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. 😝
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.
Again if you have to remove all resources for the fight to go one way you have your answer....
Resources get expended during the day. The wizard has to take a long rest to get them back except by using a different limited resource. The fighter gets most back on a short rest. If everyone has all of them, wizard wins. If nobody has any, fighter wins. I feel like I am talking to a brick wall here. We should not try to figure out the winner if all resources are available or if they are all unavailable, which we already know, but the point at which it tilts from the wizard to the fighter. What the biggest spell slots the fighter can beat are, how many action surges it would take, if second wind is needed for that, etc. Also, we should use rather generic builds rather than hyper-optimized ones specifically for the duel, for both classes. Or maybe we should just compare what was actually meant to be compared, like fighter vs paladin vs barbarian for melee or wizard vs sorcerer for spellcasting because those would be more helpful
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Generic fighter will prob be champion, maybe different subclasses but no “one turn kill samurai” or “invincible damage deletion abjurer” builds designed specifically to kill the other class.
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I'm sure if you handcuffed Mike Tyson and blindfolded him you could land a punch.... But that doesn't make you a good boxer...
If you have to remove the majority of features from a class to make the fight work in the other classes favor it's pretty clear which class is stronger.....
Wizards normally have to budget resources over a whole day, while fighters do not. That is a balancing mechanism. If you get to use your 9th and 8th level slots in one fight, you will win. But you will also kill your chances of winning other fights later.
the wizard does get to use some slots during the fight. They are supposed to get resources, as all classes do. Giving none is bias against them. I understand that.
I was talking “how many spells must the wizard use to win the fight?” Letting a character that is meant to budget their big guns through 6 fights in a day use them all in one fight without risking anything later is bias itself. One top-level (6-9) slot only is where this begins to become fair.
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Notes: Please keep commentary respectful and constructive.
Wizards normally have to budget resources over a whole day, while fighters do not. That is a balancing mechanism. If you get to use your 9th and 8th level slots in one fight, you will win. But you will also kill your chances of winning other fights later.
the wizard does get to use some slots during the fight. They are supposed to get resources, as all classes do. Giving none is bias against them. I understand that.
I was talking “how many spells must the wizard use to win the fight?” Letting a character that is meant to budget their big guns through 6 fights in a day use them all in one fight without risking anything later is bias itself. One top-level (6-9) slot only is where this begins to become fair.
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That's not completely true. A Fighter's resources are their HP which also get depleted over the course of an adventuring day as Hit Dice and healing potions and such aren't infinite either. If we admit the Wizard doesn't have their big spells then we'd also have to admit the Fighter has only like half their HP available too (and they also have some long rest features here and there they wouldn't have available either).
That being said, the initial question wasn't "Who would win at the end of an adventuring day", so I'm not quite sure why you're so desperate to create this situation.
of course wizards are equally dependent on hit dice if they don't have a fighter or other martial character to take hits on their behalf (more depending on the AC the wizard is managing with their particular build, although spell mastery + shield can make up for that), and martials become even more dependent on hit dice if they don't have casters who can deal with threats quickly and thus prevent damage from being taken
the common thread we keep bumping into is "Dungeons and Dragons was not designed for pvp it's an cooperative dungeon crawl when it is not about roleplaying"
Again if you have to remove all resources for the fight to go one way you have your answer....
No, because the alternative is assuming you will always have the best possible circumstances for the other side. Either way you're picking the winner then working backwards, this is why this thread is and always was pointless.
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Again if you have to remove all resources for the fight to go one way you have your answer....
No, because the alternative is assuming you will always have the best possible circumstances for the other side. Either way you're picking the winner then working backwards, this is why this thread is and always was pointless.
I'm saying if you give the fighter everything and take the spells away from wizard and that's pretty much the only scenario in which the fighter can win.... Well that is a bit telling for which is favored in any 1v1.
I'm saying if you give the fighter everything and take the spells away from wizard and that's pretty much the only scenario in which the fighter can win.... Well that is a bit telling for which is favored in any 1v1.
And I'm saying you're doing the opposite; if you assume the most ideal circumstances for a wizard, then you don't get to casually dismiss the same for a fighter.
