Retros_x
Adventurer
Oh you want the game designers to re-design their game because young people are playing the game wrong or what exactly is what you saying?
btw writing literally in bold doesn't make something more literal.
D&D General Wizard vs Fighter - the math
- Thread starter M_Natas
- Start date
btw writing literally in bold doesn't make something more literal.
Tony Vargas
Legend
I feel like there's been a feedback cycle with higher levels. WotC has several times admitted that higher levels got less playtesting, because people didn't play at those levels so much.
Fair.
But D&D had had a "sweet spot" forever. IMX, with 1e, it was 3-7, excluding Name Levels, entirely.
I don't know why I"ve always said 3-7. I can't point to anything at 8th going wrong. 9th, sure 5th level spells, money-pit castles,etc..(Maybe I'd seen that level range on products like modules?)
(3rd as the lower bound I still recall, no ones being killed by a housecat at that point, and 2nd level spells make the MU more interesting than casting Sleep 1-2/day and give the Cleric something beyond Cure Light wounds)
(3rd as the lower bound I still recall, no ones being killed by a housecat at that point, and 2nd level spells make the MU more interesting than casting Sleep 1-2/day and give the Cleric something beyond Cure Light wounds)
4e, as always, was the outlier, playable at all levels, but even so, WotC only got as far as good Paragon level resources in DMG2. Essentials focused on Heroic levels, where it's new martial/caster-gap-enhanced sub-classes were not that gappy.
The exp it takes to level, relative to the expected daily exp budget, is lower at 1-3rd and 12+, meaning you spend more actual play time in that sweet spot, even tho you likely start at 1st, and even if you continue some ways past 10th.
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Im saying and what I've said before is that when they redo the DMG, there should be optional class features for a 15-25 combat round adventure day.
Tony Vargas
Legend
Well or we were playing it wrong.
Who's right?
Well, when WotC is reporting to Hasbro, who's driving growth?
Old fans returning to the game now that it's bad in a familiar way, again?
Or potential new fans with no idea what good or bad is?
...
...
WotC may have already thought this through ...
James Gasik
We don't talk about Pun-Pun
If we're just looking at combat, something every class is designed to be able to partake in, I think the main problem I have with comparing raw damage is that it assumes 100% uptime, can't account for excess damage, and doesn't account for the real metric of victory- resources saved.Well do you have a better approach? I think this damage dealing approach shows pretty easily that fighters benefit from more combat rounds because they are consistent. Magic users are not consistent, they have very limited resources that - if used efficiently - can turn around situations. If they don't need to be efficient with their resources because they rest all the time of course the martials can't play out their strengths. Yes dealt damage is not the best metric, but it is the only metric we have at hand without making bigger assumptions and projections. But I think the result stays the same.
Yes, sometimes you can't enforce that, but we are not talking about exceptions, we are talking about general adventure design.
Btw, I really like your format of spoilering the anecdote, I think its a really neat idea for discussions and I will steal it
Shorter combats conserve resources, so being able to kill enemies quickly is good, but you have to look at how many resources were expended. In order of importance, these would be hit points, daily resources, hit dice needed for recovery, and short rest resources.
The Fighter has excellent damage resources in the form of extra attack, action surge, and potentially fighting style and feats, though those latter two are harder to account for, given the high variance in what is taken. I've seen defensive builds snag +2 damage, and offensive builds take +1 AC from their fighting styles, and it can't be assumed that every player takes a Feat instead of an ASI, or what those Feats are (in many balance discussions revolving around out of combat proficiency for the Fighter class, people have said "well, they could take Feats to make them better at things other than fighting"- so we have to account for the fact that players might do this). Or maybe Feats aren't even used at a table!
But their resource mitigation is sharply limited to armor and second wind. Armor is something anyone can use, with varying degrees of opportunity cost, and Second Wind does not scale well (there's Indomitable but, well, yeah).
The Wizard, by contrast, has horrible damage resources. They lack the ability to alpha strike with action surge, and while cantrips scale, they don't natively add ability modifiers to their damage, and even if they did, 2d10+Int is still less than 2d6+5 x2. They could use weapons, but lacking Extra Attack, they will always fall short. There's a slight damage boost before magic weapons come into play, as there are a depressingly large amount of foes who take half damage from non-magical weapons, and the Wizard has easy access to elemental damage, but running into a foe resistant or even immune to elemental damage can also happen often, especially at higher levels of play.
