Claims about casters having "strategic" capabilities are really mostly about wizards

[PhoenixPhyre]

In the interminable caster/martial debates, a common benchmark for "how strong martials need to be" involves pointing out certain capabilities that "casters" have and saying that martials need a way of doing those things.

But let's consider a few of them in particular.

Flight: in 5e, that means either a flying mount (something anyone can in principle get, but paladins have it the easiest), a magic item granting flight (which is available to anyone), or the fly spell. Which is only on the following lists: Sorcerer, Warlock, Wizard, Artificer. Clerics? out of luck. Druids? Can transform into something that can fly (3 levels later). Can maybe (Dm willing) summon something that can fly. But don't have native flight. And note that a large chunk of sorcerers and warlocks won't necessarily pick up fly, as their preps/slots are really really constrained. Artificers don't get it until much later if they even have room to pick it up. It's only wizards who can have a pretty good chance of having it right about level 5 (maybe level 7 or so).

Teleportation: One of three-ish spells (ignoring magic items, because again, those are available to everyone): teleport, teleport circle, and maybe transport via plants (because that has substantial limits). Teleport is only on the bard, sorcerer, and wizard list. Again, clerics are out of luck, as are druids. Teleport circle is on the bard, wizard, sorcerer, and arcana cleric[1] list. Transport via plants can kinda work, and is the only druid access to such effects. A pattern seems to be forming here...

Planar Travel: Really only one good option here. Plane Shift. Which is a bit more convenient (post Tasha's[2])--clerics, druids, sorcerers, warlocks, and wizards. And you can sorta-kinda mimic teleport circle for the low low price of 2 7th level slots. Yay.

Long-duration minionmancy: You can create undead or you can planar bind. Planar ally isn't under your control, so it doesn't really count unless your DM is bending over backward for you. Clerics can create undead, but they're not great at it. And many DMs will look askance at a cleric of a good god engaging in creating armies of the undead. Wizards (the only other class with native access, although oathbreakers and circle of spores druids also have access) can specialize in it. And eventually get free castings of it. Planar binding is actually fairly freely available: bard, cleric, druid, wizard. But only the bard and wizard have the access to also be able to summon the really good targets for it. If you go instead to the more puppeting of existing creatures (domination, et al),
- suggestion is bard/sorcerer/warlock/wizard
- geas is bard/cleric/druid/paladin/wizard
- mass suggestion is bard/sorcerer/warlock/wizard
- charm person (which is a long way from mind control, but) is bard/druid/sorcerer/warlock/wizard + trickery domain
- dominate person is bard/sorcerer/wizard + trickery domain, archfey/GOO, and 3 paladin oaths

Knock (included not because it's a great spell but because it always comes up): You guessed it, bard/sorcerer/wizard

Short-range teleportation (misty step, dimension door, arcane gate): Misty step is available to sorcerer/warlock/wizard, 1 land druid terrain, and 3 paladin oaths. Dimension door is bard, sorcerer, warlock, wizard, trickery domain, oath of vengeance (who gets it real real late). Arcane gate is sorcerer/warlock/wizard (but mostly wizard and maybe sorcerer, because it's a 6th level spell so mystic arcanum for warlocks).

Find Familiar Either a feat or...wizard-list exclusive (so the 1/3 casters can get it).

Shenanigans: Wish, simulacrum, clone, magic jar. Of the 4, only wish is available to non-wizards (also sorcerers and genie warlocks). The other 3 are wizard exclusive.

And the list goes on. The only class that has native access to all these capabilities that supposedly define the supremacy of casters is the wizard. And even the others who share a lot of them (sorcerers and warlocks) are so limited in their choices that they either won't have some of them OR will have used up most of their picks on those, hampering their other capabilities.

In essence, the crux of the supposed disparity is that wizards are out of step with the rest of the game. Not anyone else, just pretty much wizards. Bending the rest of the game to bring everyone up to that level means that no one can have any interesting features. And wizards will still dominate, because these (and similarly powerful capabilities) are just part of their enormous list of things they can pick and choose from.

[1] which didn't get republished, so it's stuck in one setting in a book that's out of print.
[2] In the PHB, clerics didn't have it. Which is ironic--the ones who are supposed to be linked to their gods couldn't go visit. But the atheist wizard could, as could the devil-serving warlock or the nature-obsessive druid. But not the holy cleric!

[MrStabby]

Well I think the most common ones I have seen have been divination spells. Spells like commune can be really high impact. And flying - the most common fly spell I have seen is polymorph. Windwalk and word of recall are poor teleportation subsitutes but are still real and still useful.

In terms of helping others at a more strategic level you get the ability to cure diseases and create food and water out of nothing. That can impact a campaign significantly.

Sending spell is probably also a "strategic" capability, as are things like animal messengers.


Edit: And Bards. Bards can get any spell.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Well I think the most common ones I have seen have been divination spells. Spells like commune can be really high impact. And flying - the most common fly spell I have seen is polymorph. Windwalk and word of recall are poor teleportation subsitutes but are still real and still useful.

In terms of helping others at a more strategic level you get the ability to cure diseases and create food and water out of nothing. That can impact a campaign significantly.

Sending spell is probably also a "strategic" capability, as are things like animal messengers.


Edit: And Bards. Bards can get any spell.

Except...those aren't the ones that are brought up in the discussions. Which is what I was going at here. And, except curing diseases, are all things wizards do best and most can't do very well at all.

Bards can only get a couple of them, and their Magical Secrets are already oversubscribed before those are included. So any particular bard might have a couple, but won't have the full set. Only wizards can reliably have the full set, especially when you look at all the ones that are wizard exclusive.

There's a huge gulf between "this is useful" and "if you don't have this, you can't interact with the setting outside of combat." And it's the latter that is claimed, that because martials don't have native flight they're just SOL. That because they don't have teleportation (and yes, the specific claim is about teleport, not any of the cheap substitutes) they're just fundamentally weaker. Etc.

No, polymorph is not a good fly spell. It's not even as good as fly, which is a pretty poor form of flight.

Part of my annoyance around this is how the goalposts are motorized--the "casters are so much better" argument bends and twists, including grasping at straws to justify things (whether that is "martials need to be mythic-class superheroes by level 10 and if you don't want to be thor you should just stop playing at 10" or "martials suck and no one should play them because casters are always better" or whatever the cause du jour might be).

