Magic Missile Staff for Halfling/Gnome

[Green Monster]

However, there's an element of this you didn't touch on: The near-absence of scenarios where "in a colossal AoE" is meaningfully greater than "the one target the AoE is centered on".

Also true! What is the diagnosis, then?

A large helping of "broken PvE design", with a dose of "broken class balance". One we can fairly easily adjust; the other could take years to fix at our current rate.

As far as class balance, I've always felt that wizards should get the same number of spells per day as sorcs. That the difference between the former being able to learn any spell vs the latter being able to cast any spell they know without prep is balance enough. Sorc casting flexibility plus almost double the spells per day is horrible class balance. But I doubt you guys would go for it because you seem to trust pnp rules a little too much for my taste . PnP doesn't care about class balance, though. It's an experience curated by 1 dm for 4 players and the dm adjusts the environment for the classes of the players. In an MMO, you have a baseline environment and you have to adjust the classes for it so that no class has an overall advantage over another. Using PnP as the guide to that is not effective, since PnP is literally the other way around.