So it's generally accepted by this point that the Evocation school in modern editions D&D is generally the weakest...

So it's generally accepted by this point that the Evocation school in modern editions D&D is generally the weakest school that a Wizard could choose, or at least somewhere near the bottom.

This is weird to me, because when you stop and think about it, Evocation should easily be devastating as a concept.

Take Fireball for instance, you're compressing fire into a sphere the size of a marble before firing it into an area and detonating it to produce a 20 ft. explosion. This should be terrifying in and out of character and yet it's seen as one of the weakest spells in the game, relative to other 3rd level and beyond spells.

Why is that?

Is it because the damage isn't scaled properly to the level you get Evocation spells at? Is it because the way that they're presented makes them seem less threatening (like how you can't set held/worn items on fire with fireball)? Or is there something else that I'm not seeing?

It's a relic of 3e optimization. In high-optimization 3e, there were two things making evocation wizarads bad. First, sorcerers (and if your GM was allowing them, psionic classes) did the job of "turning daily-recharge resources into lots of damage" better. Second, and this is the big one, in high-optimization games, doing damage was just an inefficient means of solving encounters. Wizards who focused in other schools, or who didn't focus, had much more efficient means of ending an encounter than reaching a finite number of damage against a creature... we actually had a saying at my gaming club in college about 3e. A more experienced member would ask a newbie
>How much damage are you doing?
to which his answer would inevitably be a number, which we would interrupt with
>If the answer isn't "infinity" you're doing it wrong. Think of it like high optimization magic until very recently (and especially during the time that 3e was out): creatures were almost never the best solution to a problem, and green was never on top of any meta, because it was too obvious, and wizards at the time seems to have had a philosophy that the most obvious solution NEEDS to be inefficient, and the inefficient solution NEEDS to be obfuscated with weird and unexpected combos.

Evocation is actually one of the best schools for new players.

The main issue is that at a certain point of character optimization, initial conventional wisdom breaks down and taking advantage of somewhat esoteric mechanics start to take precedence.

I say somewhat, because things like action economy aren't really that hard to understand, but it's still something that new players don't really take advantage of, and it's something that more experienced players end up putting as their highest priority.

Fireballs are essentially a measuring point for 3rd level spells, and are far from one of the weakest spells in the game. The issue is that the right combination of other spells and abilities can make the conventional goal of "drop their HP down to zero" a non-concern, since "deny your opponent their actions" or "negate the efficacy of their attacks" makes the question of how much damage you are dealing largely insignificant.

This is true for not just spells, but abilities in general, where the best fighter or barbarian builds are not the ones that just pump out the most damage each round (though those are good in their own way), but are the ones that can keep their opponents from acting to their full capacity.

Because the main advantage wizards have over other classes is flexibility. You can do a LOT of things. But just about every class can dish out damage. All the martials can do it, rogues can do it well if they slip up on someone, cleric types can both cast spells and fight in the battle line, etc.

Why duplicate another class's abilities instead of doing something that you can and they can't and add in that much more flexibility to the party?

Why do a relatively small amount of damage when you could contingency cast resilient sphere to completely ignore a monster's attempt to kill you, paralyze it, and then watch as your minio-I mean martials shank it to death?

A relic of 3.5 age, when damaging people was the least effective way to kill. Why bother do damage to their hit points, when you can bypass their health entirely with spells like sleep, shivering touch, planeshift, forcecage?

It has to do with several things, some of which have already been mentioned. Something that hasn't been brought up is that a direct-damage Fireball is a powerful spell - from the POV of the people who designed 3.X with a really casual game in mind.

As an example, 3.5's Balor, which is CR 20, has relatively well fleshed-out round-by-round tactics, but it only consists of one pre-combat buff, save-or-suck + summoning first two rounds, then full attack and teleport away. At level 20, that's not remotely a challenge. Full attack is a waste of actions for a monster like a Balor.

That's why Evocation, which just deals raw damage but realistically isn't the best option and is easily countered, is considered by WotC to be good, but when you start making a character in 3.X, and really begin considering options and alternatives, it's not great. It's just not great game balancing, unless you're playing really casually, or maybe doing some kind of direct dungeon-delving OSR-type thing, in which case it's totally fine. Someone else mentioned it being good for new players, which I also agree with.

