Marcus Smythe said:
Hmm... I suppose I gave you that one for free. I meant in the sense of 'solving specific sorts of problems' not in the sense of 'different class abilities'
Ok. Then I think, I see where the issue lies.
Im curious as to your thoughts on the second part of my post... that bit struck me like an epiphany, and I'm really wondering about peoples thoughts on it.
Of course, when we only look at the core rules for the concepts, i.e. sorcerer vs wizard, that's the primary distinction between the two:
Wizards are almost unbeatable (in terms of overall class power) in an environment, where they know what challenges they are going to face. Of course, they also need to know the right spells, which is more likely for them as for sorcerers, for obvious reasons.
Sorcerers (specifically, sorcerers with a good, versatile spell selections; themed sorcerers, which many people like to play for roleplaying reasons, are obviously much weaker, but shouldn't really be considered here, since they are basically limiting themselves by choice) can instantly react to any challenges that present themselves. In some cases they won't have an optimum response, but in most cases (from my experience at least) they do have a good response.
Here the comparison in spells is not against the spells known, but spells known vs spells prepared, which is a much smaller amount suddenly, and which is why the sorcerer easily wins out here. Also, once the wizard starts to use up spells, the number of different answers slowly diminishes, while the sorcerer usually keeps all options for the whole day, except some higher level ones eventually.
Spontaneous casting is *very* powerful. IMHO the most powerful ability (apart from spellcasting itself) in the game. Obviously, the designers also thought so, otherwise the sorcerer wouldn't lose so much against the wizard (i.e. bonus feats, delayed spell levels, etc).
And once they reach decent levels, sorcerers know *enough* spells to have answers to almost any situation. Not the perfect one, but a good one. It's universally agreed upon (from observation of similar topics) that sorcerers become too powerful too fast if they would gain much more spells known than they do. A little more would probably be alright, though.
And that brings us back to the aforementioned issue. (Tell me if my deductions are wrong.)
You compare psions with wizards, and you compare them in a way, where you treat (probably not even intentionally) wizards as having a great spell selection useful for whatever comes up against them prepared all the time. You think about a situation... then you think about what a wizard could have prepared to solve it. There's almost always a perfect solution available. That's where you came from, when you said, that arcanists are always superior up there (the part I misinterpreted a little
).
Of course - in theory - the wizard will be able to solve every situation in a pretty much perfect manner. But that's pure theory. In practice, they cannot prepare ahead for every possible situation, and they often won't know ahead of time what's going to happen. And often, they will find their spell selection that they prepared to be somewhat lacking. If that is not the case... then wizards are being prefered by the environment (playing style, whatever), which lets them appear more powerful than they really are (unless one limits the observation only to those cases, but that's not the whole picture then), and sorcerers appear weak, because they are robbed of their advantages in such an environment.
Bye
Thanee
