Caster re-balance

[Blackhawk748]

I know there are a ton of these out there so i figured id toss mine in there, so here it is:

Make all T1 and T2 casters (ie the Cleric, Wizard, Druid, and Sorcerer) have two casting stats. Duh, duh DUUUUUUUUUH!

It goes something like this. Clerics and Druids use Wisdom to determine bonus spells and the maximum spell level of spells they can cast. They use Charisma for Save DCs. Obviously Dynamic Priest needs to be removed.

Wizards use Intelligence for Bonus spells and maximum spell level castable, they use Charisma for Save DCs.

Sorcerers are a tad different, they use Intelligence to determine maximum spell level they can cast and use Charisma for Save DCs and bonus spells.

Thoughts?

[Zanos]

All of the most broken tactics for full-casters don't require your opponents to make saving throws.

As with many caster fixes, it nerfs the playstyles that aren't a problem more than the ones that are.

[AdamantlyD20]

All that does is make a slightly higher percentage of player wealth go to boosting that secondary stat?

[Blackhawk748]

Valid points both, So what if we switch Charisma to the maximum spell level stat for everyone?

[eggynack]

Meh? Meh. I mean, it changes things in a vague way, but it doesn't really fix any of the underlying problems in the system.

[Blackhawk748]

Well me and my buddy were just sitting around discussing casters and we thought this might help a bit, i mean they are all SAD as hell, so we figured this may help a bit. We are fully aware that this may not fix all the problem, but hey we figured it may help a bit.

[Grod_The_Giant]

Helps a bit, sure. But it helps in a way that penalizes newbie (ie, less troublesome) players more than anyone else, which is usually the opposite of what you want to happen.

The easiest "fix" is to use the Bard progression, with +2 spells/day of each spell level (since most casters don't have ways of contributing beyond casting spells)

[Ramza00]

A wizard level 7 core will be warping effective reality with solid fog. No opponent can move giving you time to take them down one at a time, and giving your party members time to buff.

A druid level 3, non core, with obscuring snow and snow sight would be giving the party effective improved invisibility and it is multi target, your opponents can't see you past 5 feet but you can see them. Or he can do blinding spittle which gives blindness (effective improved invisibility) but with no save but it is single target.

etc

[Drachasor]

Fundamentally, you are never going to fix casters without changing the spells/spell lists. Or buffing up non-casters to the same level. (In practice you probably need to do a bit of both).

It's also worth bearing in mind that most Tier 1/2 casters can be made so that they are worse than Tier 4. The optimization floor is very low, especially for arcane. I think it is generally a bad idea to propose a solution that doesn't take this into account.

[Just to Browse]

It won't work, because now low-level casters need to double up on stats and be sucky (they were already sucky), and high-level casters still don't care at all because a +6 stat item is cheap. Their save DC might be 1-2 smaller.

Before you and your friend toss any more ideas, here's a list of things that already don't work:

Making casting hard: If it takes a random chance to succeed, you're just making casting more swingy. Swingy casters just make rocket launcher tag feel worse and make casting feel less rewarding. It also doesn't do much about out-of-combat buffs and utility.
Making casting dangerous: If casting will randomly cripple you, make you faint, or summon a demon to kill you, it's still just as overpowered as it was before, so now optimizers are encouraged to abuse the system and regular players don't want to touch magic at all. Bad bad bad.
Slowing down casting progressions: This is the current flavor of the month for caster fixes, and it also doesn't work. It just pushes the problem with spells till later levels (solid fog and black tentacles still totally invalidate every tier 3 fighting class at levels 10-15), but it also totally screws SoD-casters while encouraging casters to use buff and utility. Any fix that encourages casters to use their most OP spells is not a good fix.
Give everybody casting resistance: This is the least effective kind of fix. The problems with casters is not that they're good with fireball and flesh to stone, the problem is that they can use spells like stone shape, blasphemy, or summon a monster that deals twice as much damage as the fighter.
Making casting hard to learn: If you give casters only 1 trick per level, you're encouraging them to pick the most overpowered tricks and spamming those in every encounter forever.
[/list]

[INoKnowNames]

Just to Browse pretty much said a lot of what I wanted to say, but I feel like adding a little bit.

The caster classes themselves are not overpowered. Heck, the Wizard class by itself has 2 skill points per level, 1 good save, the smallest hit dice, and low BAB. Alone, it's probably the weakest class, save only the Sorcerer which is just the Wizard minus bonus feats. Psions are comparable.

The Cleric has decent saves, dice, and bab, but lesser weapon proficiencies and bab. And it only gets turn undead. A playable class, but not all that interesting. Wilders fit in a bit here. Druids kinda break the analogy a little...

Your first response upon reading this is most likely going to be somewhere along the lines of "that's a stupid argument; they get spells" (and or powers).

And -that- is my point. It is not the class that is broken; it is that they get access to reality shattering hacks.

Making it harder for them to use, or lesser in number, makes them no less broken, and only serves to make those who would play them and want to be powerful focus more on the most broken of them.

