D&D General Wizard vs Fighter - the math

[MatthewJHanson]

The wizard says "no problem. Go shop for potions and stuff, and meet me back in 2 days". The party gathers again... and the wizard, following a few days of heavy divination, freaking teleports the party toSo the w the temple.

So if I'm the fighter here, I say, "Thanks, I'm glad we have a wizard in the party." I don't say, "Oh man, I'm jealous that the wizard got to do that and I couldn't."

The point is that for me, balance is more about balance of focus and balance of fun. The time that I think things are a problem is when a player says, "why do I even bother showing up when this other guy does everything. It's something that I say in third edition, but have yet to see in my 5e games and I've gone up to 20. (Though I'm also with a different group that in 3rd edition, so that might help too).

 

[NotAYakk]

The value of damage in a fight is how much damage it prevents.

Damage done early in a fight prevents at least as much damage as damage later, and often more.

Ie, take 5 monsters that the party takes 10 turns to kill, killing 1 monster per 2 rounds. The party takes 5+5+4+4+3+3+2+2+1+1 or 30 rounds of monster damage.

Now have one of the players do all their damage in the first round. Their total damage does not change, but the damage the party takes is now 4+4+3+3+3+2+2+2+1+1+1 or 20 rounds of monster damage.

Moving the damage up-front made it significantly more powerful.

Wizards can choose when to use their high level slots, and (if smart) does so when it is more important. Meanwhile, fighters have action surge as about the only way they can move damage from one round to another.

A similar effect makes damage on secondary targets less important. If you have 3 monsters, doing X damage to one monster is better than doing X/2 to two or X/3 to three. A good rule of thumb is that secondary damage is worth 50% primary target damage (within the limit of killing the primary target; if your damage is enough to kill the primary target, then secondary target damage gets upgraded!).

This issue makes fighters look better.

The last big one is crowd control. Spellcaster crowd control (status effects) can be encounter breaking, and very few fighter abilities come anywhere close to even low level spellcaster control spells.

 

[Vaalingrade]

The point is that for me, balance is more about balance of focus and balance of fun.

Don't worry, the wizard overshadows your fighter there too.

While you attack attack attack, they get several books full of options and ten minute turns deciding how they want to make the fighter look like a sad farmboy.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Yeah, it seemed pretty clear from releases that an effort had been made to balance single target damage over many rounds, with fighters getting a boost from Action Surge aproximately every-other combat, and otherwise grinding, while casters got a boost while their spells lasted, then ground less effectively with cantrips than martials could with extra attacks.

Thus the whole 6-8 encounters & 2-3 short rests thing, which is alternately presented by apologist as the only way to run the game, or as a completely meaningless non-requirement, depending on whether they're apologizing the game's mistreatment of players who don't choose casters or of DMs who don't want to force pacing.

That seemed a clear intent, at a glance, and one that at least approximately seems to work (as you've shown, once again, here), at best, at the price of constraining the DM's creativity, and pushing the party through comparatively pointless filler combats. But it only illustrates a rough, fragile balance in the combat pillar, in terms of overall DPR, the martial types' only good pillar, and best thing within that pillar.
The other two? It don't look so good.

And if the Wizard uses hypnotic pattern instead of fireball ... that's a good thing. The Wizard didn't do roughly 56 points of damage, so the fight gets longer, which adds a round or two to combat, so the fighter gets more damage output in comparison to the wizard.
Every time a spellcaster uses a spell that doesn't do damage, it allows the martials to shine more and tilts the balance more in favor of the martials.

Control spells like that can more or less trivialize a combat - unless the melee types screw it up, which is a whole 'nuther thing - and, while it may make the numbers look good for the party's damage grinders to grind damage against a more or less helpless foe for an extra round or few while the caster conserves spells and plinks with cantrips, it ain't exactly the stuff of high fantasy.

While I like numbers at least as much as the next guy, and I'm not going to quibble much with yours (there are two potential issues I see at a glance, one is topping out at 3 enemies, which seems low - 5e BA makes being outnumbered /bad/ for the party, but they should face at least equal forces now and then - the other is going out to dozens of rounds of combat in a day, when, y'know, characters, especially melee-oriented ones, do take damage, and the party can lose members outright or collectively run out of hp & HD), I do think an analysis like this completely misses the versatility & flexibility that put 3.5 casters in Tier 1&2 and non-casters in 4&5.

