Is the wizard underpowered?

**psyadam** · 02-09-2012, 23:37

Just so you know, I started this thread in the official forum, hoping that Blizzard blues might see it and take action. Unfortunately a lot of people are trying to say the wizard is not actually underpowered there.

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/top...9203?page=1#11

**mysticc** · 03-09-2012, 00:03

Originally Posted by psyadam

Just so you know, I started this thread in the official forum, hoping that Blizzard blues might see it and take action. Unfortunately a lot of people are trying to say the wizard is not actually underpowered there.

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/top...9203?page=1#11

I don't expect a majority of people on there to understand, except for the one I linked to. Most people who have good gear just want to say "L2P" or some such drivel.

**mysticc** · 03-09-2012, 00:13

I just think, ultimately, that good generalized gear should produce good results.

In diablo 2, let's ignore Faster Cast Rate or Increase Attack Speed for a bit - because I think D2 handled that pretty poorly by having different frame breakpoints. In D2, you could equip any good gear, and you're character would be good. If you had a blizzard sorc, Death's Fathom might be best in slot, but you could still be effective if you had an Occy, Tal Orb, Wizard Spike or even an Eschuatas.

While there were items that "enabled" a build, you could generally use whatever items with the build you had in mind. The build was always in your control, and it was actually kind of rare where you couldn't progress or your build didn't work at all if you didn't have the best items. I guess an exception to this is weapons to some extent, because good weapons were much rarer to drop when compared to d3, but nothing is perfect.

With Wizards in D3, it's not like that anymore. Basically, you need specialized crit gear to take advantage of a specialized crit build to do well and/or better than other classes. Without that crit gear, you are under-performing against most/all other classes by a huge margin - easily 200% worse or more. You could have the very best non-crit gear in the game, and you will still be underpowered compared to other classes using cheaper gear. This, to me, sounds like a big problem.

Other classes don't have this problem. While using crit gear makes their classes better, there is always an alternative non-crit build that actually works. The barb and monk are especially popular not because everyone has sick crit gear - but because you make one without crit gear and start farming. This isn't the case with the Wizard.

Blizzard seriously needs to look at this. The above recommendations I gave above would probably solve the issue, but I am a bit unsettled about how I'm achieving it because my solutions don't really promote build diversity - they just give non-critical mass wizards an alternative, and it's going to be the same alternative across the board. I guess that's inferno for you.

**Delvin** · 03-09-2012, 01:14

No.. Wizard is not underpowered. It's likely the most resilient ranged class in fact and still does good damage. Diamond skin absorbs multiple hits and is up constantly. If needed you can spec for Mirror Image/Teleport to avoid enemies more effectively. That *is* enough to do almost all elites (phasebeasts are still hard) even without awesome gear, I assure you. Sure barbs might have a better resistance buff but that's a ridiculous comparison, barbs take a LOT more damage by design. You don't absolutely need Life-On-Hit gear to play a wizard, but it's pretty much mandatory for melee classes.

//beat inferno as a wizard pre-1.0.3 without any "cheap" tactics (with no crit gear btw) and think it would've been harder/more gear dependant back then with any other class

**psyadam** · 03-09-2012, 01:16

mysticc, some people (on the official forums) are agreeing that the wizard are underpowered and making the same types of arguments as you spelled out.

**mysticc** · 03-09-2012, 02:49

Originally Posted by psyadam

mysticc, some people (on the official forums) are agreeing that the wizard are underpowered and making the same types of arguments as you spelled out.

One of those is my response

**mysticc** · 03-09-2012, 03:00

Originally Posted by Delvin

No.. Wizard is not underpowered. It's likely the most resilient ranged class in fact and still does good damage. Diamond skin absorbs multiple hits and is up constantly. If needed you can spec for Mirror Image/Teleport to avoid enemies more effectively. That *is* enough to do almost all elites (phasebeasts are still hard) even without awesome gear, I assure you. Sure barbs might have a better resistance buff but that's a ridiculous comparison, barbs take a LOT more damage by design. You don't absolutely need Life-On-Hit gear to play a wizard, but it's pretty much mandatory for melee classes.

//beat inferno as a wizard pre-1.0.3 without any "cheap" tactics (with no crit gear btw) and think it would've been harder/more gear dependent back then with any other class

Whether's it's good enough or not in your opinion is sort of irrelevant. Mathematically, it is worse. Do we not want to have classes that are relatively balanced? In the wizard's case, it's very uneven.

I wouldn't call the wizard resilient. If it can't turn invulnerable for a brief time like 3 other classes can, how resilient can it really be?

It does not do "good damage". It's damage is passable. It is more than a barb, but less than a monk with similar gear. The demon hunter is far out-classing it too - even if you're not going for cluster arrows. The wizard is in the middle when it comes to damage, and she's second worse when it comes to defense.

Mirror Image/Teleport is not enough. If they don't attack your mirror images, and your teleport is on cool down, then you're ****ed. Sometimes I don't know if people are playing the same game as I am. Sometimes you run into fast/teleporter/waller on the same pack, and what the hell do you do during the 16 second cool down period on your teleport? You think illusionist is going to help? LOL.

In fact, how do you do anything against horde/fast monsters? It's impossible to kite them, and the Wizard's damage sucks so much she can't possibly kill them before she dies. This is the same problem we had with fast/invulnerable minions, but even after Blizzard got rid of that mob affix, it's still hard as is.