And the wizard doesn't need to be fully drained to be beatable; if they've used some of their highest level spells then the fight is no longer guaranteed to be one sided, because the disadvantage of the Wizard is that their resources are critical to their usefulness, while the advantage of the fighter is that very little of their core features are long rest dependent. The fighter is essentially just as potent at the end of an adventuring day as when they started, depending upon how much damage they've taken.
The other advantage that continuously gets glossed over is that the fighter is also not a very costly class to run; high level wizards have expensive spell components. So when people suggest clones or simulacra then this is extra gold in the fighter's pocket for a big bag o' potions (so they can always have maximum hp no matter when in the day the fight actually happens), to hire allies, or magic items etc. Because if you're assuming a fair content then you have to assume both participants get to use the same basic resources.
What is "telling of who is favoured in any 1v1" is entirely dependent upon what circumstances the 1v1 happens under. Why are the fighter and wizard even fighting? Were they an adventuring duo who fell out half way through a difficult adventuring day? Has the wizard been terrorising a town, and the fighter has researched them carefully and chosen their moment to strike?
If you're just assuming the most white-roomy or white-room scenarios, of a fighter and a wizard suddenly appearing fresh after a long rest in a killbox and told to fight, then the circumstance still matter; does the wizard have time to cast anything before the fighter is carving them in twain with a greatsword? Action economy is not a wizard's friend if they get no time to prepare. So is your white-room setup to favour the wizard or not?
This is why the debate never ends, because objectively there is no right or wrong answer without making assumptions, and the assumptions can always be (and usually are) biased.
Again, 99% of arguments in this thread are backwards; it's people picking which side they want to win then deciding why that happens.
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I'm saying if you give the fighter everything and take the spells away from wizard and that's pretty much the only scenario in which the fighter can win.... Well that is a bit telling for which is favored in any 1v1.
And I'm saying you're doing the opposite; if you assume the most ideal circumstances for a wizard, then you don't get to casually dismiss the same for a fighter.
And the wizard doesn't need to be fully drained to be beatable; if they've used some of their highest level spells then the fight is no longer guaranteed to be one sided, because the disadvantage of the Wizard is that their resources are critical to their usefulness, while the advantage of the fighter is that very little of their core features are long rest dependent. The fighter is essentially just as potent at the end of an adventuring day as when they started, depending upon how much damage they've taken.
The other advantage that continuously gets glossed over is that the fighter is also not a very costly class to run; high level wizards have expensive spell components. So when people suggest clones or simulacra then this is extra gold in the fighter's pocket for a big bag o' potions (so they can always have maximum hp no matter when in the day the fight actually happens), to hire allies, or magic items etc. Because if you're assuming a fair content then you have to assume both participants get to use the same basic resources.
What is "telling of who is favoured in any 1v1" is entirely dependent upon what circumstances the 1v1 happens under. Why are the fighter and wizard even fighting? Were they an adventuring duo who fell out half way through a difficult adventuring day? Has the wizard been terrorising a town, and the fighter has researched them carefully and chosen their moment to strike?
If you're just assuming the most white-roomy or white-room scenarios, of a fighter and a wizard suddenly appearing fresh after a long rest in a killbox and told to fight, then the circumstance still matter; does the wizard have time to cast anything before the fighter is carving them in twain with a greatsword? Action economy is not a wizard's friend if they get no time to prepare. So is your white-room setup to favour the wizard or not?
This is why the debate never ends, because objectively there is no right or wrong answer without making assumptions, and the assumptions can always be (and usually are) biased.
Again, 99% of arguments in this thread are backwards; it's people picking which side they want to win then deciding why that happens.
It's absolutely not white room to suggest the wizard starts the fight with all it's slots.... That's exactly what the fighter gets so why not the wizard?
If the fighter gets it's resources so does the wizard... Simple as that.
If you remove any resources from one and not the other you are not creating a scenerio worth discussing imo as it's like the Mike Tyson situation above.... You don't prove anything.
If the fighter can't win with the wizard and itself at 100% resources then it is clearly not better in a 1v1 scenario.