[MrStabby]

Except...those aren't the ones that are brought up in the discussions. Which is what I was going at here. And, except curing diseases, are all things wizards do best and most can't do very well at all.

Bards can only get a couple of them, and their Magical Secrets are already oversubscribed before those are included. So any particular bard might have a couple, but won't have the full set. Only wizards can reliably have the full set, especially when you look at all the ones that are wizard exclusive.

There's a huge gulf between "this is useful" and "if you don't have this, you can't interact with the setting outside of combat." And it's the latter that is claimed, that because martials don't have native flight they're just SOL. That because they don't have teleportation (and yes, the specific claim is about teleport, not any of the cheap substitutes) they're just fundamentally weaker. Etc.

No, polymorph is not a good fly spell. It's not even as good as fly, which is a pretty poor form of flight.

Part of my annoyance around this is how the goalposts are motorized--the "casters are so much better" argument bends and twists, including grasping at straws to justify things (whether that is "martials need to be mythic-class superheroes by level 10 and if you don't want to be thor you should just stop playing at 10" or "martials suck and no one should play them because casters are always better" or whatever the cause du jour might be).

he amount of truth depends really on how much you are claiming. If you want to claim that wizards have more strategic options than other casters, then sure. I don't think thats a particularly controversial statement. If you want to claim that only wizards have the kind of strategic options that non casters don't then its a very different picture. Sure, wizards get brought up more because they are the clearest illustration to make a point, but someone bringing up a wizard because it is the cleaes illustration doesn't mean that other classes don't have similar capabilities.

I also think I am missing something with your attitude to this. Your stance on the bard seems to be that they can get all of these things but the opportunity cost is too high, but then seem dismissive of polymorph when its main feature as a flight spell is that its opportunity cost is so low because you were going to take it anyway/it does so many other good things.

I don't think the goalposts are really moved much at all. What is see is different people have different goalposts, so when you speak with different people at different times you get different impressions. Well that and some people are not great a articulating their concerns or do so in a more informal way than you might want.

And I don't get how I can bring these spells up in a discussion, and your response is "those aren't the ones that are brought up in discussions", but thats a different issue.

[PhoenixPhyre]

he amount of truth depends really on how much you are claiming. If you want to claim that wizards have more strategic options than other casters, then sure. I don't think thats a particularly controversial statement. If you want to claim that only wizards have the kind of strategic options that non casters don't then its a very different picture. Sure, wizards get brought up more because they are the clearest illustration to make a point, but someone bringing up a wizard because it is the cleaes illustration doesn't mean that other classes don't have similar capabilities.

I also think I am missing something with your attitude to this. Your stance on the bard seems to be that they can get all of these things but the opportunity cost is too high, but then seem dismissive of polymorph when its main feature as a flight spell is that its opportunity cost is so low because you were going to take it anyway/it does so many other good things.

I don't think the goalposts are really moved much at all. What is see is different people have different goalposts, so when you speak with different people at different times you get different impressions. Well that and some people are not great a articulating their concerns or do so in a more informal way than you might want.

And I don't get how I can bring these spells up in a discussion, and your response is "those aren't the ones that are brought up in discussions", but thats a different issue.

If you remove wizards from the picture, the entire discussion radically changes. Most of the key strategic capabilities are either class-unique OR all the classes that can get them already face strong constraints that mean that they'll only have a few of those capabilities.

Instead of "well, all casters can do <X> AND <Y> AND <Z>", it becomes "well, clerics can do <X>, druids can do <Y>, and sorcerers can do <X> XOR <Y> XOR <Z>". And that's a much more doable target. Being able to do one thing like teleporting, flying, etc is very different than the current, where you could give someone at-will flight and the immediate rejoinder would be "well, but they can't teleport/minionmancy/planeshift/etc". But the only reason why that's even plausible for anyone is that wizards can do all of those things while still having lots of spell picks left over. Even if they never find a scroll.

And those spells marked "shenanigans"? Those are a substantial fraction of the spells that make things unravel. And they're wizard unique.

The point being, it's not that casters, generally, are these mythic, world-changing beasts. Each caster class other than wizards tends to have a couple nice big things. Which is fine. Everyone should have a couple nice big things. But then wizards get everyone else's nice big things and a bunch more of their own on top. That is, the root of the caster/martial disparity is wizards. If (hypothetically) you deleted the wizard class and its spell list from the game, a large chunk of the disparity would just go away. And the rest would actually be solvable, instead of intractable. Even bards would be toned down tremendously, because they'd lose a lot of arrows in their "steal spells" quiver.

Would it completely solve the issue? No. Is it the best fix? No. But it's an illustration of where, exactly, the issue lies. There's a substantial outlier in power, power-scaling, and versatility. Clerics, for instance, don't go power-law scaling because their high-level spells aren't really all that much better than their low level ones. Neither, really, are druid spells. Many more caveats, limits, and general boundaries. Sorcerers are bounded sharply by their very limited spell picks. Warlocks are bound both by only getting 1 mystic arcanum per spell level AND only having a few slots. Bards aren't limited enough[1], but do have limits in that they're locked in once they make a pick and their native list is the weakest by far. Wizards...don't have those limits. Any of them. They have crap-tons of spells known (not as many as clerics or druids, but clerics have a much weaker list overall and a huge chunk of the druid list is concentration or very situational), the best ritual casting, AND all the powerful spells. And they're the only class that can directly translate downtime and cash into adventuring power by scribing spells. With only minor DM involvement at all. Even a single found spellbook skyrockets their versatility. So wizards end up scaling more like Level^4, where martials are roughly linear (at best) and other casters are somewhere closer to L^2 at most.

Instead of trying to find ways to match the outlier...fix the outlier. Bring them down into the range everyone else has, where there are actual binding constraints on their capabilities. Then the overall balance can be reanalyzed and possibly fixed. Until then, no fix is possible. Because anything you do will bump up wizards as well.

But there's a strong constituency for the idea that wizards are automatically destined to be the strongest class at everything and any attempt to bring them down to the pack is "destroying the game". At the core, that was the root of a lot of the hate for 4e[2]--that wizards weren't special any more. Not clerics, not druids. Wizards.

