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Hey folks, simple question.

I am shocked by the fact that all cantrips have been given a range of 30 feet, and I was wondering if officially, the spells and cantrips present in the original PF2E rules were still usable in play without having to be approved by DMs on a case by case basis.

Thanks a lot!

From a mechanical perspective, I'm frustrated that schools are really limited scope wise and no consideration was done for letting them have usable level 1 and 2 spells, which is going to make 1-5 play even more of a pain. No, I don't care they let the GM add more spells, the RAW schools should be usable and good out of the box. That's like saying Swashbucklers are fixed because technically the GM can give them panche whenever.

The "new schools" seem like a half-baked, rushed out solution to make sure they could not be sued by Hasbro, instead of an actual well-thought replacement for a system which had been in place forever.

Just overall a nerf to the teeth in terms of flexibility (which was supposed to be what the wizard was all about, after they got nerfed in all other areas).

"Wait and see!" said the same posters, over and over again.

I waited, I saw, and I was disappointed, just like I expected to be.

RAW the concept is awful. And telling me that "Your DM can come up with new schools!" is absolute hogwash. My DM can also tell me to suck it up.

Old_Man_Robot wrote:

Unicore wrote:

Point of order, as the threads OP, this thread exists to document and discuss what changes have been announced about the wizard and how that may play out. It might have been over run with people decry the wizard and casting doom and gloom over the class, but that was not the point of the thread, nor is it the unanimous position of PF2 players. Most folks who feel the class will be fine probably don’t feel the need to refute every point made by people who have been dissatisfied with the class from the beginning of PF2.

Please stop posts like this.

You have no claim to some silent majority. You do not get to decide how people should feel or how people should talk. You’ve been trying to “other” people who don’t agree with you on this and other topics for years.

Post as yourself, for yourself, and cease this constant claim to other peoples voices.

On closer reading, you may notice that Unicore didn't say "most people are fine with it" but "those who are fine with it probably don't feel the need to shout about it". They said nothing about whether those people were in the majority or not.

As it happens, I would much rather this thread rein back in a little to the 'reveals' part of the topic and save at least some of the speculation for if/when that time comes. I'm sure another "Wizard Nerfs and Why They're Bad" thread would gain plenty enough traction as it is--I myself am not really fond of the appearance that Wizards have nothing on Arcane Sorcerers except a hypothetically larger (but practically not) repertoire.

Even so, I find this nerf insignificantly small compared to what is to me a much more significant buff to the flavour of the wizard. The execution of the new spell schools may be underwhelming, but having a study that says something about them besides "1/8th of all magic that fits under an arbitrary definition of vaguely similar effects" might mean somebody at my table is finally interested enough in the flavour of a...

A buff to the "flavour" of the wizard?

You can have any flavour you want. This is a role-playing game. You don't need rules about schools to play as a "Battle mage". This is all part of your individual inclinations towards playing a wizard oriented towards a certain philosophy.

Wizards would be better served by having serviceable mechanics that increase playability and player enjoyment, instead of being completely lackluster.

In the first edition, you could definitely play a necromancer. In the 2nd edition, given the nerfs to minions and "sudden death" spells, that "flavour" has disappeared, because trying to play it this way will result in a character which will lag behind others in terms of effectiveness.

Same thing with a manipulator. Adding a mentalism school of magic is pointless unless adhering to said school makes your spells which deal with the minds of others better than those of generalist. Otherwise the school of "mentalism" is just a gimped enchanter. How is this an improvement?

I really would love them to make summoning useful even if they went the battle form route with preset summons. I want them useful at the levels against the tough enemies you would use them against. they are way too far behind in level in a game using PF2 math to be useful.

The way summons are designed right now is bad for the designers too as it is one of the very few aspects of the PF2 game where the PF2 math completely fails because the level difference is too high. But if they raise the level difference the monsters might be too powerful. It leaves them stuck in a bad place for summon design and balance.

They should scrap the summon creatures based on CR and come up with a template for an appropriate level creature for the spell and some abilities that work for the summon based on type and level.

That would open up the PF2 design space much better than the CR based summons that are too far behind to be truly useful across levels.

I'd be fine with summons the way they are if you didn't need to spend actions to control them and they had their full three actions per round. Just write a rule that you can only have one summon spell active at the same time. It's not rocket science.