Overall that's not a bad thing... But suggesting that one side start with a huge disadvantage while the other doesn't and this is somehow justifed in saying it's about equal who would win is completely disingenuous.
The other advantage that continuously gets glossed over is that the fighter is also not a very costly class to run; high level wizards have expensive spell components. So when people suggest clones or simulacra then this is extra gold in the fighter's pocket for a big bag o' potions (so they can always have maximum hp no matter when in the day the fight actually happens), to hire allies, or magic items etc. Because if you're assuming a fair content then you have to assume both participants get to use the same basic resources.
This is why the debate never ends, because objectively there is no right or wrong answer without making assumptions, and the assumptions can always be (and usually are) biased.
note: when dealing with 17th level+ wizards, wish removes the need to worry about material components for any 8th level or lower spell vanishes, as long as it is the kind of spell you only really need to cast once or twice (using wish to replicate an 8th level or lower spell does not come with any risk to the caster, unlike using wish to wish for things, which i'd personally never do).
I will go one step further than what you are saying and make the statement that there is no such thing as an unbiased assumption. Your own assumptions carry as much bias as the assumptions of Grimus, giving the combatants lots of gold or no gold, lots of magic items or no magic items, at their peak or at their lowest point or somewhere in the middle, etc everything carries bias, coming from what the person making the assumption thinks is fair, from what they themselves think is the normal thing to expect, from what they themselves think of as reasonable, from what they think is "the baseline". You might cite how ridding wizards of 9th and 8th level spells means the matchup is more fair since it means that the fighter is rewarded for it's consistency over the adventuring day, i might in return cite how ridding a wizard of 9th and 8th level spells robs them of the opportunity to use important class features, thus unfairly tilting the scales against them. There is no "correct" or "objective" way to compare classes
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The other advantage that continuously gets glossed over is that the fighter is also not a very costly class to run; high level wizards have expensive spell components. So when people suggest clones or simulacra then this is extra gold in the fighter's pocket for a big bag o' potions (so they can always have maximum hp no matter when in the day the fight actually happens), to hire allies, or magic items etc. Because if you're assuming a fair content then you have to assume both participants get to use the same basic resources.
This is why the debate never ends, because objectively there is no right or wrong answer without making assumptions, and the assumptions can always be (and usually are) biased.
note: when dealing with 17th level+ wizards, wish removes the need to worry about material components for any 8th level or lower spell vanishes, as long as it is the kind of spell you only really need to cast once or twice (using wish to replicate an 8th level or lower spell does not come with any risk to the caster, unlike using wish to wish for things, which i'd personally never do).
I will go one step further than what you are saying and make the statement that there is no such thing as an unbiased assumption. Your own assumptions carry as much bias as the assumptions of Grimus, giving the combatants lots of gold or no gold, lots of magic items or no magic items, at their peak or at their lowest point or somewhere in the middle, etc everything carries bias, coming from what the person making the assumption thinks is fair, from what they themselves think is the normal thing to expect, from what they themselves think of as reasonable, from what they think is "the baseline". You might cite how ridding wizards of 9th and 8th level spells means the matchup is more fair since it means that the fighter is rewarded for it's consistency over the adventuring day, i might in return cite how ridding a wizard of 9th and 8th level spells robs them of the opportunity to use important class features, thus unfairly tilting the scales against them. There is no "correct" or "objective" way to compare classes
note: when dealing with 17th level+ wizards, wish removes the need to worry about material components for any 8th level or lower spell vanishes, as long as it is the kind of spell you only really need to cast once or twice (using wish to replicate an 8th level or lower spell does not come with any risk to the caster)
Sure, but what have they been doing for levels 1-16? Only using spells without costed components?
And if you're burning a 9th-level slot to avoid spending gold, then it means you require more preparation time to achieve the same amount, during which the fighter could just earn the gold you've saved and spend it anyway, it also creates a vulnerability as if the wizard is spending a 9th-level spell every day, then the best time to attack is after they've used it already, as that will handily eliminate the polymorph + power word kill combo.
Your own assumptions carry as much bias as the assumptions of Grimus
I haven't made any assumptions; all I've done is point out factors that either aren't being considered, or are being purposefully ignored. I'm not putting anything forward as the "correct" scenario, in fact my point is the opposite, that thus far there is no good one that seems even remotely fair to both classes' strengths.
