The Problem with Wizards in D&D

Wizards are the poster boys of D and D in general for the whole game if you're a gamer of culture with a bone to pick and need to prove to everyone that you out of all of your play pretend friends have the wrinkliest brain at the table wizard is the class to turn to wordss they are a darling of the game they are a darling of the designers they get the most spells and they are really hard to play why how I'm Antonio Deo this is po hat and will'll be answering these questions and more and giving you something to take to your games for free in this episode of DN D with a twist wizard Edition so when I think of wizards I think of how listening to 2.3 wizard wizard is the intelligence class of D andd it it really is it's the only one of the core classes that cares about that stat artificer is not a core class no matter how hard I want it to be and this tells you a lot about how exactly these guys work they are masters of working out at the library and they are able to cast spells only through the power of being at massive dweed some classes get their spell casting from sucking up to a god some from becoming an elite sugar baby and some are magical trust pH babies the wizard on the other hand actually has to work for their magic through rigorous study and forgoing the whole seeing the Sun and having a social life and you got to commend them for that while all classes were busy having a life the wizard studied not the blade but the book and now the folds on their brain have quadruple and it only caused them all of their interpersonal skills to reward them for their good grades Wizards have the largest spell list out of any class being able to cast basically anything but healing spells since the 3G subass is still Stu in on Earth AR LMBO and that was barely a healing wizard anyway this mix Wizards extremely versatile casters allowing them to focus on debuffing crowd control buffing allies or Fireball I I mean damage basically anything but healing or tanking a wizard can accomplish it and their abilities are geared towards that so why don't we take a look at those wizard abilities continue with the theme of them being the best spellcaster at spellcasting with nearly all of abilities revolving around well spellcasting their first ability and what defines the class is the Wizards spell book at first level Wizards get a girl Tech journal to write who they have a crush on at wizard school and also incidentally there spells you start off with six level one spells and you get two more each level but the rest you got to find on your own Wizards always strive to find spell Scrolls either by rumaging around the garbage or copying someone's homework any spell scroll you find or just any written spell I guess in case someone has decided to write a spell in the bathroom title or something can be copied into your wizard spell book this is a weirdly costly Endeavor as it takes 2 hours and 50 gold pieces per spell level so a meanly level two spell will take you 4 hours of studying and 100 gold which it sure is a lot but since Wizards get no armor and no weapons other than I don't know a magic wand or something this is the Wizard's equivalent of spending money on inventory once successfully plagiarize into your girl Tech Journal that spell is for you to cast as much as you want when you prepare them oh yeah and this is one of those preparing spells sort of classes which means you do a little ritual in the morning and get to pick what spells you take to school for the day I'm energetically charging my Whopper with the healing frequencies of human EV as long as you have your book that is if your spell book is destroyed you can only rewrite from memory whatever spells you had prepared that day but the rest are gone yep all those spells you copied from spell Scrolls for the whole campaign lost forever real talk if a DM pulls this on you you are allowed to sue them for damages or something because what the is wrong with them but the rules are there so I guess this is legal I bet it's really fun to play at your table the ability to write any spell into your spell book along with their naturally girthy spell list it's what makes the wizard so powerful it's a shame however that this is so dependent on the DM giving you enough spell Scrolls to add to your book oh well moving on we have ritual casting ritual casting is pretty standard feature for a bunch of spell casters but not for warlocks oh warlock ritual casting allows you to do some magic self-care and take 10 minutes to cast a spell that can be cast as a ritual without using a spell slot honestly my favorite spell casting feature and what makes it worth it to take non-c combat Spells at all catch me catching some z's and looking like a berrix Potter rabbit in a tiny Hut my favorite spell in the game by the way next up Arcane recovery yet another spellcasting related ability told you their whole kid was around this through the mystical Arcane power of being snug as a bug in a rug you recover spell slots once a day and after a short rest you get a bunch of spells slots back this involves way too much math for me to like it the combined level of your spells no no the Spells slots you can have combined level yeah a combined level that is half of your wizard level okay enough whatever you get spells slots back once a day for a short rest you get it moving on okay where are we level three still no we got to go lightning round lightning round cantrip formulas you can replace that cantrip you know with another wizard cantrip extremely situational but it's nice to have the option ability score Improvement guess