[1] Being a full caster who can cherry pick the good spells AND has expertise AND has jack of all trades AND has subclass-available martial combat capability is out of bound. But they do have to specialize--they're only broad in the abstract. Any individual bard will be much more limited. Wizards can radically transform on a daily basis.
[2] Not all of it--4e did some stupid things. And there was generalize "who moved my cheese" angst. But much of the hate boiled down to "I don't feel like a wizard because I can't dominate all aspects of the game just by picking the class at level one and taking the broken spells." The devs even said as much, that they had to repeatedly try to convince people that no, wizards aren't naturally supposed to be the strongest just by picking the class.

[Unoriginal]

Well I think the most common ones I have seen have been divination spells. Spells like commune can be really high impact.

Except...those aren't the ones that are brought up in the discussions.

I previous years, I've seen a lot of people bring up divination spells as to why casters/wizards are superior... except they've never been able to explain why those divination spells were so powerful/problem-solving/etc, as usually when they described the effects they didn't actually describe things the 5e divination spells can do.

Part of my annoyance around this is how the goalposts are motorized--the "casters are so much better" argument bends and twists, including grasping at straws to justify things (whether that is "martials need to be mythic-class superheroes by level 10 and if you don't want to be thor you should just stop playing at 10" or "martials suck and no one should play them because casters are always better" or whatever the cause du jour might be).

Not to mention, all casters but especially wizards in that kind of white room theorycrafting "casters are superior" threads have an always-correct, ever-adapting spell loadout to handle the specific challenges of the adventure they're about to face.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I previous years, I've seen a lot of people bring up divination spells as to why casters/wizards are superior... except they've never been able to explain why those divination spells were so powerful/problem-solving/etc, as usually when they described the effects they didn't actually describe things the 5e divination spells can do.

Yeah, or assume that the DM will just buy into the "but it's magic and I'm smart, so I get exactly what I want" mythos. Which is also at the heart of the "wizards are automatically better than anyone" myth.

Not to mention, all casters but especially wizards in that kind of white room theorycrafting "casters are superior" threads have an always-correct, ever-adapting spell loadout to handle the specific challenges of the adventure they're about to face.

Yeah. Even better, you'll see hyper-specific builds designed for just this scenario; change the scenario and the build changes. In more realistic scenarios, wizards are still the ones who combine
a) day-to-day flexibility in spell preparation (including not having to prepare rituals)
b) a wide array of spells known
c) and a huge list to pull from, including all the best ones

Most of those that have (a) and/or (b) don't have great spell lists, especially at higher levels, failing (c).

Thus, wizards are the most likely to actually come close to being able to Schrodinger's Wizard in more realistic scenarios. Which also makes planning around them hard--if you plan for them to take <significant capability X> and they decide not to prepare it, the party is SoL. If you don't prepare for that, then they trivialize some things, often in un-fun ways.

----

To name a few other things--forcecage is a known anti-martial-fun spell. Except...unless you're a wizard, you may struggle getting out as well. And wall of force can be brought down with disintegrate. Pity it's only on the wizard/sorcerer list. Etc.

[KorvinStarmast]

If you remove wizards from the picture, the entire discussion radically changes.

NPC assassin called, he'd like that job.

If (hypothetically) you deleted the wizard class and its spell list from the game, a large chunk of the disparity would just go away. And the rest would actually be solvable, instead of intractable. Even bards would be toned down tremendously, because they'd lose a lot of arrows in their "steal spells" quiver.

The next splat book would just bloat them back up again, wouldn't it? It is Wizards of the Coast

At the core, that was the root of a lot of the hate for 4e[2]--that wizards weren't special any more. Not clerics, not druids. Wizards.

It is Wizards of the Coast It is Wizards of the Coast

But they do have to specialize--they're only broad in the abstract. Any individual bard will be much more limited.

Glad you qualified that.

Not to mention, all casters but especially wizards in that kind of white room theorycrafting "casters are superior" threads have an always-correct, ever-adapting spell loadout to handle the specific challenges of the adventure they're about to face.

Which is where the spells known limitation does help for the spells known classes.

Ritual spells probably need a re look in D&Done.

[PhoenixPhyre]

The next splat book would just bloat them back up again, wouldn't it? It is Wizards of the Coast

Yeah. that's one of the more frustrating things. Not sure if it's because it's called Wizards of the Coast or not, but there's this mindset that all spells, by default, belong to wizards. And only if there are really strong reasons not to give them to them do we drop them off the list. Fizban's was the ultimate there--wizards aren't even really thematically tied to dragons. Sorcerers are. So why the everliving why do wizards literally get every single one of the new spells there? And 19/21 in Tasha's, and 77/91 (basically missing out on only the healing/restoration ones) from Xanathar's.

[MrStabby]

If you remove wizards from the picture, the entire discussion radically changes. Most of the key strategic capabilities are either class-unique OR all the classes that can get them already face strong constraints that mean that they'll only have a few of those capabilities.

Instead of "well, all casters can do <X> AND <Y> AND <Z>", it becomes "well, clerics can do <X>, druids can do <Y>, and sorcerers can do <X> XOR <Y> XOR <Z>". And that's a much more doable target. Being able to do one thing like teleporting, flying, etc is very different than the current, where you could give someone at-will flight and the immediate rejoinder would be "well, but they can't teleport/minionmancy/planeshift/etc". But the only reason why that's even plausible for anyone is that wizards can do all of those things while still having lots of spell picks left over. Even if they never find a scroll.

And those spells marked "shenanigans"? Those are a substantial fraction of the spells that make things unravel. And they're wizard unique.

The point being, it's not that casters, generally, are these mythic, world-changing beasts. Each caster class other than wizards tends to have a couple nice big things. Which is fine. Everyone should have a couple nice big things. But then wizards get everyone else's nice big things and a bunch more of their own on top. That is, the root of the caster/martial disparity is wizards. If (hypothetically) you deleted the wizard class and its spell list from the game, a large chunk of the disparity would just go away. And the rest would actually be solvable, instead of intractable. Even bards would be toned down tremendously, because they'd lose a lot of arrows in their "steal spells" quiver.

