D&D General Wizard vs Fighter - the math

[FrozenNorth]

Yes, that is the entire issue. It I'd a table/DM issue, not a game system issue.

But it isn’t just a table/DM issue. If the DM runs a published module for instance, say Candlekeep, Radiant Citadel or Golden Key, there aren’t going to be 6-8 encounters per long rest, there are going to be substantially fewer.

And that is the case with virtually every published D&D module.

If the people writing your own adventures can’t keep up with the expected pace, the problem isn’t the DM/table, it’s the expected pace.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

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).

I'm actually thinking that using a Tasha's summon spell rather than direct damage for the highest slot used might be an easier and fairer comparison - They scale with the spell slot used, they use the concentration slot, (which is an important factor for casters) and they are single target melee damage like the fighter with no AoE complications.
Furthermore, they add effective hit points and resilience to the wizard, compensating for the fighter's higher AC, HP, and 'battlefield presence'.

 

[FrozenNorth]

Also, it’s worth pointing out that « average of 6-8 battles » per day obscures more than it elucidates.

If you have a couple of days with one or two encounters (if for instance, the party is travelling from one area to the next and you roll a random encounter), you would need a 12-13 encounter day to compensate. It’s pretty hard to come up with 12-13 separate interesting encounters, even in a dungeon!

Second, party size has a pretty big impact as well. In my 6-person party, there are enough high level spell slots that attempting to drain them isn’t a very effective strategy, even on a long encounter day. 6-person parties also tend to militate against large numbers of enemies, as combat tends to bog down.

 

[M_Natas]

I'm actually thinking that using a Tasha's summon spell rather than direct damage for the highest slot used might be an easier and fairer comparison - They scale with the spell slot used, they use the concentration slot, (which is an important factor for casters) and they are single target melee damage like the fighter with no AoE complications.
Furthermore, they add effective hit points and resilience to the wizard, compensating for the fighter's higher AC, HP, and 'battlefield presence'.

hrm, I just looked at the summon fiend one. At level 6 Spellslot, you get a creature with (Devil) 40 HP, 18 AC, doing on average 48 damage with the same hit chance as the fighter or wizard.
Hrm, thats in the same range of the damage a wizard does with damage spells at the same level. But the Devil stays several rounds. So in the first round you do average damage, in the second round you do spell damage + fiend damage.
You are right, that would even be stronger, as long as the devil gets at least two rounds to attack it will double the avarage damage of any subsequent turn it can attack.

 

[M_Natas]

Also, it’s worth pointing out that « average of 6-8 battles » per day obscures more than it elucidates.

If you have a couple of days with one or two encounters (if for instance, the party is travelling from one area to the next and you roll a random encounter), you would need a 12-13 encounter day to compensate. It’s pretty hard to come up with 12-13 separate interesting encounters, even in a dungeon!

That is true, but to be fair, unless you put up 2x deathly encounters into travels, you will never challenge the party during travel trough combat, because it is a too rare occurance during travel..

Second, party size has a pretty big impact as well. In my 6-person party, there are enough high level spell slots that attempting to drain them isn’t a very effective strategy, even on a long encounter day. 6-person parties also tend to militate against large numbers of enemies, as combat tends to bog down.

Thats why you adjust the CR of the monsters according to party size. But yeah, the whole game can easily break down, if more than 6 players play the game.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

hrm, I just looked at the summon fiend one. At level 6 Spellslot, you get a creature with (Devil) 40 HP, 18 AC, doing on average 48 damage with the same hit chance as the fighter or wizard.
Hrm, thats in the same range of the damage a wizard does with damage spells at the same level. But the Devil stays several rounds. So in the first round you do average damage, in the second round you do spell damage + fiend damage.
You are right, that would even be stronger, as long as the devil gets at least two rounds to attack it will double the avarage damage of any subsequent turn it can attack.

Oof. I was actually hoping that it would flatten out the graphs.

 

[Parmandur]

Also, it’s worth pointing out that « average of 6-8 battles » per day obscures more than it elucidates.

If you have a couple of days with one or two encounters (if for instance, the party is travelling from one area to the next and you roll a random encounter), you would need a 12-13 encounter day to compensate. It’s pretty hard to come up with 12-13 separate interesting encounters, even in a dungeon!

Second, party size has a pretty big impact as well. In my 6-person party, there are enough high level spell slots that attempting to drain them isn’t a very effective strategy, even on a long encounter day. 6-person parties also tend to militate against large numbers of enemies, as combat tends to bog down.

