D&D General Wizard vs Fighter - the math

[James Gasik]

So if the Fighter is perfectly fine and only a small number of players are asking for it to be buffed, I suppose that means most players will reject Weapon Masteries?

 

[Oofta]

Do you figure if you repeat this sort of thing often enough, it'll stop being an informal fallacy?

Do you figure that if you repeat often enough that because the game doesn't do exactly what you want people will accept that you are correct?

We're all just expressing our opinions and preferences. But there are a few actual facts. D&D is, to the best of our knowledge, more popular than any previous version. It is played by millions of people. Fighter is, by a fair margin, the most popular class.

I would also consider the concept that no game can be for everyone a fact. A few things should also be obvious. People have plenty of non-fighter options. WOTC is targeting a broad market not niches. There are a lot of 3PP options. We have no way of knowing if publishing more classes would be profitable but they did find out shortly after the release of 5E that people had no interest in additional classes.

What fallacy am I guilty of?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

So, after all the Fighter vs Wizard Discussions, I wanted to see, if it is really true that a Fighter is worse than a wizard.

So I did the math.
View attachment 306337
(Blue - the wizard is stronger by at least 20%. Red - the wizard is weaker by at least 20%, yellow is between 10-20 discrepancy, green is under 10%).

I compared the average damage output per Round in Combat for the Fighter and the Wizard for several scenarios.

First I looked at the number of battle rounds a party can have. A battle can take up 1 to 7 rounds and a party could encounter 1 (2x deadly) to 12 (easy) battles per adventuring day, if we go by the adventuring day rules. So a party could encounter between 2 long rests 1 round of battle or 84. That's a big range of battle rounds. The DMG advices between 3 and 6 battles.
So, I picked some examples:

• 3 Rounds - the typical 5 Minute adventure day
• 9 rounds - I would say on my tables probably the most common number of battle rounds between two long rests.
• 18 rounds - if you follow the DMG an adventuring party should encounter this many battle rounds on average between long rests
• 36 rounds - 12 easy encounters a 3 rounds (I hope nobody does that) or 6 hard encounters taking 6 rounds.
• 72 rounds - 12 easy encounters taking 6 rounds each - if you hate yourself and your players, do that.

Than I looked at at the number of enemies, because the effectiveness of the Wizard depends strongly on AoE spells.
I checked vs. Single Creature, vs 2 Creatures (average AoE Damage x 1,5) and more than 3 creatures (AoE Damage x2).
Fighter and Wizard get a +1, +2 and +3 magic items at levels 5, 10 and 15.

So these are my expectations.

I build a champion fighter and a plain Wizard without subclass features. The wizard takes always the spell that will do the most damage for a certain spell level, he uses up the highest spells first, if he runs out of spells, he will take cantrips. The Fighter damage is accounted for the use of Action Surge and Critical damage.

So, what does my math say?

When there are only 3 battle rounds per long rest, the Wizard will always be better than the fighter by at least 20% except at low levels vs 1 creature. But only at levels 5 and 6 will the fighter be ever stronger vs 1. Creature. The more enemies you have, the bigger the advantage of the wizard.
With 3 or more enemies creatures the wizard usually does more than double the damage of the fighter.
Over all lvls the Wizard will do

• vs 1. Creature on average 137% of the fighter damage,
• vs 2 Creatures 166%
• and vs 3 or more creatures 195% of the fighter damage.

If you have 9 battle rounds inbetween Long Rests, vs. 1 Creature, the Fighter and a wizard are pretty close in damage output. Vs 2 or more Monsters the Wizard will outperform the Fighter.
Over all lvls. the Wizard will do

• vs 1. Creature 98% of the Fighter damage.
• vs 2 creatures 122% of the Fighters Damage
• Vs. 3 creatures 146% of the fighter damage

If you have 18 Battlerounds, the Fighter will outperform the Wizard vs. 1 and 2 creatures while it is pretty close against 3 or more creatures.
Over all the levels, our wizard does

• vs 1 creature 70% of the fighter damage
• vs 2 creatures 86% of fighter damage
• vs 3+ creatures 102% of Fighter damage.

With 36 rounds the fighter is always better.
Over all levels the wizard will do

• vs. 1 Creature 53% of Fighter damage
• vs. 2 creatures 61%
• vs. 3+ creatures 69%

And with 72 rounds, it is the same.
Wizard/fighter

• 1 creature: 45%
• 2 creatures: 49%
• 3+ creatures 53%.

If we look at the extremes (3 rounds vs 32 or 72 battlerounds) the effectiveness in Combat gets reversed. In 3 rounds vs multiple creatures the Wizard does double the damage of a fighter while in 32 rounds vs 1 creature the fighter does double the damage of the wizard.