spell Mastery you choose a first and second level spell and you can just cast those without spending a spell slot that's right those are basically can trips now neat do you see why Wizards don't get healing spells yet that would be healing word or cure wounds for free no way and finally signature spells as a class Capstone you pick two third level spells and these become your signature spells you always have these prepared and they don't count against the number of spells you can prepare and once a day you can cast each of them without using one of your precious precious spell slots we know which one yall are picking and those are all the Wizard's abilities a respectable number for our resident nerds good for them as you can see every single one of these is about spellcasting I want to stress that this is not normal with spell casting classes the others give you other abilities that have nothing to do with your spellcasting like Channel Divinity or packed Boon or wild shape or I don't know whatever Sorcerers do but wizards they are committed to the whole magical bit probably because they are the ones that work for it along with parts but we're ignoring that and this special interest in Magic continues as a through line in the Wizard subclass options let's take a look at those to find find out what the hell is going on with the four eyes Community wizard subclasses are called Arcane Traditions which sounds suitably academic these are for the most part A Wizard's major what they decide to study specifically their expertise what they write their PHD on what they won't shut up a parties about the basic ones are ones that are based on the schools of magic that's the thing that the DM struggles to tell you when you use the tech magic there's one for each school and we don't have time to go through them all so why don't we go deeper into my favorite one the school of divination is as I said the wizard subass based on the study of one specific School of Magic the school of Tik Tok tarot mediums my beautiful lovelies what a stunning message from the spirits today someone's getting a rose toy through the power of major Arana and making up divination Wizards can see the tapestry of the future and decipher its threats to know what will come to pass before it does they also allow you to be the DM can you see why it's my favorite it's my favorite wizard subclass so I'll try to be objective and hopelessly fail at it let's go they are called divers which is up there with enchanter and evoker for nouns cooler than wizard I mean what's the competition abjurer and to me they're the type of wizard that makes the most sense in a world where people can reliably see into the future if they get their PHD in it who would not go for that as a wizard in many of my worlds for magain each nation has a court divver to counsel the ruler and I don't know I think it's so sick anyway remaining impartial abilities now divination is not just strong thematically and visually because it lets you do the whole astral map aesthetic I just I love Stars it is also extremely strong in its abilities they get your Baseline Savant ability that allows you to cut down on the time it takes you to learn spells of your school of choice but the meat of the subclass and the reason why most people see divination as the strongest wizard subass is their important ability at the end of a long breast you roll 2 d20s these are your glimpses into the future now that you have your portance you can replace any role of a D20 with one of your portance is let me make that clear that's any role either your roles your teammates or your enemies roll High guess what you actually saved against that attack Rollo guess what the enemy actually failed that saving throw this is what I mean with you get to be the DM the portant ability is in my eyes the perfect subass ability it's very powerful and makes you feel amazing and it makes you feel like you're actually playing the subclass you're supposed to be playing you playing someone that can see into the future and you see into to the Future at the beginning of your day it's so sick fantastic design the rest of the divy whiz is less impressive but it truly doesn't matter because you get pance most of the school-based sub classes all have very similar abilities with the expert ability allowing you to recover a spell slot of one level lower of a spell slot you cast provided the spell is of the subclasses school what is this ability that a lawyer write this okay so if you cast a level three divination spell you can get back either a level one spell slot or or a level 2 one neat but better for the evoker or any combat centered class for sure things start to get interesting again with third eye at level 10 you basically get Spidey senses getting either dark vision as if you didn't have that already ethereal sight which lets you see into the ghost Dimension 100% canonical actual name do not question me greater comprehension which unlocks your latent dualingo Powers allowing you to read any language Danga gong's food great glycine skib or just straight up see invisibility which guess what that does this might seem a bit e Until you realize that this is basically always on and you can switch between them on a short rest pretty neat finally level 14 you get greater ported and as you can guess this makes you already incredible ability even better giving you three portance to use instead of two I mean it's more of a great thing so who could complain real talk all the school stop classes end up being very similar outside of their one defining ability so for our second close look let's go weird let's