D&D 5E Why does Wizards of the Coast hate Wizards?

[tetrasodium]

@Leatherhead − good point

The most popular choice of subclass for a Wizard character is:
• Spellsinger 14%
• War Magic 14%
• Evocation 13%
• [probably Divination circa 12% because Portent for combat]

This suggests that the golden majority of Wizard players are frustrated with the Wizard class, and seeking options elsewhere.

The main dissatisfaction with the Wizard class for Wizard players, appears to be, the lack of combat survivability and the lack of damage dealing.

I disagree on the bolded bit. I think that players who go into wizard know that they will be squishies, compared to 3.5 wizards they are downright hardy. The damage dealing isn't really the prime problem though IMO. If you look at any wizard guide going back to 3.5 you will see terms like Batman/god, controller, summoner, blaster, & maybe a few others. The Wizard was never really top notch at blaster (sorc beat them handsdown & had a better toolbox). Summoner was always a divine caster wearing the crown. Controller fits many classes situationally & can be ignored. The God wizard was like batman & has two or three prime duties in the group, allowing everyone around them to be even more awesome, making opponents less awesome against the wizard's allies, and having the tool the party needs now (or at least "after we rest so i can change my prepped spells") in their toolbox.

Say what you will about the pros & cons of concentration, it unquestionably removes much of the wizard's ability to act as a force multiplier & make the party awesome unless you are a sorc with twin spell. That leaves the flexibility of having a spellbook and ritual spells. The scorlock could pretty much rival a wizard's capability of having everything in their back pocket if we can wait for tomorrow without needing to rest & reprep spells; but scorlock does it without needing to really sacrifice much, without needing to sink amounts of money that make equipping an all strength based heavy armor party look modest into scribing spells while gaining a bunch of multiplicative power bumps... with these new abilities sorcerer & warlock both gain the ability to have the spell tomorrow and don't need to invest the gdp of nations into a spellbook.

Finally you have the wizard's ability to ritually cast spells scribed in their spellbook without needing to have them prepared... This is great and all, but there are a total of nine ritual spells level 4-9 & only 6 of them are on the wizard list but tome pact warlock could already have all nine. Moon druid faces a similar problem as a wizard who thought ritual casting was important with cr3+ beasts being either too big for much use or mistyped as monstrosities.

Wizards used to get bonus feats, but now not only are they not feats at all... they are almost all warlock invocations & warlocks get them exactly like wizards got bonus feats.

In short, the UA completes the cycle of giving scorlock the "meat & potatoes" of the wizard class & wizards never really got a new bone to support their table as the legs were slowly given to scorlock.

edit: There is also the role of skills & sidelining of int as a meaningful stat while elevating charisma

 

[Son of the Serpent]

I disagree on the bolded bit. I think that players who go into wizard know that they will be squishies, compared to 3.5 wizards they are downright hardy. The damage dealing isn't really the prime problem though IMO. If you look at any wizard guide going back to 3.5 you will see terms like Batman/god, controller, summoner, blaster, & maybe a few others. The Wizard was never really top notch at blaster (sorc beat them handsdown & had a better toolbox). Summoner was always a divine caster wearing the crown. Controller fits many classes situationally & can be ignored. The God wizard was like batman & has two or three prime duties in the group, allowing everyone around them to be even more awesome, making opponents less awesome against the wizard's allies, and having the tool the party needs now (or at least "after we rest so i can change my prepped spells") in their toolbox.

Say what you will about the pros & cons of concentration, it unquestionably removes much of the wizard's ability to act as a force multiplier & make the party awesome unless you are a sorc with twin spell. That leaves the flexibility of having a spellbook and ritual spells. The scorlock could pretty much rival a wizard's capability of having everything in their back pocket if we can wait for tomorrow without needing to rest & reprep spells; but scorlock does it without needing to really sacrifice much, without needing to sink amounts of money that make equipping an all strength based heavy armor party look modest into scribing spells while gaining a bunch of multiplicative power bumps... with these new abilities sorcerer & warlock both gain the ability to have the spell tomorrow and don't need to invest the gdp of nations into a spellbook.

Finally you have the wizard's ability to ritually cast spells scribed in their spellbook without needing to have them prepared... This is great and all, but there are a total of nine ritual spells level 4-9 & only 6 of them are on the wizard list but tome pact warlock could already have all nine. Moon druid faces a similar problem as a wizard who thought ritual casting was important with cr3+ beasts being either too big for much use or mistyped as monstrosities.

Wizards used to get bonus feats, but now not only are they not feats at all... they are almost all warlock invocations & warlocks get them exactly like wizards got bonus feats.

In short, the UA completes the cycle of giving scorlock the "meat & potatoes" of the wizard class & wizards never really got a new bone to support their table as the legs were slowly given to scorlock.

edit: There is also the role of skills & sidelining of int as a meaningful stat while elevating charisma

Do you think lore mastery wizard overcomes some of the problems?

