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Ok, so just to be sure about this:
VMC Wizard gives me this at lvl 1:
School: At 1st level, he chooses a school of magic in which to specialize. For all powers of that school, he treats his character level as his effective wizard level.
And School Understanding Exploit gives me that:
If the arcanist already has an arcane school (or gains one later), taking this exploit instead allows her arcanist levels to stack with the levels of the class that granted the arcane school when determining the powers and abilities of her arcane school.
I'm not interested in Double Dipping or things like that. I just want to know if I'm going to get the full advancement of the School(Like the School Savant Archetype) or what is going to happen?
Your effective wizard level is already at its max (character level) so School Understanding does nothing. You get full advancement in the school with or without it, just from being VMC Wizard.
The only difference between School Understanding and VMC is that you have to spend Arcane Reservoir to add the secondary 1st level school power, which only lasts for a few round.
The only thing School Savant does for you is that you always count your Arcanist levels as Wizard levels for determining power and effects, and you get all of the School benefits at all times (i.e. the 8th level power, the 20th level capstone, and so on).
Also keep in mind that you don't need the School Savant archetype to pick sub-schools, since the original School Understanding exploit lets you pick any school a wizard can pick, and a wizard can pick sub-schools.
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VMC Wizard gives me this at lvl 1:
School: At 1st level, he chooses a school of magic in which to specialize. For all powers of that school, he treats his character level as his effective wizard level.
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[emphasis altered]
So picking different schools for VMC and School Understanding means that there is no stacking. As Fuzzy-Wuzzy points out, if you pick the same school then you are already maxed out and taking School Understanding was useless.
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So picking different schools for VMC and School Understanding means that there is no stacking. As Fuzzy-Wuzzy points out, if you pick the same school then you are already maxed out and taking School Understanding was useless.
Necroing my own thread here.
It still does not anwser if I get all the School powers or only the 1st one.
The Exploit only gives me one, but states that if I get the acess to the school I can stack levels.
VMC gives me limited acess to some powers, but specify that I get acess to the school.
So, if I have both options, can I get the full progression as a Wizard of my level?
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The way I see it, having both the matching Exploit and VMC Wizard would give you the effects of the Exploit until you got to character level 7, at which point VMC Wizard II would kick in and you would suddenly get full Wizard progression of Arcane School Powers, including the Exploit giving you access to the 8th level Arcane School Power at 8th level. When you got to 19th level, the Exploit would be temporarily superfluous (since at this point both it and VMC Wizard give you the 8th level Arcane School Power), but then at 20th level they would be both relevant again, because VMC Wizard specifically excludes the 20th level upgrade to the 1st level Arcane School Powers, but then the Exploit (which doesn't have this exclusion clause) would give this back. I don't think you are supposed to be able to get an effective Wizard level greater than your total hit dice (although this isn't explicitly spelled out), but it's still worth comparing this approach to the School Savant archetype.
Benefits of the above approach:
- Gets you a Familiar at 3rd level.
- Gets you temporary Arcane School Power access as soon as you take the Exploit.
- Only consumes 1 Arcanist Exploit.
- After a delay, gets you full Wizard Arcane School progression.
- Doesn't consume your Arcanist capstone.
- Eventually gives you a Wizard Arcane Discovery (although this comes quite late -- 15th level).
- No Opposition Schools.
- No worries about Arcanist archetype compatibility.
- Not PFS-legal (PFS does not allow VMC).
- Consumes 5 feats with completely inflexible scheduling.
- One of the consumed feats, at 11th level, goes to getting you a Cantrip that is on the same spell list you already have. Unless you REALLY need to prepare just 1 more Cantrip than the normal Arcanist progression gives you, this is essentially useless.
- PFS-legal.
- You get to keep all your feats.
- You get started on full Arcane School progression at the beginning of your Arcanist progression.
- You can prepare an extra spell of your chosen Arcane School for each level you can cast (caution: has confusing wording).
- Consumes 3 Arcanist Exploits with completely inflexible scheduling; if you want the Familiar after all, you need to consume another Arcanist Exploit, and the earliest you can get it is at 5th level (which is when you get the first Arcanist Exploit available with this archetype).
- You have to pick 2 Opposition Schools.
- You never get a Wizard Arcane Discovery.
- You trade out your regular Arcanist capstone for the Wizard Arcane School capstone.
- Not compatible with a lot of other Arcanist archetypes.
This thread is relevant to my interests.
Dot