go blade singing what's blade singing you ask it's a Gish it's a Spell blade it's the Wizards melee class you know they had to have one whenever a designer looks at a class there's a part within them that says I know what this scrun guy is supposed to do so what if I make him do the exact opposite and I'm firmly in that cam so I love it blad singer used to be an elf only subass and that was ass and stupid and bad so they got rid of that thank God blade singers basically give an option for melee fighting to the wizard you gain light armor and proficiency with one one-handed weapon they are super specific about exactly how much armor you can wear and how many hands you can hold your stick with and that's because of their signature ability Blade song Blade song is one of those D and abilities that basically Works under Super Saiyan rules my warlock sub class I did a while back has this to it's a sort of State you get into that lets you access fun abilities when you start blade singing which surprisingly doesn't really involve any singing you gain a bonus of your AC equal to your intelligence modifier so now it takes slightly more than a stiff wind to knock you on your ass you get plus 10 to your walking speed advantage on acrobatics check which really makes you wonder why this is not called blade dance and you add your intelligence to any concentration checks pretty solid a shame about you know the wizard still having the lowest possible HP in the game WP W once admitted passes the Wizard's childhood asthma catches up with them after all this exercise and you stop singing WP W types two oh and it also gives you an extra attack which is always good it starts to actually feel gishy when you get to level 10 and get song of Defense whenever you take damage and your Blade song is active you can use your reaction to use a spell slot and reduce that damage by an amount equal to five times s that spell slots level this means that if you use a level two spell slot you reduce the damage by 10 neat although this comes way too late for my liking and finally s of Victory which allows you to add your intelligence modifier to the damage of your weapon attacks which seeing as this is level 14 it better be five Real Talk blad singer is a really cool Concept in theory but I'm not wild about the execution it really doesn't feel like a marriage between Spud cassing and melee fighting since you only get one single ability that uses your spell SLS and that's a passive ability that only triggers if you get hit it's also extremely mad not like crazy in a British way but mad as in multiple ability dependent in order for you to actually play this in a fun way you're going to need a high dexterity score to actually hit anything a high intelligence score because you're a wizard and a super high Constitution score seeing as its only damage reduction ability comes at level 10 and Wizard's HP is basically non-existent I feel like this one needs a second rewrite a shame maybe someone could do one of those in the future this one could have my favorite but it falls short I guess that's only the Divination one and what's that what's that parting the clouds and Shining its holy light upon [Music] me that's right I lied I have two favorites order of scribes is my second favorite Wizard subass and it's once again Atasha subclass Tasha best book always although blad singer is also Atasha one so whatever still best book the order of scribes is what a wizard should feel like somehow it's the one that captures the essence of the wizard the most to me it's a subass all about writing in your spell book guess who does that that's right not Sorcerers the subclass starts out impeccable with wizardly quill giving you a floating little quill that writes for you and it's not only cute as hell it's also useful letting you bypass ink which is at massive cost for wizards and cutting down the time it takes to copy a spell into your spell book massively it's sick but not as sick as awaken Spellbook yep your spell book is alive it's alive it can move around Al Magic Carpet for maddin which is the cutest thing but I don't know a single DM that wouldn't allow you to have your spell book talk to you or at least ATM I would like to play with imagine the potential just like the Quil this is not only for comedy bits no you can use your spell book as your spell casting Focus which feels very anime to me you can cast the spell as a ritual instantaneously once before mimir time which is insane and even more insane you get to change the damage type of your spells instead of Fireball you can cast eyes ball instead of burning hands you can cast poison hands instead of witch bolt you can cast witch fire this is honestly just as cool as Porton and such a fantastic way to flavor your spells or get around resistances it's amazing and it's not even close to being the last of the cool abilities manifest mind allows you to basically make a familiar kind of thing it can look like a ghostly copy of your spell book or a scholar from the past style this thing has dark vision cuz everything in D and D has dark vision and you can see telepathically through it and more importantly you can cast through it you don't have to get close to cast touch spells anymore oh and did I mention this thing can fly this thing is broken I love it Master scrier allows you to be wizard Batman giving you the ability to prepare a spell scroll with a spell you know ahead of time prep time at all you can then use the spell once without consuming a spell slot and it's cast at one level higher than normal neat finally one with word what an name gives you advantage