I think even if it does its a sad day when only one version of a class is even relevant.

 

[Ashrym]

The suffering of the poor wizards is a bit over-stated, imo.

I'll happily jump on the magic is over-rated or mundane options are under-rated band wagons but that's typically at lower levels (there are still powerful spells, and spell DC's scale upwards), and every time spells are added to the arcane lists that's wizard love because of the spell mechanics involved.

Though I'm also a Treat Monk follower so he makes compelling arguments for the other options and non-damaging/combat spells.

It doesn't take following Treant Monk for that, lol. It becomes evident playing. I think that's just playing to the strengths of the class.

So yeah, I think Wizards have it pretty good. Leave room for other classes to be the skill experts or tool masters.

I agree. It's okay to have things wizards don't excel at to the extent of other classes and that is case in more than one area. It's not actually the case with arcana, however.

Most characters don't even have the option to take arcana in the first place. It's on the bard, druid, sorcerer, warlock, and wizard proficiency lists. Knowledge clerics can add it (with expertise) and it can be picked up with the sage background.

The argument that wizards aren't the best at arcana isn't actually valid. Being better requires expertise so we're looking at a bard (thematically correct), knowledge cleric (thematically correct), or a sage having taking expertise in an aspect of the sage (thematically correct). Even then it's barely an advantage unless INT also has a significant investment. To even match the wizard requires the proficiency and the INT investment, which doesn't sync up in other classes.

It is possible to sneak arcana into a rogue, invest in a bit of INT, and add expertise but then we can look at the real world analogy of a physician who goes to medical school and then isn't specifically skilled or trained as an EMT. Meanwhile, a person can become an EMT without going to medical school. The analogy works really well because wizards don't even have arcana training unless they add the skill. Adding any relationship between wizards and the skill is just the concept of how a person sees his or her character and is covered in taking the skill. They just see a game mechanic that can make the numbers bigger and want to own that too even if the justification argued doesn't actually match up.

 

[Salthorae]

It doesn't take following Treant Monk for that

Sure, he was just one of the first to really lead the way back in 3.5 days to the wizard as a primary controller/buffer/debuffer instead of dominate the field with more direct applications of spells, so I credit him. shrug

The analogy works really well because

See, I don't think that analogy works well at all. If Arana were divided up in to sub-sections the way real-world medicine is? Sure.

But in the non-granular mechanics of D&D, to use your medical professionals with the D&D rules for skills, it would be that the EMT who ONLY studied emergency/first-response medicine is as good at ALL medicine as a doctor who went to medical school.

A Rogue with Expertise Arcana and an Int of 12 knows as much about wizarding and all matters arcane other than actual spell casting, than an actual Wizard with a standard array 16 Int and regular proficiency. They basically have the same level of ability at this skill all the way to 12th. Then at 13th the rogue is better the rest of the way. That assumes Wizard maxes their Int by 8th and the rogue doesn't touch their 12 Int.

Same holds true for a knowledge cleric with their Domain ability.

It's just weird.

 

[tetrasodium]

Do you think lore mastery wizard overcomes some of the problems?

I think even if it does its a sad day when only one version of a class is even relevant.

Not really. I'll break down what it gives

• Lore Master@2: You get expertise in Arcana, History, Nature, & Religion. All of those skills are int based sure, but it's still blocked from being meaningful by "Skills: Choose two skills from Arcana, Deception, History, Intimidation, Investigation, Nature, and Religion" on the wizard itself. Compare that to 3.5 where you had 2+int skill points and the folloing class skills: Concentration, Craft, Decipher Script, Knowledge arcana, Knowledge arcana & engineering, Knowledge dungeoneering, knowledge geography, knowledge history, knowledge local, knowledge nsture, knowledge nature, knowledge nobility & royalty, knowledge psionics, knowledge religion, knowledge the planes, profession, spellcraft. Those were all condensed into a couple skills (mostly arcana/history/nature) & ent from there being too many for anyone to feasibly keep up so the wizard always kinda knew at least a little of that knowledge no matter their roll but nowit's so easy to learn one of those condensed skills that it's more a matter of who rolls higher.
• Spell secretsA @2: At will elemental substitution... Damage types used to be absurdly important in prior editions, now it's almost entirely "you don't want to deal nonmagic damage or use lightning against an iron golem". In the past it would have been stupid powerful, but in 5e it's barely a step from being a ribbon.
• SpellSecretsB@2: You can change a spell from using one saving throw to using a different saving throw. This is huge and allows you to do things like make an int charisma targeting web or a strength save feeblemind... but being locked behind a single archtype rather than tacked onto the core class but restricted to wizard spells it's meaningless to wizards as a whole
• slchemical casting @6: It lets you do some interesting metamagicish things with spells by expending extra spell slots, while certainly interesting & useful for a certain kind of build, I think it's more of one archtype's gimmick than a replacement leg for the wizard table mentioned earlier.
• Prodigious memory @10: Basically it says 1/long rest the lore wizard can swap one "maybe I'll need this" c list prepped spell with " of crap I need this instead". Wotc's own statistics show most games fizzle out by or shortly after level 10 so even within the archtype itself it's of dubious & limited value if it has any at all.
• Master of magic @14: Useful & if this were a feat that only wizards could take it wouldn't even get hate because it's so nice.... but as an unlock for one archtype at level 14 it's even more irrelevant to that wizard table.

