Why is wish so powerful?

[urandom]

Wish is often used as an example of the game breaking power of wizards at late levels. While I definitely see how wizards are really powerful, wish seems pretty tame from a optimizers perspective (free wishes aside). It has a short list of powerful things it can do, but none are that overwhelming, and it has a hefty xp cost. Everything else is DM approval required. It explicitly says that more powerful effects are dangerous and may not work how they are meant to. With a permissive DM, sure it has no upper limit, but relying upon a easy going DM doesn't really seem optimized or even that powerful. Is the power just from the high flexibility it allows?

[tyckspoon]

The main thing is a result of a D&D truism: There's A Spell For That. And Wish lets you spontaneously cast probably 70 to 80 percent of the spells in the game. It's expensive, yes (unless you are playing and abusing absolute RAW, in which case you are carrying around a dozen Efreeti-created Rings of Three Wishes or Wish-loaded Luckblades anyway or perhaps casting XP-free Supernatural or Spell-Like Wishes) but if *nothing* else you are carrying applies to your situation, you can Wish for the solution. Safely, at that.

The other thing is mostly pertinent to paranoia games where merely getting access to an area is very difficult (eg, your enemy lives in a planar-locked personal demiplane), but Wish does (as far as I know) uniquely and on the 'safe' list perform one of the most absolute effects in the game:

Transport travelers. A wish can lift one creature per caster level from anywhere on any plane and place those creatures anywhere else on any plane regardless of local conditions.

Doesn't matter if it's through a Forbiddance, going into a Genesis-created demiplane with no actual points of attachment to the rest of the planescape, or the personal retreat of a hermit-god; Wish will get you there, thanks to the staggering broadness of that 'regardless of local conditions' clause.

Edit: I think Gate and Shapechange are probably more relevant examples of "Wizard's game-breaking power", honestly- they are capable of solving almost as many situations as safe-list Wishes without anywhere near as much cost. Heck, they can be used to *get* free Wishes pretty trivially, even if you weren't already using Planar Binding to do that.

[lsfreak]

Well, there's the issue that the magic item creation has no gp limit. Provided you're not casting the spell yourself, that can really break things, but that's more going to be a problem with gate, mindrape, or whatever else you use to give yourself minimal-cost wishes.

And yes, I'd agree it's generally not wish itself that's so powerful. It's that there are so many ways for a wizard to get wishes without having to cast the spell themself, that all the balancing factors of wish get thrown out the window.