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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 5911896" data-attributes="member: 87792">Yes. 3e at level 1. And 4e at quite low levels, mostly due to a DM that didn't know enough about 4e. To the point where the first encounter was meant to be tough due to positioning - three snipers on the first floor of a dark building, a mostly melee party, and no stairs. Would have worked in older editions - but the 4e response was simple: Wizard casts light then scouts with familiar. Assault Swordmage marks target. Eladrin teleports up to the first floor and pushes one of the archers over the edge where the stairs were. Marked archer stabs Eladrin - at which point the swordmage teleports up. The big wizard-dominant (as opposed to wizard-MVP) fight was later when we were trying to defend a fairly narrow mountain pass against an invading company of troops. Flaming Sphere + Orb Expertise + Freezing burst + narrow path with plenty of difficult terrain and a sheer drop to one side + plenty of targets who couldn't fly. (It wasn't intended to work that way. We were meant to be forced to retreat I think).  And then there were the narrow corridors that meant that storm pillar could block an entire column of reinforcements... The thing people forget is that in 1e, fighters were pretty crap. Weapon Specialisation only showed up in Unearthed Arcana - meaning that before that fighters were barely better with weapons than clerics at low level - and wizards were most likely to be found using the monstrosities that were darts. 1e pretty much had clerics having full-spectrum dominance over the fighter, and a lot of rules in UA (including the "overpowered" fighter variants) were stated by Gygax to have been to boost the fighters against the magic users.  I think a better way of looking at it is looking at what level you get equivalence - with the LFQW issue wizards always gain more from gaining levels. My back of the envelope numbers come out at: 1e: 3rd level. The fighter has very little to recommend it, and clerics get almost full spectrum dominance over the fighter. But low level wizards are weak as well. 1e with UA: 5th level - fighters are much nastier here. And also get serious boosts as the wizard is starting to overtake. This was when fighters became good at something rather than clerics without spells. 2e: Back to 3rd level - the wizard gets two pretty huge boosts with specialisation (an extra spell/spell level is massive) and much more subtly with the destruction of the illusionist class to bring spells like phantasmal forces to the old illusionist level. 3.X: 1st level (!). The wizard gets yet another extra spell slot, and the fighter is hurting badly with the loss of exclusive access to specialisation's extra attacks. It's back to the near-complete cleric dominance over the fighter pre-UA 4e: N/A. Also a huge change between editions is the 'Lost Endgame' of D&D. pre-3e by the book, D&D changed somewhere round level 9 and the fighter got armies to play with. Which means that with a basic level range of 1-9 if you balance somewhere round levels 3-5 (to account for "thinning out" with more deaths and more group breakups), things just about work. 3.X was meant to have 20 playable levels. Which should mean that with one gaining power faster than the other you want the balance point to be somewhere round L6-9 and below that it's unbalanced towards the Linear and after to the Quadratic.</blockquote>

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