So... no it doesn't really overcome anything because it either fails to understand the problem & is hobbled by how 5e works (ie with skills & lore master) or because it's limited to one archtype at a level that makes it pointless even to that archtype

 

[CleverNickName]

I'd like to see more spells with the Ritual tag, but that's about the only thing I'd change about the Wizard.

 

[Azzy]

The suffering of the poor wizards is a bit over-stated, imo.

Just a bit.

 

[Salthorae]

I'd like to see more spells with the Ritual tag, but that's about the only thing I'd change about the Wizard.

That and I wish they had the Artificer's "Right Cantrip for the Job" ability in some shape if not exactly that. I think having flexible cantrips would be fine and appropriate for the Wizard class.

 

[CleverNickName]

That and I wish they had the Artificer's "Right Cantrip for the Job" ability in some shape if not exactly that. I think having flexible cantrips would be fine and appropriate for the Wizard class.

An elegant way to handle this could be that wizards have access to all Wizard cantrips, but make them choose X of them to be able to cast each day (where X is a number between 3 and 6, or maybe equal to their Int modifier, or their proficiency bonus, or whatever.)

I'm not familiar with the Artificer, so maybe that's how they do it already?

 

[Son of the Serpent]

Not really. I'll break down what it gives

• Lore Master@2: You get expertise in Arcana, History, Nature, & Religion. All of those skills are int based sure, but it's still blocked from being meaningful by "Skills: Choose two skills from Arcana, Deception, History, Intimidation, Investigation, Nature, and Religion" on the wizard itself. Compare that to 3.5 where you had 2+int skill points and the folloing class skills: Concentration, Craft, Decipher Script, Knowledge arcana, Knowledge arcana & engineering, Knowledge dungeoneering, knowledge geography, knowledge history, knowledge local, knowledge nsture, knowledge nature, knowledge nobility & royalty, knowledge psionics, knowledge religion, knowledge the planes, profession, spellcraft. Those were all condensed into a couple skills (mostly arcana/history/nature) & ent from there being too many for anyone to feasibly keep up so the wizard always kinda knew at least a little of that knowledge no matter their roll but nowit's so easy to learn one of those condensed skills that it's more a matter of who rolls higher.
• Spell secretsA @2: At will elemental substitution... Damage types used to be absurdly important in prior editions, now it's almost entirely "you don't want to deal nonmagic damage or use lightning against an iron golem". In the past it would have been stupid powerful, but in 5e it's barely a step from being a ribbon.
• SpellSecretsB@2: You can change a spell from using one saving throw to using a different saving throw. This is huge and allows you to do things like make an int charisma targeting web or a strength save feeblemind... but being locked behind a single archtype rather than tacked onto the core class but restricted to wizard spells it's meaningless to wizards as a whole
• slchemical casting @6: It lets you do some interesting metamagicish things with spells by expending extra spell slots, while certainly interesting & useful for a certain kind of build, I think it's more of one archtype's gimmick than a replacement leg for the wizard table mentioned earlier.
• Prodigious memory @10: Basically it says 1/long rest the lore wizard can swap one "maybe I'll need this" c list prepped spell with " of crap I need this instead". Wotc's own statistics show most games fizzle out by or shortly after level 10 so even within the archtype itself it's of dubious & limited value if it has any at all.
• Master of magic @14: Useful & if this were a feat that only wizards could take it wouldn't even get hate because it's so nice.... but as an unlock for one archtype at level 14 it's even more irrelevant to that wizard table.

So... no it doesn't really overcome anything because it either fails to understand the problem & is hobbled by how 5e works (ie with skills & lore master) or because it's limited to one archtype at a level that makes it pointless even to that archtype

"Spell secretsA @2: At will elemental substitution... Damage types used to be absurdly important in prior editions, now it's almost entirely "you don't want to deal nonmagic damage or use lightning against an iron golem". In the past it would have been stupid powerful, but in 5e it's barely a step from being a ribbon."
Could you explain how this is barely a step from a ribnon? I mean...arent there a lot of things with weaknesses this would hit?