Linear Warriors Quadratic Wizards - Television Tropes & Idioms

alt title(s): Quadratic Wizards Linear Warriors

"I am a druid, I have special abilities that are more powerful than your entire class!"

—Leeky, The Order Of The Stick

"Your wizard is like Magikarp, except instead of Gyrados it evolves into Mewtwo."

A quirk some Video Game and Tabletop RPG game systems share is that melee classes are more powerful or versatile at lower levels than casters or magic using classes. However, the trend reverses at higher levels, when the magic users gain a breadth of both versatility and sheer power over hack and slash heroes.

The divide is usually exacerbated by the ease with which a young warrior can go wading into combat compared to a novice mage. The fighter just needs decent armor and a weapon, and with their marvelous Meat Shield Hit Points they can get into the thick of things and do reasonably well. Magical weapons aren't required but can (usually) be used immediately and give amazing bonuses. Wizards on the other hand (especially young/low level ones) have no such easy shortcuts to massive magical power, they have to study, find or invent spells, and discover magic items that aren't so powerful they cause them to go into a Superpower Meltdown. In the meantime they are nearly defenseless in a fight.

Yet the trend reverses at higher levels. Much like the trope name references, the power of a warrior is linear, it grows at a steady and reasonable pace, but a wizards power is exponential, past a certain point they become the more powerful class. Not just dealing damage, but in versatility with a slew of spells with all sorts of direct and indirect practical and tactical uses. Whether it's the game designers intentionally "making up" for lots of frailty for many levels, or a quirk that comes up during play, the wizard simply outpaces all but the most Min Maxed and Munchkined out warriors.

This isn't just a Sour Grapes complaint against Squishy Wizards or a lack of Competitive Balance throughout the game, but can be a deliberate thematic choice. In such a setting there may be dozens if not hundreds of small time mystic dabblers, but they quickly thin in numbers only to resurface as potent adventuring wizards, culminating in the classic mystic recluse or the Evil Sorcerer in the Evil Tower Of Ominousness. Meanwhile the Conans and Beowulfs have the run of the place, being able to both solo and group.

If this results from a development mistake, or enough complaints convince the author to change things, there are ways to limit the awesomeness of wizards. These include restrictions on magic itself, the two classic examples being the Mana mechanic or the even more restrictive Vancian Magic. Both of these serve to cap how often a wizard can cast spells. Preventing casting spells whilst wearing armour is another, though this is often partially countered by providing a range of protective magics that work much like normal armour only better, but of course for a limited time. Other restrictions also exist; a common one is simply to make the wizard Squishy Others involve sanity and corruption systems, or making the casting of a spell a tactically debilitating act.

Sure, the wizard can do more amazing and effective stuff than the warrior can, but the warrior can do his less impressive things indefinitely! That makes up for it, right?... Well, sometimes. A tough flurry of Random Encounters can suck a mage's supply of game breaking magic, which will force them to save a bit of juice for that final boss, and not waste their power. But if all you have to do to restore your magic and health is rest or use one of your 99 elixers... Those times, it doesn't do much. Still other times, you end up with the opposite problem, wizards whose capacity to fight is so restricted that you wonder why the warriors even bother to bring them along (when this makes sense, it's because of the Inverse Law Of Utility And Lethality being applied).

Attempts to keep warriors' capabilities "normal" are far less prevalent in works of Eastern origin, and so the trope has weakened slightly in the minds of the younger generation. The common result is Charles Atlas Superpower. Also contrast Last Disc Magic. If the Warrior and Wizard were balanced at the start of the game, you're also looking at a case of Empty Levels.

Examples

Anime and Manga

Played straight in the Nasuverse; anyone who can reasonably defend oneself will have: A) supernatural and possibly divine blood, or B) knowledge of magecraft. Of course, then you have absolute terrors like Cuchulainn who know magecraft, are divine, can move, fight, and kill, faster than human eyes can track, and may have a Superpowered Evil Side.
- As Archer points out early on in the visual novel, "Its fine if you think I can only use bows...". He actually uses a kind of magic that lets him use a whole lot of swords all at once, including Saber's sword that fires energy blasts.
Inverted in Fist of the North Star: Hokuto Ryuuken is a variant style of Hokuto Shinken which heavily uses magic at the base of its style, as opposed to breath control and push-ups. And it's still stated to be explicitly inferior to Hokuto Shinken, to the point where Kenshiro doesn't even bother to copy techniques from the school.
Possibly lampshaded in MAR, where Kouga, one of the knights in the evil Chess Pieces, is incredibly tough, but his lack of magical power means that he's automatically the weakest of his rank. He is easily defeated and humiliated by The Lancer Alviss, whose has a high level of magical power (and competence).

