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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7362847" data-attributes="member: 996">Only two editions have passed since it's rather inauspicious inception, but, yeah, you're not wrong.The 3.0 Sorcerer looked, to me, at first glance, a pretty pointless idea.  It was little more than a wizard with an alternate daily spellcasting system.  Yipee, I'd seen a /lot/ of alternatives to traditional Vancian over the years - it being, simultaneously, the most iconic and most despised sub-system in D&D - and the Sorcerer's 'spontaneous' casting hardly seemed that big a leap.  But, it turned out that the 3.x sorcerer was a fantastic class, not for casting spontaneously, not for having a lot of spell slots/day (though it helped), but, mainly, for it's most brutal limitation relative to the wizard:  very limited known spells.  It meant that when you created and  leveled up a sorcerer you made character-defining choices that really painted a unique picture of this magic-using individual.  A sorcerer who could cast Unseen Servant and Shield was utterly different from one that could cast Burning Hands and Charm Person.  Just utterly different.  And not really all that likely to converge as the game went on.  A pair of wizards each with the same pair of spells in their books could confer for a bit and add eachother's spells to their books, becoming functionally identical characters.  It was the Sorcerer's lack of long-time-horizon flexibility that made it a great class.  The fighter was similarly great for building to concept for a similar reason - those feats were very defining and not chosen that often & not changed each day - albeit, from the opposite direction, the 3.x fighter being /more/ flexible than ever before, and still much less so than the Sorcerer which owed it's uniqueness and value as a character-building option to being far more restricted than the traditional Vancian wizard and even, in the long run, than the magic-user before it.  In 4e they met in the middle.  All classes were pretty fair character-building/defining tools.  The Sorcerer not only didn't stand out, but it got boxed into the striker role.  Come 5e, the wizard brakes back out into omnipotent blandness, more flexible and thus less prone to customization and character-defining decisions, than ever before.  The Sorcerer, still has the known spell restrictions that made it such a nice build tool in 3.x, but it also has hard-coded sub-class flavor that just takes the bottom out of that, completely - and it just doesn't stack up to the wizard, at all.  Meta-magic is thematically appropriate, and it's not chopped liver, but it doesn't compete with the wizard's neo-vancian uber-flexibility including co-opting the Sorcerer's claim-to-fame spontaneous casting.  Not the way spontaneous vs prepped and nice boost in daily slots used to.  The 3e sorcerer was arguably behind the wizard on the power curve, Tier 2 not 1, whatever, but it was competitive.  The 5e sorcerer feels closer to the futile horror of strict inferiority. So, like nobility, destined heroes, demi-gods, and just, in general, most of the protagonists in myth and fantasy literature.  Yeah, you're right.  That was also part of what made 'em such a good class.  I mean, Merlin, the other archetypal wizard besides Gandalf, was the son of an Incubus, his power was in part inborn.  And Gandalf, of course, was a Maiar.  Medea and Circe - also oft-cited archetypal wizards - were technically demi-godesses, having divine parentage (not that that was at all unusual in Greek mythology).Prospero, though, he was a wizard-by-learning-only.  So there's that.</blockquote>

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