Would it completely solve the issue? No. Is it the best fix? No. But it's an illustration of where, exactly, the issue lies. There's a substantial outlier in power, power-scaling, and versatility. Clerics, for instance, don't go power-law scaling because their high-level spells aren't really all that much better than their low level ones. Neither, really, are druid spells. Many more caveats, limits, and general boundaries. Sorcerers are bounded sharply by their very limited spell picks. Warlocks are bound both by only getting 1 mystic arcanum per spell level AND only having a few slots. Bards aren't limited enough[1], but do have limits in that they're locked in once they make a pick and their native list is the weakest by far. Wizards...don't have those limits. Any of them. They have crap-tons of spells known (not as many as clerics or druids, but clerics have a much weaker list overall and a huge chunk of the druid list is concentration or very situational), the best ritual casting, AND all the powerful spells. And they're the only class that can directly translate downtime and cash into adventuring power by scribing spells. With only minor DM involvement at all. Even a single found spellbook skyrockets their versatility. So wizards end up scaling more like Level^4, where martials are roughly linear (at best) and other casters are somewhere closer to L^2 at most.

Instead of trying to find ways to match the outlier...fix the outlier. Bring them down into the range everyone else has, where there are actual binding constraints on their capabilities. Then the overall balance can be reanalyzed and possibly fixed. Until then, no fix is possible. Because anything you do will bump up wizards as well.

But there's a strong constituency for the idea that wizards are automatically destined to be the strongest class at everything and any attempt to bring them down to the pack is "destroying the game". At the core, that was the root of a lot of the hate for 4e[2]--that wizards weren't special any more. Not clerics, not druids. Wizards.

[1] Being a full caster who can cherry pick the good spells AND has expertise AND has jack of all trades AND has subclass-available martial combat capability is out of bound. But they do have to specialize--they're only broad in the abstract. Any individual bard will be much more limited. Wizards can radically transform on a daily basis.
[2] Not all of it--4e did some stupid things. And there was generalize "who moved my cheese" angst. But much of the hate boiled down to "I don't feel like a wizard because I can't dominate all aspects of the game just by picking the class at level one and taking the broken spells." The devs even said as much, that they had to repeatedly try to convince people that no, wizards aren't naturally supposed to be the strongest just by picking the class.

Oh right,yeah. Well if all you are saying is wizards have the greatest access to strategic spells then yeah, sure. I dont think there will be many people that disagree with you. It seems to be one of the most orthodox beliefs in 5e.

[DrLoveMonkey]

https://youtu.be/3Oe7Q8OCm5I

Just posting that I agree wizards are the standout for this kind of thing. From necromantic hordes to making Leomunds Tiny Hut, which basically flips off every other form of keeping watch ability or safeguarding sleep, they have the spell list, the number known, and the slots per day to be the most important character of almost any group.

[Dr.Samurai]

Nice post PP.

[NichG]

Things don't have to be game-breaking shenanigans to be 'strategic' in scale... Like, anything that would correspond to something that would take a unit of 1000 soldiers or equivalent resources in modern military operations to accomplish probably can be considered strategic in nature.
If we're talking about things which are 'open-ended' though, maybe...

There's also a different category of things 'with huge setting implications'

E.g. Druid strategic capabilities:

Control Weather (8 hours, 5 mile radius effect) - destroy crops, delay armies and probably at scale even cause hundreds of casualties. Depends a bit on whether the DM ever lived in an area that periodically gets shut down by heavy snowfall, I guess.
Earthquake - basically destroy about half of a city block worth of buildings with a casting. Borderline strategic, but its equivalent in structural damage to modern non-nuclear cruise missile payloads.
Mirage Arcana - 10 day duration, 1 square mile effect. Definitely strategic in scale. Not game-breakingly powerful.
Wind Walk, Transport via Plants - long-distance transport for a small number of units. Mobility is definitely important at the strategic layer and those units can also be individually as powerful as hundreds of soldiers
Move Earth, Stone Shape - replicates the efforts of hundreds of workers, does so in safe conditions that don't require the caster to actually be able to physically reach construction sites.
Locate Creature, Scrying - not game-breaking because its hard to get it to stick, but definitely changes what is possible with regards to espionage and information gathering. Imperfect, but definitely useful - like having a good chance of landing an unremovable tracking device with at least a few miles range on anyone whose face you've ever seen.
Commune with Nature, Speak with Plants - doesn't quite hit the 1000 soldiers benchmark, but it is a small team of scouts in a can with instant updates. Like having intermittent satellite coverage of a military engagement, I'd say it probably counts.
Control Water - Slightly on the small side at only impacting a 100ft cube, but water does move, and this has a duration. Creating 20ft waves on demand every 6 seconds in large bodies of water would be a very effective attack against towns or cities on flat terrain.
Pass Without Trace - really depends on how the DM interprets 'cannot be tracked except by magical means'. Had a DM once who ran this as basically 'once you've lost eyes on the target, there's nothing short of spells that you can do to re-acquire their position unless they choose to step into your line of sight again' - basically no 'you stumble on them by searching everywhere' sorts of things possible. If its run like that, massive impact on guerilla warfare if nothing else.

Druid spells with massive setting implications:

True Resurrection - massively setting-altering. We're just a bit numb to it because its a D&D staple.
Reincarnate - similar to above, but setting altering because it makes immortality a thing. Imperfect transhumanism in a single spell. We're numb to it because campaigns tend not to last over those timescales but 'you're a 90 year old king and your heirs just died, I can give you a second reign' should at least be narratively very potent.
Regenerate - also huge setting implications. Diluted for adventurers because limb loss isn't a standard consequence of things. Depends on whether the DM is running rules-as-physics, or whether there actually are tens of thousands of people with permanent injuries around the setting.
Awaken - Well, druids have solved AI. Creating new intelligences on demand? No problem.

Meanwhile, as far as 'open-ended' stuff, its yet a different set of spells:

Planar Binding, Conjure Fey - scales with other things in the setting; if there are new kinds of Outsiders the DM introduces, these spells can make their powers accessible to the druid.
Plane Shift - open-ended in that the more potent stuff is out there in the planar cosmology, the more leverage this spell gives the druid relative to someone who doesn't have it. Plane with different rate of time passage? Plane with abundant gemstones? Plane flooded with positive energy? All become potential 'powers' that a character can collect and make use of.
Find the Path - very borderline, but there are potential shenanigans with its ability to solve arbitrary pathfinding problems between you and a known point. Requires thinking like a computer scientist to really break this I suppose, but I'd put it on a watch-list for someone using it to solve NP-hard problems or something like that.
Druidcraft - nothing seems overtly potent, but 'instantly make a flower bloom, seed pod open, etc' doesn't have any caveats for exotica like a flower that only blooms every thousand years or whatnot. This was basically a character-defining power of one of the more powerful characters from the Xanth novels.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Things don't have to be game-breaking shenanigans to be 'strategic' in scale... Like, anything that would correspond to something that would take a unit of 1000 soldiers or equivalent resources in modern military operations to accomplish probably can be considered strategic in nature.
If we're talking about things which are 'open-ended' though, maybe...

