D&D 5E What is REALLY wrong with the Wizard? (+)

[DND_Reborn]

It is a spell that is one the Wizard spell list but not on clerics. The cleric only got it through their domain. So yes, it is a problem for all wizards (and the few clerics that also get the spell).

You may respond that the problem is the spell itself. But it isn’t one spell, it’s spell after spell after spell, and most of them are on the wizard’s spell list, some exclusively.

• Find familiar,
• LTH,
• Simulcrum,
• Wish
• Hypnotic Pattern
• Forcecage
• Wall of Force
• True Polymorph

Then all this falls under either "Spells are too powerful" or "Too Large a Spell List"...

But again, many of these aren't exclusive to wizards. Only three of your examples (Find Familiar, Simulacrum, Wall of Force) are for Wizards only. So, really, more of the "Spells are too powerful" issue probably.

If it isn’t that powerful, why isn’t it available to the classes that are supposed to be the best at buffing? Why is it that the wizard has to be the best class at debuffing, multi target damage, with extremely powerful buffing starting at first level, great scouting, and great utility?

They aren't. That is just one type of buffing. And many other classes have access to the same spells. You seem to be singling out Wizards, when it isn't the class so much as the spells in the game.

Plus more wizard spells being overpowered. Plus every splatbook that comes out adds spells to the wizard’s list, and just a couple to other lists.

Take Tasha’s and compare how many new spells wizards got compared to sorcerers.

Again, not just Wizard spells. Perhaps more that Wizards have too much access to these spells? So, the "Too Large a Spell List" issue.

So, looking at Tasha's, since you brought it up. Here is the count of the spells in Tasha's and how many classes have access to each spell. No spell is exclusive to a single class.

Artificer: 6
Bard: 2
Cleric: 2
Druid: 3
Paladin: 2
Ranger: 3
Sorcerer: 10
Warlock: 15
Wizard: 18

So, Wizard's get more, certainly, but Warlock's aren't far behind. And Sorcerer's, although nearly half of Wizard's, are still third.

But, if you continue to look into Tasha's, Sorcerers gain two more Metamagic options as well as a new class feature, Warlocks gain an entirely new Patron as well as 8 new Invocations, while Wizards gained... "cantrip versatility." Their "thing" is access to a lot of spells since they get nothing else. (FWIW, I am not saying they don't have too much, but that is all they have...)

Having very few spells and having to pick spells carefully is a big part of that.

Off set by having Metamagic--which Wizards don't have (Wizards have ritual casting, which is certainly useful, but not to the point of metamagic IMO). If you want to look at class balance, you have to examine all the features the class has, not just part of it.

So, how does responding “that isn’t a wizard issue” advance that goal?

Because it is identifying that it isn't a Wizard issue (or more so perhaps "not just..."). It the issue truly the class or spells in general?

Like above for the Jester example with Polymorph. I mean, you know that Polymorph isn’t on the cleric’s general spell list but is on the wizard’s. So, this is clearly an issue that affects wizards more than other spellcasters.

No, polymorph is just on the Bard, Druid, and Sorcerer list as well. Any of those classes could cast polymorph and do the same thing. Not really a Wizard issue as much a general spellcaster issue, or again goes back to the "Too Large a Spell List" issue.

Are you trying to support my point?

Again, playing Devil's Advocate.

How about these (which don't require rolling either):

• Barbarian: Fast Movement
• Bard: Jack of All Trades, Song of Rest
• Druid: Wild Shape
• Monk: Too many to bother with...
• Paladin: Divine Sense (and others)
• Ranger: Natural Explorer
• Sorcerer: Font of Magic
• Warlock: Invocations

That's why we need the check though - to determine what happens. Rather it fiat always working 100%. The current result should be like a clean success.

But no check to play a Song of Rest, change via Wild Shape, detect via Divine Sense, etc.?

In general, yes, as with most other utilities that require a roll.

But they don't, do they? (Other than skill checks as we've already covered)

I'm not talking about some kind of old-school "spellcasting check" this is a Fantasy Heartbreaker from the 1980s.

Which (again) people advocate for in recent years as a way to balance out Wizards (in particular).

 

[tetrasodium]

I literally said that every other spellcaster is also unbalanced, just to a lesser degree than Wizard: "some of them aren't especially great for balance either." Further, I didn't even say that Bard was balanced, just that it was closest. That cannot be true if one thinks that Wizard is the only class with problems. And, per my previous email post, I expressly said that the problem lies with Vancian spellcasting, and Wizard is simply the class that actively avoids any of the tools one might use to fix the faults of Vancian spellcasting.