It's absolutely not white room to suggest the wizard starts the fight with all it's slots.... That's exactly what the fighter gets so why not the wizard?
It absolutely is Optimus, because you're choosing that scenario because it supports your intended outcome; it would be just as fair to assume that neither has any resources left, yet that's not the situation you want to consider, is it? How about a dungeon with an antimagic field so neither side has magic; what could be more fair than that?
D&D combat is balanced on the assumption of around six to eight encounters per adventuring day, meaning 83-88% of all encounters are done when your character is no longer "fresh" and fully resourced, and each encounter after the first means you likely have fewer and fewer long rest resources. If one class thrives on having all its long rest resources, while another thrives on not being reliant upon them over an adventuring day then it simply isn't possible for a comparison at either end of the day to be fair.
Stacking the deck as much as possible in the Wizard's favour only makes the argument flawed, and it's about as white-room as you can get if you're assuming both combatants are simply dumped fresh into an arena.
Even if you go white room like that there are other factors at play; how big is the arena (can the Fighter get into melee range in a single turn)? How much cover is there (can't be targeted by many spells if you can't be seen)? How "fresh" are we talking (equipment? Spells cast before the fight begins? etc.). Or are we just to assume that the Wizard gets infinite time to prepare an arena, teleports the fighter in and then executes them?
And it 100% matters, because if the wizard wins with most of their resources and time to prepare but loses without one or both of these, then you don't have a clear winner; all you've established is that it depends. You can't just keep insisting that the former proves the wizard's better at 1v1 when the latter is just as possible in a 1v1 scenario; if you can't see that, or refuse to see it, then why post at all? Because that's not arguing which is better, that's just proclaiming that you want it to be the wizard and that everyone who won't accept your scenario in which they do is wrong.
That's not winning the argument, that's refusing to take part.
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I'm saying if you give the fighter everything and take the spells away from wizard and that's pretty much the only scenario in which the fighter can win.... Well that is a bit telling for which is favored in any 1v1.
And I'm saying you're doing the opposite; if you assume the most ideal circumstances for a wizard, then you don't get to casually dismiss the same for a fighter.
And the wizard doesn't need to be fully drained to be beatable; if they've used some of their highest level spells then the fight is no longer guaranteed to be one sided, because the disadvantage of the Wizard is that their resources are critical to their usefulness, while the advantage of the fighter is that very little of their core features are long rest dependent. The fighter is essentially just as potent at the end of an adventuring day as when they started, depending upon how much damage they've taken.
The other advantage that continuously gets glossed over is that the fighter is also not a very costly class to run; high level wizards have expensive spell components. So when people suggest clones or simulacra then this is extra gold in the fighter's pocket for a big bag o' potions (so they can always have maximum hp no matter when in the day the fight actually happens), to hire allies, or magic items etc. Because if you're assuming a fair content then you have to assume both participants get to use the same basic resources.
What is "telling of who is favoured in any 1v1" is entirely dependent upon what circumstances the 1v1 happens under. Why are the fighter and wizard even fighting? Were they an adventuring duo who fell out half way through a difficult adventuring day? Has the wizard been terrorising a town, and the fighter has researched them carefully and chosen their moment to strike?
If you're just assuming the most white-roomy or white-room scenarios, of a fighter and a wizard suddenly appearing fresh after a long rest in a killbox and told to fight, then the circumstance still matter; does the wizard have time to cast anything before the fighter is carving them in twain with a greatsword? Action economy is not a wizard's friend if they get no time to prepare. So is your white-room setup to favour the wizard or not?
This is why the debate never ends, because objectively there is no right or wrong answer without making assumptions, and the assumptions can always be (and usually are) biased.
Again, 99% of arguments in this thread are backwards; it's people picking which side they want to win then deciding why that happens.
This exactly is correct. Thank you
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note: when dealing with 17th level+ wizards, wish removes the need to worry about material components for any 8th level or lower spell vanishes, as long as it is the kind of spell you only really need to cast once or twice (using wish to replicate an 8th level or lower spell does not come with any risk to the caster)
Sure, but what have they been doing for levels 1-16? Only using spells without costed components?
