How good/bad is a Lore (arcane trad.) Wizard?

[samcifer]

Looking through the UA material, I found the Lore arcane tradition for the wizard class in the Esrlock and Wizard article and it looks really interesting, but is it a good tradition for a wizard to use?

[Saiga]

Yes. It's very powerful and received a lot of criticism for being totally broken. It's likely that it won't make the cut for Xanathar's guide based on that feedback.

[SharkForce]

"good" as in powerful, yes.

"good" as in remotely balanced with anything else in the game? well, maybe it's comparable to level 20 moon druid in how broken it is.

[Nifft]

well, maybe it's comparable to level 20 moon druid in how broken it is.

Hey, that's not fair.

The Moon Druid 20 had to play through 19 levels of being merely excellent.

[Unoriginal]

Lvl 20 moon Druid isn't that broken

[Degwerks]

Just 2 levels of the Lore Master arcane tradition is OP enough. Even if you only use the ability to change damage types and that's it and just take 2 levels it's going to be OP combined with any other caster that you mix it with.

[SharkForce]

Hey, that's not fair.

The Moon Druid 20 had to play through 19 levels of being merely excellent.

well, yeah. that's why i specified level 20 :P

[90sMusic]

It is absurdly, brokenly overpowered, yes.

It lets you change the element of damage spells, which no one else has the ability to do, letting you do things like not only bypass immunities on enemies but possibly also get vulnerabilities out of it. So if you were fighting, say, a group of Salamanders that are immune to fire damage and would be much more difficult to do AOE damage to, you just make your fireball do cold damage and not only hit them, but do additional damage by exploiting their vulnerability on top of that. It's too much.

Beyond that, they can expend 1st level spell slots to further increase their spell damage by another 2d10 which is crazy, improve spell ranges to ONE MILE which is bananas, and increase the DC of the spell by 2, also insane.

They can choose to make their spells use a different saving throw to try to resist, so you cast that instant-save-or-die ability that virtually all of them use constitution save, and just decide to instead make it use an int save which virtually nothing has save proficiency in and not many creatures have that high of intelligence.

Once per short rest you can swap your spells out which enormously softens one of the penalties of being a wizard which is having to choose your spells in advance for your situations. And then being able to cast an even better version of the Wish spell starting at level 14 is crazy. And by the time you can cast wish, which is restricted to once per day for anyone else, this guy can do it twice and use his special version to cast any 9th level spell in the game.

It is absurdly overpowered, at every level.

[Findulidas]

Its unfortunate since I want expertise in arcana without spending a feat or starting MC in knowledge cleric.

However just using this archetype the intended way is too strong.