Literature

Most mythology avoids the whole problem by making everyone magic; heroes like Hercules, Gilgamesh and Cuchulainn would have either supernatural origins, supernatural backing, or both. While they do exist, very, very few mythological heroes are genuine Badass Normals, and it was common (though frequently omitted or downplayed in later Christianized versions) for them to use what we could call 'magic' in one fashion or another. Greek heroes would routinely attempt to divine the future or call upon supernatural patrons, for instance. The modern conception of magic as something a few specific people go into a tower and learn is newer than you might think; by definition, the thinking of most mythological ages was that nearly everything was magical, with Hercules no less magical than most of the monsters he kills.
- One of the best examples is in the Elder Edda, the ancient and very much valor-oriented compilation of Viking oral traditions. During the Svipdagsmal, the hero Svipdag receives enchantments from his mother, Groa, one of which protects him from magic to the extent that "Yet never the curse of a Christian woman/From the dead shall do thee harm." From the perspective of the poem's original audience, a dead Christian woman was a Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot combination of all the attributes that would have made up the deadliest possible spellcaster (to the Vikings who feared Christians like Christians today fear Satanists or Neo-heathens themselves!) (Also it should be pointed out that Groa herself was dead when she gave him this magic, so it's not like this was all a theoretical situation)
Conan The Barbarian subverts this by having the titular barbarian outwit the wizards he faces... some might say mostly by act of author induced Villain Ball on the part of the wizards.
Drizzt Do'Urden, R.A. Salvatore's famous character, both subverts this and falls victim to it. Frequently, he or one of his companions completely thrashes a powerful but unprepared wizard, but there are rare occasions where Drizzt is nearly dispatched by wizards who have, as yet, posed no threat to him, exemplified by his being duped into stumbling into a realm populated entirely by demon lords by a Quadratic Wizard in The Pirate King.
Discworld wizards are not merely quadratic, they're most often cubic. Oh, wait! We aren't referring to body shape here? Well, then it remains to be said that a highly trained wizard has no problems with turning a trained warrior into a frog or just burning him, to say nothing about what a sourceror can do.
- Equal Rites, Sourceror, and later books make it clear that the reason wizards don't rule the world is not that their magic doesn't give them the power to do so, but that the widespread abuse of such power would quickly make the world stop making sense — and so the hierarchy of wizards exists mainly to encourage them to waste their energies plotting against each other. In later books Vimes explicitly talks about avoiding a "first use of magic" in a war, in other words comparing the outright use of magic to the use of nuclear weapons.

Live Action TV

Buffy The Vampire Slayer was a near-perfect demonstration of this trope in action. In the early seasons, the focus was firmly on Buffy, the warrior; Willow, the wizard, was limited to the occasional ritual spell cast from the safety of her own home. In a fight she was no more help than Xander, and sometimes less. As the seasons progressed, however, the balance of power began to shift. This shift became clear at the end of season five, when Buffy described Willow as her "big gun" - pointing out that while she, Buffy, had been unable to even slow Glory down, Willow had actually managed to inflict some damage. In season six, their relative status was no longer in question; Willow was the stronger of the two, and when it came to a showdown between Willow and Buffy in the season finale, Willow threw Buffy around like a rag doll. (The writers powered her down a little for season seven, bringing her back to the point where Buffy was at least relevant; but Willow was still solidly in the Quadratic camp.)

