Why are 3.5 lvl 20 wizards more powerful than lvl 20 clerics...

Because wizards are gods themselves

3.5 was built in such a nonsensical way that max level casters far surpass anything any mythological god could achieve.

Thus, it doesn't matter that the cleric gets powers from a D&D god, because D&D gods are just casters that are forced to be more thematic (i.e. less versatile and therefore weaker)

>implying balance has anything to do with flavor

No you don't, and the problem is you.

A level 20 "warrior" jizzes fully formed Conans and donkey-punches Wish spells because they are beyond the point where they believe in their own skills; their skill is a constant of the universe and beyond the concept of question

>Why are they more powerful?
Because that is how the rules were written, I'm not a big fan of it, and I blame the vancian spell slot system more than anything else.

>Why should they be more powerful?
Prefacing this with the 'I am playing devils advocate and don't genuinely think this,' it's a matter of scope. A prophet or miracle worker is powerful, but narrow. It's the difference between Moses and someone like Suleman or those wizards on the heavy metal album arts. Both are powerful, one doesn't have a goal, they're unchained.

That said, barring shit like spell mastery, a wizard in a cell is just an old man, but a cleric is still just as dangerous no matter how many years they've been in a dungeon.

Because their spell list is better.

>why should a master wizard be more powerful than a prophet with GOD on his side?
That kind of shit is exactly the reason why 3.5 balance is fucked.
>Oh no, warriors can't be as strong as wizards, they have no magic!
>Someone with a sword can't compete with someone who throws fireballs
That kind of reasoning belongs in a story, not in an RPG. RPG classes should be on roughly equal footing because playing the weak-ass sidekick is no fun.
Game balance and fun trumps "but i have GOD on my side".

Take your shitty Mary Sue fantasies and write shitty fanfiction that i don't have to read about it if you have to, but keep it out of my gaming.

>No you don't, and the problem is you
Yes I do. I am just a natural curious person.

Thanks. This explanation makes sense. I can go to bed now that I have an explanation.

Go read Dresden Files, Gods may be all powerful but they are also bound by there own laws, Wizards can give two shits about laws

Why can't a level 20 fighter cleave a mountain in half?

This is bad bait, and shows how disconnected System War trolls are from actual facts and knowledge.

In all fairness, I do miss 3.5. My group is exclusively PF now, which is nice, I just miss some nifty classes and occult is kind of meh for me.

He can, but he needs to be fairly optimized and the mountain can't be too big.

And he can't do anything else.

Lvl 20 cleric follows a god
Lvl 20 wizard IS a god!

By the time you reach epic levels, you're nearing the power levels of the gods themselves.

Because arcane power is inherent to the individual rather than drawn from an external source (besides shit like Favored Souls where it's setting dependent the degree of control the deity has, or archivists who are just divine wizards), once you start getting to the Big Leagues having a patron deity becomes less of an advantage and more of a liability.

A wizard can sits in his own personal demiplane can just scry-and-die with clone bodies virtually risk free until the end of time, beholden to nothing but his own whims. A cleric has a divine agenda to advance that almost definitely stands in the way of doing the universe-unravelling shit epics can get up to in 3.5, since the game starts to come apart at the seams. Houserules and gentleman's agreements are the only thing that keep casters from taking over the game at mid-levels, but by epics it goes from turning a blind eye to some of the cheesier shit you could do to downright self-sabotage as the only excuse, with how many options you have to outright decline.

This isn't a problem if you're okay with all your PC's becoming multiversal threats to reality that run around blowing up continents and comitting deicide, but the problem comes when only some of the party members get to play with the bazooka, while the others are stuck with muskets.

OP, you are full of shit. Level 20 Clerics are MORE powerful than level 20 Wizards, not less so.

That's actually an interesting question that I haven't thought much about.

If I'd have to guess, it's because they designed individual Wizard spells to be stronger to compensate for them being more difficult to get your hands on - a Cleric can get any goddamn Cleric spell within 24 hours, after all, while the Wizard is "limited" to what they have in their spell book.
This fails horribly, of course, because the Wizard gets more than enough spells just from leveling up (4/spell level, minimum) plus scrolls and whatnot are cheap enough that CharOp once figured out that if you wasted half your WBL and some decades of your character's life you could get every single Wizard spell scribed into your eleven-volume Boccob's Blessed Books series.
But the basic logic of "it's rarer, so it's more powerful" stands up.

Then you have the thing where the Cleric has "GOD on his side" - the Cleric is in a subservient position, so I could see the logic of having their spells be slightly weaker than the one actually mastering them themselves. I don't like it, but I can see it. "It's borrowed power, so it's weaker than owned power."

Overall, though, they're just weaker because 3E was horribly balanced and the devs had no idea what the fuck they were doing.

(Also, a better example would probably be why the DRUID is weaker - the Cleric's not that far beneath the Wizard, but at level 20 the Druid noticeably falls behind. Here the answer probably is that they felt that spellcasting was just one thing among many the Druid was doing, and they probably thought that wildshaping and animal companions scaled better into really high levels.
Still, though - when Shapechange is your only broken 9th-level spell...)

because god does not exist. proven by wizards

And he needs a lot of magic items.

Because class balance in 3.5 was never great, and it just gets crazier as you head towards upper levels. Low to mid levels, clerics are fine compared to wizards, as they have a solid selection of spells and are also passable combatants. At higher levels though, the sheer scope of wizards' spells increases exponentially, leading to them having ridiculous amounts of versatility. At the same time, raw martial prowess drops off outside of extremely focused builds; the 3/4 BAB cleric struggles to keep up. The cleric gets some neat tricks, but Wizard just gets more. This is mostly a result of the classes being built with specific ideas in mind and balance not really factoring into their scopes. They decided wizards could do anything, while clerics mostly just buff and heal, with the occasional anti-evil/undead/fiend thing.

Shapechange is the most broken spell in the game, though.

Well, yeah. But when it's the only thing you get, when the Wizard gets Shapechange AND Wish AND Gate just in core?

(Also, I'd argue that Ice Assassin might top Shapechange. It's a hell of a close race, though, and Zodars make up for a lot.)