I disagree. There are numerous situations where the Wizard does not simply enable others to finish the job--where they can single-handedly defeat most or even all of an encounter with the right choice of 1-2 spells. Once you get past the very earliest levels, spending 1-2 spells on an encounter is a perfectly normal cost for the Wizard. Even if you somehow manage to actually reach 6-8 encounters a day, despite that being stupidly over-long compared to what most players are actually interested in doing and most DMs are actually desiring to run, that's still ~9-12 spells a day, something the Wizard can always achieve by level 7 counting Arcane Recovery (or 9 without it.)

This isn't unfixable. There are ways to address it. The problem lies with folks who refuse to permit the possibility of a Wizard that isn't omni-flexible, totally focused on Spells And Only Spells, and generally having the most powerful and diverse selection of spells in the game with the ability to eventually have Cleric-like spellcasting with a lenient DM (once you learn all the worthwhile spells of a given level, you have effectively paid money, otherwise mostly worthless for a Wizard, to get the Cleric "you can memorize any spell on your list" feature.)


The problem is, you need something that consistently provides a stick, not just a carrot, for spellcasters who blow their load ASAP. 5e simply does not have a mechanic that can do this, so the DM is forced to use fiat and framing, and repetitious uses of the same forms of fiat and framing gets old really fast. This encourages the development of a DM/player arms race, where caster players look for ways to maximize their ability to reject "soft" restrictions and leverage the social contract to oppose "hard" restrictions, while DMs must escalate to ever-greater threats and ever-sharper demands in order to push things back toward equilibrium.

And, of course, the usual proposal for how to introduce this "the mechanics need a stick" thing is to make spellcasting horrifically awful, e.g. "madness" mechanics or "casting spells can literally just straight-up kill you every single time," which is simply not going to fly with the average consumer. Such brutal "survival game" mechanics are great for niche settings/campaign concepts or opt-in game modes, but cannot and will not work for everyday players, especially not in this brave new post-podcast world where many new D&D players come to it wanting something closer to a serialized narrative and not at all like a "mercenary company" where the brand is more important than the people.


I have been explicit in my criticism of 3e for a very, very long time at this point, saying almost exactly what you've said here. On another forum, I phrased it as, "4-6 solo adventurers who happen to adventure in the same place at the same time." This was very specifically why I had such issues with 5e's design during the Next Playtest. I explicitly and repeatedly called this out as a likely problem, and was almost universally dismissed.

Being Cassandra is not fun.

That bold bit is the problem, You are trying to exclude a bunch of classes from a system problem that uplifts all classes to the point of being able to solo near each other rather than working as a team or failing as a team. That's not a caster specific problem, it's a 5e problem. Since the primary role for wizards was & still kind of is being the grease that makes everything work together smoothly as a team with better efficiency & results it is impacted to a greater degree by 5e deemphasizing the team aspects.

Posting about how the wizard "can single-handedly defeat most or even all of an encounter with the right choice of 1-2 spells" as a problem while ignoring that the reason they can do that is due to everyone being able to do it while no longer needing the wizard to fill some other team enhancing role. is a pretty serious bit of tunnelvision. I made a post about changes to web earlier in the thread that goes into how that shift away from a team game to soloing near each other took away the extreme values present in a mechanically weaker web in a way that made it pointlessly strong while still not making it important as another example.

edit: The shift in skills is not simply a cassandra thing, there were meaningful reasons why knowing something or not made a big difference in a fight & now it just doesn't matter because those things don't really matter.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

How about these (which don't require rolling either):

• Barbarian: Fast Movement
• Bard: Jack of All Trades, Song of Rest
• Druid: Wild Shape
• Monk: Too many to bother with...
• Paladin: Divine Sense (and others)
• Ranger: Natural Explorer
• Sorcerer: Font of Magic
• Warlock: Invocations

So to save us time I just put strike-throughs on the ones that are either:

A) Obviously not utility abilities. Come on.

B) Involve rolling, which is whole point.

C) Are effectively or literally spellcasting, and where that's utility, we're already advocating a check.

