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allot of people seem to confuse the way they play the game as the only way to play. you can finish any paizo ap from start to finish as a pure blaster without any issues.
for alot of people rolling fistfulls of dice is fun. the fact that you can add things like rime spell etc to your blasting means you dont have to be devoid of controll.
Blast builds are viable. But playing them invalidates the argument that casters need martials to kill the enemies after disabling them. So for some people such builds are frowned upon.
And they can destroy the fun for other players who want to participate, too.
Blasting can be done well, but it doesn't function well "out of the box." It requires a lot more tinkering under the hood than most other wizard builds to get it up to a good power level.
As mentioned nearly every time this topic comes up: Dazing Spell makes blasters not only damage dealers, but controllers as well. That feat alone made blasters comparable to controllers. And they weren't terribly far off to begin with.
An Evocation (Admixture) wizard with Magical Lineage (fireball) and some metamagic feats is a value package and a half.
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From some threads that I've read it seems like there hasn't always been much love for blaster-type magic users, but that may have changed at some point. What is the current mood on them? I ask because they are probably my favorite type of spellcaster. Either a generic, Evocation, fireball and lightning bolt caster, or sometimes a more specialized elemental caster (electricity being my favorite).
Are builds like this viable?
Blaster builds are..well a blast IMO. My blaster(admixture wizard) focuses on acid.
Blaster Wizards got a real treat in the form of Preferred Spell. With that feat, you can play through the low levels as your standard battlefield controller, then switch to blasting as your feats come online. And even then, you can prepare all the utility spells and switch them out as needed for Metamagic'ed Fireballs. It requires Heighten Spell, but you'll want that for bypassing Globes of Invulnerability.
Versatile Evocation allows you to change the damage type when the spell is cast, in case of fire immunes.
A one level dip in Crossblooded (Orc/Draconic) boosts your damage even further, though it comes with -2 Will and delays your Wizard casting down to that of a Sorcerer. It has its pros and cons.
Also the Blaster is very dependent on metamagic, so ask your DM how he feels about you taking both Magical Lineage and Wayang Spellhunter. Spell Perfection will be your Level 15 feat. Consider taking Craft Rod as well - As a 3rd level spell, Fireball works with Lesser Rods.
Get yourself a Familiar and a rod or two of Familiar Spell. For a few rounds a day, your Familiar can blast like a mini-you.
If 3.5 content is allowed (remember, PF is backwards compatible!), prestige into Incantatrix and pick up Energy Admixture and Twin Spell, along with Arcane Thesis. Now you're cooking with gas.
They can be fun. They're not usually optimal, since there's usually better things you could be doing with your spell slots, even in combat (unless you factor in stuff like dazing spell, but I've often seen that 'soft banned' i.e. no one uses it, since they know how ridiculously bonkers stuff like that can get, and they don't want to be 'that guy'), but they can be fun.
Battlefield control & party buffing is a better way to go, but there's nothing wrong with a good Fireball, etc once in a while.
A one level dip in Crossblooded is a HUGE trap. You have then nerfed yourself badly to be a little better at one thing.
The best way around it is Versatile Evocation, which lets you change the damage type at the time the spell is being cast.
Other than that, Orb of Force from 3.5 is single target only, and requires an attack roll (vs Touch AC), but allows no save and ignores SR. It was the go-to blasting spell in 3.5, so if that material is allowed then it can be made to work.
If that's the case then Sorcerer is back on the table; with Arcane Fusion and Arcane Spellsurge you can wring a lot more actions out of each turn.
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A one level dip in Crossblooded is a HUGE trap. You have then nerfed yourself badly to be a little better at one thing.
a dip into crossblooded is a trap? since when...
i dont know a first level character who is dealing 3d4+6 burning hands as a crossblooded sorcerer seems good to me. or a wizard 5/sorcerer 1 dealing 9d6+20 fireballs or acid damage.
-2 to will saves can be off set by choosing dwarf, half elf, or aasimar as your starting race.
Blasting builds will work better in some campaigns then others.
A blaster is amazing in
OTH, in Kingmaker, my recollection is that a majority of enemies had high dex and good reflex saves, making AoE damage very suboptimal.
It'll just depend. It's quite viable, though.
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Blasters can certainly be competent damage dealers - when it comes to dealing with large amounts of mooks, there's no one that can beat them. (As long as you don't run out of spells!) But here's the main issue, I think: for most martials, dealing damage is what they do. If you're a barbarian, chances are you want to run up and smash things for massive damage. With a blaster caster, they'll go down in half the time, but still be at full damage-dealing capacity for that time; with a battlefield control caster, they'll be partially disabled or singled out while you wallop them. Both are legitimate ways of dealing with enemies; however, if I'm playing a fighter, I like to fight! I'd just as soon not have the combat be over in 2 rounds, AND have to focus more on defense since the enemies are dealing relatively more damage.
