Yep, that’s right, the wizards’ reliable, never-missing friend is back! Of course, Magic Missile never went away, but it had been seriously nerfed in the Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition rules. I you find this too good to be true, feel free to check the last article in the July issue of Dragon Magazine or the errata PDF for yourself.
This is a tremendous benefit to mages and their parties. Since wizards typically are more dangerous to themselves with weapons than they are to their enemies, having something that always hits – even for just a few points of damage – helps to level the playing field. Also, since they cannot wear armor (or shouldn’t anyway), the fact that this unerring is ranged keeps magic-users alive a bit longer.
For the – most probably minority – players who think that this gives wizards an unfair advantage. Think about how much damage a barbarian typically does in 5 rounds of combat, and compare it to the average damage of 5 magic missiles from a wizard of the same level. I’ll give you one guess as to which number is higher in a typical battle. Also, the barbarian’s likelihood of remaining conscious for all five of the rounds mentioned is considerably higher than the mage’s. This change back to a more traditional magic missile helps to balance the game again.
On a slight tangent, I really like the change in 4th Edition classifying Magic Missile as an "at will" ability. First, this makes much more sense in the context of many of the works of fiction where wizards are slinging these back-and-forth all day. Second, mages were the only characters that couldn’t use their weapon every round; yes, I realize they had daggers, darts, staffs, etc. and – in some extremely rare instances – battle axes, swords, and the like. However, apart from these rare fighting mages (through multi-classing, Planescape factions, or other unusual occurrences) wizards were not even very skilled at simple weapons. Spells are the true weapons of magic-users and there should always be able to cast something. Thankfully Wizards of the Coast did take this into consideration with the most recent version.
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