on all Arcana checks as long as you're holding your emotional support spell book and since you're the wizard you'll be the only one doing those unless you have an artificer in the party at which point you can fight amongst yourselves to see whose turn on the Arcana chicken is oh also remember that manifest mind familiar ghost thing if you take damage while that thing is up you can make it take the damage itself you do lose access to a bunch of spells temporarily but temporarily means 1d6 long rest here so actually this one is not as good don't use it unless you're like about to die oh what a damper on otherwise fantastic sub class anyway if that put a sour taste in your mouth which to me it didn't I still think is one of the best and strongest wizard sub classes but there are many many others you have the school of cruy go time rouette the school of Illusions illusion and the edgy one that everyone loves but nobody plays spooky scary skeletons so that's nice we've talked about what a wizard is its abilities its subclasses but what's all that about the problem with Wizards I titled this video for well what if we give Wizards a new twist so you want to play a wizard as I said Wizards are the poster boys of DnD D classes playing a wizard feels different than playing any other class and I'm not talking gameplay I'm talking I don't know this kind of sounds too Grand but Legacy Wise It's the class they are immensely powerful but not in an obvious way like some other powerful classes that can output a lot of damage the wizard is power powerful if you understand spell casting their abysmal HP is balanced by the huge breath of spells they can learn and it's up to you to put that to use their abilities allow you to spellcast more or spellcast harder go hard if you will go hard like real hard but there's nothing there like when you hit you do a ton of damage and everyone explodes and you win it's harder to get a wizard to be useful but they can be basically more useful than anyone if played right in video game design we talk about skill ceilings and skill floors and the wizard has a very high skill ceiling and a very high skill floor which is the hardest combination of things to play they can be immensely powerful but only in the right hands so why do they feel so bad yep that's my problem with Wizards Wizards feel awful to play at lower levels they have abysmal HP the lowest HP in the game and as I said this makes sense you have to give these guys a pretty big drawback because of what they can do but at early levels they really can't do all that much the early level wizard is not particularly more powerful than other spellcasters I've always felt this and I felt this again when I was playing balers Gate 3 where I only took Gail off of the Eternal Camp bench when we got past like level six at least I felt this when I played Wizards in Adventures and I feel this as I played my first wizard in a long-term campaign now I'm playing witch light nobody's surprised by that it has a circus and F Bull in it it was made for me the only way would have been more made for me is if it had train Cowboys and Pirates and maybe it does who knows anyway as a matter of fact the early level wizard can feel worse because they have no other abilities other than spellcasting to rely on bars can swing a Rapier Sorcerers can do some fun metamagic stuff warlock can eldrich Blast for the 17th turn in a row but Wizards it's just spellcasting now you might say well that's why you get extra spells to add to your book and here's the thing that's true technically you do get extra spells as a wizard to add to your book if your DM gives them to you but most of the time they don't you don't get spells every session or every few sessions even I as a baby DM have done a bad job at dming a wizard because I treated spell Scrolls like I treated loot because the book wants you to treat them as such so you hide them in Dungeons and The Wizard ends with what one new spell per level two maybe at most not fantastic and this once again through no fault of the wizard at all the wizard can be playing a wizard amazingly but if the DM does not have a spell scroll vending machine on hand the wizard ends with way less Tools in their tool belt now you might say okay I'll just give more spells to the wizard well about that wizard spells are expensive like really expensive to put in your book this is at the same time genius design because it gives a class that basically cares a negative amount about equipment something to spend money on but yet again it makes the early game awful because if your DM is stingy with money which is not a bad DM quality by the way some DMS want to run games where money is a concern that means that even if your DM gives you a bunch of spell Scrolls they're prohib itive cost means you might not be able to transcribe them into your book at all insufficient suddenly that throwaway order of scripes subclass ability sounds way more useful doesn't it this problem is way less of an issue at higher levels as the D andd economy continues to break down more and more and you are swimming in cash but guess when this is an issue at lower levels when Wizards are already struggling and so we find ourselves with a class that is at the same time extremely powerful but also extremely weak at lower levels and most importantly through no fault of the player that's rough that's a pretty hard problem to solve it seems inherent to the classes and all it's surely hard to do H human familiar wizard subass now I hate it here okay wizard subass let's go I originally thought about making a tank wizard but I thought that only