gives spellcasters strengths and weaknesses that aren't catastrophic in nature, and that play better as members of an adventuring party.</blockquote>

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