Sfpanzer, correct. If the wizard pre-casts a bunch of spells they win. If they do not, they get taken down by 8 arrows in one turn if the fighter’s initiative is good. Everyone here seems to assume time to prepare for the fight, so I guess wizard wins if both plan in advance. If some being teleports both to an arena and tells them to fight to the death, fighter stands a chance.
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Also action surges and subclass features mean 8 attacks at least, possibly more. Most wizards cannot survive that if subclass features boost the damage.
Yes they can.... Read the "Dread" build here.
200+ HP.
Here is the math for an elven Accuracy fighter with CBE and SS:
to summarize this entire godamm thread in just a couple of words: the wizard always wins this scenario because power is contextual and in this context the wizard has the clear advantage
the strongest melee-only build will be rendered worthless by a flying enemy with a basic ranged attack
the strongest stealth- archery build is only good as long as you have arrows left in your quiver and cover to hide behind
a feature that let's you as an action instantly kill a single target, with no save or attack roll attached, at-will, would sound great until the thing you are fighting is 25 individual ordinary CR 1/8th kobolds with a zealous death wish, where suddenly that feature is useless compared to fireball or even a warrior with Extra Attack
having literally infinite hit points is great if you are in a two-person deathmatch, but that on it's own will not help you assassinate someone, or prevent you from being imprisoned or put to sleep, or protecting someone else from a gang of thugs, or really any context where the objective is anything other than "prevent myself from dropping to 0 hp and being killed"
a mage might be able to contest the gods if they bring their strongest resources to bear against their opponent, but not be nearly as dangerous over the course of a long adventuring day when they have to conserve their resources a lot more
a build that requires finding certain types of magic items is only going to be reaching their true potential as long as the means to find that magic item as treasure or the downtime to craft it yourself becomes available, or if you have party members who can do that for you, and it will only remain at it's strongest as long as the magic item is never stolen or destroyed.
in different contexts, different things will be the best or the strongest thing, and it seems pretty clear to me and almost everyone else here that in the specific context of a 20th level character with all their resources fighting another 20th level character with all their resources and there is nothing in the future that warrants saving resources for, the wizard has the upper hand. Dnd 5e is not a game that is balanced for pvp (one might argue it is not balanced for it's adventuring days either but that's a discussion for another day, since when are game designers infallible), it makes sense that when put in a drastically different situation to what the game was designed for, the power gap between classes becomes much greater than what it was before and some classes start to shine really brightly, same as how a Gritty Realism campaign arguably heavily favors warlocks and fighters and how an entirely social campaign with no combat encounters heavily favors bards, rogues and utility-focused casters. Dnd is an asymmetric game with asymmetric choices, different choices will be rewarded in different contexts.
An encounter where one side can use a 9th level slot, an 8th level slot and a 7th level slot or two is inevitably going to be a one-sided affair because you are supposed to get those once per adventuring day, they are supposed to be the kinds of features that can completely reshape the course of a single encounter because you can only use them a handful of times over a longer adventuring day with several combats. The wizard wins overall in this match up, and it's supposed to win overall, if it did not then it would indicate that this is a completely different game with completely different design principles, a game that is either designed for pvp combats rather than pve combats, or a game where non-combat abilities & spells are valued way higher than what they are in 5e such that it makes perfect sense for a fighter to overall be better at combat than a wizard at their peak, or maybe even a game like 4e where every single class uses the same type of resource and classes only differ by flavor and what kinds of combat encounter they are good at.
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i am soup, with too many ideas (all of them very spicy) who has made sufficient homebrew material and character to last an thousand human lifetimes
to summarize this entire godamm thread in just a couple of words: the wizard always wins this scenario because power is contextual and in this context the wizard has the clear advantage
the strongest melee-only build will be rendered worthless by a flying enemy with a basic ranged attack
the strongest stealth- archery build is only good as long as you have arrows left in your quiver and cover to hide behind
a feature that let's you as an action instantly kill a single target, with no save or attack roll attached, at-will, would sound great until the thing you are fighting is 25 individual ordinary CR 1/8th kobolds with a zealous death wish, where suddenly that feature is useless compared to fireball or even a warrior with Extra Attack
having literally infinite hit points is great if you are in a two-person deathmatch, but that on it's own will not help you assassinate someone, or prevent you from being imprisoned or put to sleep, or protecting someone else from a gang of thugs, or really any context where the objective is anything other than "prevent myself from dropping to 0 hp and being killed"
a mage might be able to contest the gods if they bring their strongest resources to bear against their opponent, but not be nearly as dangerous over the course of a long adventuring day when they have to conserve their resources a lot more
a build that requires finding certain types of magic items is only going to be reaching their true potential as long as the means to find that magic item as treasure or the downtime to craft it yourself becomes available, or if you have party members who can do that for you, and it will only remain at it's strongest as long as the magic item is never stolen or destroyed.
