D&D General Wizard vs Fighter - the math

[FrogReaver]

That is a real problem with D&D, and not just 5e, either.
D&D has rarely done much with out of combat challenges - utility spells, roll a d6 to search for secret doors, theif 'special' abilities, single skill checks from an expert. Spells kinda do stand out as by far the most numerous and powerful out of combat options.
It's a long-standing and valid criticism.

I say feature not bug.

 

[FrogReaver]

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.

I think we've got to be careful here - it's not a fallacy to cite popularity as evidence of goodness. It just doesn't completely prove it - something can be popular and bad - but most popular things are popular because they are good. So if we knew nothing else other than this one thing is popular and this other thing is not then i'm betting every time that the popular thing is better than the unpopular thing.

Or how about this question - what measurable criteria is better than popularity for determining goodness? I don't think there is anything particularly better.

 

[M_Natas]

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.

I accounted for arcane recovery, but because that is capped at lvl 5 slots, ot affects lower levels more strongly. The lower the level of character the stronger the relativ boost of arcane recovery. At Lvl 1 arcane recovery with low amount of battlerounds by aprox. 40%.

 

[PJ Coffey]

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.

<snip>
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).

Thankyou very much for your work here. 3 rounds between long rests is definitely not enough combat! Fighters and Monks are often described as underpowered (along sometimes with Warlocks) because their resources are gated behind short rests. I am intrigued by the different magic systems that are in place as when you start digging spell slots for post 11th level casters (6th level spells) and pre 11th level casters (5th and below) are treated very differently.

"Characters can convert Hit Dice to spell points as they choose a the rate of each Hit Dice grants 2d3 spell points. Hit Dice only recover at the rate of a maximum half per long rest. Unused spell points can be saved from day to day so long as the level times six limit is not exceeded."

It's not a universal solution, but it's a bit more elegant than a week long rest etc. The six encounters per day with two short rests is the platonic ideal of the game as described, but outside of a very dungeon crawl environment it's hard to picture it.

Spell points derived from hit points.

 

[Scott Christian]

erm... that's kinda the simplification going on in this analysis.

I really don't think it is an oversimplification of things. I believe what I said points out the obvious: a table's playstyle can make the game feel broken.

Yes, if you think about it there are two other pillars where the wizard has many useful spells, and some skills that use his prime stat so he's pretty good at them, and the fighter has a skill that uses his prime stat. If you think about, yeah, well, actually, there are things to do, even in combat, besides grind out damage, and that, as you grind out damage, your probably get ground down by some damage, too, and will drop eventually... yeah, it gets more complex.

I agree with you. I said it in my quote. PCs drop. Our warlock drops all the time. Our fighter has never dropped once in nine levels. If you play a game of stats, those missing rounds add up - a lot. But then there are rounds the fighter has hold person cast on him. There are rounds when the fighter isn't fighting but having to do something else. Those missing rounds add up.
But they are all playstyle additions. A hundred variable equation can't be solved by a few people on a forum - even if I feel, they are all really intelligent. So the nuance and depth you speak of, I get it. The complexity. I get it. The debate to want to officially change a class because a table's playstyle makes it weaker? I don't get.

 

[Scott Christian]

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.

Not true. That's why this is a circular debate. They do not outshine the fighter. At your table, with your playstyle (which specifically goes against what the DMG and PHB describes as play) the wizard might always outshine the fighter. That doesn't make it so for the majority, nor even a large minority.

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.

And when they fix that, players will complain about not having enough encounters in a day, or too many. And, while they may have mentioned this, it is a blip on a landscape where they have mentioned one million other things too. Resting is entirely a table/DM decision and is brought about through a table's playstyle.
There is no winning for WotC here. Players always want to be at full health, and the game relies partially on them not being at full health. And it is the DM's job, per the description in the DMG, to help tell the story and create encounters that push the players' PCs into more than one encounter per day if it matches the story.
There is a tug of war that has always existed. It has been there since a party started stocking healing potions in AD&D. And this tug of war, it's ok if you let it be ok. If you play the game by disregarding the DMG, the DM's role to tell the story, and always succumb to the players' feelings of wanting to be as powerful as possible and maximize every benefit, then the game is broke.
Edit: When I say broke, I mean slightly bent out of alignment. And the slight bend is probably something very few people would notice.

