Rebalancing Spellcasting 5e

[MrStabby]

Interesting.

I'm of the opinion that high level spells, and low level spells, and spellcasting in general, aren't good enough.

Part of it is that they don't scale naturally and high level slots are very limited. Many of their effects are also incredibly unreliable. There's just a few spells that are outside the power level of even their peers, skewing the curve, IMO.


If I were to rebalance magic, I'd return damage scaling by caster level instead of spell level and/or return additional spell slots for having a high casting stat [or maybe just increase the number of slots per day]. Then, I'd look at the spells that have effects that are now too strong, and eliminate or reduce their effect.

There's no reason for Wish to exist beyond legacy. It would go, since it skews the curve for all other spells.
Dominate would be re-worked, because it's kind of useless now since it's such a high level high value slot that has such a high probability of just doing nothing, but its effect is supposedly worth it if it happens. This is IMO a bad model, and I would make it weaker [such as eliminating the direct control clause to just "give directions to" and reducing duration to like 1 minute instead of 1 hour so it's an encounter-length ability.]
Power Word Kill and Forcecage are pretty mundane, and probably don't need anything done about them.

I think there are two things here... one is overall power of spell casting and the other is how it is expressed. On the overall power I think we disagree - I think the most feted low level spells dont tend to do damage and they do stay pretty powerful: fairy fire, misty step, hypnotic pattern, bless, shield etc.. now they are probably so highly regarded as they do scale as they dont do damage, but do spellcaster need 100% of their spells to scale as well as their best scaling 30% do?

How it is expressed is more interesting. Being a spellcaster and not being able to cast spells sucks. Being stuck with cantrips sucks... a system that pushed more of a class's spellcasting power into lower levels slots would be cool by me - less variance in what you do. I am not sure spell slots are the way to go for this though. Bigger changes.might be needed.

Certainly I think you have a point about how spes dont scale with caster level. Whilst we differ as I think it would overpower casters if it did, with no other changes, I think that there is some merit to your suggestion if you could keep an ok class balance. Those thematic spells that your character loved get forgotten as they are no longer effective - if burning hands was a bit of a trademark of your character then it is a shame to see it dropped rather than grow.

The balance between spells is terrible, I think we agree on that. Of all the spells in the PHB there are clear gaps between good ones and the mediocre ones and the bad ones. I think that sometimes this is forgotten or underplayed. For all that big sweeping changes can be proposed to systems, a lot of the problems could be fixed by changing about a third of spells.