Tabletop Games

Some Tabletop RPGs suffer from this, such as Dungeons And Dragons. D&D in particular has the curious affectation that in a typical dungeon-crawling adventure, warriors are more effective than wizards at low levels, but the opposite holds true at high levels. The trope name refers to this in mathematical terms: warriors are linear (Level X 2) in terms of how their power grows, but mages are quadratic (Level X^2), meaning that before they reach a certain level (in this case 2) warriors are more powerful... but at every point afterwards, mages become quadratically stronger. The actual point at which Wizards overtake fighters is somewhere between level one (when they get color spray) and level five (when they get fireball and haste), depending on who you ask.
- The original balancing act was supposed to be that Wizards have a limited number of spells per day, where Warriors can swing a sword all day long. It didn't work out too well ("Let's rest so the wizard gets more spells!")
- Those cowards can run away too, with their haste spells, leaving the fighters to take the heat. If it was my choice, I would kill them all.
- In Order Of The Stick, Vaarsuvius complains when fighting an enemy who seems to be randomly resistant to magic. "It's almost as if the universe is trying to force some form of arbitrary equality between those of us who can reshape matter with our thoughts, and those who cannot."
- The supplement Tome of Battle: Book of Nine Swords caters to those who prefer their warrior-types more superhuman. The Tome of Battle classes have received a mixed reception, most players seem to think they're a step in the right direction, but a vocal minority see them as "Weeaboo Fightan Magic" or didn't see anything wrong with Fighters in the first place.
  - Some people actually thought the fighters actually become to strong with this supplement and wanted things be balanced again. This create the supplement called tome of magic. But the only new class that this troper can think is way too powerful is the crusader because not only he has a lot of maneuvers (martial abilities "similar" too magic), he never runs out. But honestly, that was a lame excuse
- In a further refining of the trope, 3rd Edition and 3.5 made it into Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards, Geometric Priests. Clerics and Druids in particular led to the coining of the phrase "Co Dzilla", as if a power gamer looks at the class the right way, they see class features more powerful than entire other classes.
- Averted in 4th edition, which defines "martial powers" alongside "arcane powers" and "divine powers"—the warrior-types get more powerful abilities as they go up in level, too, and balance was a key goal. A lot of complaints that the game is no longer D&D or has turned into an MMORPG on paper. As shown in one of their cartoons, Wizards doesn't think much of the people who make complaints like this.
- The 2nd Edition Dark Sun setting managed this problem in an interesting way - high-level warriors attract followers in a similar manner to 3.5's "Leadership" feat, while wizards are feared and hated by just about everybody thanks to the fact that arcane magic in Dark Sun sucks the life out of everything around the spellcaster, and is the reason why the world is such a barren wasteland.
- Notably averted in the so-called Goldbox series (early 1990s AD&D-based computer games), with more and more insanely powerful equipment available for the warrior types and most magic powers, due to gameplay limitations, available only on a battlefield.
- Partially subverted in the (3e) Player's Handbook II where the introduction of the Duskblade created an "Arcane Paladin" that while not as powerful as a Wizard and a Fighter, is more versatile than either by itself.
Averted in Unknown Armies - certain forms of magic are explicitly more powerful than others, but in keeping with one of the game's main themes, the unbalanced powers are saddled with an equally unbalanced personality. This means that a "clued-in mundane" can be very effective - this is repeatedly pointed out in the sourcebooks, with many dangerous, powerful but entirely mundane NPCs, and borne out in the various restrictions and disadvantages magicians must contend with, ranging from all-consuming obsessions to a lack of access to "paradigm" skills that protect P Cs from going insane.
Hack Master' (based around the older second edition AD&D rules) slightly subverts this by pointing out that looking at the abilities of high level characters and comparing them to those offered in other classes was rather pointless, as there was a pretty good chance you'd be stone dead long before you got that far.
Averted, a little bizarrely, in most Free Form RPGs - if you play a mundane character, especially one who isn't a warrior either, people give you so much leeway you might as well have magic powers. This Troper finds her sneaky Master Of Disguise char, armed with a bunch of wigs and some acrobatic skills, plays like a ninja with a Glamour spell that never fails.
In the Legend Of The Five Rings, this trope falls in slightly murky waters. Wizards (shugenja) are most decidedly quadratic-a rank 2 Shugenja is immensely better than a rank 1 shugenja, and a rank 1 bushi is extremely likely to be able to carve either one of them into cat food. Among bushi (warriors), however, rank doesn't mean a whole lot-a higher rank means you have higher skills and stats, since rank is derived from skills and stats, but the only thing a bushi gets from rank-up is a new School Technique, which, while nice, is generally not as big of a power step as it is for shugenja. Why does the trope still apply? Because that same shugenja who didn't stand much of a chance before at rank 1 can now have elemental spirits char you into a skeleton by asking nicely, that's why.
- That's definitely overstated. The "Bushi" (or, Warrior) schools have some brutal abilities on their own - and not always limited to combat. Several of them are likely to sneer at the strongest magical attacks the game allows, while others are magic-resistant or would inevitably kill the wizard before he blinked twice. One favorite possibility in the system is to take several high-ranking Shiba Bushi, who can render each other functionally immortal and stop all damage dealt while being able to kill anything on the field. Legend of the Five Rings is a subversion if anything, because while high ranking spellcasters can devastate the land, a powerful Bushi can nearly carve up whole armies as well.
The original Rune Quest subverted this trope through healthy realism. Magic in this game was very weak, and you had to spend magic points to cast spells, and characters only had a very small number of magic points. Thus, sword-swingers with the ability to use physical attacks indefinitely could have had a huge advantage over spell-casters. However, if you think about it, nobody can swing a sword all day long: the more you use your muscles, the more tired you get, and sooner or later your arms feel so numb and heavy you can't even lift your weapon anymore. This is why, in the name of realism, the Rune Quest designers made it so that swinging your sword required that you spend stamina points, of which you had only a small number too. A warrior with no stamina points left, like a wizard out of mana, became exhausted and unable to fight.
- Also, just about everyone in a typical RQ game will have some minor magic spells. Dedicated priests or Rune Lords (servants of their gods, like D&D's Paladins) have access to significantly more powerful divine magic, without the usual limitations most people have on them. To balance it, they have to spend most of their time on religious duties, severely cutting into their adventuring time.