What can we learn from this?

First of all, what everybody is always already saying is: the 5 minute workday is utterly broken for spellcasters. If you have less than 9 rounds of combat inbetween rests, even at lvl 1 the wizard will outperform the Fighter and latest at level 5 will have spell slots to spare for non Combat situations, paving the way for Spellcaster domination in all aspects of the game from that level on.

How to Fix that as a DM: if you only want to have one battle, make the battle longer and vs. one strong enemy. Give the creature more hitpoints to last longer (at least for 6 rounds, better 9). You have to adjust the damage output of the creature, because the damage is usually balanced around 3 rounds of survival, so in 9 rounds it can do way more damage to your party than the CR would tell you.

For 9 rounds, it depends on the number of enemies. If you as the DM always use one appropriate monster to challenge the party, the Fighter and wizard will be equal (98% similar damage output). but the Wizard will from level 5 on have spell slots to spare for other situations. Vs. 2 or more creatures, the Wizard will outdamage the fighter, and he will have spell slots to spare.
So if you want to have few battles and not a lot of combat rounds (not a lot defined as 9) in one day, use single monsters to challenge the party and give the Fighter a chance to shine.

18 battle rounds between long rests seems to be the sweet spot between fighter and wizard.
The fighter will outperform the Wizard vs 1 and 2 creatures and will be equally good vs 3 or more creatures and the Wizard will have to use up to level 12 all his Spellslots to keep up with the fighter. So now the wizard needs to decide, if he spares some ressources and be less effective in Combat or blast everything in Combat and doesn't have utility outside of combat.
18 battle rounds could be 6 fights a 3 rounds or 3 fights a 6 rounds or a big boss fight with 9 rounds and 3 smaller fights a 3 rounds.
But what we see here, is, that the Adventure Day guidlines in the DMG work as intended. 6 encounters a 3 rounds is the balanced sweet spot between long rest ressources (spellslots) and at will powers (fighter).

36 battlerounds and above

This is fighter land. Wizards don't need to apply.
But having a lot of battlerounds - I realistically can only see that working, if the Gritty Realism Rest rules are used. Than you can stretch out the battles over several ingame days.

Conclusions without rules changes

So, if you are DMing a game and feel like, that the martial classes are underwhelming at your table and the casters are overpowered and dominating every aspect of the game, without rules changes to the classes themselves, you can do the following things:

• Increase the number of battlerounds either by having more battles or making battles longer (more hitpoints for the monster) - the sweetspot is 18 Battlerounds per long rest, as low as 9 can be fine, when you ...
• use single creatures to reduce the effectiveness of AoE spells.
• use gritty realism rest rules

Conclusions for rules changes

It seems that the number of battles (and battlerounds) in a day is at the modern gaming table drastically lower than what the makers of D&D expected.
That has several reasons:

• 6 battles a day doesn't fit most modern narratives - dungeon crawling is not the standard mode of play anymore
• players optimising the fun out of the game and being risk adverse by taking every long rest they can (from a mechanical standpoint, long resting after every battle is the optimal strategy).

Mechanically, there are several solutions:

• Alternative Rest rules to stretch out the time between long rests or make long rests less effective (like giving back as much spellslots ad you have Prof. Bonus)
• reducing the number of spell slots available per day (more akin to warlock)
• strengthing the fighter - in order to keep up with the wizard in a 5 Minute workday day environment, the Fighter needs 40% more damage against single targets and he needs to get AoE Damage capabilities that increase his damageoutput against multiple targets by at least 100% to make them as good as Wizards. So increase that even more, so the fighter is best at fighting while the Wizard can keep his utility abilities. Make the stronger abilities daily powers so that if their is suddenly an increase in battle rounds that the fighter will not overwhelm everything (like the wizard does right now with few battlerounds).

There are a few more lessons to take from this:

1. Wizard subclasses are icing on the cake. A Wizard without subclass is still capable of outshining a Fighter with subclass. That's kind of a problem, I would think. Especially given some of the very powerful subclasses like Bladesinger.
2. This establishes a useful soft floor for Wizard combat contribution. Oftentimes, control spells are even better than damage would be, or combine a mix of useful-but-not-maximum damage + useful control.
3. The Champion Fighter is, as most folks knew, really really bad.
4. Note the spikes in power at character level 5 and 9. Fighters get a real boost from Extra Attack--it actually pushes back against the Wizard despite fireball showing up! But within two levels, it's back to Wizard-favoring other than single-target fights, when 5e was specifically designed to use hordes of smaller targets, and by level 9, aka around the time most groups stop playing, Wizards rule the roost again even in 9 rounds/day solo fights.
5. Conclusively, more rounds of combat per day are better for 5e's balance than fewer rounds per day. IOW, they really actually did design it expecting that you'd get around 6-8 combats per day and 2-3 short rests (because a typical combat is 3ish rounds), despite all the repeated claims that 6-8 was massively excessive. Unfortunately, it appears most groups prefer to run something more like 3-5 combats per day with 1-2 short rests, which shortchanged Fighter and other classes like it (notably Warlock.)