made it so their HP was not as much of an issue as lower levels and a different worst issue at higher ones so how about we fix the HP issue and their over Reliance on the DM handing out stuff what if we provided a substitute to spell Scrolls that use the same resources as spellcasting but that the player had control over other than the DM because the DM cannot forget to put it in the game if we hand control over those resources to the wizard instead of the DM this makes it so that they are responsible for them it's less about lowering the skill floor or lowering the scale ceiling but more about limiting the outside forces that can make playing a wizard Less Fun by giving you new things to do as a wizard that don't rely on your DM and giving you magic Scooby Snacks it doesn't make the wizard easier to play but it makes them less reliant on the DM catering to them which is what I think wizard players want yeah but what what can we use as a resource that a DM will always put in their games and that a wizard can use for spellcasting hear me out monsters I bet many of you in the audience are weeps I mean Final Fantasy fans Final Fantasy has classes too although they call them jobs to be more depressing and you can map them out pretty easily to D and D classes too most of them were just D and D ripoffs when they started isn't that right ff1 white Mages are clerics but Wars bards are red Mages Rogues are thieves or ninjas if you're in a particularly weeb title Fighters are Fighters and wizards are black Mages unlike seven others a wizard can be a final fantasy evoker which is different from a D and D evoker actually the D and D evoker in Final Fantasy would be The Conjurer which is another Final Fantasy job except in the tactics spin-off that is that that's an Illusionist and in Final Fantasy 14 it's not a job it's a class which is different from a job okay I'm I'm losing the non weeps point is the wizard class and its sub classes can embody plenty of Final Fantasy spal casty Abra kadabi Hocus Pocus classes do you know which one they can't embody though blue Mages the blue Mage in Final Fantasy is a mage that learns their spells from Monsters they can use their magic to reproduce the abilities of monsters now you don't need to be a we I mean a final fantasy fan to see how cool as hell that is and wouldn't you know DMS always throw monsters at Players what if your wizard could learn spells from Monsters but we're not just going to steal the flavor here the flavor of blue Mage is extremely poorly Define and changes every game so let's not do that no we're going to make our own what could a magic user that casts with intelligence and learns their magic rather than it being gifted to them but in a less structured Academic Way than the wizard could possibly be hear me out again witches isn't it insane that we don't have witches in D and D I mean we got hags and if you're a real one an OG you know I made a video about them ages ago my second video ever don't watch it it's ancient it sounded like I recorded it at 3:00 a.m. trying to not wake my parents up and I haven't lived at my parents place since I was 17 so I don't know why I did that anyway you can't play a hag and even if you could what if you're a boy well I'm extremely happy to tell you that which used to be a gender neutral term and many a man has had the pleasure of being burned at the Stak for being a witch so not just the femoids but the Mano and the thems of the world can be witches too we are perfectly in the clear and doesn't a witch perfectly track with what we're trying to accomplish here they feel like they should slot themselves in the Wizard category but you can definitely see a witch learning their spells from Monsters whereas a stuffy academic wizard less so they're like field study Wizards it's sick so how about we come up with a story for this little imaginary subclass we've been cooking Candela always loved magic but hated learning it her parents were by no means rich but saw her interest in Magic as a viable career opportunity for her so they worked hard to send her to miss Veta School for Girls the best Wizarding School in the county not the country that's St an that one is too expensive they couldn't afford it unfortunately as Candela would find out soon enough casting magic and studying it were two very different things Candela excelled at the Practical side of Wizardry the actual process of manipulating The Weave of magic but severely struggled with the academic side of things sitting down for hours on end concentrating on a task she did not find particularly interesting was just impossible for her and despite her best efforts her great reflected this inability Candela saw in front of her what would soon become her Grim reality flunking out of the school her parents had spent money they did not have to give Candela the future she wanted and she was about to disappoint them and there was nothing she could do to change it she would languish in the study halls fruitlessly trying to muster the necessary concentration to study the mathematical abjuration and necromantic formulas to no avail she started to become a sort of ghost of the school idly wandering the grounds rereading the same sentence over and over again trying to get it in her brain and it was in one of these walks around the grounds that someone took notice the grounds keeper an Old Woman by the name of olivina saw something nobody else saw and Candela potential Olina was a groundskeeper at Miss Veta School for Girls the youngest students were terrified of her because the older students would spread all sorts of rumors about olivina