Another thing that really fucked over evocation, really really specifically, was the advent of a bunch of Conjuration spells in the Spell Compendium (ie Acid Orb). These were all no Spell Resistance touch attacks that scaled like Fireball, but better in every way, as there were fewer ways they could be avoided. That's an issue more specific to 3.X, but the above warped vision of D&D balancing held by WotC is probably applicable to other editions too.

>3.5 age

It's something that's been true in every edition of D&D, and largely true in every other game as well. There's very few games where high damage is the ultimate concern.

>Another thing that really fucked over evocation, really really specifically, was the advent of a bunch of Conjuration spells in the Spell Compendium (ie Acid Orb).
This

You'd think that the highest damage spell would belong to the school that deals with nothing but direct damage but nope, it's all generally conjuration spells that target touch AC (which never scales up, making them largely auto-hit) generally being scaled like Fireball.

It's insane.

How do we "make Evocation great again"?

>How do we "make Evocation great again"?
Step 1: Remove HP bloat
Step 2: Give each damage type a unique effect
Step 3: Take all direct damage spells in the game and shuffle them under Evocation.

Boom.

Going off what I was mentioning with the SpC Conjuration spells, what you'd do is several things, some of which just involve more research, which is a bit dull.

Remove Spell Resistance for Evocations, increase save DCs for Evocation specialists. Make sure that people doing Evocation know about an Evocation spell in every energy type, Fireball and Lightning Bolt seem to be the commonly known ones, but sonic, ice, force, acid, and whatever else would be good to know. I'm sure they exist.

Do those things, and Evocation specialists will be able to be fairly decent Mailman Wizards, particularly with metamagic feats and metamagic reduction, which they'd be taking anyway. None of it really seems overpowered to me either, given there are still better options, but it's a quick and easy fix to address some of the concerns, and reward players that just want to play classic Blaster Wizards.

>Is it because the damage isn't scaled properly to the level you get Evocation spells at?

Yeah- AD&D ancient dragons had like 88 HP at most. In 3.5 they can have several hundred HP. Fireball does the same damage in both editions.

And modern editions made saves HARDER to make as levels increased, rather than easier. So back in the days of yore, saving throws trashed lower level enemies but actually disintegrating a dragon or whatever? Good luck m8

While I agree with this in part, I don't think it would be super great to make it so something like a Fireball can just wreck an ancient dragon. In 3.5 they've got like ~400 hp, a maximized fireball with some metamagic reduction is going to take up like a 4th or 5th level spell slot, and if it lands is going to take out 1/7th of its HP. That's not insignificant, especially if you're fighting an ancient dragon as some kind of end boss.

>Fireball does the same damage in both editions.

Sort of why Meteor Swarm exists around the time you are fighting ancient dragons.

Sure, but the same optimization could also give you a bunch of +DC to your spells and then you could own the dragon with save or sucks.

I mean, evocation is ok at killing shit. But other schools kill shit without caring about HP at all. And they do stuff besides kill shit too. See the rest of the thread for examples of this.

Dragons have pretty great Wiil/Fort, and there's only a handful of SoS/SoD spells that solely target Ref.

There's a medium to be sure. The point is he was answering the question of why evocation is bad nowadays, and the simple answer is health inflation.
Meteor Swarm is a 9th level spell and the damage cap on that is 144, assuming all four meteors hit and they all do maximum damage and the creature fails the save. The problem isn't just the raw numerical aspect, it's also all the other assumptions I need to make. Sure, could put metamagic reduction on it and then add empower or whatever, but that doesn't change the fact that you're using a 10th+ effective spell when you could just Za Warudo with a 9th and finish the job then and there when you have free turns to act.
Or do this. The beauty of save-or-sucks is that generally they don't care about hitpoint totals so the inflation is a moot point there. The killer on save or sucks is that making the save often results in a wasted action. You could summon or gate or something, however, and then just turn the tide with action economy on some gay angel or demon summon.

Generally speaking, you're better off doing something to manipulate action economy than dealing damage. There are classes who spend less valuable resources to do damage than you, let them do the heavy lifting after you win the fight for them.

