Rebalancing Spellcasting 5e

[LordCdrMilitant]

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.

4 rounds of combat in an adventuring day sounds kind of ridiculous.

I could see maybe 4 rounds in a single combat, especially if everybody unloads, but in a whole day seems kind of extreme levels of 10 minute adventuring day. I would say that we probably usually have 4-10 rounds in a single combat, and in a day that involves combats, there are usually several [Most days do not involve combat]. I definitely understand an argument that short rests might as well not exist so Fighter doesn't get to alpha strike more than Sorcerer, but Fighter isn't actually relying on being able to recharge her burst abilities on a short rest to outperform the long rest Sorcerer, only that there's 7 or more rounds of combat in a day where there's a fight.

As far as being a melee centered rogue, it's not just the caster showing you up:

As mentioned, even a basic fighter build [any type, PAM & GWM] is going to downrange 204 average potential damage on the opening/action surge rounds and 102 on a regular turn. Shooty Rogue, on the round they Assassinate [first round], outputs 20d6+2d10+15 [107] [or some combination thereof, since most of the damage is coming from Sneak Attack] on the first round of combat and drops to 10d6+1d10+15 [61] on each round thereafter. This isn't favorable at all. Without Assassinate, Rogue doesn't even get the damage spike on turn 1 [I don't know what Swashbuckler gets, though].

I’ve never played a level 10+ game so I haven’t yet seen this problem firsthand.

That being said, I’ve been toying with a novel approach to fixing it. Basically, the spell progression follows the normal curve until level 6 (10 spell slots total). After level 6, spells casters don’t get more slots, their slots simply
get more powerful (i.e. they gain a new slot, but lose their lowest level existing slot).

A 7th level wizard has 1 4th level, 3 3rd level, 3 2nd level and 3 1st level slots. A 12th level wizard has 1 6th level, 2 5th level, 3 4th level, 3 3rd level and 2 2nd level slots. You can always cast a spell using a higher level slot, so your Shield spell remains somewhat useful.

You have to be careful with your spells because even at high levels you can run out.

IMO, expecting the use of cantrips for damage is only really acceptable in the calculation if the alpha strike and follow-on rates are actually exceeding the every-turn always-active floor for the noncaster. Given that this isn't true, I think that casters just need the potential in their low end slots to grow with level.
[as a side note, without twinning spells the burst damage out of a spellcaster isn't even that high]

If we took, for example, Fireball [which is common and good when it becomes available but is obsolete not too long afterwords] and scaled it as it used to be [1d6/caster level], then it would do 20d6 [80] damage at 20th level. This would be pretty acceptable for a 20th level blast effect, and alleviate the problem of high-level casters having 6 turns of useful damage output [which still for the most part doesn't actually exceed noncasters] before dropping off to irrelevance in that regard and mostly being useful for teleporting places.