It's never too late to change class...
The point of having classes to begin with is so that there are multiple different styles of playing through the game, there by opening the game up to a much wider audience; not everyone is meant to be a tank, not everyone is meant to be a healer.
By making a class that effectively reaches god tier not too far in it's life (i.e. executioner dishing out 150 DPS at medium range, whilst being very reasonably tanky, and I'm not joking in the least by the way), you basically defeat the purpose of even having classes to begin with.
This is a problem that Terraria has been facing since it went into 1.2 and is still dealing with to this day, where someone going full tank can also have the highest and most reliable dps in the game, effectively breaking unregulated pvp.
Anyone who plays their classes strengths effectively will be hard to beat. Try to ensure any fight is done on your terms, not theirs.
I'd have an easier time playing sorcerer class to its strength if my 38-42 damage shot didn't have a 1-second cool down and if it was easier to aim.
That alone sets my maximum dps as a master sorcerer at INT 30 to an average of about 40, and that's assuming I'm close enough to hit each shot reliably, and that the server isn't lagging so much that my shot is firing from 20 blocks away at the opposite angle.
For the Mage this means always keeping a medium distance from you and your target and never ever allow a warrior to get close enough to use their skills on you - You're too squishy.
I very well understand this, but the problem with trying to do this during a raid (whether offensive or defensive) is that, since none of the families want to have their legal entrances to be at all easy to find/navigate, raiders try to use caves to sneak in, and then all the fighting happens underground. this will be changed later when elytra are added into the mix, but I recon we still have maybe a few days until that becomes a reality.
there's also the thing about alchemists using enderpearls, but I have yet to see that happen, and I myself am not a high enough level of alchemist to do so.
There's also the part where I have to wait a full second between shots, and that may not seem like much at first glance, but once your target starts running, they have all the liberty to come at you in such a way that you simply can't land a second hit, and trust me when I say that I've tried turning and running.
To be short and level with everything, executioner has too great a reliable DPS for how tanky it is, even with armor removed from the equation, and sorcerer has too low of an unreliable DPS for how squishy it is, and this really needs to be fixed, especially in the case where executioner should be finding it's fire power from the STR stat and not INT, because right now, executioner is behaving exactly like a super tanky top tier magic class.
To fix this on the executioner's end,
we simply need to make darkscythe NOT be INT based (because why the hell should a melee class be the best magic class?), or if it should remain INT based, lower how much INT boosts darkscythe (28 INT darkscyhe was enough to give a 50 damage melee attack, and likely on a diamond hoe, too, based on how quickly the blows were delivered). If not that, then cap out the max damage of a melee hit to be somewhere around 20 damage, a little higher on slower weapons and a little lower on faster weapons.
On the sorcerer and mage end, well, to put it firstly, the only practical difference between fireball and icebolt is that icebolt gives a minor slowness effect that quickly wears off.
Secondly, fireball and icebolt have a medium range (at which the further end becomes hard to aim at), a small collision box, a hearty 1-second cooldown, and, in the case of icebolt, relatively slow velocity (making it painfully easy to dodge if you're smarter than a zombie). And unlike bows, your vision doesn't zoom in and your movement speed slow down so that you can aim very nice and precisely.
To make specifically fireball and icebolt be worth anything in actual pvp, one or two of the major issues need to be dealt with:
*Mid-low damage compared to what is currently out there.
*These specific spells are basically clones of each other, except that one is 5 more mana to use and slows people for a short period.
*Make one or both of the spells have higher velocity and/or ignore gravity.
*Increase the firing rate slightly on one or both of these spells.
For those interested specifically in my final recommendations, look simply for the
blue text.