There's also a different category of things 'with huge setting implications'

E.g. Druid strategic capabilities:

Control Weather (8 hours, 5 mile radius effect) - destroy crops, delay armies and probably at scale even cause hundreds of casualties. Depends a bit on whether the DM ever lived in an area that periodically gets shut down by heavy snowfall, I guess.
Earthquake - basically destroy about half of a city block worth of buildings with a casting. Borderline strategic, but its equivalent in structural damage to modern non-nuclear cruise missile payloads.
Mirage Arcana - 10 day duration, 1 square mile effect. Definitely strategic in scale. Not game-breakingly powerful.
Wind Walk, Transport via Plants - long-distance transport for a small number of units. Mobility is definitely important at the strategic layer and those units can also be individually as powerful as hundreds of soldiers
Move Earth, Stone Shape - replicates the efforts of hundreds of workers, does so in safe conditions that don't require the caster to actually be able to physically reach construction sites.
Locate Creature, Scrying - not game-breaking because its hard to get it to stick, but definitely changes what is possible with regards to espionage and information gathering. Imperfect, but definitely useful - like having a good chance of landing an unremovable tracking device with at least a few miles range on anyone whose face you've ever seen.
Commune with Nature, Speak with Plants - doesn't quite hit the 1000 soldiers benchmark, but it is a small team of scouts in a can with instant updates. Like having intermittent satellite coverage of a military engagement, I'd say it probably counts.
Control Water - Slightly on the small side at only impacting a 100ft cube, but water does move, and this has a duration. Creating 20ft waves on demand every 6 seconds in large bodies of water would be a very effective attack against towns or cities on flat terrain.
Pass Without Trace - really depends on how the DM interprets 'cannot be tracked except by magical means'. Had a DM once who ran this as basically 'once you've lost eyes on the target, there's nothing short of spells that you can do to re-acquire their position unless they choose to step into your line of sight again' - basically no 'you stumble on them by searching everywhere' sorts of things possible. If its run like that, massive impact on guerilla warfare if nothing else.

Druid spells with massive setting implications:

True Resurrection - massively setting-altering. We're just a bit numb to it because its a D&D staple.
Reincarnate - similar to above, but setting altering because it makes immortality a thing. Imperfect transhumanism in a single spell. We're numb to it because campaigns tend not to last over those timescales but 'you're a 90 year old king and your heirs just died, I can give you a second reign' should at least be narratively very potent.
Regenerate - also huge setting implications. Diluted for adventurers because limb loss isn't a standard consequence of things. Depends on whether the DM is running rules-as-physics, or whether there actually are tens of thousands of people with permanent injuries around the setting.
Awaken - Well, druids have solved AI. Creating new intelligences on demand? No problem.

Meanwhile, as far as 'open-ended' stuff, its yet a different set of spells:

Planar Binding, Conjure Fey - scales with other things in the setting; if there are new kinds of Outsiders the DM introduces, these spells can make their powers accessible to the druid.
Plane Shift - open-ended in that the more potent stuff is out there in the planar cosmology, the more leverage this spell gives the druid relative to someone who doesn't have it. Plane with different rate of time passage? Plane with abundant gemstones? Plane flooded with positive energy? All become potential 'powers' that a character can collect and make use of.
Find the Path - very borderline, but there are potential shenanigans with its ability to solve arbitrary pathfinding problems between you and a known point. Requires thinking like a computer scientist to really break this I suppose, but I'd put it on a watch-list for someone using it to solve NP-hard problems or something like that.
Druidcraft - nothing seems overtly potent, but 'instantly make a flower bloom, seed pod open, etc' doesn't have any caveats for exotica like a flower that only blooms every thousand years or whatnot. This was basically a character-defining power of one of the more powerful characters from the Xanth novels.

That's just all playing semantic games with "strategic". If you're granting extra-spell narrative power to things...well...that's your problem. You can give similar narrative powers to just about anything with as much rules backing. It doesn't really play into the greater caster/martial debate because it doesn't (or rarely) affects play, which was the whole point.

The whole point is that solving a problem right requires identifying the root cause. And I was showing that all the other classes, operationally, exist on a nice, fairly dense spectrum. Fighters are similar to barbarians, who are similar to paladins, who are similar to clerics, who are similar to druids and sorcerers. And then, WAY OUT THERE, there are wizards. And it's wizards who are used as the touchpoint, the "place everyone else has to meet or they're useless". When they're the outlier in many ways. Unless you fix wizards, you can't fix the disparity without causing more issues.

Wizards (more specifically the design of the wizard class) is the root of the problematic caster martial disparity. Take them away and it mostly goes away (at least until DMs start reading extra capabilities into spells "because magic", which no redesign can fix). It reduces the problem from massive (or so the constant complaints would have one believe) to, well, mostly tolerable. And way easier to fix. Because hitting "on par out of combat with the Cleric" is way easier and less disruptive than hitting "on par with Schrodinger's wizard who always has the right spells prepared for every situation."

[MrStabby]

Things don't have to be game-breaking shenanigans to be 'strategic' in scale... Like, anything that would correspond to something that would take a unit of 1000 soldiers or equivalent resources in modern military operations to accomplish probably can be considered strategic in nature.
If we're talking about things which are 'open-ended' though, maybe...

