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

[DND_Reborn]

In a word "cantrips", but it's the thought process & priorities that created them as is. I think it will take an MMO analogy to distill that huge collection of mechanics that down though.

Take your average MMO, you've got tanks, strikers/glass cannons/dps, healers, controllers, & various hybrids of those. Somewhere in there is a mix of things like buffing &/debuffing (usually split between healers & controllers). Those groups break down further though you've got tanks & you've got tanks that are good enough to remember by name & check with when you need a tank... You've got controllers & controllers you remember by name to check with when you need one.... It goes like that so on & so forth down the line until you get to group two... Group two are people you remember by name & consider leaving groups that contain them... That's where you hit the DPS who can't manage their aggo the healers who don't know how to juggle cooldowns, the controllers who don't know how & when to use their skills vrs pointless "nukes", so on down the line. 5e has too many elements that play out like someone did a focus group among group 2 & decided their needs were what the other group was really desperate for too. Unfortunately wizards as a class were decimated by the results & they were given pointless nukes they never wanted to make up for the hash made of their party role when someone tried to make them into pointless dps. For the last 8 years there's been a lot of catering towards trying to make wizards appeal to group2 but I'm not sure anyone at wotc cares what people who enjoyed playing wizards(group1 analog) need or want because group2 is huge.

FWIW I appreciate your response but having never played MMOs or anything like this, you've lost me a bit.

In short, it sounds like group 1 are players who know how to use and manage their features and group 2 doesn't--or am I missing something?

In 4E my invoker had a spell called Walls of Hestavar that gave you ten spaces worth of wall that you could place, and which was roughly equivalent to Wall of Stone. It trivialized encounters fairly often because it locked creatures in place, blocked their line of sight, prevented them from entering or leaving, etc. AND it provided travel utility.

So, this falls under the spells too powerful issue in the OP then. While not 5E, thanks for a concrete example.

As to why Leomund's Super Dimensional Fortress is so good now; I got nothing. I used to love the spell, now I hate it, because I've had to deal with so many abuses concerning it's use in 5e, and the truly inane "rulings" made regarding it.

Yeah, we nerfed it. I have no clue why WotC made it so powerful in 5E other than the "let's make 5E easy mode" design choice.

 

[Incenjucar]

Heck thinking back to 2E, there's the time my ninja carefully went around an enemy camp replacing water in water skins with lamp oil, gathering wood in certain spots, and then finally starting a fire and bolting, half-dead because stealth didn't go perfectly well. And then the wizard did web+fireball and did significantly more damage anyway.

 

[James Gasik]

Heck thinking back to 2E, there's the time my ninja carefully went around an enemy camp replacing water in water skins with lamp oil, gathering wood in certain spots, and then finally starting a fire and bolting, half-dead because stealth didn't go perfectly well. And then the wizard did web+fireball and did significantly more damage anyway.

I mean, that's what it comes down to. What you can do with normal tactics takes time and is hard; what a spellcaster can do by using a spell slot can often be done in zeptoseconds and is more efficient. It really does feel sometimes like there are two different paradigms of play going on.

 

[Zubatcarteira]

For an example, I play on a westmarch with a fair amount of high level play, and my Wizard hit level 17 recently. He got Wish and True Polymorph and immediately he got the ability to turn his Simulacrum into a Ki-Rin, which is a level 18 Cleric that can cast True Resurrection even. That sort of thing is just silly, and the amount of shenanigans you can pull off with access to monsters CR 20 and below can be crazy.

 

[DND_Reborn]

But ok, real play example.

We were fighting a demon that had been summoned by some cultists. Now, the demon was quite powerful for our level, but if we could get to this altar and destroy it, we could banish it for good. The problem, of course, was the demon itself was doing a great job of preventing us from getting there.

We spent many combat rounds barely surviving, with the Cleric doing their level best to keep us from falling. I actually started to think we might even win after I got a good critical hit in.

Then the Wizard said "aha, I got it!" and suddenly (courtesy of a failed Dex save), the demon was trapped in a resilient sphere, so all we needed to do was casually stroll up to the altar and destroy it, exiling the demon.

In that moment, I felt like all our efforts had been for nothing. The damage we took, the damage we dealt, the whole battle, and in the end, one low roll and poof, it was all over.

The more I thought about it, the problem wasn't the spell. It certainly seemed like an indestructible sphere of force was the kind of thing magic should be able to do. It was more how very little of the best spells the Wizard has care one iota about what the rest of the party is doing. One spell can turn a battle into a mopping up operation, where you're just finishing off foes that are technically alive, but no longer any threat.

Or worse, there's nothing even left to stab!

If more spells worked like sleep, color spray, or the various power words, it wouldn't feel like the Wizard is on an entirely different battlefield, I think.

