Quote Originally Posted by lesser_minion View Post
You're dealing in dodgy statistics.

Take a fighter with the manouevre "kill anything and everything you want dead within 10,000 feet. Things with fighter levels are immune, but no other recourse is permitted." That's one manouevre. Massively underpowered, right?

Take a wizard with the spells "summon fluffy bunnies", "feed hamster", "summon inflatable mallet", "summon discarded banana peel" and "wet tissue paper armour". That's five spells. Five times more spells than the fighter gets manoeuvres. That's ridiculously overpowered, right?

Now obviously, this is an extreme pair of examples, but you should be able to see the point: simply having 40 spells doesn't make you more powerful than a guy with five manoeuvres, or even necessarily more versatile. It depends on what the spells are and what the manoeuvres are.
Okay now think this through seriously and tell me you honestly believe that the Fighter's 5 maneuvers will be more varied in use and utility than even 5 of the Wizard's spells, much less 40 of them.

Yes, power level matters. But number of options does as well. Right now the current design is Wizards get more powerful spells, that are more versatile, and a greater number of them, because "magic". Even if you made sure all of the fighter maneuvers had the same diversity and power as spells, the Wizard still has a greater number, and is better (see: Wizard vs Sorcerer).

The only way for the argument to work out in your favor is if, as you posit, the spells are made MUCH weaker than the maneuvers, and have a very limited scope. You and I both know that isn't going to happen, so why do you even bother trying to put it forward as a possibility?