Not a 6-8 average, 6-8 is maximum capacity. And yes, any group of over 5 characters is unstoppable.

For WotC, then players steamroller Monsters is not necessarily a problem. But the balance point is a Dungeon with 6-8 Wncounters on a timeline with 4 or 5 PCs. Any more PCs, or any less Encointers, will be a cakewalk. Any more Encointers or less than 4 PCs can be a big problem.

 

[jgsugden]

Also, it’s worth pointing out that « average of 6-8 battles » per day obscures more than it elucidates.

If you have a couple of days with one or two encounters (if for instance, the party is travelling from one area to the next and you roll a random encounter), you would need a 12-13 encounter day to compensate. It’s pretty hard to come up with 12-13 separate interesting encounters, even in a dungeon!

Second, party size has a pretty big impact as well. In my 6-person party, there are enough high level spell slots that attempting to drain them isn’t a very effective strategy, even on a long encounter day. 6-person parties also tend to militate against large numbers of enemies, as combat tends to bog down.

Or, alternatively, you'd treat the couple one day encounters as not significant enough to require any adjustment. If you run 6 to 8 encounters during dungeons and event settings regularly, then there is no problem having a few one encounter days as well. That isn't theory - that is established experience.

 

[NotAYakk]

Because if you take away short rests during the day, you don't get actual healing and it just makes everything a slog through dwindling HP.

Oh, you don't want to play D&D. That is ok.

D&D is an attrition game. Spell slots, HP, etc. In a fight, the only attrition is (living allies) and (HP of characters). Outside of combat, HP and Spell slots (and reuse abilities).

This allows for danger to accumulate over more than 1 encounter. Without such a mechanism, you'd either need players to regularly lose encounters (as they run out of resources), or combat to create the illusion of the possibility of losing, or combat becomes an automatic win.

With attrition mechanics, how well you do in a fight matters. If you barely win, you'll lose a bunch of resources, and it will feel like a hard victory. Players will feel that they almost lost. And if they blow through the encounter the opposite is true -- they'll feel their characters are fully recovered and undamaged.

There are games that don't have any attrition whatsoever. And you can emulate it in D&D with long rests between each and every fight.

But what I'm talking about is characters having a pool of resources for each chapter and scene - they have HP, HD, Spell slots, short and long rest abilities. Each fight and danger chips away at these. Players, when they exhaust their resources, either risk their PCs death or back off and risk "losing" the scene or chapter.

"Losing" a scene or chapter just means that a less than optimal (from the perspective of the Character's goals) result occurs. This isn't by DM fiat, just due to the Player's and PCs choice. So if they are trying to save a village, and they retreat part way through the Scene, they don't manage to save absolutely everyone. Some NPCs die or are captured or whatever.

Each scene/chapter (and encounter!) has more than one possible outcome this way, and everything isn't presumed total victory by PCs. And players have a way to make choices about their PCs actions that is informed by the resources they have lost up to this point.

OTOH, if all resources are refreshed after each encounter, there is no meaningful information to be gained from how well they did in the previous encounters. A win by the skin of one's teeth is equivalent to an encounter that was trivial. The past is erased. And the only way an encounter can feel at all dangerous is if it risks defeat as a solo encounter divorced from everything else. Which either requires illusion (lies), or actual risk of failure, which means PCs don't last very long. An encounter with a 5% risk of failure means your adventures last about 20 encounters before a TPK.

Secondary, when the dramatic structure is the Scene, three fights in the same day are just an extended encounter. This means that when balancing encounters you need to take this into account.

But, if you want this mechanically in 5e, you just make healing potions free, or add in a potion that incapacitates and heals 1d4 HP/round until full HP. Now out of combat healing is trivial, as requested, and other resources remain depleted.

Yeah, I don't want players 'at my mercy'. I want a fair, non-adversarial game. I don't need HP to 'matter'. I don't need attrition. I need HP to serve their purpose as a dramatic counter for how long a character can keep up a given fight.

HP isn't (only) a single-fight resource. Losing 30 HP in a fight when you have 100 HP matters when getting it back isn't free.

Wizards lose spells, Fighters lose HP.

Clerics can trade spells for other PCs HP. In 5e initially this wasn't very efficient.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Mmm, 'not D&D' gatekeeping. always fun and fresh.