There's also a different category of things 'with huge setting implications'

E.g. Druid strategic capabilities:

Control Weather (8 hours, 5 mile radius effect) - destroy crops, delay armies and probably at scale even cause hundreds of casualties. Depends a bit on whether the DM ever lived in an area that periodically gets shut down by heavy snowfall, I guess.
Earthquake - basically destroy about half of a city block worth of buildings with a casting. Borderline strategic, but its equivalent in structural damage to modern non-nuclear cruise missile payloads.
Mirage Arcana - 10 day duration, 1 square mile effect. Definitely strategic in scale. Not game-breakingly powerful.
Wind Walk, Transport via Plants - long-distance transport for a small number of units. Mobility is definitely important at the strategic layer and those units can also be individually as powerful as hundreds of soldiers
Move Earth, Stone Shape - replicates the efforts of hundreds of workers, does so in safe conditions that don't require the caster to actually be able to physically reach construction sites.
Locate Creature, Scrying - not game-breaking because its hard to get it to stick, but definitely changes what is possible with regards to espionage and information gathering. Imperfect, but definitely useful - like having a good chance of landing an unremovable tracking device with at least a few miles range on anyone whose face you've ever seen.
Commune with Nature, Speak with Plants - doesn't quite hit the 1000 soldiers benchmark, but it is a small team of scouts in a can with instant updates. Like having intermittent satellite coverage of a military engagement, I'd say it probably counts.
Control Water - Slightly on the small side at only impacting a 100ft cube, but water does move, and this has a duration. Creating 20ft waves on demand every 6 seconds in large bodies of water would be a very effective attack against towns or cities on flat terrain.
Pass Without Trace - really depends on how the DM interprets 'cannot be tracked except by magical means'. Had a DM once who ran this as basically 'once you've lost eyes on the target, there's nothing short of spells that you can do to re-acquire their position unless they choose to step into your line of sight again' - basically no 'you stumble on them by searching everywhere' sorts of things possible. If its run like that, massive impact on guerilla warfare if nothing else.

Druid spells with massive setting implications:

True Resurrection - massively setting-altering. We're just a bit numb to it because its a D&D staple.
Reincarnate - similar to above, but setting altering because it makes immortality a thing. Imperfect transhumanism in a single spell. We're numb to it because campaigns tend not to last over those timescales but 'you're a 90 year old king and your heirs just died, I can give you a second reign' should at least be narratively very potent.
Regenerate - also huge setting implications. Diluted for adventurers because limb loss isn't a standard consequence of things. Depends on whether the DM is running rules-as-physics, or whether there actually are tens of thousands of people with permanent injuries around the setting.
Awaken - Well, druids have solved AI. Creating new intelligences on demand? No problem.

Meanwhile, as far as 'open-ended' stuff, its yet a different set of spells:

Planar Binding, Conjure Fey - scales with other things in the setting; if there are new kinds of Outsiders the DM introduces, these spells can make their powers accessible to the druid.
Plane Shift - open-ended in that the more potent stuff is out there in the planar cosmology, the more leverage this spell gives the druid relative to someone who doesn't have it. Plane with different rate of time passage? Plane with abundant gemstones? Plane flooded with positive energy? All become potential 'powers' that a character can collect and make use of.
Find the Path - very borderline, but there are potential shenanigans with its ability to solve arbitrary pathfinding problems between you and a known point. Requires thinking like a computer scientist to really break this I suppose, but I'd put it on a watch-list for someone using it to solve NP-hard problems or something like that.
Druidcraft - nothing seems overtly potent, but 'instantly make a flower bloom, seed pod open, etc' doesn't have any caveats for exotica like a flower that only blooms every thousand years or whatnot. This was basically a character-defining power of one of the more powerful characters from the Xanth novels.

I would add plant growth to that list. The ability to support huge cities with relatively small amounts of farmland is going to shake up a setting - kind of allowing much more modern sized cities (the smaller the farmland the less effort is needed in transportation). Some of this can be covered by teleportation circles, but that's higher level magic.

[Anymage]

There's a massive difference between the impact that a spell effect can have on a societal level, and the impact that can be brought to bear by having it on one adventurer's spell list. Teleportation gates or golem laborers or conjuring water into a desert are setting details. Being able to personally bamf anywhere on the planet (and possibly beyond) at a moment's notice is a rather significant ability for an individual adventurer. When that teleportation is just one toy in a big bag of tricks, that's hard to work around.

[animorte]

And this, this is why I dislike Wizards. Good argument.

However, I don’t recall the last time I was even in a game with a Wizard (maybe 8 years ago). There was still always a noticeable divide of caster/martial disparity, even without them.

[PhoenixPhyre]

And this, this is why I dislike Wizards. Good argument.

However, I don’t recall the last time I was even in a game with a Wizard (maybe 8 years ago). There was still always a noticeable divide of caster/martial disparity, even without them.

Noticeable, yes. "I can't contribute unless I can cast spells"? Less likely. It defangs most of the common talking points in arguments.

No, removing (or better fixing) the wizard wouldn't remove the issue entirely. Spells (and spell-casting in general) has lots of other issues. But it would, I content, reduce the salience of the issue tremendously. Especially if DMs were in the habit of not giving spells extra power "because magic".

[LudicSavant]

Knock (included not because it's a great spell but because it always comes up): You guessed it, bard/sorcerer/wizard

Clerics have an arguably better level 2 spell for opening doors (and walls) than Knock. Like, there's even a thread going about it right now.

This is a fundamental pattern in your argument. You point at an Acme Brand Wrench and say "members of (class) don't have this particular wrench!" But they have a different brand of wrench that also solves the problem.

Non-Wizards have plenty of strategic capabilities. They don't need to exactly copy the Wizard's brand of strategic capabilities to have strategic capabilities.

Clerics can create undead, but they're not great at it.

I'd say they can very definitely become great at it. Especially the Tasha's Clerics. There are some extremely potent minionmancy Cleric setups floating around.

Flight:
(...)
Clerics? out of luck.

Clerics have various ways to get flight, or solve the problems that would be solved by flight.

For example, Summon Celestial is big enough to ride, and is also a good anti-air platform, and is something that Clerics are often casting for other reasons already. For another example, Twilight Clerics have a very generous flight feature (more generous than comparable flight features offered by martial subclasses, frustratingly).

Misty step is available to sorcerer/warlock/wizard, 1 land druid terrain, and 3 paladin oaths.

Misty Step (or other forms of short-range teleportation) is really easy to add to any caster that wants it, by a variety of means -- though Fey-Touched is the most common.

Yes, a non-caster can hypothetically take Fey-Touched too, but they benefit far less from it.

Wish

Clerics (aside from Arcana!) may not get Wish, but they do get Divine Intervention. Again, it's a different brand of wrench. Maybe a worse brand in this case, but it's still a damn good wrench.