And if you're burning a 9th-level slot to avoid spending gold, then it means you require more preparation time to achieve the same amount, during which the fighter could just earn the gold you've saved and spend it anyway, it also creates a vulnerability as if the wizard is spending a 9th-level spell every day, then the best time to attack is after they've used it already, as that will handily eliminate the polymorph + power word kill combo.
Your own assumptions carry as much bias as the assumptions of Grimus
I haven't made any assumptions; all I've done is point out factors that either aren't being considered, or are being purposefully ignored. I'm not putting anything forward as the "correct" scenario, in fact my point is the opposite, that thus far there is no good one that seems even remotely fair to both classes' strengths.
It's absolutely not white room to suggest the wizard starts the fight with all it's slots.... That's exactly what the fighter gets so why not the wizard?
It absolutely is Optimus, because you're choosing that scenario because it supports your intended outcome; it would be just as fair to assume that neither has any resources left, yet that's not the situation you want to consider, is it? How about a dungeon with an antimagic field so neither side has magic; what could be more fair than that?
D&D combat is balanced on the assumption of around six to eight encounters per adventuring day, meaning 83-88% of all encounters are done when your character is no longer "fresh" and fully resourced, and each encounter after the first means you likely have fewer and fewer long rest resources. If one class thrives on having all its long rest resources, while another thrives on not being reliant upon them over an adventuring day then it simply isn't possible for a comparison at either end of the day to be fair.
Stacking the deck as much as possible in the Wizard's favour only makes the argument flawed, and it's about as white-room as you can get if you're assuming both combatants are simply dumped fresh into an arena.
Even if you go white room like that there are other factors at play; how big is the arena (can the Fighter get into melee range in a single turn)? How much cover is there (can't be targeted by many spells if you can't be seen)? How "fresh" are we talking (equipment? Spells cast before the fight begins? etc.). Or are we just to assume that the Wizard gets infinite time to prepare an arena, teleports the fighter in and then executes them?
And it 100% matters, because if the wizard wins with most of their resources and time to prepare but loses without one or both of these, then you don't have a clear winner; all you've established is that it depends. You can't just keep insisting that the former proves the wizard's better at 1v1 when the latter is just as possible in a 1v1 scenario; if you can't see that, or refuse to see it, then why post at all? Because that's not arguing which is better, that's just proclaiming that you want it to be the wizard and that everyone who won't accept your scenario in which they do is wrong.
That's not winning the argument, that's refusing to take part.
It's not refusing to take part it's refusing to agree to a shitty premise.
If you have to remove features from one combatant to make the fight "fair" then you have your answer.
If your saying both classes having all their resources is "stacking in the wizards favor" you have already answered the question being asked.
If we give the wizard more than 1/3 of their spell slots, that is bias. Wizards need to budget their slots for a full day, which the game assumes to have 6 encounters. All fighter resources except indomitable and a few subclasses budget via short rest, which the game expect 2 encounters between. The wizard may be able to clean the fighter quickly by using their 9th, 8th, and 7th level slots in a row, but what happens when they encounter something else later?
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Again if you have to remove all resources for the fight to go one way you have your answer....
Resources get expended during the day. The wizard has to take a long rest to get them back except by using a different limited resource. The fighter gets most back on a short rest. If everyone has all of them, wizard wins. If nobody has any, fighter wins. I feel like I am talking to a brick wall here. We should not try to figure out the winner if all resources are available or if they are all unavailable, which we already know, but the point at which it tilts from the wizard to the fighter. What the biggest spell slots the fighter can beat are, how many action surges it would take, if second wind is needed for that, etc. Also, we should use rather generic builds rather than hyper-optimized ones specifically for the duel, for both classes. Or maybe we should just compare what was actually meant to be compared, like fighter vs paladin vs barbarian for melee or wizard vs sorcerer for spellcasting because those would be more helpful
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Generic fighter will prob be champion, maybe different subclasses but no “one turn kill samurai” or “invincible damage deletion abjurer” builds designed specifically to kill the other class.