Oh it's far from a good way of killing a dragon, and it would probably fail due to the dragon's saves or its SR, but if you really want to play a Blasting Wizard, I don't think that taking down an ancient dragon in one third level spell is really that interesting, so it's good that blasting, if successful, is slightly more moderated.

Otherwise, yes I agree.

In modern editions of D&D, dealing HP damage is a highly inefficient way of ending an encounter because anything worth fighting has hundreds of HP. You're better off dealing ability damage, draining levels, or forcing saves.

Over powered and overly complex for 5e's current simple model

I think that health inflation is part of it, but it's not the only part. Other things include far superior conjuration spells for the same role, and a game that doesn't always play in the way that WotC imagined it would, making some things they considered "classic" blatantly not the best option.

My opinion on Evocation is that the place where it works best is when you're fighting a lot of different monsters at once. Things like Blade Barrier, Chain Lightning, all of the Wall of X spells, any AoE designed to take out low-save mooks - I mean a maxed-out Chain Missile hits 11 targets, and if you tack on Fell Drain or something, it starts to really screw over the smaller creatures.

That being said, this is pretty niche, and SoS/SoD options will basically always be better, though Evocation for battlefield control and large battle management shouldn't be discarded entirely.

Modern Editions also have ridiculous damage output, where they can deal hundreds of damage in a single round. Even 5e, which has generally lower damage than 3+4, can hit over 200+ in a single round in a game where HP rarely goes above 300.

We had this Fearun game going at the FLGS waaaaay back when, 3.0 was still farily fresh. We had a That Guy playing a wizzard. Creamed his pants when we hit level 5. We're in some ruins or another, open a door to a small room, 10ft deep and traingular. Full of much from a collapsed roof. And one aligotor. That Guy goes dead last in the round, after the front line guys are all around said gator in tiny, tiny room.

You know damn well what That Guy did.

I had some shit luck that game, my pally got killed by like three crits in a row, and we had a cleric and a fighter/barb half orc. And a monk. And a bard, with her adhd son just sitting around watching us (when he remembered to take his meds anyway) and fighter speced for archery, it was a big game. So I thought I would try to mentor That Guy by example and rerolled enchanter. Took Evoc as a prohibited school. Used daze on a ogre so a raging half orc in fullplate and swinging a two handed battle axe could gut it with impunity.

Didin't really work. And then the GM's dice caught fire again and I got pepered with arrows despite my sheild spell giving me +7 AC, so I had to reroll again. This time I decided to aim for War Wizard of Cormyr and just do what That Guy wanted to do but better. Took fighter for my first level, so I could get Mobility and Combat Expertise.

War Wizard had some good times. GM wanted to pull a you get arrested by goons of evil lord bit, and when the fucking bartender revealed he was in on it, by being a lvl 1 sorc and counter spelling me, I dove over the bar and beat him unconscious with my fists.

He got the hint, then.

But you have to build your character specifically to do that kind of damage, to the exclusion of doing anything else.

Also even if Evocation isn't optimal, war wizard RP is fun imo

Not really. It's actually kind of hard to build a one-note character in 5e, and most abilities that lead to insane damage output are actually action economy abilities with multiple uses.

well in 5e, you get fireball at level 5, and it deals 8d6 fire damage in a radius
this gives an average damage of 28
a typical CR5 mosnter would be a troll, with 84hp

this would take out ~33% of its hp if it fails its DEX save

however, it is much better against many small units, who are less likely to pass their save and will almost certainly die
it is a guaranteed kill up to CR1, bug bears have 27hp
so the most efficient use is clearing a room of many goblins

And you get a bitchin cloak.

Not playing D&D ?

Or at least stop pretending that evocation is just about blasting. It should be about creating temporary objects from pure energy. They don't last and can be dispelled but in theory a wizard can create anything. Even things that do not have any right to exist any other way.

It's all relative to monster HP. You could get a monster of a Fighter in AD&D too, especially if he had a Wizard buddy backing him up. A level 16 Fighter with, say, 20 STR from a magic item, a +4 two handed sword, and specialization has a THAC0 of -3 and hits that dragon for 3d6+14 5/2 times a round, and that's very much lowballing the magic items a Fighter could expect to have at that level and assuming he's not even gonna have Wizard backup.

Evocation is still pretty great in D&D, especially with small groups of PCs in the 2-4 range.

