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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6511913" data-attributes="member: 42582">They're not defender spells because they don't involve standing in the middle of a melee scrum, taking on all comers. Which is more-or-less what "defender" means in 4e. (For more elaboration on the 4e roles, see my post above this one.)Arcane Lock is a defensive spell, in the sense that you can protect the party from attack by use of it. But it doesn't involve being a "defender" in the 4e sense of that role. In 4e Arcane Lock is a ritual, so available to a character of any class (but wizards, among others, start with the feat for free), but not able to be used in combat. There is a design reason for that, but it is orthogonal to the issue of role and rather goes to 4e's approach to scene-framing authority. (TL;DR - in 4e the GM has this, not the players.)Hold Person, Web and Evard's Black Tentacles are all control effects in D&D parlance, and all appear on the 4e wizard's spell list. A very respectable argument could be made that a 4e defender is really just a species of controller, but for legacy reasons the game draws a distinction between characters who exercise control by putting their own bodies on the line in melee, and those who don't. Hold Person, Web, and EBT don't involve the wizard putting his/her own body on the line.Wall of Force appears on the wizard's spell list in 4e - it is a control effect, not a defender one, for the same reasons as given in the previous paragraph. It is about degrading the enemy by controlling their position or, if used to surround them or box them in, by denying them actions.Burning Hands is an odd one. As a straight damage dealer, by default it should be considered a striker effect. But because of the D&D legacy of wizards being both artillery and non-hit point targeting condition-imposers, characters labelled "controller" in 4e also get some straight AoE damage. Burning Hands is an example of this.In other words, all the spells you named but one (Arcane Lock) appear on the 4e wizard spell list, who is labelled a controller, and all are, in 4e terms, control effects, with the arguable exception of Burning Hands which is grouped into the control category for the legacy reasons I've noted in this post and my post preceding it.Prestidigitation is also a wizard ability in 4e, so its use for purposes of controlling would be no great surprise to a 4e player.</blockquote>

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