in different contexts, different things will be the best or the strongest thing, and it seems pretty clear to me and almost everyone else here that in the specific context of a 20th level character with all their resources fighting another 20th level character with all their resources and there is nothing in the future that warrants saving resources for, the wizard has the upper hand. Dnd 5e is not a game that is balanced for pvp (one might argue it is not balanced for it's adventuring days either but that's a discussion for another day, since when are game designers infallible), it makes sense that when put in a drastically different situation to what the game was designed for, the power gap between classes becomes much greater than what it was before and some classes start to shine really brightly, same as how a Gritty Realism campaign arguably heavily favors warlocks and fighters and how an entirely social campaign with no combat encounters heavily favors bards, rogues and utility-focused casters. Dnd is an asymmetric game with asymmetric choices, different choices will be rewarded in different contexts.
An encounter where one side can use a 9th level slot, an 8th level slot and a 7th level slot or two is inevitably going to be a one-sided affair because you are supposed to get those once per adventuring day, they are supposed to be the kinds of features that can completely reshape the course of a single encounter because you can only use them a handful of times over a longer adventuring day with several combats. The wizard wins overall in this match up, and it's supposed to win overall, if it did not then it would indicate that this is a completely different game with completely different design principles, a game that is either designed for pvp combats rather than pve combats, or a game where non-combat abilities & spells are valued way higher than what they are in 5e such that it makes perfect sense for a fighter to overall be better at combat than a wizard at their peak, or maybe even a game like 4e where every single class uses the same type of resource and classes only differ by flavor and what kinds of combat encounter they are good at.
to summarize this entire godamm thread in just a couple of words: the wizard always wins this scenario because power is contextual and in this context the wizard has the clear advantage
Why does the wizard have the advantage? Because they got spells? If we compare bare chassis against one another, of course the wizard will seemingly win. But, that's not how a fighter wins. A fighter's growth is not in their build alone, but in their itemization as well. Let's say we build a samurai that uses elven accuracy, but we add a twist: They use the Snicker-Snack greatsword.
They only need to crit once to win this fight, and for that to happen they've got a 70% chance in their eight-attack volley to make that happen, assuming we forgo swift strikes to keep super advantage on every outgoing attack. If we look at "the dread build," which is capped at +5 initiative, the samurai can easily fit in feats like alert and lucky to gain a definite leg up. This theoretical samurai that uses such a sword wouldn't even need to increase CHA to make use of it for the purposes of killing wizards, it only needs to crit once to win.
My point is the conclusion is not that simple. Is it a white room scenario? Is it a real in-character encounter? How did the fighter and wizard build? There's simply too many factors to say "Oh, the wizard wins because it's a wizard!"
Yes, this thread stopped being useful a while ago when people created hilariously optimized builds for the encounter. In fact, it probably stopped being useful long before then. The question is simply too hard to answer properly
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If we go with homebrew items then there's no point in arguing since you could homebrew an item that just says the Wizard loses but the Wizard could have an item that says the Fighter loses and the world would explode lol
What happens when an immovable object meets an unstoppable force?
I guess we have an answer
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But Wizards get to have items too? Also afaik there's no official item that prevents any of the Wizard's shenanigans they could have prepared. Snicker-Snacker does shit if the Fighter can't even hit the real Wizard's body or if they have prepared Clones or something.
If we go with homebrew items then there's no point in arguing since you could homebrew an item that just says the Wizard loses but the Wizard could have an item that says the Fighter loses and the world would explode lol
My point isn't stating that wizards don't get items, or that fighters are better with them.
