All this talk about needing to land CC's and denial roles tell me people are running party comps that do mediocre damage and don't have companions respecced to have optimal stat allocations and feats instead of their gimped baseline odd number starting stats and bad subspecs like trickery cleric.
Or it could be telling you that there are multiple ways to breeze through this game, and the particular way you found is not the only one.
We're talking about the usefulness of the various wizard subclasses. I think the difference is that when I think about them, I'm evaluating them on their own. I'm not thinking of "Evocation wizard, but also dependent on my character taking this feat, and using this equipment, and my companions being optimized, etc, etc, etc." I'm thinking of the single most broken mechanic allowed to any of the subclasses in isolation. And that is by far and away the massive number of portent dice. Spell sculpting, frankly, doesn't even actually seem that great. The vast majority of the time I'm able to cast aoe spells into melee anyway by being a bit mindful about placement and fiddling around with where exactly I target the spell. That's why I consider it a nice "friendly feature" but not anything groundbreaking.