Video Games

Baldurs Gate 2 had the "Wizard Slayer" kit for fighters. They were supposed to specialize in killing magic users, so they got a modest amount of magical resistance — but they couldn't use any magical items except for melee weapons (in the unmodified game, that even included healing potions). Unsurprisingly, it's one of the worst classes in the game. Bizarrely enough, you can actually dual-class a wizard slayer to a wizard. After which you have to slay yourself, presumably.
- This restriction could be bypassed by dual-classing a wizard slayer to thief and taking the high level ability called "use any item". Not technically useful, but still there.
- There was also the significantly more badass "Inquisitor" kit for Paladins who was immune to a few common nasty spells, and was quite capable of dispelling magic. Ideally equipped with a special wizard-slaughtering Infinity Plus One Sword, just to make sure.
  - While Baldurs Gate 2 does play this trope straight, with Wizards (and other such spellcasters) being much more versatile and broken than anything else in the game, it also avoids taking it as far as some examples; strong fighters at high-levels can very quickly tear most mages apart after getting through their defenses, let alone Mooks, as well as shrugging off most attacks. So a balance of both is still very helpful later on.
  - Although the ultimate wizard-killer is still the druidic Insect Plague spell, which renders them incapable of concentrating, drains away their (limited) health, and generally renders them useless.
Inverted in the early years of World Of Warcraft, where spellcasters scaled linearly and Warriors scaled quadratically. Shiny new raid dungeon weapons massively boosted warrior damage, while a new staff gave casters... more mana. Stat increases from equipment also followed this pattern; strength boosted warrior damage, but intellect only increased caster longevity. The situation was eventually remedied by greatly increasing the amount of "spell damage" stat found on caster gear, and altering the allotment of item budget "stat points" for caster weapons to favor magic damage over useless weapon damage.
- However melee classes scale better in the arena mode pvp because they tend to get large amounts of armour penetration and because the melee weapons damage generally increases more between the different tiers of gear than spelldamage does.
- On the other hand, while everybody does more damage as they get better gear, they also get better defenses, which means that gear improvements don't increase melee lethality as much as you'd think. Casters, however, ignore armor, which means that while you can better survive a melee fight if you have good gear, casters will still punch through your armor.
In a subversion, Final Fantasy X has an effect you can put on your armor called "One MP Cost" that does Exactly What It Says On The Tin, although it's only helpful for healing and buffer spells since regular attacks will do the same damage as offensive spells near the end of the game (even the mages).
- The sequel Final Fantasy X 2 one-ups it with with "Spellspring", which makes MP cost drop to zero, which is actually helpful since magic does get stronger than regular attacks.
- Of course, the Infinity Plus One Swords of the two mage characters (Lulu and Yuna) have this effect.
- Whose definition of "end of the game" and whose play style? I did a moderate amount of powerplaying in X (enough to get and power all the ultimate weapons), and I say [One MP Cost] + Holy rocks. Some characters could keep up with it using physical attacks, but not my Yuna.
Might And Magic 6 & 7 plays with this trope. Warriors tend to be better in the beginning until the mages get access to their stronger spells and enough mana to be able to use it reliable, at which point magic users outshines them. However at the end game you gain access to blasters which make both equals in damage dealing but the warriors come out on top again.
In the first half of Kingdom Hearts, Donald, the party mage, is all but useless because of his squishiness and the relative weakness of his spells (except Heal, everyone loves Heal), while Goofy, the party bruiser, is great at bashing stuff from the get go. Because of this, many players will just switch the duck out in favor of the Guest Star Party Member of whatever world you're on. Later in the game, though, because of Leaked Experience and the new spells you acquire, Donald becomes a force to be reckoned with, and becomes the preferred party member to keep on.