But summons have always been a difficult balancing act. Make them too powerful and the martials become useless, make them too weak and they're punching bags or can be totally ignored. And if you add mythic levels (which I am sure will happen at some point), given the fact they are linked to spell levels, they end up being totally useless.

Point of order, as the threads OP, this thread exists to document and discuss what changes have been announced about the wizard and how that may play out. It might have been over run with people decry the wizard and casting doom and gloom over the class, but that was not the point of the thread, nor is it the unanimous position of PF2 players. Most folks who feel the class will be fine probably don’t feel the need to refute every point made by people who have been dissatisfied with the class from the beginning of PF2.

With all due respect, this is crazy talk.

If anything, there ought to be a giant outcry about the changes done to the wizard, which is by far one of the weakest classes in PF2, bar the investigator or alchemist (also - stop adding pointless classes. Focus on existing ones instead of adding pointless garbage no one cares about).

I'm a caster player, but even I agreed that magic needed toning down. But the toning down just went way too far.

You can't nerf summoning, and spell duration, and number of spells per level, and bonus spells, and spell damage, and spell effects, and minions, and golems, and adding rarity to spells, and adding secondary casters to rituals (did I miss any other aspect?), and raising saving throws and armor class to the point most spells will reliably fail, while simultaneously making ever other base class except champions better than they used to be.

The second edition kneecapped magic. The wizard is only about magic. They have no other class abilities. Now we can see that the remaster, as far as magic schools is concerned, is a rush job. The main focus of it seems to be making Paizo not suable for plagiarism, with little consideration for gameplay.

There definitely should be as much discussion as possible about this, precisely BEFORE it's too late. Once November comes and people who said "Let's just wait and see" (and who probably do not play wizards or do not care...), well, it's too late and nothing will change before a possible third edition.

Discussion also isn't helped when certain users invariably pop up in posts voicing concerns about wizards and just constantly paint these concerns as being invalid or telling people to "just wait and see".

I think the problem I and many other people are having with all the changes to wizards, cantrips, and the like is really a mismatch of expectations vs what the designers are trying to accomplish.

It's clear to me now that casters were never intended to be blasters or have damage remotely approaching that of a martial. Rather the purpose of casters are to support the martials via buffs, debuffs, and the occasional oddball hat trick.

Frankly, this is not what I came to play. But to be fair the designers never advertised the classes as such.

The question that I, and I beleve others need to come to terms with is what to do next. Obviously grumbling on the forums isn't going to change anything.

I see 3 choices:

1. Keep playing what one is currently playing and accept that this is the way things will be.
2. Play a martial.
3. Play a caster in a different game.

Pretty much this.

Even though I love wizards and played a ton of them over the years, I didn't really mind a general toning down of the class or magic system, but I feel as if they just didn't know when to stop, and stooped down pretty low. This isn't a MMORPG.

The description of teleport is the best example of that.

I'd rather have a % chance for my teleportation to go catastrophically wrong (while still letting the DM decide how familiar I am with my destination... Since PF2E is all about giving the DM back his agency), with a chance to get really hurt or to end up in a dragon's lair or something actually interesting happening, instead of a blanket "Lulz, you appear 1% off target automatically". It honestly makes me want to slap whoever designed the spell across the face hard.

Making the spell uncommon, on top of it being level 6, on top of it being nerfed, just makes me angry.

But hey, if you're a 17th level elf, you can get magic rider so you ONLY end up 1 mile off target if you burn that 9th level slot for it! Joy!

I'd like the option to play wizard who is a good at blasting things, even if it means I might not be as "flexible" as a generalist. You'd think a school of battle magic would go in that direction, instead of just being a rushed renaming job for copyright purposes, which ends up also being a nerf.

They did say that the Wizard class had the biggest set of changes, and what we saw in the remastered preview was basically "the rules you need to make RoE work."

So I assume there's a lot of other stuff that changed about the Wizard that we don't know about yet. Some of it is likely even good.

Isn't it what people were saying before the 2e rules came out about the wizard, only it turned out the situation was even worse than previously thought?

The lack of any official reassurance about these issues speaks volumes - Paizo could easily dispel fears. If they say nothing, then it's probably even worse than what we are thinking.

Calliope5431 wrote:

PossibleCabbage wrote:

People tend to massively overestimate how many monsters have ̶A̶o̶O̶s̶ Reactive Strike. It's like 15% of the bestiary, tops. You'll go whole sessions of adventuring without seeing one of them.