To balance a caster is the wrong question. To balance the spells themselves is the angle you should be focusing on.

[TypoNinja]

Well me and my buddy were just sitting around discussing casters and we thought this might help a bit, i mean they are all SAD as hell, so we figured this may help a bit. We are fully aware that this may not fix all the problem, but hey we figured it may help a bit.

Its not that being SAD is what makes them powerful (though being MAD does make some classes suck) its that magic is just that good when used to its full potential.

[Know(Nothing)]

Yeah, zero-ing the most traditionally broken and exploitable spells is a good start. I think, however, balancing things isn't just about dragging casters down, but building up mundanes. I'm currently working on an expanded treatment of Half-Wizard's (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showpost.php?p=16533817&postcount=32) fix that not only uses in-built features of 3.5 to even things out, but has the added bonus of not nerfing casters as they stand.

[Drachasor]

I think about the only traditional caster that's really balanced, even weak, is the Warmage. This is due to his very restrictive (even overly restrictive) spell list. However, he also has the advantage of a higher floor, which is a good thing.

I have mixed feelings on the Beguiler and Dread Necromancer. They are very high T3...bordering on low T2. The tier system doesn't seem to capture their power very well because of this, especially when you take into account some of the spells they can add to their lists.

For balancing casters, assuming you are aiming for a T3 game, consider the following:
Healer: Too weak. But you could buff it up some and it would make for a fine class. Gestalt it with a Rogue, Paladin, Fighter, or Ranger (with no ACFs, except perhaps for ones that remove spellcasting) and you probably have an interesting class -- though either houserule gate or remove it from their list. You could even tweak its spell list a little bit for flavor (move it a bit towards nature, with careful changes and a Ranger-Healer gestalt makes a good druid replacement.

Warmage: A bit too weak. It really lacks flexibility. Some fixes are potentially problematic, such as letting it learn any wizard spell with its advanced learning ability (also, this makes the floor-ceiling gap wider). It could use some buffs, utility magic, or crowd control, but all 3 is too much.

Warlock: It just doesn't have enough abilities and EB damage is too little. I recommend making EB deal Level*d6 damage rather than Level/2+1 d6. But make sure to half EB damage on abilities that combine it with full attacks (Hideous Blow is probably ok). Also, they need some more power options and to get a new power every level (imho). This really a lot of ways you could go about fixing them. You could even have Invocations become more powerful with level -- at least the ones that don't naturally scale, so that the lower level attack invocations stay useful. I've been toying with the idea of giving them a number of Arcana Points they can use every day to power up their abilities, as well as gaining 3 types of Invocations -- Buffs, Short-Duration/Instants/Attacks, and Any. It's kind of taking a page from ToB where stances were separate from maneuvers.

Binder: I've heard good things about the Binder, but I've never gotten around to really looking at it.

Psywarrior: T3 IIRC, so it is probably good to look at.

Bard: Again, T3. Though I haven't had much experience with how Save-based spells work on a 2/3s casting class. I'd worry that they wouldn't be very good (which is kind of lame in some respects).

I'd seriously consider having all classes have 3/4 BAB or full BAB (or even all have the same BAB progression like 4E, which I thought was one of the good moves). It allows more flexibility in character design without really affecting balance, imho. BAB just isn't as big a deal as a lot of people think. This is especially true if you weaken casting.

Another starting point is removing all Save Or Die spells and No Save Debuffs. Some other spells like Fabricate and the like need to be monitored in use and perhaps adjusted. Some stuff like Simulacrum are just a mess in general. Basically, the starting point is not allowing a spell unless you know it is balanced.

As for balancing with regards to melee stuff. Well, consider the Tome of Battle and Wildeshape Ranger as good baselines for melee flexibility. A lot of the PHB classes can work fine just by increasing their flexibility.

[TuggyNE]

Here's a list of things that already don't work:

Making casting hard: If it takes a random chance to succeed, you're just making casting more swingy. Swingy casters just make rocket launcher tag feel worse and make casting feel less rewarding. It also doesn't do much about out-of-combat buffs and utility.
Making casting dangerous: If casting will randomly cripple you, make you faint, or summon a demon to kill you, it's still just as overpowered as it was before, so now optimizers are encouraged to abuse the system and regular players don't want to touch magic at all. Bad bad bad.
Slowing down casting progressions: This is the current flavor of the month for caster fixes, and it also doesn't work. It just pushes the problem with spells till later levels (solid fog and black tentacles still totally invalidate every tier 3 fighting class at levels 10-15), but it also totally screws SoD-casters while encouraging casters to use buff and utility. Any fix that encourages casters to use their most OP spells is not a good fix.
Give everybody casting resistance: This is the least effective kind of fix. The problems with casters is not that they're good with fireball and flesh to stone, the problem is that they can use spells like stone shape, blasphemy, or summon a monster that deals twice as much damage as the fighter.
Making casting hard to learn: If you give casters only 1 trick per level, you're encouraging them to pick the most overpowered tricks and spamming those in every encounter forever.