Phantasy Star Online plays this straight overall, but it's a long road getting there. Forces start by being barely able to kill a room full of enemies before needing to go recharge their mana, while physical types have a far easier time of it. The forces quickly outgrow their warrior counterparts, playing the trope straight, but hit a brick wall in Ultimate difficulty where the enemies' magic resistance gets a huge boost, subverting the trope. However, if you keep playing that force and level up their high level area magic, you can easily find forces that can clear an entire room in seconds without suffering a single attack, where a warrior or ranger would be swamped by the sheer number of foes. Also a force with high level jellen and deband can put their defence so high and the enemies' attack so low, even a force is in no danger of falling to their attacks.
Oddly enough, reversed in the original Final Fantasy. Black Mages are indeed capable of casting high-level magic to quickly wipe out the non-boss enemies, but Fighters, Black Belts, and Thieves can hit single enemies much harder in the late/end-game. In addition, because most bosses (read: Fiends and the Big Bad Chaos) have very high magic defense, Black Mages are generally reduced to casting Haste and Temper on the physical damage dealers, and then standing back while they have at it. White Mages don't even factor in here, except in, you know, keeping everyone else alive.
- They are actually better tanks than fighters. They have the ruse spell, which raises evade by 80. Use it twice or thrice, and almost no enemy can hit you. With careful leveling, they can do damage comparable to fighters.
  - Try giving the White Wizard the Infinity Plus One Sword Masumune and see how useless she is. :) It's like getting a 2nd Ninja-level fighter suddenly.
- Played more or less straight in the GBA remake, though. Unless you get the Ultima Weapon, at which point Warriors become gods.
Inverted in Warcraft III, especially in custom maps. Early on, spellcaster heroes deal large amounts of damage with their spells, but as physical attack heroes gain stats, especially in maps where large stat gain items are available, physical attack heroes will eventually dominate, with large reserves of health and high DPS. That is not to say that spells become wholly worthless, though, as a good chain-stun will still halt any non-magic immune in its tracks. There are some maps that try to change this by using the trigger system to let stats affect damage, but this is a complex system that has not really caught on.
The weakest class in every Geneforge game has been the most physically-oriented one. On the plus side, it doesn't need to use canisters as much, so it tends to stay sane longer.
In the original Diablo, this trope was carried out in full force, with higher-level sorcerers towering above warriors and rogues.
In Kingdom Of Loathing, this applies less to magic users (Mysticality classes) and more to rogues (Moxie classes). Because the Moxie stat determines an enemy's chance to hit, thieves may not deal much damage but even the Big Bad can't actually hit them at moderately high levels.
City Of Heroes averts this completely by making the source of your superpowers irrelevant to what the power actually does. Literally, "Origin of Power" is selected separately from actual powers. The result is genuine wizards fighting with fire swords and protected by blocks of ice and acting like pure fighters while more "normal" characters can use a conventional bow to fire dozens of arrows at a time, decimating large groups of enemies. Everyone with the same set of powers, regardless of origin, will get stronger at pretty much the same rate.
- Applicable to certain Controller builds, however. Early in the game, Controllers can be extremely party-reliant, having the lowest damage and low hit points, but having very useful crowd control abilities. A starting Controller might only be able to keep an enemy from moving, but once they hit the late teens and early twenties, they can keep an entire crowd from taking any action at all. And then there's Fire Controllers, who go from being squishy support characters and then once they hit the late levels get the Fire Imps power. A group of buffable pets with great damage makes them quite soloable in comparison to some of their peers.
