Daniel Fletcher's page

There is a gulf of difference between a battle wizard not being the best blaster in the game and not being effective enough at blasting to blast every encounter and still not having an exclusive focus on blasting.

Like the school of battle wizardry give non-blasting spells at more than half of spell ranks and even has a non-blasting hire rank focus spell. With irresistible magic your battle wizard will still be better at sticking spells against difficult opponents than the blaster sorcerer.

This doesn’t seem like a fair argument you’re making. I’m not asking for the wizard to be a more mechanically optimized blaster than a sorcerer, I’m asking for a way to play into the class fantasy of a battle mage and not feel bad for using a wizard as the base instead of a sorcerer. I don’t believe irresistible magic is sufficient for enabling an area of play for a wizard that makes it have a different experience than an arcane sorcerer. Also the non blasting spells from the battle magic school are there to keep the character alive so they can keep using their offensive spells i.e. blasting spells being offered by the school. I highly doubt most sorcerers are going 100% all offensive spells and not taking any defensive or utility spells, so I doubt that the play experience between the two classes is very different.

You say sorcerers should feel more satisfying to play as a blaster than a wizard, I would argue if that’s supposed to be the case why create the expectation that you can be a primarily blasting wizard. Ranger players didn’t get told archery for them should feel less satisfying for them than for a fighter character because rangers get more options, they gave them different class feats to make a different play experience. To ask for a unique play experience for a class is not asking for too much, especially if it is about making the equivalent of a subclass viable to fulfill the fantasy it’s supposed to invoke.

The bottom line of this entire discussion, but especial the last several pages of this thread, is that what you want out of a caster is largely going to shape wether you find the wizard to be interesting and compelling in play, and because of that, almost no one is going to change their opinion based on anything less than personal experience.

It boils down so much to play style and assumptions about what can be done in exploration mode and downtime mode that convincing someone their personal experience is wrong is fairly demeaning and a fruitless activity.

Certainly players that are asking for something like flexible casting to be built into the wizard chassis are never going to satisfied with a class built on prepared casting, but that doesn’t actually mean anything to someone who would never pick the flexible casting archetype and would rather be able to cast 2 more top 2 rank spells a day.

Personally, I am happy for sorcerers to hear that dangerous sorcery is a built in class feature and that the whole time players have been complaining about blasters, the devs have been working on making it more clear that the sorcerer is the default “blaster first” spell caster. Trying to build and play a wizard that plays the same as a blast happy sorcerer is, and should be a less satisfying experience than playing a sorcerer in the first place.

Then offering the school of battle magic to wizards in the first place seems like a trap choice if blasting isn’t meant to be a viable option for wizards. Also sorcerers aren’t locked into only the arcane tradition, so gatekeeping arcane blasters to a class that isn’t even necessarily an arcane caster seems like an odd design choice.

It sounds like we need more depth in the spell lists to make prepared casters stand out more compared to spontaneous casters, preferably niche and situational spells that spontaneous casters would be less inclined to pick for their repertoire. As for the wizard chassis itself I think we’re stuck with what we have until PF3 unfortunately, although new arcane schools with better/more interesting focus spells could go a long way towards making wizard stand out.

Perpdepog wrote:

Daniel Fletcher wrote:

Would porting arcanist casting from PF1 for wizards break the game?

Do you mean flexible spellcasting?

I'm opposed to just giving wizards this ability because it makes spontaneous feel significantly less unique and I rather a different solution, assuming one even needs to be found

It’s admittedly not ideal, tuning feats and features would be preferred but I was looking for easier ways to make wizard more attractive to players at my table.

Daniel Fletcher wrote:

Perpdepog wrote:

Daniel Fletcher wrote:

Would porting arcanist casting from PF1 for wizards break the game?

Do you mean flexible spellcasting?

More or less, but without requiring a feat and not lowering the spells per day. Wizards’ class features and feats feel weaker than other casters, I’m curious to hear from people more experienced with the system if “baking” in flexible spellcasting would break the game.

I made all casters spontaneous. Didn't break the game. Works fine. Still can't get anyone to play a wizard, but it's no doubt better than the base wizard.

PF2 is a very tight system regardless of what spells you cast. Saving throws are set very tight. Hit points very tight. All casting DCs are a set progression for all casters. All casters use the same version of spells unless accessing a unique spell to a list.

The only thing differentiating casters in PF2 is class features and cosmetic differences.

I understand the math for PF2 mostly, I mainly was curious if giving wizards flexible casting by default would be enough to make wizards competitive vs other casters.

Daniel Fletcher wrote:

Perpdepog wrote:

Daniel Fletcher wrote:

Would porting arcanist casting from PF1 for wizards break the game?

Do you mean flexible spellcasting?

More or less, but without requiring a feat and not lowering the spells per day. Wizards’ class features and feats feel weaker than other casters, I’m curious to hear from people more experienced with the system if “baking” in flexible spellcasting would break the game.

I think it depends on what you mean by "break the game." Does break the game mean distort the current assumptions of the system? Yes, that'd do that. Flexible casting is basically all the upsides of both spontaneous and prepared casting rolled together.

Would it break the game if that was the case for all casters, and you treated all of them similarly? Probably not, though it'd make some classes less attractive because you'd be cutting down on build diversity. It's not going to shatter someone's home game into little pieces or anything though.

I meant applying it to wizards only, would it make playing any other arcane caster pointless or do their features and feats give them enough to compare with a flexible wizard.

Daniel Fletcher wrote:

Would porting arcanist casting from PF1 for wizards break the game?

Do you mean flexible spellcasting?

More or less, but without requiring a feat and not lowering the spells per day. Wizards’ class features and feats feel weaker than other casters, I’m curious to hear from people more experienced with the system if “baking” in flexible spellcasting would break the game.

Would porting arcanist casting from PF1 for wizards break the game?