Another thing to consider is that it's a caster's responsibility to make sure your teammates can successfully deal damage to tricky enemies. If they're invisible, you need to cast Glitterdust or Invisibility Purge; until you do, your teammates are effectively helpless. If they're flying, and your archer can't take care of it, it's up to you to Dispel their flight magic or Air Walk your teammates. True, you could simply blast the enemy... but then your team is just sitting around twiddling their thumbs, and if you go down before the foe is dead they could be in serious trouble.
TL,DR: Blasting is fine, but there are many things only casters can do. Don't neglect those responsibilities in order to blast!
PS: Remember also that bosses usually come with high saves and sometimes spell resistance to boot. Make sure you keep Enervate or something similar in your back pocket, or cast some good buffs so the martials can take care of it. These will be far more helpful than ineffectually pew-pewing at the boss while it slaughters your frontliners.
That's why Preferred Spell is so great. Prepare all the utility and swap it for blasting as you go.
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It's an often-talked-about truth that solo bosses have a tough time against PCs, because PCs get many more actions together than the boss. So often the GM will even the odds by giving him minions.
Those minions will distract your fighter/paladin/barbarian from going all-out on the boss, which is bad, because they're really good at that. They do enormous damage to individual enemies.
A blaster wizard does decent damage to individuals, but not spectacular. Not like the martials. But he's way better at large groups of weaker enemies. Like the horde of minions protecting the boss from the fighter.
Basically, a blaster wizard's interpretation of Battlefield Control is to sweep off all the enemy's smaller pieces.
Preferred spell is nice, but I'd like to also make mention of Selective Spell. Selective Spell is nice if enemies try to stand around you, instead of staying on their side of the room. Or if your martial fellows want to engage the boss in melee (which is where they'll be most effective), to avoid friendly fire.
Nicely enough, Preferred Spell allows you to add on Selective only when you need it; if you have a level 4 spell you'd like to use as Fireball Slot but no need for Selective, just Heighten it for +1 save DC. While Heighten is boring, it's actually quite decent with Preferred, because you always have a useful way to spend off "spare" levels on the spell slot you're sponting to Fireball.
Ascalaphus's well-thought-out post made me think of the Magic metagame. The environment tends to swing back and forth between "agro" (fast aggressive decks) and "control" (slow, more defensive decks). Do we see a similar phenomenon in Pathfinder optimization? DMs catch on to the latest optimization craze, design counter-measures, and then the PCs introduce their own counter-measures?
Because, as Ascalaphus notes, blasters function best in a metagame environment, so to speak, where boss monsters use lots of minions.
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Ascalaphus's well-thought-out post made me think of the Magic metagame. The environment tends to swing back and forth between "agro" (fast aggressive decks) and "control" (slow, more defensive decks). Do we see a similar phenomenon in Pathfinder optimization? DMs catch on to the latest optimization craze, design counter-measures, and then the PCs introduce their own counter-measures?
Because, as Ascalaphus notes, blasters function best in a metagame environment, so to speak, where boss monsters use lots of minions.
That depends on a few things, really. The right sorcerer build can turn single target spells like scorching ray and (much more easily) disintegrate into a death sentence for whatever is in their cross hairs.
I think reading into a meta is just straining credibility. First, most players either stick with one GM, or PFS it up. PFS has no ability to adapt to meta (unless you're implying they write the adventures specifically to be resilient against blasting/control alternately), and your local GM's meta extends no further than his table.
That, and most GMs I know aren't playing to win. Furthermore, there are a lot more ways to tailor a challenge than "add more guys" and "add freedom of movement". Agro and control are two very broad concepts that apply to nearly every deck (even killing a creature with a lightning bolt is a control-based move, even though you find said bolt in an agro deck). You can go through an entire AP and never even use control spells or blast spells. Martials can fulfill both roles as well, and tailoring against them is very different from tailoring against fireball and web.
Jaunt I don't think it "strains credibility." I'm not choosing this hill to die on or anything, it was just an idle consideration, but I think there's some valid comparisons to be made. Abilities are nerfed and errata issued, in PFS as well as the game in general, based on metagame considerations. The release of a new rulebook is analogous to releasing a new set.
If there's no metagame then optimization boards would seem to make no sense. Clearly optimizers have meaningful things to say to each other besides "well in my game the GM runs it this way..." so there must be some kind of strategic metagame at work.
Even if you don't buy the M:tg analogy, I think the point remains valid that the viability of blasters is going to depend a lot on the typical tactics and combat set-up of your individual GM. Regardless of whether that's influenced by reading the boards a lot or any other idiosyncracy. And that's a metagame consideration.
