Rebalancing Spellcasting 5e

[Misterwhisper]

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.

That is one of the other main issues, there are no extended fights like old editions.

I never made it to level 20 but I have made it to 16 once and 17 once.

No fight lasted more than 4 rounds. None.
I have never even heard of a combat in other groups go past 6.
Most of the time of a fight goes past 4 it is because everyone is stuck in darkness or fog or something and people are doing nothing most of the time.

Heck in the level 16 capped game where I played a melee rogue, I didn’t even bother rolling initiative after level 11 because I knew that nothing I was going to do in actual combat mattered.

We had:
An evoker wizard one level fighter
A life cleric
A bear totem barbarian with PAM
A vengeance paladin one level hexblade and PAM
A Lore Bard
And
Me as a melee centered rogue swashbuckler who used a custom made 2 handed reach finesse weapon.

It was very much the 10 min adventuring day, so I just went around and scoped places for hidden rooms and things while everyone else handled the fighting.