It's not generally surprising when a creature does have it, since it's almost always something that looks like it has martial training. "Having to fight differently against different monsters" is not really a bad thing.

Yup, I know. I did a survey of this when I first started playing, it's somewhere around 1 in 8 or 1 in 9. But it does indeed suck when it happens.

Even so, wizard, witches, and co simply do not have the hp to survive in melee, especially since their AC is also lower so the flat-footed penalty from flanking and grapples is more likely to result in monsters critting. Druids potentially do, but the vast majority of leveled spells are (and I highly doubt this is going to change with the remaster, given the shocking grasp -> thunderstrike transition plus the cone of cold -> howling blizzard shift giving the option for big range) not melee-based. Meaning it's pretty much cantrips or bust.

(and yes, I know mirror image and invis exist. But those are actions and spell slots you could be using to blow up the monsters rather than improve your melee survivability when you don't even need to do that)

Encounters are not all the same. No character can survive long in melee against some enemies in PF2. Any character that is totally unprepared for a round or two of being stuck close up is often forcing the rest of the party to absorb a lot more damage. I am not saying all casters, or even any caster needs to rush into melee, but treating it like a situation to avoid at all costs, rather than having a plan for when it happens is limiting yourself out of a lot of good options.

Certain classes are made to be into melee, others are not.

I would say you are limiting yourself out of a lot of good options if you think the party wizard needs to tank a couple of rounds of melee fighting to let melee work.

Because, after being told your power is debuffing and killing mooks, I guess the next step is becoming a glorified punching bag so your melee overlords don't need to actually *gasp* take hit point damage.

Huh. Just realized. Secrets of Magic is unlikely to get remastered anytime soon. Meaning that all of its stuff is fully on the table, yes?

There are several blast spells that really exceed the fireball/howling blizzard damage curve. Such as the 7th level spell frigid flurry (18d6 ~ 63 ~ 10d12, more damaging than chain lightning at that level) or the 8th level spell boil blood (10d10 ~ 55 plus drained 2 is at least 75 damage, plus save half on the fire damage making it much more impressive than polar ray).

So even if blasting does get nerfed, as long as SoM is allowed it's not too bad.

Blasting, the aspect which got nerfed the most, gets nerfed even more and "it's not so bad"?

There are too many missing pieces from this pdf to make sense of what a wizard will actually look like. Are all other spells remaining mostly the same? I don’t think so. Not seeing any of the “attribute only” cantrips like daze and haunting hymn, we don’t know if all spells are excluding attributes to damage as default and if the reason why is because more classes are getting feats to boost spell damage, possibly by adding it back in.

People are saying cantrips are getting beefed, but that is a pretty wild reaction to seeing one damaging cantrip which now has a way of casting it where it will do more damage than before. The range and areas of spells generally getting increased is also another question mark. After having played a high level Druid in an urban module, if adventure locations remain small rooms and hallways, increased areas just become dangers to the party, but if maps are getting bigger they n written material these number increases will be a big deal.

Many of the folks posting here have been skeptical of the wizard from day one, so it is not surprising to see further skepticism after the pdf dropped. If there are enough schools and guidance towards making your own, I have 0 concerns about the “curriculum nerf.” Many of the showcased spells heighten better than pre-remastery spells, so having good ones at level 1 will go a long way on the class that gets to auto heighten spells. I understand feeling nervous with only one showcased school, but this is too little information to make real assessment off of.

If wizards are limited just to their own school’s focus spells, and there are not additional focus spells available within the class, I too will be disappointed with that decision. The option to have spell affecting metamagic focus spells like the psychic amps, is unexploited design space that could have been really cool, and very wizardy in narrative. But it is also something that could still come later. I definitely want to see class feats before trying to really get a handle on what...

I strongly disagree with this.

By now anyone should be able to see that "wait and see", as far as wizards in 2e is concerned, will only lead to disappointment. Not that we can do anything about it, mind you, the books are probably already ready and printed.

But thinking "Come on, it can't be that bad"... Well, everytime I thought that it turned out to be even worse, so I'll go with that.

NECR0G1ANT wrote:

The best Wizard build is currently a high-INT Imperial Sorcerer, and Player Core 1 won't change that.