My point is there exists a variety of timelines where a fighter wins this fight, enough to say we can't just state "the wizard will always win."
to summarize this entire godamm thread in just a couple of words: the wizard always wins this scenario because power is contextual and in this context the wizard has the clear advantage
Why does the wizard have the advantage? Because they got spells? If we compare bare chassis against one another, of course the wizard will seemingly win. But, that's not how a fighter wins. A fighter's growth is not in their build alone, but in their itemization as well. Let's say we build a samurai that uses elven accuracy, but we add a twist: They use the Snicker-Snack greatsword.
this thead is so long precisely becuase we have already tried and tried and tried again. Yes we can make the most impressive, the most niche fighter builds with the highest burst damage but the chances of that fighter managing to defeat the most resilient wizard builds are still so limited. Heck i even threw in a few monk builds a while back for a laugh. This thread has successfully managed to figure out the most op fighters imaginable to fight the most op wizards imaginable and there is not much we can do from here.
The reason i state that the wizard has an advantage is because the core assumption of the game that the classes are built around is player-vs-enemy cooperative scenarios where you fight multiple encounters per long rest and have a few short rests in between. Under these assumptions, the fighter, who mostly uses passive features or features that regain on a short rest, is perfectly on par or even better than the wizard, who has a few limited spell slots to bring to bear per long rest. 5e is not built for a scenario where two 20th level pc's are fresh out of a long rest and fight to the death (which are the core assumptions that this thread has been dealing with most of the time). As i clearly stated, this is a far more nuanced opinion than merely "oh the wizard wins bc spells" no the wizard wins because the only balancing factor for 9th and 8th level spells is that you only get one to play with per long rest and have to carefully choose where to apply it over the 8 combat encounters that day. If the wizard and fighter were both fighting with none of their limited resources remaining things would probably be much different. If they were fighting with all long rest resources exhausted but all short rest resources still active things will be different. If the wizard and fighter are fighting completely naked and without gear or in an anti magic field or whatever the hell else things will be different. Different contexts favor different things,
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i am soup, with too many ideas (all of them very spicy) who has made sufficient homebrew material and character to last an thousand human lifetimes
Basically for every build you can make for fighter that would potentially win you have a wizard build that can sustain or counter.
The only iteration that had a chance was the Arcane Archer build that used banish arrows.
That would only work if you let the wizard have literally 0 prep for the fight.... And when you start putting limitations on one class but not the other then I think you can see which class is better suited for a 1 on 1 fight.
Wizards with any kind of daily prep beats all fighter types due to the spells they have available.
Unless both have already fought things that day. Wizards have a few big guns per day. Fighters can take a 1 hour break and get all their fuel back. This thread was asking a stupid, unanswerable question from the start.
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Unless both have already fought things that day. Wizards have a few big guns per day. Fighters can take a 1 hour break and get all their fuel back. This thread was asking a stupid, unanswerable question from the start.
If you have to take spells away from the wizard to make it a fair fight you have answered the question already.....
Unless both have already fought things that day. Wizards have a few big guns per day. Fighters can take a 1 hour break and get all their fuel back. This thread was asking a stupid, unanswerable question from the start.
If you have to take spells away from the wizard to make it a fair fight you have answered the question already.....
If you assume a full tank then you've stacked the odds; the problem with these arguments is that they all work both ways. The game just isn't designed for 1v1 PvP, and Wizards are balanced over the course of an adventuring day, not a one-off fight one minute after that they woke up (and cast their "ready for the day" spells).
Because the sensible Fighter doesn't fight the Wizard until said Wizard is desperately looking for a place to sleep; that's when you pull their head off, and consult that amulet of locate clones you bought with all the money you saved not needing any expensive spell components. Probably have enough gold to spare for some mercenaries to help you surveil the Wizard's lair, or put up a reward for a few adventurers to come help.
This is why this thread will never end, because there's no actual answer to any question in D&D. 😝
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I have unsubscribed from all topics and will not reply to messages. My homebrew is now 100% unsupported.
Not fair fight. Compete fighter domination. If all limited resources are consumed, fighters get both bigger hits and more hit points. Plus most fighter resources are tied to short rests. At dawn, wizard wins. At dusk, fighter wins. The question the thread asks has a definitive answer, “depends”. On builds, on initiative, on time of day.
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Sfpanzer, correct. If the wizard pre-casts a bunch of spells they win. If they do not, they get taken down by 8 arrows in one turn if the fighter’s initiative is good. Everyone here seems to assume time to prepare for the fight, so I guess wizard wins if both plan in advance. If some being teleports both to an arena and tells them to fight to the death, fighter stands a chance.
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Yes they can.... Read the "Dread" build here.
200+ HP.
Here is the math for an elven Accuracy fighter with CBE and SS:
https://imgur.com/a/1UKjfMB
Vs an AC of 23 they are averaging 126 HP....
