Arelith

Like always, the threads of Sorcerer vs. Wizard keep popping up.

Some people seem to think that the Sorcerer+Divine dip is the strongest class in PvP due to insane saves and Sorcerer spellcasting endurance.

If this is the reason Sorcerers can not be buffed/given new things, how would you propose to nerf the synergy between Sorcerer+BG/Paladin, to give room to give Sorcerers cookies of their own?

/Discuss.

If you wanted to nerf people dipping BG/Paladin for Dark Blessing/Divine Grace, cap the Cha bonus to saving throws by class levels in BG/Paladin. So the standard 3 or 4 level dip would cap the benefit from Cha to +3 or +4, while not affecting dedicated BGs or paladins.

On Arelith currently, if you completely disallowed blackguard/paladin dips on sorcerers, the only thing that would change is their reflex save would be stuck around the low 30s. So you could maybe bigbys them or get a grease off assuming you've breached their FoM.

The strength of sorcerer isn't that it can dip these other classes to leverage their charisma into not being useless. Their strength has been a few things.

#1 they have more spell slots, obviously.
#2 their spell slots are spontaneous. They don't need to think ahead, they can cast their spells in a number of combinations as needed.
#3 there simply aren't very many good spells on NWN. Typically if a spell saves "will save negates" or "fortitude negates", the spell is immediately worthless and serves as a trap option. There's a few exceptions to this and some select builds that simply cannot get either a high fort or will, but it's typically those two that everyone builds around.

Due to the limited number of actual good spells, even with sorcerer's very narrow selection they're able to pick every single spell that they care about. The only things they cannot grab is something more quality of life like polymorph self for carry capacity or what have you when hauling heavy fixtures. Even then they can just FoM wand though.

So what you're left with is this comparison

Wizards get: +4 feats, nearly double the skill points of a sorcerer
Sorcerers get: +2 spell slots at any given level, no need for preparation ahead of time

Most of the buffs people talk about giving sorcerers are things that would basically eliminate wizard's advantage over sorcerers. Things that sorcerer honestly doesn't need to be good.

It's been a long time since I've referenced the numbers but last I recall there were significantly more wizard characters than sorcerer characters. Even if it's technically true that in instances of PvP sorcerers have more stopping power I'm not sure why there's been so much discussion about it recently. Why there've been calls to buff sorcerer and calls to nerf it. It's a class that from what I've seen is simply overshadowed and sees a lack of representation because people are okay with being a little bit worse of a spellcaster because they get far more feat room and way more skill points to tinker with. Feat room leads to fun RP abilities such as taking divination or illusion or what have you.

If you wanted to nerf sorcerer to give an excuse to give them more RP cookies you'd have to look into nerfing the defining class identity of a sorcerer since that's what props it up so much, that being spell slots and lack of preparation. Alternatively, something else that I suspect will happen over time now that HAKs are here, more new and good spells being added will begin to make sorcerer's lack spell learning begin to weigh more heavily and really push wizard's versatility forward. Maybe if this creates enough of a disparity then you can say that sorcerers are weak enough that nothing bad would come from giving them RP cookie buffs.

It's fine as it is.

What would make sorcerers cool and interesting without taking away what wiz have...would be bloodlines...

Tarkus the dog wrote: ↑

Sun Dec 08, 2019 11:45 am

It's fine as it is.

Agreed.

I don't think sorcerer and wizard need a nerf to basic class mechanics. I think certain spells need a nerf that would help level the playing field. Specifically, timestop either needs to be fundamentally changed or just go away. Most conversations I have with people figuring out how to counter one end with 'unless they use timestop, then I lose.'

With timestop, there are multiple combos of spells that can just nuke the majority of builds into the ground without any way to fight back. Sure, you can pray out of it, but that's something that in a balanced environment would be better saved to avoid something like bigbys.

It's hilarious how timestop continues to come up even with the nerf, the cooldown, and the UMD removal. Folks: timestop isn't broken.

Ork wrote: ↑

Mon Dec 09, 2019 3:25 am

It's hilarious how timestop continues to come up even with the nerf, the cooldown, and the UMD removal. Folks: timestop isn't broken.

Kaeldre wrote: ↑

Sun Dec 08, 2019 7:15 pm

Tarkus the dog wrote: ↑

Sun Dec 08, 2019 11:45 am

It's fine as it is.

Agreed.

This sums up my feelings. While I agree the combination of the classes is strong, I don't think they're wrong or broken- the classes just have particularly good synergy, which is good, because they don't have synergy with too much else, unlike other things - such as fighter and rogue - which multi-class pretty well with everything else. Let's not forget the holy grails of dipping, monk and bard.

I'm all for pure things getting cookies, but at this point in the balancing game it would be flawed to call out any one multi-classing combination that isn't already covered by alignment rules without nerfing them all.

Fair arguments. Perhaps it is indeed fine as it is.

Perhaps the skill overhaul (when it comes) soothes some of my concerns, and maybe there will be some Bloodlines or Paths to add flavour to Sorcerers in the future. We shall wait and see.

I have no problem power wise with the cross class, but I find it limiting in the types of sorcerers you can build. As it stands now, there are five alignments that never get sorcerers because +15/16 saves that don't count toward the +20 cap are too good to pass up. I don't know much about the class admittedly, but I always thought it leaned toward the chaotic end of the spectrum too, which makes every non evil sorcerer being LG a flavor fail. I might be wrong there though.