D&D 5E What Level is the Wizard vs. the Fighter?

[Maxperson]

yeah becuse save or suck and save or die spells are ALWAYS bad choices... do we play the same game?

They aren't nearly as good in 5e and hey, every successful save, and there will be many, is a round you do nothing and the fighter does a lot more. Will you succeed sometimes? Yep. Won't surpass the fighter that way, though.

I mean it isn't in and of it self ALWAYs the best choice, but it and hold person are spells that are as useful at level 20 as at level 1

Hold Person is highly limited at level 20. The vast majority of your fights will be against non-humanoids, whereas a huge number of level 1 fights will be against humanoids.

yeah, becuse no one has ever shared a story of wish helping... (Btw the example I used was one I saw in a game I played... I was the cleric who got killed even though I had revivify raise and even true res able to be cast...but not on myself)

Once in a while it's useful. Most of the time it's just taking up a spell spot while you cast other things.

 

[Micah Sweet]

LOL, no please! They are my favorite caster class.

But, I am all for doing any or all of the following:

• Remove most damage causing spells so their focus isn't combat? (not joking )
• Force either a focus or a general. Focused casters get higher level spells faster, but can't do other things well if at all. General casters take longer to get higher level spells, but can do many things well, but not great.
• Stop cantrips from scaling after level 5, but allow all casters to add their spellcasting modifier to cantrip damage.

All of the things you want to change are reasons many other people love the wizard, so I don't think they are going to happen in the official game.

 

[Greggy C]

So, here's the question: You have a Fighter at level 1, level 10, and level 20. What level would you consider the fighter at those levels to be "equal" in power, shenanigans, or such to a wizard?

You have three votes. Please vote once for a Fighter 1, once for Fighter 10, and once for Fighter 20.

For example, you might consider a Fighter 1 equal to a Wizard 1, a Fighter 10 to a Wizard 7, and a Fighter 20 to a Wizard 12; so your votes would be 1, 7, and 12.

Thanks for voting!

You can test this running 100 fights instantly on dndcombat.com

 

[Micah Sweet]

Ah, the ocean campaign. As if getting the players into 8 fights wasn't hard enough, now it's 8 aquatic fights, which no one ever wants to do, but the DM really wants to use the cool monsters.

I don't level them that often, so it would really just me deleting wizards with extra steps.

While I strongly disagree with some of the more nuclear options being proposed, I do find it odd that WotC has never even tried to address the adventure day problem.

 

[Yaarel]

While I strongly disagree with some of the more nuclear options being proposed, I do find it odd that WotC has never even tried to address the adventure day problem.

The designers might be finetuning the adventure day solution now?

If all "short rests" become proficiency frequency per long rest, instead, then defining the "long rest" as a day, hour, or week, or per number of encounters, becomes even easier to do at each table.

 

[tetrasodium]

While I strongly disagree with some of the more nuclear options being proposed, I do find it odd that WotC has never even tried to address the adventure day problem.

It's an extremely difficult problem to untangle because different classes have different stockpiles & recovery rates with some of them literally having the same abilities (ie fireball from wizard/some clerics & bards/dragon sorc/warlock) on top of class abilities that are meant to be balanced against being a sometimes thing rather than almost all fights thing (rage/action surge/warlock slots). Fixing that requires an almost complete redesign as anything you touch will start a cascade of unintended consequences that spiral into untrackable levels with the addition of archetypes & multiclassing. the tweaks in xge/tcoe/etc so far are largely stuck in the idea that small incremental additions that don't really change much will fix things enough to make everyone ignore the rest of the problems if they can just check off specific rough edges. If 5.5 is still clinging to the same level of total compatibility I'm skeptical that they can with that either.

 

[Maxperson]

not a strawman... just not in responce to you... someone was saying that 4 attacks every round with 2 action surges per short rest would pull ahead over 6-8 encounters... so again this wasn't a 10th level fighter it was at least a 17th if not 20th level fighter

The fighter still pulls ahead with damage at 20th level, it's just not as far ahead as at mid levels. At 20th level you can get spells off in half the round of combat. Assuming save or suck spells and at DC of 19, 50%(or more depending on save stat) of those are going to be saved against by CR 20 creatures and never work at all, and half of the ones that are successful will only be successful for 1 round. So your wizard is only going to be useful in 8, not 16 of the 32 rounds of combat, and then for only 1 round in 4 of those 8 that actually work.

The fighter is going to be trucking along dishing out lots of damage in each round.

 

[Maxperson]

While I strongly disagree with some of the more nuclear options being proposed, I do find it odd that WotC has never even tried to address the adventure day problem.

I don't know how they could possibly address it. Since they fundamentally balanced the game around it, they'd have to redesign the fundamentals of the game to create a solution. That's pretty major and probably isn't going to happen before 6e.

 

[Zubatcarteira]

For a level 20 Fighter, if they're really optimized, then I'd say 16 Wizard at most. Once Wizard has True Polymorph and Wish at level 17, you just can't reasonably compete.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I don't know how they could possibly address it. Since they fundamentally balanced the game around it, they'd have to redesign the fundamentals of the game to create a solution. That's pretty major and probably isn't going to happen before 6e.

But that's my point. The adventuring day is not exclusively a 5e problem. Every WotC edition, and arguably every edition ever has suffered from it. And yet, no solutions have even been ventured, and they've never even really discussed it, even though fans must have brought to their attention at some point. Given their track record, why would it be any different in 6e?