So the only ones I think might need looking at are Wild Shape and Divine Sense. As someone who plays a lot of Druids, I feel like Wild Shape might benefit from some kind of check, but that's a whole other in-depth discussion. I think forcing people to choose a very limited number of forms (like, say, Proficiency Bonus) that they can "auto" turn into, and forcing a check on others would be reasonable. I could kind of see Natural Explorer's climb speed, but I feel like that's more of a discussion of whether climb/swim speeds in general should work as well as they do in D&D (and would also apply to Spider Climb). I'd personally say all climb-speed people should have to make checks. Even mountain goats fall off mountains, and geckos off trees - hell, and spiders too - I've seen spiders fall off stuff! But that'd be a fundamental rules-change to climbing speed rules.

Divine Sense should some kind of check, sure. I think it has been in the past maybe?

Also, dude, you're saying "Devil's advocate", but you're pushing dangerously close to "actually just trolling in kind of a lazy way" with some of these examples. You definitely know what a utility ability is. You definitely know most of these aren't that in any meaningful sense. The benefit of Devil's advocate" is when you manage to pull out examples that are interesting, like how you got me to talk about healing.

But maybe check yourself before you wreck yourself? Because when stick in a bunch of lazy, silly stuff like Song of Rest (a healing ability, not a utility one, we've already discussed that difference), it's grating and makes me want to dismiss you as not acting in good faith, and rather sealioning/time-wasting. I don't think you actually are, but maybe take a little more thought/care?*

(Equally Jack of all Trades, that's a small numerical bonus to a ROLL. So you're already ROLLING the dice. There's already risk. Sheesh JoaT gets Bards into trouble plenty because they try stuff they're unlikely to succeed at lol.)

* = I am aware that this is a somewhat hypocritical position for me to take generally but you're the one being Devil's advocate, so I get to moan about it this time!

 

[DND_Reborn]

So to save us time I just put strike-throughs on the ones that are either:

A) Obviously not utility abilities. Come on.

You definitely know what a utility ability is. You definitely know most of these aren't that in any meaningful sense.

I think the issue is we have VERY different ideas of what utility abilities are. I think all the previous examples you hand-waved away ARE utilities.

Can a Wizard increase his speed as a class feature? He has longstrider perhaps, but why roll for it when the Barbarian can do it all the time without a roll?

Can a Wizard gain a bonus (even a small one) to non-proficient skills, tools, etc. like Bard? Perhaps enhance ability or skill empowerment but again, the Wizard is already rolling also when he makes the check, so why roll for the spell when the Bard doesn't have to roll for JoAT?

Can a Wizard ignore difficult terrain in certain terrains like a Ranger? The Ranger doesn't have to roll to grant that ability to his entire party, nor does he have to check to avoid getting lost, etc. Why should the Wizard for using a spell (a limited resource) to do the same thing?

Can a Wizard pull on a reserve of magic as a bonus action to gain more spell slots at need like a Sorcerer? No roll is needed by the Sorcerer to exchange those slots--no chance of failing that.

Can a Wizard see in magical darkness up to 120 feet like a Warlock? Should the Wizard need to roll to cast darkvision or truesight when the Warlock has devil's sight all the time?

But maybe check yourself before you wreck yourself? Because when stick in a bunch of lazy, silly stuff like Song of Rest (a healing ability, not a utility one, we've already discussed that difference), it's grating and makes me want to dismiss you as not acting in good faith, and rather sealioning/time-wasting. I don't think you actually are, but maybe take a little more thought/care?*

So, you hand-wave away my examples and then accuse me sticking in a bunch of lazy, silly examples? I have not done anything that would indicate I am making this discussion in anything other than good faith. I'm glad you don't think I'm actually not, because I'm not. And frankly I think there was adequate thought/care put into my responses.

EDIT: Here's another one I just thought of (not utility, but still....): Does a PC proficient in heavy armor have to make a roll to be sure it was put on properly so they gain the full AC value? If not, then why should a Wizard have to roll to successfully cast mage armor?

 

[Redwizard007]

I've seen a different problem from OP. Wizards as blasters. Sounds cool, right? Unoptimized as hell, but fun for a certain type of player. "Let's rain fire and death on our enemies, defile the corpses in search of exotic spell components, and bathe in the blood of their animal companions." Great, you made Conan the Evoker. Except, the wizard isn't really a great blaster, and no matter how many times you suggest they play a sorcerer or even a warlock or light cleric, all they want is to be a wizard. Then they get frustrated when the warlock is knocking monsters off bridges, or the sorcerer is quickening fireball and following it up with a cantrip.

