Quote from: Peregrin;3936573e D&D PHB.

I rest my case.  As per usual, DeadUematsu is as vague as possible regarding his premises, so as not to have to support them in any meaningful way. (EDIT:  I don't think Peregrin is or ever has been guilty of this) However, I believe several posters have already mentioned that the issue was really not evident until 3.x; prior to that, it was virtually guaranteed that Magic Users can't outshine Fighters (or anyone else) consistently.  I mean, if you stretch it just a bit, Fighters generally have decent odds of kicking in a door, so you don't really need the Thief to pick the lock, right?

I won't deny that there may be a noticeable problem with this in 3.0 and later; perhaps even a regular problem.  I won't address the problem in 3.x or later.  I gave up on those editions a number of years ago.  I will clarify, however, for those who want to discuss this in good faith - as I am sure Peregrin does - that the solutions I propose are applicable to the earlier editions.

Quote from: Shazbot79;393718Wealth was not hard for a 7th level magic user to create.

This is one of the reasons that AD&D was a lot more balanced, because spellcasters didn't have easy access to game economy breaking things like scribe scroll and create wand....so material components were a much bigger deal back in those days.

Ostensibly XP costs should have discouraged this kind of thing. Played straight, I think casters might have leveled more slowly than non-casters if they took advantage.

I don't know how significant an impact it had or how often xp costs were enforced, unfortunately. And for what they did I think just buying them was pretty cheap too. I don't think I ever played in a group where the cleric didn't have a wand of healing (pricing guidelines for custom magic items let you make an unlimited healing wand... it may as well have been on the standard equipment list... it was more expensive, but even with a very low level spell it did what it needed to).

It is amazing to me how people who want so desperately to make D&D an MMO fail completely to understand stand the difference between burst and sustained DPS. This is the most basic of design concepts, people.

Also, D&D is not a PvP game, and monsters shouldn't have the same stats as players. They don't in WoW even.