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After today reading Brewer's highly entertaining Guide to the Blockbuster Wizard, I'd say blaster wizards can work just fine. Here's roughly how I'd do it:
* Admixture wizard. Bypassing elemental defences with grace and style is essentiual.
* Don't neglect knowledges. Know (IC!) about creature types and elemental immunities.
* Try to snag Magical Lineage for Fireball. It's so OP though, that your GM may give you the evil eye for it.
* Go Heighten Spell->Preferred Spell(Fireball)
* Learn feats that make your Fireball better: School Focus, Penetration, Metamagic, Specialization etc. You MUST work towards Spell Perfection. You have lots of choice here; more feats than you can actually take.
* Prepare good spells, including some battlefield control, utility for various situations, and boss-killer spells.
* Be prepared to swap out any of those spells for Preferred Fireballs with exactly the right metamagic you need for the situation.
You get the joys of blasting without giving up the versatility of a wizard. You don't need all manner of contrived build twists to have a good time. Ignore item creation and boast about how mature you are for not doing that kind of powergaming :P
I wouldn't bother with cross-classing. The wizard bonus feats are on a very tricky schedule already. Getting that level 15 bonus feat together with Spell Perfection is pretty nice.
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You get the joys of blasting without giving up the versatility of a wizard. You don't need all manner of contrived build twists to have a good time. Ignore item creation and boast about how mature you are for not doing that kind of powergaming :P
Now see your idea wasn't that bad until you got that part right there. Optimizing =/= immature. Someone whose idea of fun does not align with your idea of fun is, in fact, not indulging in bad wrong/evil fun. People without a high degree of system mastery should expect to fall behind those that do have it. That's just how the game works; it has always been that way. That being said, the person with the character that eats, sleeps, and craps extinction level events ought to know when to rein it in so other people can get their jollies.
Sorry if "strains credibility" came out wrong. Nobody, least of all me, is dying on any hill.
But yeah, optimizers have a lot to say about stuff, but those are game considerations, not metagame considerations. If someone says "Fireball is so good because you can get Dazing Fireballs at level 2 with no save" that's a game consideration. It's the first level. If they say "Man, fireball is situationally good, but this situation is extremely common in my game (large hordes of mooks), then that's meta. Most of what optimizers say is "X is really good, because it's better than Y and Z other options", and not "X is really good, because my GM always uses K".
If players play more blast spells in response to the number of mooks a GM adds, sure, that's meta. I just don't think the meta environment extends very far beyond that. Blasts definitely scale way up or way down based on what it is you encounter.
I think Dazing spell was a terrible mistake to print but yeah blasters are fun and useful.
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Err please explain how he does 5d6+90 DMG thanksBlasters are very useful.
A fireball specialist with the right build and gear can go army killing.
Nobody in the game can kill a group faster than a blaster caster.
Ex.
The blaster specialist Sorcerer in our group loves to see dungeons coming. Those nice small rooms and cramped hallways make throwing down the nuke pretty much a clear the room spell.
At level 7, might have been 8th, he could throw like 4 5D6 + 90 fireballs. No matter what we make sure nobody charges in before his initiative.
One trick pony with that build, but that one trick kills groups dead as Dickens.
its impossible but at 10 he could deal as much as 19d6+42
Yep! That's it ^^
Most of the advice on mechanics is tilted toward efficiency and the message is not normally "x can't work". The message is "x is not as efficient or as good as ___", but people tend to read it as "x can't work".
Blasting is the same way. It is not as efficient due to the amount of focus needed to make it really good, but I would not say it is not useful.
Total spell level increase.
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Now see your idea wasn't that bad until you got that part right there. Optimizing =/= immature. Someone whose idea of fun does not align with your idea of fun is, in fact, not indulging in bad wrong/evil fun. People without a high degree of system mastery should expect to fall behind those that do have it. That's just how the game works; it has always been that way. That being said, the person with the character that eats, sleeps, and craps extinction level events ought to know when to rein it in so other people can get their jollies.You get the joys of blasting without giving up the versatility of a wizard. You don't need all manner of contrived build twists to have a good time. Ignore item creation and boast about how mature you are for not doing that kind of powergaming :P
Did you notice the ":P" at the end of my post?
One thing I have to wonder...
How powerful would a Tattooed Sorcerer with Magical Lineage and Wayang Spellhunter be? They can take Spell Focus and Eschew Materials at first level.
Control is the most powerful type of effect you can have.
Control spells usually stop a monster on a failed save.
Well blasting damages a creature and has a much harder time of stopping them outright.
Now to make the spells more likely to outright kill something most blasters need to squeeze every drop.
Thus all the advice above.
My blaster wizard has a level of oracl to add cold spell so I slow them on a failed save of my spell.