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Example generic melee fighter: https://ddb.ac/characters/51456874/zJnTcW
replace any of last 3 asi with feats because I own the books physically. This is purely an example
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I'm sure if you handcuffed Mike Tyson and blindfolded him you could land a punch.... But that doesn't make you a good boxer...
If you have to remove the majority of features from a class to make the fight work in the other classes favor it's pretty clear which class is stronger.....
Wizards normally have to budget resources over a whole day, while fighters do not. That is a balancing mechanism. If you get to use your 9th and 8th level slots in one fight, you will win. But you will also kill your chances of winning other fights later.
the wizard does get to use some slots during the fight. They are supposed to get resources, as all classes do. Giving none is bias against them. I understand that.
I was talking “how many spells must the wizard use to win the fight?” Letting a character that is meant to budget their big guns through 6 fights in a day use them all in one fight without risking anything later is bias itself. One top-level (6-9) slot only is where this begins to become fair.
[REDACTED]
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of course wizards are equally dependent on hit dice if they don't have a fighter or other martial character to take hits on their behalf (more depending on the AC the wizard is managing with their particular build, although spell mastery + shield can make up for that), and martials become even more dependent on hit dice if they don't have casters who can deal with threats quickly and thus prevent damage from being taken
the common thread we keep bumping into is "Dungeons and Dragons was not designed for pvp it's an cooperative dungeon crawl when it is not about roleplaying"
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No, because the alternative is assuming you will always have the best possible circumstances for the other side. Either way you're picking the winner then working backwards, this is why this thread is and always was pointless.
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I'm saying if you give the fighter everything and take the spells away from wizard and that's pretty much the only scenario in which the fighter can win.... Well that is a bit telling for which is favored in any 1v1.
Overall it's mostly pointless as DnD isn't PvP.
And I'm saying you're doing the opposite; if you assume the most ideal circumstances for a wizard, then you don't get to casually dismiss the same for a fighter.
And the wizard doesn't need to be fully drained to be beatable; if they've used some of their highest level spells then the fight is no longer guaranteed to be one sided, because the disadvantage of the Wizard is that their resources are critical to their usefulness, while the advantage of the fighter is that very little of their core features are long rest dependent. The fighter is essentially just as potent at the end of an adventuring day as when they started, depending upon how much damage they've taken.
The other advantage that continuously gets glossed over is that the fighter is also not a very costly class to run; high level wizards have expensive spell components. So when people suggest clones or simulacra then this is extra gold in the fighter's pocket for a big bag o' potions (so they can always have maximum hp no matter when in the day the fight actually happens), to hire allies, or magic items etc. Because if you're assuming a fair content then you have to assume both participants get to use the same basic resources.
What is "telling of who is favoured in any 1v1" is entirely dependent upon what circumstances the 1v1 happens under. Why are the fighter and wizard even fighting? Were they an adventuring duo who fell out half way through a difficult adventuring day? Has the wizard been terrorising a town, and the fighter has researched them carefully and chosen their moment to strike?
If you're just assuming the most white-roomy or white-room scenarios, of a fighter and a wizard suddenly appearing fresh after a long rest in a killbox and told to fight, then the circumstance still matter; does the wizard have time to cast anything before the fighter is carving them in twain with a greatsword? Action economy is not a wizard's friend if they get no time to prepare. So is your white-room setup to favour the wizard or not?
This is why the debate never ends, because objectively there is no right or wrong answer without making assumptions, and the assumptions can always be (and usually are) biased.
Again, 99% of arguments in this thread are backwards; it's people picking which side they want to win then deciding why that happens.
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It's absolutely not white room to suggest the wizard starts the fight with all it's slots.... That's exactly what the fighter gets so why not the wizard?
If the fighter gets it's resources so does the wizard... Simple as that.
If you remove any resources from one and not the other you are not creating a scenerio worth discussing imo as it's like the Mike Tyson situation above.... You don't prove anything.
If the fighter can't win with the wizard and itself at 100% resources then it is clearly not better in a 1v1 scenario.
