I was thinking about updating the wilder’s abilities for the sake of Pathfinder RPG, but since I’ve played a wilder once and haven’t seen anyone else play them I wanted to post here and figure out if my experiences were not the norm before putting together several pages of wilder modifications.
To start I probably should describe the abilities of my character before moving forward. My feats were at the beginning were primary the feats from Complete Psionic that reduced the pain that came with the enervations.
My power list started with energy ray for damage and demoralize for a general area of effect to hamper a lot of things at the same time. Later on I got recall agony (but later on I realized I was almost never used it because I had other powers that did the same thing so I replaced it with ego whip), took feat to learn energy missile, and finally got touchsight, and psionic dimension door. Early on I picked Split Ray as one of my feats, but I changed that when I realized that it only worked for a single power.
Playing a wilder was an interesting experience. Playing it I had a couple thoughts, the first being they have very few powers. Choosing them was a little painful balance between various damage dealing powers and some more utility powers. While I say utility I don’t mean something like knock or identify, I felt I had to choose powers that would be useful in combat situations before powers that would only see use outside of combat. Also, I really didn’t want my wild surge to go to waste and my power selection reflected that; every power I choose was augmentable. I didn’t really see any point in choosing any powers that were not augmentable since I didn’t feel that my class abilities would work well with them.
The second thing that I noticed was that I was using a full augmented power with wild surge for every power. I think this was partially because of my power choices and the campaign environment. On in-game days where there was combat there was usually only one fight. Sometimes there were two or more fights, but those were few and far in-between. I was able to go through these fights discharging my powers at full without getting really close to emptying my power point reserve, I believe in the longer fights it dropped to about half after the fight was over. Since my powers were all augmentable, most of them cheap, there was a constant temptation just to go full blast.
What I want to do with the wilder is make it a better choice to grab the non-augmentable utility powers or even force them onto the class. For example detect psionics is a good power, especially if it can be used to identify psionic (or magic) items. However at third level a wilder knows two powers, choosing detect psionics would be a painful choice and would leave you with only one power in a fight. At higher levels you still have few powers and have the option to choose higher-level powers than 1st so it is unlikely that the wilder would ever willingly choose this. Finding some way to let a wilder use these without items would be helpful to the wilder and the party.
My final note is on volatile mind. It is a nice flavorful ability, but my wilder never had to use it. In fact, I think I could have gone to twentieth level without ever using this ability. It requires another character to manifest a telepathy power on the wilder. This is relatively unlikely unless you are facing a lot of psionic characters in a campaign. Also it is very weak against the creatures it affects. The ability only removes a few power points from the enemy and unless that enemy was facing an army of wilders or casting telepathy powers on the wilder throughout the battle, I don’t think it would have any significant effect on the enemy. Maybe they would have to manifest a 5th level power instead of a 7th level power before running out of power points completely in the final round of a long fight.
What I found making a Wilder more fun to play was taking the Hidden Talent feat for an always available useful power like Astral Construct and or using it with a class that really complements it.
Originally I really liked the Battle Sorcerer using the Precocious Apprentice trick at L1 (the trick doesn't work in all games) in a leveling up game with Cerebremancer: Sorcerer - 1, Wilder - 4, Cerebremancer - 10, X-5 to personal taste. In many ways using Beguiler instead of Sorcerer is quite a bit better mechanically despite the minor Intelligence MAD.
The Variant Wilder option picks up 4 bonus known powers.
Playing one of the Dragon magazine Dark Sun +1ECL races which pick up powers and power points at various levels (Mostly fixed powers except for humans). Bonus first level power at L1 with +3 PP, bonus second level power at L5 (+6 PP), bonus third level power at L10 (+11 PP), bonus fouth level power at L15 (+18 PP)and a bonus fifth level power at L20.
Do you think more getting more powers are necessary for an updated wilder? I felt the limited choices hit pretty hard. Especially when the first powers had to be some sort of damaging ability to be able to contribute to battles.
Maybe the wilders could automatically get some methods to deal damage with power points. That way they might be able to look toward different powers early on.
By the way, where is the Variant Wilder?
Yes. WotC you want the "Educated Wilder" variant in The Mind's Eye: Expanded Classes Part One on 2/14/07. Bet you'll love picking up the 4 extra known powers at levels 5, 9, 13 and 17 for losing the Volatile Mind class special based on your first post in this thread.
There is also the option of taking a Mantle for giving up Elude Touch and having to take the first level mantle power or powers. There are a few with decent powers and some of the mantles provide interesting benefits including a few additional known powers as options.
Now if we could have an "Educated Erudite" along with the Spells to Power variant the class would become playable on it's own at lower to mid levels instead of going Cerebremancer.