I really need to bookmark this for future reference. It is quite a comprehensive and concise explanation!

[Ardul]

To balance a caster is the wrong question. To balance the spells themselves is the angle you should be focusing on.

I'm agree with this. A caster with the "wrong" spells is not unbalanced.

[KorbeltheReader]

I'm agree with this. A caster with the "wrong" spells is not unbalanced.

Thirding. The problem isn't the wizard, sorcerer, cleric, or druid; the problem is the wiz/sorc, cleric, and druid spell lists. In my opinion there are really only 4 options for dealing with them:

1. sift through all several hundred spells in all of the books and ban the ones you don't want.
2. make every player clear the spells they pick with you in advance.
3. change the mechanics so the players only receive spells you give them specifically as treasure or special training or something.
4. ban all classes that get full access to the wiz/sorc, cleric, or druid spell lists.

[Fitz10019]

My suggestion is that wizards (T1) have to multi-class to sorcerer(T2) at a ratio 3/1 or 4/1. Then they aren't MAD, you've slowed their progress, they'll never get to 9th-level spells, and they should have plenty of spells for an adventuring day. I have not tested this -- it's pure speculation.

[tzar1990]

The closest I've come to a fix was to say that each full caster has to pick and stick with a theme - and they are incapable of using spells outside of that theme (save with UMD or something like that). Yes, any given theme will have some overpowered abilities, but it won't have ALL of the broken abilities, lowering them down to Tier 2 or 3.

The issue with this, of course, is that it's a lot of work - you're essentially designing a new class along the lines of the Beguiler, Warmage or Dread Necromancer. But those classes are actually balanced, so I'd argue that it's worth the trouble (especially cause you can offload some of the work onto the players, or make it up as they go along).

[Zanos]

The closest I've come to a fix was to say that each full caster has to pick and stick with a theme - and they are incapable of using spells outside of that theme (save with UMD or something like that). Yes, any given theme will have some overpowered abilities, but it won't have ALL of the broken abilities, lowering them down to Tier 2 or 3.

My theme is binding creatures and/or summoning.

Whoops, I'm tier 1 again.

Limiting spell lists is a good why to make casters less powerful, but I don't think making every caster have a theme is necessarily a good idea from a roleplay standpoint. Many iconic wizards, especially in D&D settings, have no real "theme'd" spell lists.

[Drachasor]

My theme is binding creatures and/or summoning.

Whoops, I'm tier 1 again.

Limiting spell lists is a good why to make casters less powerful, but I don't think making every caster have a theme is necessarily a good idea from a roleplay standpoint. Many iconic wizards, especially in D&D settings, have no real "theme'd" spell lists.

It's also really hit or miss in terms of effectiveness. Pick fire and you'll suck, but at least you have a lot of spells. Pick Lightning or Acid and there are very few spells. Pick something like "conjuring things (not creatures" and there are also relatively few spells. And the balance is essentially completely random. People need to remember that there are many character themes that make sense and seem like they should be effective that D&D just doesn't support.


My suggestion is that wizards (T1) have to multi-class to sorcerer(T2) at a ratio 3/1 or 4/1. Then they aren't MAD, you've slowed their progress, they'll never get to 9th-level spells, and they should have plenty of spells for an adventuring day. I have not tested this -- it's pure speculation.

That's just a type of delayed progression. It doesn't really fix anything because all the broken spells are still there. You can be overpowered without 9th level spells easily enough.

[INoKnowNames]

I'm agree with this. A caster with the "wrong" spells is not unbalanced.


Thirding.

Yay, people agreed with me! I'm persuasive!


Healer: Too weak.

The funny thing is, between Sanctified Spells to gain some offense and a bit of utility, the recommended types of spells made available via the Spell Compendium, and some optimization through snagging Domains, the Healer Class can actually be made a bit stronger than a lot of people might think. It's not nearly strong enough to be game-breakingly so, but that's probably a good thing in most situations anyway.


That's just a type of delayed progression. It doesn't really fix anything because all the broken spells are still there. You can be overpowered without 9th level spells easily enough.

Dang, you said this before I could. But yeah.

Talk to the players playing those casters, and find a mutual agreement on how strong they should be, for the sake of the game world and for fitting in nicely in the party. Getting the players to not select broken spells is probably easier than going through each and every individual book and supplimental material, research and determine which ones are broken and which ones aren't, and ban accordingly.

[Devronq]

I don't think anything less than rewriting alot of spells and possible changing some mechanics would help with balance at all. It would just be a slight annoyance to someone who already can anything and everything

[Grod_The_Giant]

If you're measuring casters against Fighters and Barbarians, there is nothing you can do to fix things, short of turning them into 1d6/level blasters with a single attack spell. Any class with options will shine in the face of a class without options.

The solution, then, is to give everyone options, not take them away. Compare casters to Swordsages and Binders, rather than the utter crap that are early 3.5 noncasters. Find homebrew boosts for lower-tier classes; there are about a thousand on these boards alone, many of them very good. Then you can start cutting out spells that are actually broken, rather than just "more useful than a skill check."