Hate to share from the site we definitely don’t think about anymore, but I think this is too interesting to miss. If true, it’s a big insight into the design of the game. All credit to that OP of course.
Summary is that WotC’s balancing decisions seem to make sense if they balance the classes like they balance monsters, using max damage output over a three-round fight. Basically they overvalue that, especially for certain nova classes (the OP suggests those classes are Fighter/Wizard/Sorcerer) and undervalue utility.
TLDR. WoTC seems to value Single Target Guaranteed DPR in a Nova over 3 rounds, and balances the game around that not too dissimilar to how they calculate the power of CR. And that seems to reflect every design decision and choice they have made when viewed this way, and what they gauge class power around. The core resource management of the game is about novaing now or later, and how can classes recover their novas.
Based on the way they’ve reigned in nova damage with 1D&D but have left utility spells basically untouched, I think the theory has merit.
This is exactly what they do, and what they did also for 5e.
The thing people are not understanding regarding utility is that players are better to argue about it with spells than they are about normal things. The second problem is the vision people can have about the game: for some people, a class has to have special things it can do in every area of the game. I call this a video game mindset. The actual mindset of the game is that a class simply defines abilities and it’s up to players to leverage their abilities.
The fantasy is different between these considerations : many people want martials to be anime characters. The game original fantasy is more about how a Odysseus will fight a sorceress or a giant with his wits and martial prowess. The game suppose that a martial will go on a quest to get a mighty artifact or seek the help of an archmage to do what he can’t. Players argue that a wizard pc can simply do these things by itself, without asking the dm, but it’s wrong. It’s just a culture that players built on Internet to weaponize the rules to do what they want. And in this game, the more special rules you have, the more you can leverage them against the dm.
I digress a bit. In short there is a divergent view about the rules, the dm role, the fantasy, and the kind of rpg people want to play. Utility can’t really be balanced anyway.
I’m not sure I concur here.
Perfect balance is impossible, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t try to make classes feel at least roughly equal with no obvious winners and losers. What’s the benefit of having a class that people agree on is bad? For a long time that was Ranger, and it was clear that they didn’t want Rangers to be bad because they tried to fix the Ranger in UA like four times before Tasha’s finally did a solid job with it. And most of the Ranger fixes aren’t straight combat buffs either, so they definitely do care about out of combat ability to some extent.
It’s not “anime” to give martials more power or more things to do. You say it’s wrong that a caster can do stuff without asking the DM that a martial has to rely on DM fiat for… but how so? That sounds completely accurate to me.