The thing that really gets me though is that it's impossible for the wizard to "out gear" this, unlike the monk or barbarian. Yes, there are bad affixes for the monk for example, but once you out-gear the content, no champion/elite pack matters anymore. This is not so with the wizard. Act 2 is not terribly hard, but some packs are so brutal, you will die every time - even if you have over 1000 @ res and 6000 armor. I don't even want to discuss the end of act 3 and act 4.

As for barbs taking damage: If barbs had no facility to heal as well as they do with Rend/Revenge/Charge, then I'd agree with you. It would make sense that even with the 30% extra damage reduction, things would be fair due to the number of hits they take.

But honestly, have you ever actually played a Barbarian? It's easy mode compared to a Wizard. You have so much ability to heal yourself, that the combined rate of healing with the damage reduction and naturally higher armor/resists makes you 25x harder to kill compared to a wizard.

Like I said above, if the Templar wasn't such a piece of crap, maybe the Wizard would be a lot more playable. Any 1 or 2 hits has the Wizard in real danger mode, while the Barbarian happily gets hit hundreds of times and it doesn't even matter. 1 point of his vitality is worth 5 or 10 times that of a Wizard's vitality, and he can keep healing like crazy on top of this. I think 25x is underestimating his survivability compared to the Wizard actually.

**NBarnes** · 03-09-2012, 05:16

Originally Posted by Dogbert

And i thought i was alone having this feeling.. Thank god there are others sharing the same view.

Oh, Goddess, no. I recently spent 1.5 mil upgrading my wizard's gear and took her for a spin farming A1. The difference between her and my monk was... I could cry, really. I've been playing mages and sorceresses since forever, and the wizard is just such a brutal step down from those, I could cry.

As I said in another wizard thread here, I really think Hydra is keeping wizards down. Having so much of the class' power tied up in one brain-dead-to-use spell means that the rest of the class has to be terrible to keep it under control.

**deya** · 03-09-2012, 05:42

I play CM Wizard and I kill packs about 10 times faster than my friend who has one of the best gears on EU on his Monk.

Archon with decent gear stomps even harder.

It seems to me that people think that kite builds doesn't need defensive approach in their gearing. Wrong, dead wrong. Regardless of the class you are playing Diablo 3 with, you need to build some AR and Vita to survive some blows - otherwise it will get boring and fast. Wizard is in a very smooth spot due to Force Armor/Prismatic Armor and she can survive so much better than DH and WD (the classes you should compare her to, not Barb or Monk anyway). WD got some nice buffs but for me, Wizard is still the 2nd best softcore class after Barb (Hi2u Run Like the Wind).

For HC, I think WD or Monk would be a lot safer choise (Monk due to natural sturdiness and WD due to Spirit Vessel).

Nothing wrong with Wizard.

**Dogbert** · 03-09-2012, 07:27

Originally Posted by Delvin

No.. Wizard is not underpowered. It's likely the most resilient ranged class in fact and still does good damage. Diamond skin absorbs multiple hits and is up constantly. If needed you can spec for Mirror Image/Teleport to avoid enemies more effectively. That *is* enough to do almost all elites (phasebeasts are still hard) even without awesome gear, I assure you. Sure barbs might have a better resistance buff but that's a ridiculous comparison, barbs take a LOT more damage by design. You don't absolutely need Life-On-Hit gear to play a wizard, but it's pretty much mandatory for melee classes.

//beat inferno as a wizard pre-1.0.3 without any "cheap" tactics (with no crit gear btw) and think it would've been harder/more gear dependant back then with any other class

Yes diamond skin is up constantly. Sure thing. It has a 15 second cooldown same as teleport so stop with the non sense.
No one cares if you beat inferno in 1.0.3 when a monk can do it twice as fast, twice as safe.

Originally Posted by NBarnes

Oh, Goddess, no. I recently spent 1.5 mil upgrading my wizard's gear and took her for a spin farming A1. The difference between her and my monk was... I could cry, really. I've been playing mages and sorceresses since forever, and the wizard is just such a brutal step down from those, I could cry.

As I said in another wizard thread here, I really think Hydra is keeping wizards down. Having so much of the class' power tied up in one brain-dead-to-use spell means that the rest of the class has to be terrible to keep it under control.

Yes but we need hydra because it's the only skill that can do damage while kiting. Without hydra it would be even worse i think.

Originally Posted by deya

I play CM Wizard and I kill packs about 10 times faster than my friend who has one of the best gears on EU on his Monk.

Archon with decent gear stomps even harder.

It seems to me that people think that kite builds doesn't need defensive approach in their gearing. Wrong, dead wrong. Regardless of the class you are playing Diablo 3 with, you need to build some AR and Vita to survive some blows - otherwise it will get boring and fast. Wizard is in a very smooth spot due to Force Armor/Prismatic Armor and she can survive so much better than DH and WD (the classes you should compare her to, not Barb or Monk anyway). WD got some nice buffs but for me, Wizard is still the 2nd best softcore class after Barb (Hi2u Run Like the Wind).

For HC, I think WD or Monk would be a lot safer choise (Monk due to natural sturdiness and WD due to Spirit Vessel).

Nothing wrong with Wizard.

And you don't even get what the point of this thread is. Read the op's first post. It's right there but all you talk about is your cm wizard which is so irrelevant i could care less.

If a monk with worse all around stats, worse gear and half damage compared to a wizard still performs better. MAYBE there is a problem somewhere MAYBE.

Yes nothing wrong with wizard move along people.