Well it is also pretty good if you are playing E6. You could have literal army wizards and armies scheming around them.

And for comparison to that Fighter's capabilities, a red great wyrm in 2E has -11 AC(Fighter hits on an 8) and 102 HP(Fighter does 31.85 DPR on odd rounds and 47.775 DPR on even rounds). Wizard backs him up with Enlarge? His damage is now (3d6*2.5)+14, which rockets his DPR up to 52.325 on odd rounds and 78.4875 on even rounds. It may not be the instant oneshot chargers from 3E but it's still a very large step up above 5E Fighters.

Evocation is shit because battlefield control is in general a much better use of a wizard's time then dealing damage, you probably have a whole party of damage dealers already.
Fireball I think is actually an exception and is a decent spell, its not a good single target damage spell at all, but if you are fighting large groups of weaker minions, just killing them all is better then any other form of crowd control, and fireball does that.

Because evocation spells are instantaneous and rarely kill a creature
A creature operates equally if it's at full health or at 1 HP
But battlefield control spells on top of lasting several turns debuff creatures making them inefficient

Not in my experience, I usually play in 3 man groups, and focused conjurers are fucking awesome in those, if you build them right you can split the enemies and force them to attack your group in small teams which makes combats fucking easy

See, I get this idea, and I know why it works, but there's two problems with it in my experience.

1. Making the enemy unable to fight is great, but you still need to be able to actually kill them, and the longer that takes, the more chances you give the DM to add more enemies to the mix, because why wouldn't they? You've neutralized one threat, but it's his job to threaten the group, and his bag of tricks is bigger than yours. It's an arms race you can't win.

2. It's no God damn fun.

What this user said. It's not that Evocation is BAD, it's that the other schools combine both more "effective" means of combating others (such as never having to fight at all with Illusion or Enchantment) with extra utility at well.

Evokers are great at damage dealing. But Diviners can absolutely ruin any attempt for the DM to use mystery in the game, Enchanters can end fights before they begin, Conjurers can summon a creature perfectly suited to provide whatever skills are easiest...

That said, this is mostly a 3.e meme. 5e does support it, but to a lesser extent - and that's mainly because 4e broke the idea over its knees, but people bitched so much about the combat spells/utility rituals split that made it work that WoTC hastily went back to the old style of doing things.

introduce penalties for damaged creatures, reduce hp bloat

Evocation is generally though of as Fireball and Lightning Bolt, but it does have access to a lot of really, really good battlefield control spells, ie Blade Barrier, the entire Wall of X line, and so on.

This brings up the question: do people want better Evocation, or better blasting? Because better blasting is just Conjuration via Orb of X. Better Evocation is smarter spell selection at its most basic, and a slew of various minor fixes as have been mentioned elsewhere in this thread at it's most complex.

Isn't "creating temporary objects from pure energy" (supposed to be) Conjuration's thing though? Evocation is creating and manipulating different forms of energy, and conjuration is calling things into existence?

>3e meme

I don't think you've played earlier editions, where high level spell casters had insane exploits that broke the game over their knee.

Better description might be that Evocation is energy manipulation, whereas Conjuration is bringing something into being or manifesting something - in one instance you're creating, and in the other you're just using placing something that already was somewhere else.

There's probably a better description, but I think that saying Evocation is creation is correct, whereas Conjuration is taking advantage of what is already created.

I don't think YOU played earlier editions where high level spell casters were figuratively living armies, and high-level fighters were LITERALLY armies because they literally had armies.

That is true, there are a lot of good evocation spells, but I think people mostly are talking about blasting when they talk about evocation. Especially since in 5e, you aren't restricted on what schools of spells you take, specializations like evoker are just bonuses. You can take all of the good evocation spells, but have the much better bonuses of being a diviner for example, and the evocation bonuses buff damage or are built around using aoe spells like fireball.

It always confuse me. Aren't there better schools, or only the arcaic D&D trope ones?

Because resilient sphere breaks line of effect between you and the monster.

Retard.

>It's no God damn fun
We don't play games of make-believe to have fun, faggot.

>confirmed for never playing AD&D

>damage cap on that is 144
Assuming one big, giant motherfucking dude instead of a large amount of smaller dudes.