[Waazraath]

Solid analysis. I don't think it's a really big problem to begin with, and there are some controls (the DM deceiding for instance on the availability of rare components, for spells like Planeshift), but overall I can follow your argument quite far, and I agree that the game would be better off if the wizard class would have been split up. Just ditch it in favor of the beguiler / warmage / dread necro (a la late 3.5) and you have a better and more interesting game, with more interesting thematic choices for people who want to play an arcane caster.

[NichG]

That's just all playing semantic games with "strategic". If you're granting extra-spell narrative power to things...well...that's your problem. You can give similar narrative powers to just about anything with as much rules backing. It doesn't really play into the greater caster/martial debate because it doesn't (or rarely) affects play, which was the whole point.

The whole point is that solving a problem right requires identifying the root cause. And I was showing that all the other classes, operationally, exist on a nice, fairly dense spectrum. Fighters are similar to barbarians, who are similar to paladins, who are similar to clerics, who are similar to druids and sorcerers. And then, WAY OUT THERE, there are wizards. And it's wizards who are used as the touchpoint, the "place everyone else has to meet or they're useless". When they're the outlier in many ways. Unless you fix wizards, you can't fix the disparity without causing more issues.

Wizards (more specifically the design of the wizard class) is the root of the problematic caster martial disparity. Take them away and it mostly goes away (at least until DMs start reading extra capabilities into spells "because magic", which no redesign can fix). It reduces the problem from massive (or so the constant complaints would have one believe) to, well, mostly tolerable. And way easier to fix. Because hitting "on par out of combat with the Cleric" is way easier and less disruptive than hitting "on par with Schrodinger's wizard who always has the right spells prepared for every situation."

I mean, I don't take 'having strategic capabilities' to be a bad thing. When spells have narrative power proportional to what their effects actually imply, that's a good thing! But I think dividing things up more carefully here is helpful because even if you get rid of the open-ended stuff, the things I marked 'strategic' are still just that - high-abstraction atomic actions that modify large-scale situations for people. And yes, even without stuff like Wish, I think if moves like 'feed a city' or 'delay an army' are atomic actions for one subset of characters, it makes sense to have similar scale of things be atomic actions for other characters if there's any pretense that the different categories of character are playing the same game.

I'm not disagreeing that wizards are 'way out there' compared to other casters in a particular direction, but I am disagreeing that if you remove them suddenly everything left is really same-scale appropriate to each-other. Not even close. As I said in the other thread, I'd play someone whose sole character ability was 'cantrips' over playing a Fighter if I was looking to have an impact on a setting.

[Dr.Samurai]

I'm not disagreeing that wizards are 'way out there' compared to other casters in a particular direction, but I am disagreeing that if you remove them suddenly everything left is really same-scale appropriate to each-other. Not even close.

But who is this a problem for exactly? Who decides to play a fighter, and then feels bad that they can't control the weather or make plants in the area grow really well for the next year? Where are these unicorns??

As I said in the other thread, I'd play someone whose sole character ability was 'cantrips' over playing a Fighter if I was looking to have an impact on a setting.

Did you mean "cantrips and a permissive DM, to have an impact on a setting"?

[Pex]

There is nothing wrong with wizards.

1) There is a point to wizards should not be able to do everything, but that is not the same thing as they should never be able to anything warriors can't do. It is absolutely perfectly acceptable for wizards to do things warriors could never do. If that Thing is versatile far distance traveling than so be it.

2) There is a point to a wizard should not be able to everything, but a wizard cannot do everything because contrary to popular belief they do not have the exact perfect spell needed for the situation at the moment it's needed. The wizard without Knock is not opening the Important Locked Door.

3) A wizard without the most perfect spell today is not still perfect because he can have the most perfect spell tomorrow. Having the perfect spell tomorrow is useless when the need for the spell is right now at this moment when the wizard hasn't prepared it. The wizard might not even have the spell at all in his spellbook. Just because a spell is published and listed on the spell list doesn't mean the wizard PC has that spell himself.

4) Then there are times when the wizard has prepared the exact perfect spell needed at the moment it's needed and saves the day. Hooray for the wizard. That's suppose to happen. Wizard players are entitled to have their turn of moment in the sun and be the MVP of the combat/encounter/adventure. Wizard players are entitled to have their fun.

[Rukelnikov]

But who is this a problem for exactly? Who decides to play a fighter, and then feels bad that they can't control the weather or make plants in the area grow really well for the next year? Where are these unicorns??

I don't get this, wouldn't that also apply to the suppossed wizard problem being talked about in the thread?

Did you mean "cantrips and a permissive DM, to have an impact on a setting"?

I think he meant cantrips and tbh, I kind of agree.

[NichG]

But who is this a problem for exactly? Who decides to play a fighter, and then feels bad that they can't control the weather or make plants in the area grow really well for the next year? Where are these unicorns??

There have been lots of people in these threads asking for at least having Tome of Battle levels of transmundane ability, and many asking for mythic abilities.

In personal experience I've certainly had even very clever players pick martial classes and then when the campaign significantly featured wide-spread events, geopolitics, natural disasters, and the like and other players were able to directly engage with and thwart those things, they ended up regretting picking that archetype to play. At which point my usual remedies were of the 'yes, you have the ability to cure a plague by calling out the god of disease and fighting it in a duel' variety, which did work.

Did you mean "cantrips and a permissive DM, to have an impact on a setting"?

Cantrips and a DM who is not actively hostile against proactive play would be fine. Or you could say 'cantrips and a DM of at least the minimum permissiveness that I would consider playing with at all'. Which does exclude people who are specifically setting out to just run a certain adventure path or module or dungeon crawl.

[LudicSavant]

I'm not disagreeing that wizards are 'way out there' compared to other casters in a particular direction, but I am disagreeing that if you remove them suddenly everything left is really same-scale appropriate to each-other. Not even close. As I said in the other thread, I'd play someone whose sole character ability was 'cantrips' over playing a Fighter if I was looking to have an impact on a setting.

But who is this a problem for exactly? Who decides to play a fighter, and then feels bad that they can't control the weather or make plants in the area grow really well for the next year? Where are these unicorns??