So to deal damage, they have to call upon daily resources that do not scale; a 1st level spell slot to cast magic missile, for example, will always deal 3d4+3 damage. That stops being impressive very quickly. AoE spells can create impressive spike damage, but they are rarely going to slay a foe outright, so while you did hasten their demise, you aren't cutting into the damage foes deal straight away in the same way a Fighter can, by drilling deep into one foe at a time.
While it is true that shorter combats conserve more resources than longer ones, being able to severely blunt incoming damage with a non-damaging spell can be noteworthy. While daily resources are important, hit points are even more so, because when they run out, the action comes to a screeching halt.
And it's right here where we have a problem. Slow does not deal damage. We can't look at it and say "well, that's 28 damage per foe on average". Instead, Slow tells up to 6 targets that they are limited to one attack per turn, and their speed is halved, plus their AC and Dex saves are reduced. There's also a 50% chance of spells being delayed, which occasionally comes up. Slow lacks the targeting issues of fireball, as you can pick 6 targets of your choice in a large area, instead of needing enemies closely packed in for a fireball.
So we know that a successful slow makes it easier to kill foes, might prevent a foe from entering melee at all, and drastically limits the effectiveness of monsters that rely on multiattack for damage output.
If we have six foes hit by slow, 2 save on the first turn, 2 save on the second turn, and 2 save on the third turn, and they all have 2 attacks each, that one spell slot prevented the damage of 10 attacks. The only way for a Fighter to be as effective is if they can kill 5 enemies in three rounds of combat.
TLDR: in combat, the Fighter and the Wizard are accomplishing the same task, mitigating resources lost by the party, but they accomplish this in different ways. Comparing the Wizard's methods of accomplishing this task to the Fighter's and saying, "see, Fighter is superior" isn't very useful until we also compare the ability of the two classes to cast Web to prevent attacks from being made by foes.
Well, I could reiterate: why are you turning an argument about mechanical balance into one about quality of design?
Once you get past basic qualities such as editing, grammar and adequate coherence, all judgements of whether the game is "good" or not is subjective. People vote with their dollars and their time on whether or not they think something is good. Best ever? Nah. But good? Well made? I don't think it would see continued year on year growth if it wasn't decently well made.
In an essay about playing MUs, in White Dwarf 24 (1981), Lewis Pulsipher wrote that "Although charming a dragon is elegant, blowing it up is more exciting."
I think this is part of the wizard vs fighter equation: if you want to do the exciting bit, of actually cutting down your foes, the fighter remains a key option. That's not to say that mechanical balance is not important for some players; but I think it is relevant to comparing the design of these two classes in the D&D context.
James Gasik
We don't talk about Pun-Pun
I totally concur, players like dealing damage. Most Wizards I've actually seen played like to blow things up. When I first started playing 5e and started using control spells, the other players were confused and didn't really see the point. "Why cast sleet storm when you can fireball?"
But while they didn't notice, the DM sure did, and often expressed his frustration at his enemies "not being able to do anything", lol.
Hence why the Fighter is popular, IMO- the class delivers on it's promise to make you a strong damage dealer, and there is something visceral about imagining yourself clashing blades with giant monsters!
I mean heck, how many Clerics have we seen that seem to believe that the extent of their spell list consists of Healing Word, Spirit Guardians, and Spiritual Weapon? Despite having several unique spells, I have only seen a single Druid that wasn't Circle of the Moon (Circle of the Land, very underrated subclass, IMO).
If all you want from the Fighter is a guy who deals impressive damage numbers while being in general all-around tough, accept no substitutes. I actually think they are superior to Barbarians in this regard, since you can't always be raging (and from what I've seen, using Savage Attacker w/o Rage quickly makes one realize that a d12 Hit Die isn't all that impressive).
The downside of the Fighter is that is, in general, the bulk of what the class offers. And WotC seems perfectly happy to hand out Tier 2 Fighter toys to even spellcasting classes, while giving them far less of the pie in exchange (compare and contrast say, Eldritch Knight to Bladesinger). But this generally doesn't bother the majority of Fighter players (at least initially).
At higher tiers of play, when magic use is fundamental to winning combats, and spellcasters have nothing better to do with lower level spell slots than use them liberally outside of combat to their advantage, that you might start to see strain.
@James Gasik that all seems very sensible to me.
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