epends, if the mage has a contingency setup
How many mages on Forgotten Realms has Chain Contigency and similar spells? How many mages can learn tier 9 magic and get a scroll of it?
Note that the condition to activate contingency is seeing the enemy. If the magician doesn't sees you, he loses...
It is like the discussions between Batman VS Superman. With preparation, Batman can make deadly traps, weapons and armor to defeat the Superman. Without preparation, Superman wins.
Contingency (not chain contingency) is a level 6 spell. Contingency - Stoneskin will likely save a mage from a martial fighter unless they are literally killed in 1 hit. Killed in 1 hit already assumed an "unfair" fight from the get go, where you are setting up a situation where one of the fighters are asleep or in some way incapacitated. If a fight broke out suddenly in a bar for example - the mage would have time to activate contingency. If the mage was on a battlefield, they would have that kind of magic active already because they expect to have to defend themselves. If the mage sees someone approaching in a threatening manner or anything else, they have time to activate contingency. When don't they have time? "Mage is walking through a street and an assassin on the roof top shoots them," or, "poison is added to the food of the mage." What do all of these scenarios have in common? You are assuming the mage has no time to react, at all. You are tailor making scenarios where there isn't a fight to begin with. Give the mage even 1 turn to cast and they can probably turn the scenario to their advantage.
Not true. Wizards are expensive. Sorcerers needs a specific bloodline which you can't chose and warlocks, require that you convince a powerful extraplanar ally to TEACH magic to you. Clerics require to follow a dogma.
Reach lv 10 as a wizard on 2e also requires way more XP than reaching lv 10 as a Thief.
Not true? How many career opportunities does a weapon afford you. You can be a guard for some person, hire yourself out as a mercenary or maybe participate in intermittent tournaments or join wars. A mage? You can perform lots of other tasks beyond just fighting. You are not limited to war in order to make money. Choosing to limit yourself to a weapon is actually a piss poor career choice all things considered, choosing to do pretty much anything else would put you in a better place. Even NPCs like politicians probably have a better life expectancy, a better income and better prospects. Even a low level mage can do things not limited to combat, even if its as simple as, "identify this item" for people.
Wrong. My point is that people who are min maxing and trying to solo the game on unfair most of the time uses martial classes. When they pick casters is only to buff the martial capabilities. This here on codex, on reddit, everywhere.
And a Wizard has almost no spellcasting capabilities until chapter 2 or 3(xp share off/on). The unique caster build that can beat the game on unfair is the sorcerer with animal companion. And even him, needs a party to be effective and the animal companion fullfil the martial role... You will ran out of spells so quickly if you are soloing.
Almost all solos are with either an Arcane or Divine caster, either a full caster or a half caster. The main exception to this is Kineticist soloes. I challenge you to find me a solo with a fighter, barbarian, paladin or rogue. Go on, I am waiting. A Wizard 20 solo character who is playing in dragonform is still a Wizard. A Sorcerer 19/Monk 1 is still a sorcerer, regardless of how they choose to do damage. A Cleric 19/monk 1 is still a cleric. An Arcane Trickster or Eldritch Knight is still a caster and so is a magus. Why do people pick these classes for solo gameplay?
Because they have magic.
Let me enlighten you to the solo unfair gameplay, since it seems like you are unfamiliar with how it works. You struggle through early fights with a caster until you get to the old sycamore, at which point you reach level 6ish and have access to level 3 spells. You then use AoE spells like Fireball to absolutely destroy everything, because the early game fights are not balanced around the player having access to them. You buff up with stuff like Mirror image and expeditious retreat, run and kite all the enemies into 1 group and then nuke them. Even if they make the save, most of them die to 3d6 fireball damage. For druid you just cast spells like Spiked Growth and have enemies kill themselves as they walk through it. Until the end of act 3, you will be killing most enemies with magic, because its much, much faster than using anything else. At the start of act 4 you then get options, you can choose to keep using spells or if you want to be efficient in terms of action economy, you can buff yourself up and clear the map with melee attacks. Because almost anyone who plays solo unfair likes to be efficient in their gameplay (myself included) they tend to favour the latter, buffing yourself up and then default attacking. It isn't that you cannot continue to nuke things, its just that, if you want to rest as rarely as possible (at most once per map), its more efficient to play the buff and spank game.
You know what is the important part of all those solo runs though? The spells are. You can solo the game without doing any melee fighting, but you will really struggle to solo the game without any magic. Now, how about instead of trying to represent the interest of the "solo player" for which it seems you have no experience and are in no position to provide an opinion on, you actually listen to the solo player. You might actually learn something. Sorcerer, Wizard, Druid and Cleric are
not martial classes, even if you can default attack with them. So saying, "most of the solos are with martial classes" is outright lying when the majority of them will fall into those 4 classes, with the second highest group being Magus, Kineticist and Vivisectionist and the reason that most of these classes are picked is because they have spells, its not because they use weapons.