 

[Scott Christian]

Not sure what this means

Sorry Frogreaver, I should have been clearer since this is a new thread. It is a reference to an old thread. There were players that literally stated their characters would not actively participate in a skill check through the social or exploration pillar because someone in the group was better than them. That person always rolled. This line also references the fact that players stated their social, exploration, and combat never mix.

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

The very fact that this thread was started with math using damage per round suggests otherwise.

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.

Again, damage per round started the conversation. People trying to pile on saying look at all the cool things a wizard can do on top of damage per round is where everything becomes hyperbole. Because the second the wizard does do something cool that is not damage, some people seem to hold two things in their mind:

1. They act as if the wizard is still doing damage and doing that cool thing
2. They act as if the fighter can't also do cool things

Not sure what this means either

The write-ups for pillars of play in every D&D book literally has examples of PCs doing things they may not be the best at. In fact, they are often with other people who might be better. But because they are playing their character, they do it. The last thread had many people discussing sitting there waiting for only the PC with the greatest chance of success to roll. The others, specifically the fighter, was useless. He just sat there, completely excluded from the game.
And this is where the debate is futile. If your table plays that way, then fine, the fighter is lackluster. They will always be lackluster until you convince WotC to make them the superhero you want: the best damage giver and taker combined with the grace and charm of a roguish bard, and on the side a heaping helping of skill monkey.

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.

I think that is a fair statement, and I agree, at some tables, this can be a problem. (Not sure it catches what I was saying, but it is fair and accurate, nonetheless.)

 

[pemerton]

D&D has rarely done much with out of combat challenges - utility spells, roll a d6 to search for secret doors, theif 'special' abilities, single skill checks from an expert. Spells kinda do stand out as by far the most numerous and powerful out of combat options.

Are we just ignoring 4e D&D's skill challenges here?

 

[FrozenNorth]

Yes, if you think about it there are two other pillars where the wizard has many useful spells, and some skills that use his prime stat so he's pretty good at them, and the fighter has a skill that uses his prime stat. If you think about, yeah, well, actually, there are things to do, even in combat, besides grind out damage, and that, as you grind out damage, your probably get ground down by some damage, too, and will drop eventually... yeah, it gets more complex.

More generally, there is an inherent value to versatility.

Let’s ignore the other two pillars for an instant.

If I can attack at range, or melee, or AC, or multiple saving throws, or throw out control spells, or buff, or target one opponent, or target multiple opponents, I would expect to be less effective at each of them than a character that can only do one or two.

The fighter is at one end of the extreme. A Str fighter can attack at melee and attack AC. Their ranged attacks tend to be poor, and attempts to debuff limited.

The wizard can do everything on the list. One would expect with such extreme versatility, he would be less powerful on each. But he isn’t. He is still one of the best debuffers of the game, among the best at targetting multiple defenses, among the best at targetting multiple foes, does decent single target damage (rises to great single target damage if there are fewer combat rounds).

Once you add in the other two pillars of the game again, it gets worse, with the fighter struggling to contribute while the wizard’s versatility continues to serve him well, even without using spell slots (as the wizard has native access to multiple knowledge skills that run off their main stat and several cantrips are extremely useful outside of combat).

 

[Oofta]

There is no way to objectively state whether a class is good or bad. White room analysis is always going to be flawed based on assumptions, what is being measured and variations in actual play. So we can only determine if a class meets it's goal, which in the case of a game like D&D means that we have to base the judgement on completely subjective measurement, do people want to play the class.

The answer for fighters? It's the most popular class there is. People choose it over other classes because in their subjective opinion it's the class they want to play. Nobody is being forced to play a fighter. So yes, for this particular scenario popularity is a good measure of does the class meet the goals of class design for the game being played. Is it the best possible version of fighter for everyone? That's not possible, it's a compromise like all other classes.

P.S. insisting that something is a fallacy does not make it so. If there is a flaw to my logic go ahead. But saying "People don't really want to play" has no basis, saying "Popularity fallacy" is also meaningless on it's own.