NetHack plays this trope extremely straight, with wizards arguably starting out the worst class at level one and quickly becoming the most powerful as it gains spells and all kinds of magical items.
Inverted in Xenogears. Physical combat has 3 different types of attack (light, medium, and heavy), and characters who specialize in fighting can later learn dozens of new ways to link those attacks into powerful combos. Magic, on the other hand, mostly consists of either defensive spells or fire-and-forget elemental attacks, and without a certain rare accessory, spells typically don't do any more damage than combos do, even into the late game.
Severely averted in Mass Effect: biotics have nervous systems laced with Element Zero, enabling them to manipulate gravity with a gesture. Groovy. But in a galaxy filled with man-portable Deflector Shields, all that's good for is Status Buffs, Standard Status Effects and grabbing, lifting and throwing people without harming them whatsoever. "Even level-twelve biotics are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.”
- At higher difficulties, the enemies do enough damage to swiftly penetrate any armour you have. Biotic abilities allow you to control a battle, and prevent anyone from attacking you. With barrier, they can survive that blaster blow with ease, and toss you into the air. And after the first shot, you won't get off a second.
Final Fantasy V. Mage type characters will eventually be able to turn the party immune physical attacks, give everyone reflect, reset the battle, take double turns, double cast, and so on. A physically oriented characters get maybe four abilities that don't suck.
Final Fantasy VI both averts and plays this straight at the end of the game. While magic is amazingly powerful, a player can equip a character with the Master Scroll relic that allows a character to attack four times per turn and the Genji Glove relic which allows the player to equip two weapons which doubles the number of attacks per turn. While attacks while equipping the master scroll are less powerful than normal attacks under most conditions, two weapons ignore this because of special conditions. The Valiant Knife makes attacks more powerful as the user's HP gets lower, and the Ultima Weapon has a high level multiplier (while being weaker when the user's HP is low). It is relatively easy for characters equipped with the Master Scroll, Genji Glove, and two Ultima Weapons to hit for 9999 damage 8 times in a single round, killing every non-boss monster and many bosses in a single attack round. But since Square never likes to be too predictable, of the four characters who can equip the Ultima Weapon, two are melees and two are mages.
- Well, "relatively easy" in the sense that you won't be doing so without bringing your level up to a point where nothing really threatens you anyway. It's a myth that you'll be hitting 9999 each hit with the Master Scroll's half-damage penalty on a regular basis until then. Still potentially devastating to your enemies, however.
Final Fantasy XI made a lot of effort to avert this to the point where elemental casters are nearly useless in a lot of fights. Also, due to the limiting nature of MP, partying with Black Mages fell out of style in favor of "TP Burn" parties where heavy melees simply unleash their awesome all over innocent (and not-so-innocent) monsters.
- Case in point: Black Mages received a serious Nerf when "Manaburn" parties became popular at high levels. These parties, consisting of five Black Mages and one Miscellaneous class (for pulling), would have the non-Mage member pull something and then all the Mages would rain holy hell down upon the monster before it could say "broken".

Web Comics

Order Of The Stick: Happens during the siege on Azure City, with Belkar merrily stabbing along. Later on, Vaarsuvius begins to regret the limitations of will-working, having "nightmares" about fleeing invisibly from battle as warriors died all around.
- Given that so much trouble in this comic is caused by high-level wizards, one can't help but suspect Rich Burlew has a beef with this trope.

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