>Is it because the damage isn't scaled properly to the level you get Evocation spells at?

Got it in one. Monster health skyrocketed from 3e on and Evocation spells didn't keep up. It also takes a lot more work to get more bang for your buck with Evocation than, say, charging someone.

Now there are still some boss ass Evocations, they just tend to be Walls and Contingency. Or have status effect riders on them. Or they're repeatable like Fire Seeds.

It goes back ye old days of when WotC was working on 3.0. They took some of the design staff from MtG and those folks believed that the most foreword option should be the lest useful. Why do you think enchantment is so good of a school in D&D? It is for the same reason.

I have, and once you started allowing Player Option books, all the bad stuff OSR people rag on 3e for came out in full effect. Mostly Priests fighting better than the Fighter and having amazing spells, but there was also gaming Dual/Multiclassing for low level survivability that turned into high level spellcasting if you crunched the numbers. Also fun with throwing darts and weapon speeds.

AD&D felt more balanced because characters died so often a Wizard probably wasn't making it to the level where they would be a problem and if they did, the DM was given carte blanche to fuck them. The Internet was also smaller/nonexistent, so CharOp culture was those asshole munchkins nobody liked at your store.

Yeah, I agree with you, I'm just saying an easy way to make Evocation better is to pick some better Evocation spells, and if you want to do blasting, stick to Conjuration.

Sorry, I'm just referring to the standard 3.X schools for this.

Being heavily reliant on elements, when monsters get more and more resistances or immunity to them as you level up, certainly doesn't help.

Your example with Fireball is also kinda flawed. You're looking at it from a realistic, scientific perspective. But D&D has its own rules with its very peculiar physics. That Fireball isn't "really" a 20 ft. explosion. As written, it's a sphere of instantaneous, one time xd6 fire damage. The spell even goes out of it's way to say that it doesn't alter pressure or generate shockwaves like a real explosion would.

And that's why Evocation is bad. For all the nice, detailed descriptions you get, what you're really casting is variations of this: an area where elemental damage will occur.

Enchantment's awful. The fuck are you on?

See, the problem with that as a concept for a role in 3E is that large amounts of smaller dudes that could be killed/mostly killed are ineffective in that game.

I DM'd for a party with two high level sorcerer/incantatrix twin PC's. The two players had identical builds which only deviated after they'd finished the PrC.

The amount of no-save high damage spells they had at their disposal was more than enough to solve most issues that they had. Immunities? They had bypass options. Metamagic to deal with specifics, ranges, shaping to avoid friendly targets and the like easily. Saves? I count it a godsend that they were kind enough to provide the erata for the Irresistible Spell feat so that it just added +10 to the DC instead of removing it entirely, nevermind the naturally no-save effects that make up the Mailman delivery methodology.

The fact that enchantment, transmutation and illusion can solve things by default doesn't mean that Evocation falls short without fail; a focused evoker will solve the same problem with admittedly more destructive results. Immunity to most mind-affecting and control options becomes old-hat at high levels, but the same level of defenses against that (items, templates, persisted buffs) essentially require the same level of anti-defense work as is required to make Evocation a viable option.

An irresistible born of the three thunders sonic snap cantrip makes any single-target encounter end with a single 0 level spell.

Oh, and Chained Chain Lightning.

Incantatrix is a special case because they get to throw free metamagic nonstop, plus Sorc gets Arcane Fusion. I'm not sure pointing out a PrC that's permabanned almost everywhere as an example of blasters being good is a good idea.

I think of it like this: wizards can manipulate the very fabric of reality. Time? Your bitch. The fundamental laws of the cosmos? For lesser beings.
And evocation wizards want to use this potential power to... throw magic missiles? Of varying strengths and flavours sure, but you are essentially throwing rocks.

>And that's why Evocation is bad. For all the nice, detailed descriptions you get, what you're really casting is variations of this: an area where elemental damage will occur.
This!

Every other school gets spells that are effective and flavorful while Evocation generally gets "this area gets damaged by a specific elemental damage type" without any of the unique flavor or effects that would make something like fireball intimidating.

Think about it, an m80 IRL can blow off fingers and the blast radius is generally pretty small. Imagine an m80 that can explode with enough force burn shit in a 20ft. radius.