You can really easily build a wizard with higher hit points.
https://ddb.ac/characters/71810211/4nKsxc
182 hp wizard... Boom.
This is assuming they don't have their 43 HP arcane ward up, but likely they would making their effective HP 225.
Even if I'm being generous with damage they would have to almost double their average damage to take the wizard down.
to summarize this entire godamm thread in just a couple of words: the wizard always wins this scenario because power is contextual and in this context the wizard has the clear advantage
the strongest melee-only build will be rendered worthless by a flying enemy with a basic ranged attack
the strongest stealth- archery build is only good as long as you have arrows left in your quiver and cover to hide behind
a feature that let's you as an action instantly kill a single target, with no save or attack roll attached, at-will, would sound great until the thing you are fighting is 25 individual ordinary CR 1/8th kobolds with a zealous death wish, where suddenly that feature is useless compared to fireball or even a warrior with Extra Attack
having literally infinite hit points is great if you are in a two-person deathmatch, but that on it's own will not help you assassinate someone, or prevent you from being imprisoned or put to sleep, or protecting someone else from a gang of thugs, or really any context where the objective is anything other than "prevent myself from dropping to 0 hp and being killed"
a mage might be able to contest the gods if they bring their strongest resources to bear against their opponent, but not be nearly as dangerous over the course of a long adventuring day when they have to conserve their resources a lot more
a build that requires finding certain types of magic items is only going to be reaching their true potential as long as the means to find that magic item as treasure or the downtime to craft it yourself becomes available, or if you have party members who can do that for you, and it will only remain at it's strongest as long as the magic item is never stolen or destroyed.
in different contexts, different things will be the best or the strongest thing, and it seems pretty clear to me and almost everyone else here that in the specific context of a 20th level character with all their resources fighting another 20th level character with all their resources and there is nothing in the future that warrants saving resources for, the wizard has the upper hand. Dnd 5e is not a game that is balanced for pvp (one might argue it is not balanced for it's adventuring days either but that's a discussion for another day, since when are game designers infallible), it makes sense that when put in a drastically different situation to what the game was designed for, the power gap between classes becomes much greater than what it was before and some classes start to shine really brightly, same as how a Gritty Realism campaign arguably heavily favors warlocks and fighters and how an entirely social campaign with no combat encounters heavily favors bards, rogues and utility-focused casters. Dnd is an asymmetric game with asymmetric choices, different choices will be rewarded in different contexts.
An encounter where one side can use a 9th level slot, an 8th level slot and a 7th level slot or two is inevitably going to be a one-sided affair because you are supposed to get those once per adventuring day, they are supposed to be the kinds of features that can completely reshape the course of a single encounter because you can only use them a handful of times over a longer adventuring day with several combats. The wizard wins overall in this match up, and it's supposed to win overall, if it did not then it would indicate that this is a completely different game with completely different design principles, a game that is either designed for pvp combats rather than pve combats, or a game where non-combat abilities & spells are valued way higher than what they are in 5e such that it makes perfect sense for a fighter to overall be better at combat than a wizard at their peak, or maybe even a game like 4e where every single class uses the same type of resource and classes only differ by flavor and what kinds of combat encounter they are good at.
i am soup, with too many ideas (all of them very spicy) who has made sufficient homebrew material and character to last an thousand human lifetimes
/Thread
Why does the wizard have the advantage? Because they got spells? If we compare bare chassis against one another, of course the wizard will seemingly win. But, that's not how a fighter wins. A fighter's growth is not in their build alone, but in their itemization as well. Let's say we build a samurai that uses elven accuracy, but we add a twist: They use the Snicker-Snack greatsword.
They only need to crit once to win this fight, and for that to happen they've got a 70% chance in their eight-attack volley to make that happen, assuming we forgo swift strikes to keep super advantage on every outgoing attack. If we look at "the dread build," which is capped at +5 initiative, the samurai can easily fit in feats like alert and lucky to gain a definite leg up. This theoretical samurai that uses such a sword wouldn't even need to increase CHA to make use of it for the purposes of killing wizards, it only needs to crit once to win.
My point is the conclusion is not that simple. Is it a white room scenario? Is it a real in-character encounter? How did the fighter and wizard build? There's simply too many factors to say "Oh, the wizard wins because it's a wizard!"
Yes, this thread stopped being useful a while ago when people created hilariously optimized builds for the encounter. In fact, it probably stopped being useful long before then. The question is simply too hard to answer properly
Royalty among the charge kingdom. All will fall before our glorious assault!