I assume you made sure to account for the extra slots per day from Arcane Recovery? Those add up to quite a bit of extra magic mojo, especially at high level. Bringing 1-2 extra 5th level spells per day is a doozy, since 5th level spells are quite powerful, as your data shows.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

When a group plays according to the suggestions in the PHB and DMG, things are not broken.

Evidence suggests otherwise. Like, I dunno, the designers explicitly telling us that Warlocks were falling behind because actual players don't take enough short rests for Warlocks to keep up.

That, right there, indicates that the assumptions baked into the math above are what the designers actually assumed when making 5e.

They assumed 6+ encounters of ~3 rounds each (or 5ish of not-quite-4 rounds each, or the like.) They translated, as they have explicitly told us, crowd-control/debuff/etc. effects into a hypothetical damage-equivalent, and then used those numbers to model the DPR of characters.

Call it what bad names you like. This is the math 5e used. And it doesn't work with the way people actually do play this game at real tables, in real life, right now. The majority of players play 5e under assumptions which make casters more powerful than non-casters.

That's not a white-room argument. That is the truth, backed up by observation, actual statements from designers, and theoretical modeling. Do with it what you will.

 

[overgeeked]

What fallacy am I guilty of?

Appeal to popularity. Because it’s popular it must be good.

Also the Oberoni fallacy. Because the referee can make house rules to fix the flaws of the game then they aren’t really flaws.

 

[Oofta]

Appeal to popularity. Because it’s popular it must be good.

Also the Oberoni fallacy. Because the referee can make house rules to fix the flaws of the game then they aren’t really flaws.

People play classes they enjoy. The game is all about entertainment and having fun. If people didn't have fun playing fighters they wouldn't be popular.

Something being popular does not make it bad, especially when there are several other options.

 

[overgeeked]

People play classes they enjoy.

Hopefully, but it’s not guaranteed. Ever play in a game where no one wanted to be the healer only for someone to have to switch and play the healer?

If people didn't have fun playing fighters they wouldn't be popular.

Does not follow. The fighter is the simplest class in the game. That could be why it’s popular. We don’t know. Either way it’s an assumption.

Something being popular does not make it bad,

Never said it did. That would be another fallacy.

 

[FrogReaver]

When a group of people play separating all pillars of the game;

Not sure what this means

when they play with an assumption that no one ever drops,

I don't think I've ever seen this assumption

no one ever has anything else to do but do damage;

I've never seen this assumption either. What I have seen is that when someone needs to do something other than damage it's the casters that have the options for that -> which directly implies they can do damage unless there's something even better for them to do. In this sense the damage comparison simply serves as the lower bound.

when they play that only the highlight gets the highlight per DM casting call - the game will always be broken.

Not sure what this means either

When a group plays according to the suggestions in the PHB and DMG, things are not broken.

I'd phrase it a bit differently - when any character optimizes to any degree at all the game breaks. SS+CBE+Percision Attack Battlemasters Break games based on those assumptions. It's just casters past a certain point break the game harder.

 

[FrogReaver]

And the problem with all that additional nuance is that every iota of it all falls in the wizard's favor. From just a pure DPR analysis, the fighter and wizard are balanced at some high number of rounds, if and only if you're fighting solo monsters...when the wizard doesn't even get any subclass features...and every single extra bit of extra "context" makes the wizard more and more powerful compared to the fighter.

Well... I don't think it's clear that magic items are in the Wizard's favor. I'd suggest they tend to aid fighters more than Wizards.

 

[FrogReaver]

People play classes they enjoy. The game is all about entertainment and having fun. If people didn't have fun playing fighters they wouldn't be popular.

Something being popular does not make it bad, especially when there are several other options.

Well... I don't think anyone has claimed a person cannot have fun with fighters. Most people play low level where there isn't much if any of a gap between fighters and wizards. In fact, i'd suggest that a variant human CBE, SS, precision attack battlemaster at level 1-4 is more powerful than a wizard.

It's just even if the fighter is really out shining in the damage arena - the Wizard still has strong control options and can lean more heavily into out of combat areas.