In 3.5 there was a huge debate over whether the Sorcerer's (and other less famous spontaneous casters) round-by-round flexibility to cast the pest spell they knew, or the Wizard's (or CoDzillas') day-by-day flexibility to prepare the best spells they anticipated would be useful, was ultimately more powerful. The Tier list consensus was prepped beat spontaneous, putting Wizard/Druid/Cleric in Tier 1 and Sorcerer/Favored Soul in Tier 2.
That debate is moot in 5e, since all slot casters cast spontaneously, so have greater flexibility than they did at their height in 3.5

 

[Parmandur]

Excellent analysis, really shows how the Classes actually work and the importance of DM encounter design.

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).

Yes, and this is about what the designers expect to see based on their playtesting: 6-8 combat encounters lasting 2-3 rounds, breaking a bell curve from 12 to 32

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.

I do not see that there is any evidence per se that this is true by and large.

 

[Oofta]

Teleport,

You get from point A to point B faster. Easily countered by a few spells in the book like Inner Sanctum which can easily be made permanent. Mostly used as a plot device to get across the world to make the wizard feel special instead of setting up the BBEG down the street or just saying you buy passage on a boat and hand-wave the travel.

Wizard Eye,

Arcane eye? Can be useful for spying I guess. I've never seen anyone ever using it. You do need to be pretty close to what you're spying on of course and it can only see 30 feet, hope there aren't any patrols around.

Augury

, (Improved) Invisibility, Disguise Self, Alter Self, Polymorph, Wall of Fire, Wall of Stone, Wall of Force, Forcecage, Passwall, Dimension Door, Fly, Levitate, Wish, Hold Person, Charm Person...

Need I go on?

Tired of typing and I habe better things to do...but again none of these bypass all encounters. What they do have in common is that they're situational, require limited resources and happening to have the right spell ready to go. When the planets align, cool.

Unlike 3E, in 5E the fighters in every game I've ever played the fighters have never felt pointless.

 

[MuhVerisimilitude]

While it is known that casting spells for damage dealing is not optimal, it is useful to know that suboptimal play from a wizard is superior to the basic fighter option.

Or rather, you have shown that optimising for something less than ideal (damage) a wizard can still outperform a fighter (that is essentially unable to optimise for anything else)

 

[Mort]

You get from point A to point B faster. Easily countered by a few spells in the book like Inner Sanctum which can easily be made permanent. Mostly used as a plot device to get across the world to make the wizard feel special instead of setting up the BBEG down the street or just saying you buy passage on a boat and hand-wave the travel.

This depends a bit on the campaign. By the time the wizard can teleport, there are plenty of other world beeting things they can do.

Arcane eye? Can be useful for spying I guess. I've never seen anyone ever using it. You do need to be pretty close to what you're spying on of course and it can only see 30 feet, hope there aren't any patrols around.

Again, this depends on how well the DM ensures the party can't just rest on their own schedule. If they can, arcane eye and spells like it can be a real issue. If not, it's just another resource.

Tired of typing and I habe better things to do...but again none of these bypass all encounters. What they do have in common is that they're situational, require limited resources and happening to have the right spell ready to go. When the planets align, cool.

The Wizard (in particular) gets LOTS of spells. They don't need the planets to align if they just pick a nice assortment of extremely useful ones, while still maintaining a good combat assortment. If the memorize spell (or whatever it's called...) from the ne playtest packet makes it through to 2024, then we might REALLY see a 3e revival of the wizard never being flatfooted! And yes, I've made my dislike of the feature known in the survey.

Unlike 3E, in 5E the fighters in every game I've ever played the fighters have never felt pointless.

It's not a question of pointless, it's a question of being more difficult to make matter. The fighter has a clear lack of support in the pillars other than the combat pillar. Yes, they can take steps to mitigate (like anyone else can), but there is not even a twinge of a discussion from WoTC as to what to do there - that's not a good thing. There is HUGE room for improvement, that's my big issue.

 

[Mort]

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).

Thanks for the analysis, really interesting. I think it's clear that one problem (as stated) is that most campaigns, including ones that use published modules, don't have neary as many fights/encounters between rests as the rules assume they would.

That said, I'll echo what was said by multiple people above. It's not really about combat. IME fighters are fine, even good/great in combat (though to my taste a bit boring, but that's a different issue).

The problem is in the other tiers of the game where fighters get so much less options/support than the caster classes.

 

[M_Natas]

While it is known that casting spells for damage dealing is not optimal, it is useful to know that suboptimal play from a wizard is superior to the basic fighter option.

Or rather, you have shown that optimising for something less than ideal (damage) a wizard can still outperform a fighter (that is essentially unable to optimise for anything else)

If a wizard doesn't optimise his damage output, encounters will be harder.

But I agree that the fighter needs a boost. Especially in the AoE Department. That's his combat weak spot.