Rebalancing Spellcasting 5e

[LordCdrMilitant]

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.

For martial vs. caster damage output balance, a very basic level 20 fighter can downrange 75+4d10+1d4 damage every turn without considering special abilities or anything. This is like a low bar for per-turn damage potential.

A sorcerer at 20th level can do more damage in a burst, but doesn't even come close to that kind of damage for an extended fight, and drops to 4d10 after all her spells are gone or she doesn't want to use them anymore. It's hard to measure her base per-turn downrange damage, but the bulk of her abilities are doing like 30-50 damage per turn, and her high-mid level but still really rare abilities like disintegrate aren't topping the fighter's baseline damage potential.

I nominated sorcerer because she's comparable to fighter, with twinned spell basically being like an action surge. Sorcerer can twin a disintegrate/finger of death and quicken a cantrip for along the lines of [20 to 38]d6+80+4d10 for 9-12 sorcerery points, and can do this twice per day [before running out of sorcery points], before dropping off to doing just the 10d6+40 twice, then then further down into irrelevance in the damage per turn realm. The Fighter can action surge her full attack cycle for 150+8d10+2d4 twice per day before dropping off to the 75+4d10+1d4 damage.

38d6+80+4d10 averages out to 256 burst damage, and 150+8d10+1d4 averages out to 204. Sorcerer then drops to 80 and Fighter to 102, and then Sorcerer drops again to like 40 and then to like 20 and stops being comparatively relevant as a damage source. Fighter takes over the lead in damage on only the 6th or 7th round of combat for the day.



I don't think this is actually too bad, because to some degree the caster is supposed to be providing less damage to more targets [like a meteor storm of 160 average to basically-everybody once per day] and/or support abilities that make everybody else more effective or the enemy less effective, as opposed to single-target alpha striking. However, I think this illustrates why there should be something to push the lower level spells up in ability without costing high level spell slots.

Some spells that don't do damage are strong, but because of the way combat works in 5e [which is another problem and another discussion to have another time], a lot of the ones that do damage I think are actually legitimately strong options when they come available, and then quickly decline into obsolescence and the slots into sorcerery points.

The low level spells that IMO have the best staying power are Invisibility, Fly, D-Door, and Greater Invisibility because they have tactical maneuver value and minimal failure chance, and assuming the party size doesn't change, neither does their effect grow relatively weaker.