Overall that's not a bad thing... But suggesting that one side start with a huge disadvantage while the other doesn't and this is somehow justifed in saying it's about equal who would win is completely disingenuous.
note: when dealing with 17th level+ wizards, wish removes the need to worry about material components for any 8th level or lower spell vanishes, as long as it is the kind of spell you only really need to cast once or twice (using wish to replicate an 8th level or lower spell does not come with any risk to the caster, unlike using wish to wish for things, which i'd personally never do).
I will go one step further than what you are saying and make the statement that there is no such thing as an unbiased assumption. Your own assumptions carry as much bias as the assumptions of Grimus, giving the combatants lots of gold or no gold, lots of magic items or no magic items, at their peak or at their lowest point or somewhere in the middle, etc everything carries bias, coming from what the person making the assumption thinks is fair, from what they themselves think is the normal thing to expect, from what they themselves think of as reasonable, from what they think is "the baseline". You might cite how ridding wizards of 9th and 8th level spells means the matchup is more fair since it means that the fighter is rewarded for it's consistency over the adventuring day, i might in return cite how ridding a wizard of 9th and 8th level spells robs them of the opportunity to use important class features, thus unfairly tilting the scales against them. There is no "correct" or "objective" way to compare classes
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That's fair take... We all have assumptions
Sure, but what have they been doing for levels 1-16? Only using spells without costed components?
And if you're burning a 9th-level slot to avoid spending gold, then it means you require more preparation time to achieve the same amount, during which the fighter could just earn the gold you've saved and spend it anyway, it also creates a vulnerability as if the wizard is spending a 9th-level spell every day, then the best time to attack is after they've used it already, as that will handily eliminate the polymorph + power word kill combo.
I haven't made any assumptions; all I've done is point out factors that either aren't being considered, or are being purposefully ignored. I'm not putting anything forward as the "correct" scenario, in fact my point is the opposite, that thus far there is no good one that seems even remotely fair to both classes' strengths.
It absolutely is Optimus, because you're choosing that scenario because it supports your intended outcome; it would be just as fair to assume that neither has any resources left, yet that's not the situation you want to consider, is it? How about a dungeon with an antimagic field so neither side has magic; what could be more fair than that?
D&D combat is balanced on the assumption of around six to eight encounters per adventuring day, meaning 83-88% of all encounters are done when your character is no longer "fresh" and fully resourced, and each encounter after the first means you likely have fewer and fewer long rest resources. If one class thrives on having all its long rest resources, while another thrives on not being reliant upon them over an adventuring day then it simply isn't possible for a comparison at either end of the day to be fair.
Stacking the deck as much as possible in the Wizard's favour only makes the argument flawed, and it's about as white-room as you can get if you're assuming both combatants are simply dumped fresh into an arena.
Even if you go white room like that there are other factors at play; how big is the arena (can the Fighter get into melee range in a single turn)? How much cover is there (can't be targeted by many spells if you can't be seen)? How "fresh" are we talking (equipment? Spells cast before the fight begins? etc.). Or are we just to assume that the Wizard gets infinite time to prepare an arena, teleports the fighter in and then executes them?
And it 100% matters, because if the wizard wins with most of their resources and time to prepare but loses without one or both of these, then you don't have a clear winner; all you've established is that it depends. You can't just keep insisting that the former proves the wizard's better at 1v1 when the latter is just as possible in a 1v1 scenario; if you can't see that, or refuse to see it, then why post at all? Because that's not arguing which is better, that's just proclaiming that you want it to be the wizard and that everyone who won't accept your scenario in which they do is wrong.
That's not winning the argument, that's refusing to take part.
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.
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This exactly is correct. Thank you
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It's not refusing to take part it's refusing to agree to a shitty premise.
If you have to remove features from one combatant to make the fight "fair" then you have your answer.
If your saying both classes having all their resources is "stacking in the wizards favor" you have already answered the question being asked.
If we give the wizard more than 1/3 of their spell slots, that is bias. Wizards need to budget their slots for a full day, which the game assumes to have 6 encounters. All fighter resources except indomitable and a few subclasses budget via short rest, which the game expect 2 encounters between. The wizard may be able to clean the fighter quickly by using their 9th, 8th, and 7th level slots in a row, but what happens when they encounter something else later?
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