Wizards: Already Too Strong?

[Meophist]

We playtested it yesterday and the wizard's Ray of Frost was extremely powerful. The party encountered the Owlbear and the wizard saved the day by freezing it (with a roll of 7+) almost every round. The others stood away from the owlbear and attacked with ranged attacks, slowly grinding down it's 110 hit points. Twice the wizard failed his ranged attack and the owlbear did a little damage. If the players had stood away more than 30 feet from him, he wouldn't even have managed to do that, since he couldn't have reached them in one round. All in all, the fight felt very boring. I hope they'll change Ray of Frost.

One possible solution is have the Owlbear go on a defense for its action if it's out of range of any party member. This should make future Ray of Frosts more difficult to hit.

 

[eamon]

That might work. I think it works fine for encounters with more than one opponent, but for solo monsters its an issue.

But then that has been true of many spells in the past. The main problem is fighters where you have a group of pc's take on one creature are often fundamentally uninteresting.

Also, conversely, if you balance your PC's so that their special abilities can't trivialize a single opponent, the abilities need to be really, really trivial and thus quite boring in the normal scenario where there are multiple enemies.

I think balance is a bad idea here: this is something that needs to be solved during adventure design, and to a limited extent during monster design, and not by changing PC abilities.

If tactics and strategy matter, a smart opponent will virtually always be able to get overwhelming odds over an opponent if he can prepare enough. The alternative is an unavoidable slogging through hit points and solos that are immune to everything and the kitchen sink. That might be OK for dragons, but I don't want everything to be like that.

Even 10ft of slowing (e.g. cheap, mundane caltrops) would be enough to make a retreat-shoot-retreat-shoot strategy perfectly safe if the environment permits it - just to highlight that it's so terribly easy to do this to a solo.

 

[Sir Robilar]

One possible solution is have the Owlbear go on a defense for its action if it's out of range of any party member. This should make future Ray of Frosts more difficult to hit.

A good suggestion! I didn't think of that during our session.

 

[nnms]

Equalise the weapons and strengths, and the sum total of the fighter's bonusses in combat are: +1 (unexplained) to hit, +2 damage, +3hp.

That simply doesn't compare to spells.

It certainly does not compare.

I think it's going to be fairly easy to take a class and add themes and backgrounds and make a combatant that will out fight the fighter just by adding their magic to the mix.

 

[variant]

Do we know if backgrounds and themes will have ability score requirements?

 

[SSquirrel]

Ok so at 9th level, casting Magic Missile, the Wizard can reliably do 8-20 points of damage a round. Even in older editions of the game, that is pretty poor. He can kill 4 kobolds in a single turn at 9th. Or he can drop a fireball and kill 20 of them. Let me think what would be best.

The Wizard is fine.

 

[Rack]

So he has the worst combat abilities in the game (comparable attack to non-fighters and zero defence), can save a few copper pieces on torches and has detect magic? What exactly would you consider underpowered, would he literally have to save or die every hour to keep breathing?

 

[Whytebio]

Automatically hitting for 1d4+1 a round is overpowered?

Mildly annoying someone is overpowered...

I don't understand.

Wizards are supposed to be powerful. These are people who learn to bend reality to their will - the idea of "balance" for such beings in an advanced state of their careers in comparison to mouth-breathers that swing around bits of metal, is insane.

Crawling through early to mid levels of ferocious monsters trying to flay you alive when you're wearing nothing but a toga and possess the woeful fortitude of a domesticated cat, deserves a suitable reward. Compound that with the theme of Wizards being people who warp the fabric of space and time, and I balk at the idea that auto-hitting with the equivalent of a few knife-stabs from strength 13 is somehow overpowered.

I'm sorry sir, but I must disagree. Then again I haven't play-tested, so I'll go back to the shadows.

 

[variant]

Yes. Mike Mearls tweeted last night that all backgrounds and Themes are not tied to classes and you can mix and match as you like.

He had also tweeted that some Themes would have restrictions and gave the example of Necromancer being restricted to arcane and divine casters.

 

[KesselZero]

Automatically hitting for 1d4+1 a round is overpowered?

Mildly annoying someone is overpowered...

I don't understand.

Wizards are supposed to be powerful. These are people who learn to bend reality to their will - the idea of "balance" for such beings in an advanced state of their careers in comparison to mouth-breathers that swing around bits of metal, is insane.

Crawling through early to mid levels of ferocious monsters trying to flay you alive when you're wearing nothing but a toga and possess the woeful fortitude of a domesticated cat, deserves a suitable reward. Compound that with the theme of Wizards being people who warp the fabric of space and time, and I balk at the idea that auto-hitting with the equivalent of a few knife-stabs from strength 13 is somehow overpowered.

I'm sorry sir, but I must disagree. Then again I haven't play-tested, so I'll go back to the shadows.

If you want to use your method of balance, where wizards are extremely vulnerable at low levels and insanely powerful at high levels, then the problem is that during a level-1 playtest my wizard completely outshone the other characters and never came near to dying. If you prefer a more modern type of balance in which classes are balanced with each other at each level, then the problem is that during a level-1 playtest my wizard completely outshone the other characters and never came near to dying.

I'll admit that I'm revising my opinion of Magic Missile, Light, and Detect Magic. Ray of Frost is still a worry, but what I found while playing is that every time I dropped an actual spell it was a game-changer or encounter-winner. We had three fights and I dominated two of them with Sleep and Burning Hands; the one I didn't dominate was against two hobgoblins and over in two minutes anyway. My concern ultimately is that after those spells are gone, the wizard is still pretty useful in combat (MM against kobolds or rats is an auto-kill, Ray of Frost is great against solos, and Shocking Grasp is better than either of the rogue's attacks). So in my playtest at least, the wizard was better than the rest of the party when dropping real spells, then more or less comparable when using cantrips. That's my concern.