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Nov 8, 2012 -- 11:17PM, Ahglock wrote:

Am I missing something.  People keep complaining about the lack of at wills but as far as I can tell they are still there.  Sure the specialties might determine which ones you have access to and you have to prepare them, but you can prepare 3 at 1st level. A academic can prepare any cantrip and cast it as an at will.  So I can cast burning hands all day long if I prepare it and am either an academic or a battle mage.

The main problem here is a wizard is supposed to be a flexable character. Kind of the point of playing a wizard. By saying 'you have these three spells as at wills' you basically make certian the wizard will prepare those three spells and never unprepare them, never giving the wizard the chance to swap them out for new at-wills. It hacks at the wizard's flexability, which is core to him, and limit the creativity of the spells.

Oct 31, 2012 -- 7:50AM, AH_unc_samurai wrote:

Having read through the changes in this playtest packet, I realized I was going to have to rebuild the wizard I was playtesting.  And in the process of re-building the character, I am very disappointed in what has happened to the class.

I never thought the wizard was overpowered.  In my playtest experience, it was nice to be able to have a little variety of spells, and a handful of minor spells to fall back on when I didn't want to expend a better spell or was out.  The new class is far too toned down.  The wizard traditions are a nice addition, but the rest of the class got hamstrung.

Let's go through the list of changes...

Slightly more hit points - a nice little addition; I never found myself taking large amounts of damage, but that may have been a result of years of playing very cautious with fragile low-level wizards.

Magic Attack, Weapon Attack, Save DC for spells - functionally unchanged, no problems here.

Starting Abilities - Arcane Knowledge is now Wizardly Knowledge, largely unchanged.  The Tradition of Wizardry adds flavor and some customization, and we knew it was coming.  No big problems there.  But Cantrips are gone, which leads us to the big problems...

Wizard Spells Per Day - I feel like the designers made a major mistake here.  Instead of having a handful of minor spells that could 1:  be cast at-will and 2: didn't need to be in the spellbook.  This meant that I would actually consider casting Ghost Sound, Light, and Mage Hand.  Magic Missile was powered down a little, and Ray of Frost was powered up a little from their 3rd edition descriptions.  I'll complain more about Magic Missile in a minute, though.

Some Traditions allow you to use prepared 0-level spells as if they were at-will.  This takes some of the sting away, but it still limits the variety of minor spells you can cast.  You still have to prepare them, and you don't get the variety you used to (unless you pick a specific tradition).  Preparing 0-level spells always felt silly, considering the flavor has always been something to the effect of, "these spells are so simple and you've been casting them so much you know them by heart."  I feel as if this was a whole lot of class reconfiguring that just wasn't necessary.

The other major mistake is in the spell progression chart.  Yes, wizards now have signature spells - or if you're an academic, a single extra spell slot at your highest level.  This does not make up for the fact that wizards' spell progression is flat.  After 2nd level, you never get another 1st-level spell slot.  I can not stress enough how bad of a design flaw this is.  Wizards are supposed to be able to make use of the variety of spells they can take, and limiting their spell progression means limiting their creativity, and that is a core concept of Dungeons and Dragons.  

As it stands now, a wizard will never have more than 2(+1) 1st-level spells.  In 1st edition AD&D, the magic-user eventually had 4 at 10th level and 5 at 20th.   It was identical in 2nd.  In 3rd, it was 4 & 4.  But now the most a wizard will ever seem to have is 3.  The wizard isn't supposed to be able to cast all the spells he has at his disposal, but having a limited number of spell slots punishes the wizard.  Instead of being able to prepare spells, the wizard is confined to using what he considers his most useful spells.  Why would I bother taking anything other than an offensive spell and Grease...

Spell List - ...WAIT, WHAT?  Seriously, what in the world were the designers thinking with this spell list?  Looking at my playtest campaign character, a full half of his 1st level spells aren't there anymore.  Alarm?  Gone.  Cause Fear?  Gone.  Ray of Enfeeblement?  Gone.  Grease?  Gone.  This last one is particularly annoying to me, because Grease has become a staple spell for a low-level wizard who wants to be able to exert some battlefield control.  Oh, and now to my 2nd-level spell list - Counterspell, Flaming Sphere, Hold Person, Melf's Acid Arrow, Mirror Image, and Web.  Hooray!  I get to keep...Melf's Acid Arrow and Web.

Did I miss something?  I've tried to be up-to-date and thorough on all the development notes.  Do the designers want us to try out different spells for the purposes of playtesting?  I could almost understand that, but pulling some spells and adding others still means they're being developed in a vacuum.

As for Magic Missile:  The trade-off on not having extra d4s at higher levels for Magic Missile was the ability to deal d4+1 damage whenever you wanted, and that was fine.  Now it's back to being a first-level spell that you have to prepare, but there's no cap on its damage if you want to prepare it at a higher level.  I don't think that's a net plus.  It doesn't do anything to improve the flavor of the spell, and it's lost its utility. 

Wizarding Tradition - It's a fine idea.  I don't mind the signature spells, they just feel a little too much like the domain specialty spells that clerics got in 3rd edition, except it's one spell that just gets bigger.  The special abilities, such as Spell Tactician and Arcane Deception just don't seem all that useful and don't make up for the things taken away from the class, mentioned above.

The Class as a Whole:  I've been approaching this playtest as a player who liked a lot about 3rd edition, but was driven away from the game by 4th.  As such, I'm hoping for a product that gets back to what made D&D fun in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd edition - and I don't think that's too far off from what the designers want.  I understand wizards were pretty broken by the end of 3.5.  I don't think that playtest wizards were all that powerful compared to other classes.  I've been dealing less damage than the rogue and doing more battlefield control (and with a raven familiar, a lot of scouting and ranged spell delivery).

But I see no need for what has been done to the wizard in this update.  My playtest group and I feel that it's important with the playtest to play as close to Rules As Written as possible, but I'm not looking forward to playing this iteration of the wizard, because it's more complicated, more limiting, and less fun than in previous versions.

Well said, and I agree 100%.  In our most recently playtest, nobody wanted to even try the wizard, and we had 3 players who routinely enjoy playing wizards.  I ended up having to take a wizard as a second character so that we could provide wizard feedback on this packet. 

The player who played the cleric in our group had similar issues with the changes to the cleric's at wills, number of spells per day, and the build option being dictated by which zero level spells they wanted to have at-will.  He would have preferred to play a war cleric, but really wanted at-will ranged spell, so ended up playing a lightbringer.

By the end of the session, the general consent was that they enjoyed 3.5/PF more, and I'm not even sure if I'll be able to get the group back together for a second session using the current ruleset.