Quest offer! Enter the deep dungeon here
Ctg’s blood is on the spam filter’s hands
What happens when an immovable object meets an unstoppable force?
I guess we have an answer
Royalty among the charge kingdom. All will fall before our glorious assault!
Quest offer! Enter the deep dungeon here
Ctg’s blood is on the spam filter’s hands
My point isn't stating that wizards don't get items, or that fighters are better with them.
My point is there exists a variety of timelines where a fighter wins this fight, enough to say we can't just state "the wizard will always win."
this thead is so long precisely becuase we have already tried and tried and tried again. Yes we can make the most impressive, the most niche fighter builds with the highest burst damage but the chances of that fighter managing to defeat the most resilient wizard builds are still so limited. Heck i even threw in a few monk builds a while back for a laugh. This thread has successfully managed to figure out the most op fighters imaginable to fight the most op wizards imaginable and there is not much we can do from here.
The reason i state that the wizard has an advantage is because the core assumption of the game that the classes are built around is player-vs-enemy cooperative scenarios where you fight multiple encounters per long rest and have a few short rests in between. Under these assumptions, the fighter, who mostly uses passive features or features that regain on a short rest, is perfectly on par or even better than the wizard, who has a few limited spell slots to bring to bear per long rest. 5e is not built for a scenario where two 20th level pc's are fresh out of a long rest and fight to the death (which are the core assumptions that this thread has been dealing with most of the time). As i clearly stated, this is a far more nuanced opinion than merely "oh the wizard wins bc spells" no the wizard wins because the only balancing factor for 9th and 8th level spells is that you only get one to play with per long rest and have to carefully choose where to apply it over the 8 combat encounters that day. If the wizard and fighter were both fighting with none of their limited resources remaining things would probably be much different. If they were fighting with all long rest resources exhausted but all short rest resources still active things will be different. If the wizard and fighter are fighting completely naked and without gear or in an anti magic field or whatever the hell else things will be different. Different contexts favor different things,
i am soup, with too many ideas (all of them very spicy) who has made sufficient homebrew material and character to last an thousand human lifetimes
Basically for every build you can make for fighter that would potentially win you have a wizard build that can sustain or counter.
The only iteration that had a chance was the Arcane Archer build that used banish arrows.
That would only work if you let the wizard have literally 0 prep for the fight.... And when you start putting limitations on one class but not the other then I think you can see which class is better suited for a 1 on 1 fight.
Wizards with any kind of daily prep beats all fighter types due to the spells they have available.
Unless both have already fought things that day. Wizards have a few big guns per day. Fighters can take a 1 hour break and get all their fuel back. This thread was asking a stupid, unanswerable question from the start.
Royalty among the charge kingdom. All will fall before our glorious assault!
Quest offer! Enter the deep dungeon here
Ctg’s blood is on the spam filter’s hands
If you have to take spells away from the wizard to make it a fair fight you have answered the question already.....
If you assume a full tank then you've stacked the odds; the problem with these arguments is that they all work both ways. The game just isn't designed for 1v1 PvP, and Wizards are balanced over the course of an adventuring day, not a one-off fight one minute after that they woke up (and cast their "ready for the day" spells).
Because the sensible Fighter doesn't fight the Wizard until said Wizard is desperately looking for a place to sleep; that's when you pull their head off, and consult that amulet of locate clones you bought with all the money you saved not needing any expensive spell components. Probably have enough gold to spare for some mercenaries to help you surveil the Wizard's lair, or put up a reward for a few adventurers to come help.
This is why this thread will never end, because there's no actual answer to any question in D&D. 😝
Former D&D Beyond Customer of six years: With the axing of piecemeal purchasing, lack of meaningful development, and toxic moderation the site isn't worth paying for anymore. I remain a free user only until my groups are done migrating from DDB, and if necessary D&D, after which I'm done. There are better systems owned by better companies out there.
I have unsubscribed from all topics and will not reply to messages. My homebrew is now 100% unsupported.
Not fair fight. Compete fighter domination. If all limited resources are consumed, fighters get both bigger hits and more hit points. Plus most fighter resources are tied to short rests. At dawn, wizard wins. At dusk, fighter wins. The question the thread asks has a definitive answer, “depends”. On builds, on initiative, on time of day.
Royalty among the charge kingdom. All will fall before our glorious assault!
Quest offer! Enter the deep dungeon here
Ctg’s blood is on the spam filter’s hands