The revelation I finally had, however, was not that the spell was unreasonable compared to the rest of the spells in the game- but that someone had decided this was something magic could do long ago, and that had never really been challenged.

There really isn't anything wrong with the spell, but with the set-up in combination. The DM offered destroying the altar as a way to defeat the demon, so trapping the demon became the solution instead of actually fighting the demon.

Normally, the point of the spell is to secure a creature, but you can't harm it either. That is why the spell became what it did, the DM set it up probably without realizing what kind of blowback there might be. The spell basically became a Save or Die for the demon...

And attempts to reign in magic, as I said before, are usually met, not with "hey great, balanced magic", but people feeling like Clerics and Wizards no longer feel like the miracle workers they feel they should be. And you can't bring Fighters and Rogues up to their level, because they the complaint is they feel "too magical", "ungrounded", and "unbelievable" (see The Book of Nine Swords or 4th edition).

Yep, it is a definite issue, but one I (personally) find unique to 5E. In BECMI and AD&D it was never an issue--so I really don't know what has changed that made it one.

 

[DND_Reborn]

I mean, that's what it comes down to. What you can do with normal tactics takes time and is hard; what a spellcaster can do by using a spell slot can often be done in zeptoseconds and is more efficient. It really does feel sometimes like there are two different paradigms of play going on.

This sort of thing comes down to at-will vs. limited resources. And in 5E, classic spells like fireball and sleep aren't nearly as effective as they were in AD&D unless you are using them against mooks, in which case they are overkill typically.

I've had thief/assassins infiltrate campsites and kill everyone in them by stealth... something the group caster would have had a hard time doing. Even in 5E our rogue (assassin) took out all the guards in a maze leading our group to the center unmolested, something the caster could never have done.

 

[Incenjucar]

A big issue with magic in contemporary D&D in general is that magic is generally rapid combat magic or slow out-of-combat magic. A lot of spells would be a lot better if they took multiple rounds and the spellcaster NEEDED their allies to make them work, making it a powerful group effort instead of a powerful individual effort.

 

[tetrasodium]

FWIW I appreciate your response but having never played MMOs or anything like this, you've lost me a bit.

In short, it sounds like group 1 are players who know how to use and manage their features and group 2 doesn't--or am I missing something?

yes and no, group1 likes what their class does & wants to use it for what their class excels at (which requires inderstanding). Group2 is trying to be something else (like the star rather than part of a group). Cantrips eat up too much of the power budget & other changes like enshrining wackamole healing of near immortal PCs as good & desirable or the overuse of concentration squeezes out reasons for why it was important. You can see that in the scorn oozing for the 3.5 glass cannon wizard role here yet 5e tries hard to push casters (wizards included) towards blasting with how it treats "iconic" spells.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

Everything after your first sentence is...a denial of said first sentence. Arcane Recovery + being able to acquire extra spells + the best and most diverse Ritual Casting options = significant excess of power with reduced restrictions. That's pretty much definitionally a problematic design.

More that the issue is the fundamental systems of what spells themselves can do. I feel that all casters have this issue to some extent, it is just more prevalent in the Wizard because they get to use more spells.

I agree. Do you think shifting some of the versatility away from wizards to other spellcasters would help?

While Wizards are "Best at Spells", I've argued other spellcasters have additional features (Channel Divinity, Wild Shape, Metamagic, Inspiration, Invocations, etc.), so wizards have superior ritual casting as their "additional feature". Do you think that is an adequate reason for their being Best at Spells, since they have nothing else?

Arcane recovery is most definitely not "nothing else".

With casters such as Clerics, Bards and Druids, they get good non-spell features, but there is a strong assumption that a decent proportion of their spells will have to be used to heal the group. It is quite rare that any of those extra features compete with the extra spells that the wizard gets instead.

 

[Staffan]

The biggest problem I have with the wizard is that they can do All The Magic. Not each individual wizard, but if it's something you can do with magic, the wizard can probably do it (except healing). This eats up humongous amount of design space that could instead be used for more narrow casters, ideally with good theming. For example, I'm fairly certain that one of the reasons they haven't given us a proper psion for 5e is that there's pretty much nothing you could do with a psion that you couldn't do with a wizard, and now that wizards have neo-Vancian casting that doesn't really give power points much of an advantage.

Come to think of it, I think the 3.5e psion is a pretty good model for a genericish caster. There's a central list of powers that all psions have access to, but the juicy stuff is exclusive to psions focusing on that discipline. For example, any psion can learn energy bolt (the equivalent of lightning bolt, but any energy type), but only kineticists can learn energy ball (same for fireball). Any psion can learn various mind-effery like cloud mind, mental disruption, or mindwipe, but only telepaths can delve into proper mind control like charm or dominate, or read someone's mind with read thoughts.