The "unicorns" who want martials to have better non-combat/"strategic" capabilities can be found on every single D&D forum. I'm one of those unicorns. Neigh.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I mean, I don't take 'having strategic capabilities' to be a bad thing. When spells have narrative power proportional to what their effects actually imply, that's a good thing! But I think dividing things up more carefully here is helpful because even if you get rid of the open-ended stuff, the things I marked 'strategic' are still just that - high-abstraction atomic actions that modify large-scale situations for people. And yes, even without stuff like Wish, I think if moves like 'feed a city' or 'delay an army' are atomic actions for one subset of characters, it makes sense to have similar scale of things be atomic actions for other characters if there's any pretense that the different categories of character are playing the same game.

I'm not disagreeing that wizards are 'way out there' compared to other casters in a particular direction, but I am disagreeing that if you remove them suddenly everything left is really same-scale appropriate to each-other. Not even close. As I said in the other thread, I'd play someone whose sole character ability was 'cantrips' over playing a Fighter if I was looking to have an impact on a setting.

"Have an impact on the setting" isn't a power. It's not part of any spell unless the DM adds it in. And DMs do that entirely by fiat. And don't need spells to do so.

You're so firmly stuck in the "spells can do anything, including stuff they don't say they do, because magic" mold that nothing can help. Seriously--if that's the mindset you're coming from, no amount of buffing martials can compensate. Because "magic can do anything" has no limits, and no limits >> limits.

-------

@LudicSavant -- Again, you're taking the "it's similar, if I squint and read into it a lot of things." Let's take clerics and flying, for example. Conjure celestial is not a replacement for fly. For one thing, it comes in 8 levels higher (7th vs 3rd level spell). For another thing, what you get is entirely up to DM fiat. For a third thing, it relies on having a Large creature amount of space (plus the passenger). There is exactly 1 Large Celestial that qualifies at 7th level--the Pegasus. For a last thing...I already covered that type of spell with "have a flying mount". Which is something open to anyone, no spell needed. Or open to no one, if the DM doesn't allow it.

Fly...has none of those limits or caveats. For Conjure Celestial to be a replacement, you have to handwave away a lot of things. Just like you can get an almost teleport by planeshifting twice...as long as you're going to somewhere there's a teleport circle (because otherwise your precision is entirely up to the DM). And are willing to spend 2 7+th level spells to do so. And have a safe-ish location in another plane to bounce off of.

-----

And let me reiterate. Would there still be a disparity without wizards. YES, unequivocally Should martials get nice things. YES, unequivocally. But also, does fixing the wizard dramatically reduce the problem. YES, unequivocally

[LudicSavant]

@LudicSavant -- Again, you're taking the "it's similar, if I squint and read into it a lot of things." Let's take clerics and flying, for example. Conjure celestial is not a replacement for fly. For one thing, it comes in 8 levels higher (7th vs 3rd level spell). For another thing, what you get is entirely up to DM fiat. For a third thing, it relies on having a Large creature amount of space (plus the passenger). There is exactly 1 Large Celestial that qualifies at 7th level--the Pegasus. For a last thing...I already covered that type of spell with "have a flying mount". Which is something open to anyone, no spell needed. Or open to no one, if the DM doesn't allow it.

Fly...has none of those limits or caveats. For Conjure Celestial to be a replacement, you have to handwave away a lot of things. Just like you can get an almost teleport by planeshifting twice...as long as you're going to somewhere there's a teleport circle (because otherwise your precision is entirely up to the DM). And are willing to spend 2 7+th level spells to do so. And have a safe-ish location in another plane to bounce off of.

So first thing, I spoke about the 5th level spell, Summon Celestial, not the 7th level spell, Conjure Celestial. This seems like a repeat of the last time I spoke to you, where you spent the whole time arguing about Bless in response to the mention of Blessed Strikes -- a completely different mechanic.

Anyways, said spell is often cast by Clerics not as a 'replacement for Fly,' but just as a mainstay of their single target DPR strategy. And it happens to give you a flying creature that's large enough to ride, as a side effect.

It doesn't do everything Fly does, but it doesn't have to -- after all, the same is true in reverse. Summon Celestial has a lot of utility that Fly doesn't, too. And indeed, I could name quite a few "strategic" features that Clerics have that Wizards usually won't.

Being an exact replacement is not actually relevant to the question of whether or not these classes have significant "strategic" capabilities beyond martials.

[PhoenixPhyre]

One complete oddity I found while trawling through spells: druids don't get spider climb by default. Nope, that's reserved for arcane casters and a couple circle of the land choices. :wat: Edit: oh, and warlocks don't get Black Tentacles by default (and the fathomless doesn't get it at all, only GOO). Also...only druids get antilife shell by default? That seems...off.

Another couple I noted: The two "rest-safety-ensuring" spells (tiny hut and rope trick) are on, respectively, the bard/wizard list and the artificer/wizard list. Clerics? Druids? Warlocks? Even sorcerers? Nope, out of luck. Unless a bard spends a 2nd level Magical Secrets on Rope Trick (which means 6th level at the very earliest, with stiff competition, or 10th level normally, where it doesns't even rate), you need an artificer or wizard in the party for that one. Can't even use a scroll! And artificers get it at 5th level and don't get Ritual Casting by default. So it's a very expensive spell for them.

Also wall of force is a wizard exclusive, other than 1 oath and 2 artificer choices. Both of which only get it in T4.

[NichG]

"Have an impact on the setting" isn't a power. It's not part of any spell unless the DM adds it in. And DMs do that entirely by fiat. And don't need spells to do so.

You're so firmly stuck in the "spells can do anything, including stuff they don't say they do, because magic" mold that nothing can help. Seriously--if that's the mindset you're coming from, no amount of buffing martials can compensate. Because "magic can do anything" has no limits, and no limits >> limits.

Lets remove the actual 'spells' bit and just talk about 'things that happen' regardless of their source.

Being able to reverse aging is transformative to a setting
Being able to restore lost limbs or destroyed organs is transformative to a setting
Being able to choose the weather is transformative to a setting
Being able to bring back the dead is transformative to a setting
Being able to potentially track people in an undetectable and unremovable way is transformative to a setting
Being able to travel in a minute what would previously have taken a week is transformative to a setting

Any one of those things, you could have a sci-fi story entirely centered around 'this thing wasn't possible, but then someone figured out a way to make it possible, and things changed'.