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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mad Mac" data-source="post: 3976359" data-attributes="member: 27873">Both methods are useful. The advantage of having, say, a seperate "Summoner" class is that summoning is his main bag, and since he's not loaded down with the ability to turn people invisible and toss meteor swarms around, he can be balanced as being really awesome at summoning.   A Class that can cast really awesome summoning, enchantment, and evocation spells, is inherently stronger and more versatile than one that focuses mainly on a more narrow catagory of magic. To put it simply, breaking specialists into other classes allows the creation of specialist classes that aren't weak and lame. You can also play with archtypes more, and create stuff like an enchanter who also has lots of sleight of hand/manipulation type skills, or a Necromancer with a host of unique class abilities, instead of forcing every type of magic into the same restrictive class framework.  Granted, you can do similar things with Wizard paragon paths, but this will constrain design in creating effective specialists more than creating new classes. Paragon paths are, as far as we know, only designed to add benefits, not take away class features, so you can never create a balanced Wizard paragon path that can do as much cool stuff with illusions or Enchantment as a seperate Illusion based/Enchantment based class (Like the Bard) who pays for his specialized powers in part by not also being able to blow up mountains.   Specialist Wizards have never been very interesting or effective, going all the way back to their debut in 2nd edition. Optimized Wizards were almost always generalists, except in 3.0 where you could make a Diviner with opposed school Necromancy and not take much of a hit.</blockquote>

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