I think paizo would rather have a class rhat was too weak rather than too strong, but I'm surprised to see a nerf to a low-tier class like the wizard after hearing great rhings about the kineticist.

I will say what held back the wizard (INT-based, prepared casting), can't really be addressed short of an edition change.

Int based prepared casting is not what is holding back the wizard. The fact that you even think that's the issue shows you how much Paizo screwed the class and the Int stat.

Indeed.

Nerfing all aspects of magic will make the class based solely around magic so weak it's border useless, who would have thought.

The wizard is weak enough as is. But it's not enough, so let's make sure it's not even versatile anymore. Oh, and by the way, if you want to play a viable blaster, go kineticist (hint hint).

What's more baffling and borderline concerning is how much gloating and schadenfreude you will find on these boards concerning the current state of the wizard, really casting the idea that this was about balance in doubt.

Wei Ji the Learner wrote:

Remaining optimistic that there are factors that we are not seeing that will be entering play here.

Honestly can't see destroying an iconic class when raising other classes *to* that power level would be more fun for everyone.

Imagine if they made the absolutely horrendous decision to nerf every other class to make the wizard seem better. Oh my goodness that would be like stabbing a knife in your own game's heart. I hope that is not the case at all. You don't nerf other classes to make another class seem better. Terrible way to do things.

They nerfed the wizard repeatedly while making other classes better, to the point where playing a wizard in a party relegates you to a debuff bot or a "cleaner" for low level encounters.

And yet you still find people telling you that because you deal a lot of damage to weak mobs in with an aoe in a single round the wizard is a good class, never mind the fact the melee characters could just mop them all up without expending anything (it would just take them a few extra rounds to do so).

One of the selling points of wizards was their "versatility". Before you could pick any spell from your school of the appropriate level to memorize in the extra slot, and that meant 3-4 options easily per level, if not more.

Suddenly the "versatility" part is also gone. This is (yet another) straight up nerf to wizards.

There's nothing versatile about casting spells.

- Cast a spell --> Two actions
- Sustain a spell --> One action

I sure hope you remembered to cast haste so that you can actually move once per round and not be one giant sitting duck.

Cantrips are just a silly bandaid to the huge amount of issues the class has.

The whole rationale of reducing the number of spells per day was to "force wizards to decide when to use their spells instead of using cantrips".

But the saves being much, much higher than what they used to be now forces wizards to make sure that they have spells for each possible save (or be even more useless); but since they have fewer spells, you have to really think about when to cast what few spells you have. Because once you're out of spells, you're back to using two-action cantrips.

Nowadays "saving the big guns" for challenging encounters is actually a terrible idea, because if CR+2 to +4 are very unlikely to fail a saving throw, even on their weak saves; the "critical failure" save on spells seems like a pointless, rage-inducing last minute inclusion to make you remember what your spells used to be able to do.

Nowadays you're a glorified sidekick to martials.

I am surprised by these changes.

"Subtly" nerfing blaster wizards was not on my list of expected changes.

I get it, wizards WERE too strong - compared to other classes - in PREVIOUS editions.

They could have gone the "Tome of Battle" way to spice up things, and instead they went the "bat to the knees" way towards wizards. And it seems like they aren't quite done yet.

Usually I wouldn't jump the gun on criticism, but I was reasonable and waited before the 2nd edition was revealed, and, guess what, it was even worse than what I thought it would be.

The wizard class is bland.

They lack feats, they lack personalization options, they lack differentiated and viable class options. Most wizards end up the same mechanically. I would be quite fine with a wizard class that went totally different paths with very limited spell lists but cooler thematic powers, like an actual necromancer (and no, I don't want to play class "x", I want a classical necromancer wizard).

It's poorly designed, especially with the move to a three action round, the extremely awkward "most spells cost 2 actions per round" to make sure you can only cast one spell per round (which in itself is an ironic throwback to a previous edition where spells were too powerful - nowadays you could cast 3 spells per round and it wouldn't make a difference against challenging (+2 to +4) encounters).

I get it. Action economy. I get it. Wizards shouldn't be able to do everything, and especially not do it better than other classes. I just wish there was a way for me to say "Know what? I'll give up x% of my spell selection so that I can be really good doing y", and right now it's just not there.

But I will no doubt be told how "amazing" wizards are at debuffing or at killing mooks.