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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7157297" data-attributes="member: 996">That's an interesting contrast, actually, and illustrates the different scopes of imbalance. The 3.x wizard was Tier 1, able to dominate in virtually any challenge, and the classes in general were profoundly imbalanced, spread over 6 tiers. It was too deep and pervasive a thing to fix with a few house rules or errata, even had the prevailing zietgeist been open to such.In cintrast, the 4e classes were robustly balanced from basic design up, and the wizard, though arguably at the top of the heap, stii, was atop a relatively flat heap.  Rather, the novel save mechanic had initial bugs that could have done with some more playtesting.  One spell, one class feature, a feat & item all stressing that one weakness, and you had a broken combo...Ironically, in spite of the 'orbizard' being possible in a basic form at release, the 4e wizard was decried as having been nerfed into the ground.... ... of course, it had been nerfed relative to 3.5 (and would have to be considered so relative to 5e), it was just still pretty breakable.  Other good examples of imbalances from early 4e were blade cascade and the fey charger build.  Both also 'updated' back into line fairly quickly.An interesting difference among WotC editions has been the attitude towards errata.  3.x released errata slowly, and 3 5 was very nearly a bundle if much-needed errata you had to pay for.  There was also an attitude in the RAW-obsessed community that errata was both an admission of failure and an unwarranted nerf of legitimate RAW builds, to which players were entitled.  3.x also never fixed combos that might be deemed broken in any other ed, perhaps because they were intentional 'rewards for system mastery.'  4e cynically called errata 'updates' I suppose out of fear of that stigma, but was quick to issue them to fix balance and mechanical problems. 5e barely issues errata, at all - The DM is empowered to fix any system issue they can, and expected to change/overrule things as a matter of course, anyway.I suppose you could say that 3.x was committed to imbalance, 4e committed to balance, and 5e just has a fear of commitment...<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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