 

[DND_Reborn]

I've seen a different problem from OP. Wizards as blasters. Sounds cool, right? Unoptimized as hell, but fun for a certain type of player. "Let's rain fire and death on our enemies, defile the corpses in search of exotic spell components, and bathe in the blood of their animal companions." Great, you made Conan the Evoker. Except, the wizard isn't really a great blaster, and no matter how many times you suggest they play a sorcerer or even a warlock or light cleric, all they want is to be a wizard. Then they get frustrated when the warlock is knocking monsters off bridges, or the sorcerer is quickening fireball and following it up with a cantrip.

So your issue is Wizards aren't as good as the others at blasting stuff? Or is it the misconception some players have about how Wizards differ from Sorcerers or Warlocks, etc?

Or is it something else?

 

[renbot]

I'd like to see wizard cantrips with signifcantly lower damage but with more interesting effects.

I was just going to say this. If one agrees with the martial/caster power gap concern (and not everyone does), having more "combat" cantrips that briefly hinder an opponent (or briefly enhance a teammate, but let's put a pin in that for now because I would like to see clerics get those) allows the wizard to contribute and sets the martials up to bring the hammer (your melee weapon might vary) down. Current design seems to think that cantrips have to do damage AND hinder an opponent (or just do more damage). Why not just hinder in more interesting ways?

 

[Pedantic]

I want to throw in quickly, as a counterproposal to the "run everything through the skill system" idea that we've gotten to, right on time as usual in these discussions: skill checks, particularly in 5e, are generally low agency and not a particularly fun resolution system. They're mostly reactive, in that, as a player you often don't get to decide to roll a check or which check, you instead have to roll one in response to an event as it unfolds, and generally offer basically no ability to modify your chance of success.

Because 5e lacks specified DCs, you can't really try to maneuver the task you're dealing with to angle for benefit (i.e. spotting that it's easier to climb the stone walls than open the gate's lock); because of bounded accuracy you often do have party members with meaningfully differentiated skills, and almost no one outside of some specific expertise builds gets to escape the RNG and ever reach a level of assumed competence, where they can take declarative actions.

While we can argue about the distribution and timing of spell effects (it's weird that one class gets all of them, and that half the classes get none, and not a lot of thought has gone into when specific classes of utility magic come online), I don't think removing the spellcasting gameplay loop is a good solution. If anything, I should think we'd want to go the opposite way, and give other classes some way to do stuff without resorting to the skill system or put declarative effects into the skill systems from the ground up and make those classes good at using them.

Here's a think I wrote elsewhere in more detail explicating this using lockpicking as an example.

Spoiler: Lengthy Discussion of Picking Locks

"Open a locked thing" is a pretty discrete ability in and of itself. Maybe you add a few levels of locked (average house vs. secure building vs. vault), but really, the ability to unlock a locked door without breaking it is a pretty specific problem solving power. Assuming we have some kind of take 10/take 20 rules and making an arbitrary assumption about the difficulty of level appropriate DCs, we can write the mundane/magical versions of that ability out something like this.

Mundane:

1. 1 Action: 50% chance to unlock a locked thing.
2. 10-20 Actions: Guarantee of opening a locked thing.

Magical:

1. 1 Action, 1 Resource Point: Guarantee of opening a locked thing under pressure.

The struggle is that these two systems are playing entirely different games, and the underlying design of those games are fundamentally not the same. The magic player is trying to assign limit resources to overcome a series of problems. The underlying incentive is to use those resources as efficiently as possible, and to attempt to shape the emergent situation so that the problems you face don't exceed your resources. The mundane player might be managing time as a resource, but has limited control because the outcome of their choices is random. Mundane play often isn't actually making decisions and just reacting passively to the game state, or worse, because of differences in action resolution (e.g. stealth can add exponential danger, persuasion has limited risk) means that when problems have multiple solutions, the optimization problem is trivial and unbalanced toward particular approaches.

Worse, the mundane game exists alongside the magic one, and is mostly only invoked as a fail state to the magic game. If the magic player hasn't managed the resource expenditure problem perfectly (they didn't prepare Knock, or ran out of slots, etc.) then we invoke the mundane game. It's definitely a problem that using spells to conquer obstacles is often better than using mundane approaches, but that doesn't mean the fundamental game mundane skills represent is actually very good.