that she was once a teacher but got demoted after a student died in her class that she was the daughter of a hag and a troll that she was a witch an archinist that blends the study of Wizardry with an older Magic based on Instinct feeling and the manipulation of spiritual energies and at least this last one was true Olina was a witch and she saw in Candela a worthy Apprentice she took the child under her wing and showed her that her parents were not wrong in seeing potential in her instinctual interest in Magic it just had to be channeled differently alavina and Candela would meet at night in the groundkeeper cottage and then the lessons would begin together they fought monsters and olivina taught her new Apprentice the art of Witchcraft the power to bend the spirits and learn from them spells and abilities that other Wizards can only hope to achieve canela's greats were just as bad however despite all the magical learning she had been doing under the tutelage of olivina and at the end of the school year she was unceremoniously expelled from Miss Veta school for girls but by then she had other plans one can graduate from the school in two ways by studying there or by passing the homologation exam if one is good enough a wizard they can prove so and get a degree from the prestigious school instead of following traditional schooling Candela decided to make her parents proud and graduate school like they wanted her to but in her own way olivina agreed and said kandela on her journey to become a full-fledged witch olva handed her Apprentice a heavy book bound in Magic a grimoire Candela was to join a party of adventurers and fill this grimoire with all the spirits she would encounter in her journey all the pages of the grimoire were blank except for one the very last one a page much older than the rest written in a script she could not translate the only word she could recognize in the entire text was hag once scandel had filled her grimo with Spirits she would be considered a real witch and she'll be ready to take Miss Veta school for girl's final igation exam and finally become not just a wizard and not just a witch but both a true expert of the Arcane sounds cool huh well okay I'm dropping the stick because not only is The Witch Wizard subass in the description of this very video no 12 witch sub classes are yes you heard that right one witch sub class for every core class and much much more because my book is in the description yep I have a book I have more than one but we're talking about the which one today my book that I wrote and I made before I was ever a YouTuber I have been doing this for like 2 years I think it's been no time is in the description of this very video and you can buy it now now there's two additions to this book familiar show them [Music] off [Music] wow why am I doing ASMR and if you buy a physical book before the end of April you get the free pdf of the book as well with your purchase for free just make sure that you go to this drop down menu right here and select the free pdf the wizard sub class we talked about and all the lore about how witches work are there too and that one is free if you want to take a look and see what's up I had to give y'all something for free after all you know the pointy had way but if 12 entire soft classes one for each class sounds like a thing you would like to have and you've liked my content so far well it's there for you to purchase all these sub classes are are witches and they all work with Spirits The Bard witch creates auras of specific Spirits with song the reinder Witch can pilot a spirit Mech yep somehow the monk Li can punch ghosts into people I'm sorry for gushing but I truly love them all I guess cuz I wrote them you also get how to put witches in your game and hear me out let me cook three entire Adventures three of them several session long Adventures for a bunch of different levels and they all feature witches so if you've liked my free fayall adventure well there's more where that came from and like so many more things the standard book will start shipping by the end of the month but if you want the deluxe cover which is honestly my favorite thing I've ever drawn in my life that will start shipping by the end of May at the latest as I want the original backers to this Kickstarter to receive theirs first if you do buy any of the two just remember to click the option for the free pdf of the book with your purchase remember this free pdf thing only lasts until the end of April but yeah finally I get to talk to you all about this it would mean the world to me if you went there and checked it out but what if witches aren't enough for you well if you like spellcasters but not necessarily Wizards and you're still craving a subass here's my video on warlocks although the witch warlock in the book is so sick and if warlocks and wizards are not your thing how about the very first video on the channel Barts or wait until the next and last class video

Channel: Pointy Hat

Views: 492,478

Keywords: DnD, D&D, DnD with a twist, 5e, TTRPG, How to, Illustration, Dungeons and Dragons, D&D with a twist, d&d battle music, pointy hat, animation, rant, hat, homebrew, trailer, D&D trailer, OneD&D, one d&d, onednd, OGL, SRD, Wizards, wizards of the coast, WotC, WOC, OGL drama, class, classes, best subclass, worst subclass, necromancer, warlock, wizard, wizards, dnd wizard, frieren, wizard subclass, best wizard subclass, bladesinger, gale, gale bg3, worst wizard subclass, divination, broken, arcane tradition

Id: e5ePwuzG4gE

Length: 30min 55sec (1855 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 06 2024