The tl;dr for all that though is that if you focus on just the gameplay loop, the thing where you picks spells and then look for opportunities to spend them to get what you want, is a more engaging game than rolling skills. I would contend we should be moving all classes to a place where they have specified declarative abilities that just do whatever the action says they do, not making spells more closely resemble skill checks. Utility magic points more to a problem with the fighter and rogue than the wizard.

 

[Redwizard007]

So your issue is Wizards aren't as good as the others at blasting stuff? Or is it the misconception some players have about how Wizards differ from Sorcerers or Warlocks, etc?

Or is it something else?

I could have been clearer. The problem is misconceptions.

Since the whole interweb says that wizards are the best, that they must be the best at everything, and when players find out differently, they can feel cheated. It's not a class problem, or even a player problem, as much as it is a reading comprehension and/or critical thinking problem.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I think the issue is we have VERY different ideas of what utility abilities are. I think all the previous examples you hand-waved away ARE utilities.

Can a Wizard increase his speed as a class feature? He has longstrider perhaps, but why roll for it when the Barbarian can do it all the time without a roll?

Can a Wizard gain a bonus (even a small one) to non-proficient skills, tools, etc. like Bard? Perhaps enhance ability or skill empowerment but again, the Wizard is already rolling also when he makes the check, so why roll for the spell when the Bard doesn't have to roll for JoAT?

Can a Wizard ignore difficult terrain in certain terrains like a Ranger? The Ranger doesn't have to roll to grant that ability to his entire party, nor does he have to check to avoid getting lost, etc. Why should the Wizard for using a spell (a limited resource) to do the same thing?

Can a Wizard pull on a reserve of magic as a bonus action to gain more spell slots at need like a Sorcerer? No roll is needed by the Sorcerer to exchange those slots--no chance of failing that.

Can a Wizard see in magical darkness up to 120 feet like a Warlock? Should the Wizard need to roll to cast darkvision or truesight when the Warlock has devil's sight all the time?


So, you hand-wave away my examples and then accuse me sticking in a bunch of lazy, silly examples? I have not done anything that would indicate I am making this discussion in anything other than good faith. I'm glad you don't think I'm actually not, because I'm not. And frankly I think there was adequate thought/care put into my responses.

EDIT: Here's another one I just thought of (not utility, but still....): Does a PC proficient in heavy armor have to make a roll to be sure it was put on properly so they gain the full AC value? If not, then why should a Wizard have to roll to successfully cast mage armor?

Okay, so this looks a lot more like bad faith to me, given your last example - you know that's not a utility spell, you even admit it, so why the heck are you asking me about it? Honestly, unless you can explain that cogently, you've gone beyond the bounds of Devil's Advocate. Don't ask me about stuff we both know is outside the definition. That's just time-wasting at best, and trolling at worst.

But I'll quickly do your examples so you can't complain:

1) Speed - AS I SAID EARLIER, movement rules are a whole other kettle of fish. That's a separate discussion. Neither should roll.

2) Dice bonuses - FOR THE THIRD TIME, YOU'RE ALREADY ROLLING DICE YOU DON'T NEED TO ROLL MORE. I'm sorry for the caps but how is this hard for you? A bonus to a roll is DEFINITIONALLY not the same as a fiat ability. Come on.

3) Is that what Natural Explorer does? I thought it was the climb speed thing. Interesting because it sounds like a very rare example of a non-magical fiat ability. Probably they should roll though, at least in some situations.

4) Spell slots - Obviously this isn't a utility ability, obviously outside the discussion, cannot take that serious. That's just a mechanical balance benefit and you know it.

5) Vision - This grants an ability, but it's not really fiat, because just like everyone with Darkvision, you're still going to have to make checks, a lot of them at Disadvantage.

And you're confusing "hand-waving" without "obviously outside the scope". I'm suggesting non-combat spells that don't currently involve checks at all, that just give a fiat effect, should involve checks. I'm suggesting we exclude healing (solely because adding checks causes complication and necessary rebalancing with no benefit), movement (solely because it's a separate issue - I think checks to moving with climb speed would be a good idea), and certainly stuff that just grants basic vision some PC races have anyway, because all that does is let you make more checks, essentially. The risk is built-in. Bonuses are already excluded by definition, and I shouldn't have to clarify that.

It seems like you're fixated on this idea that I want "spellcasting checks", but I dismissed that several posts ago.