So, I realize this is EXTREMELY early into the remaster, to the point that officially it hasn't even officially started yet, but I feel like the new incarnation of magic schools are unsatisfying, an objective nerf to a class that was already mid, and worst of all incredibly uninteresting.
So schools have gone from a broad swath of magic, roughly one eighth of all spells to basically worse/more restricted sorcerer bloodlines. My initial thought was to scrap "school slots" and make wizards pure four slot casters who can spontaneous cast their school spells from otherwise prepared slots. This avoids the issue of dead slots that late game wizards are currently stuck with but it makes the schools even MORE "just sorcerer bloodline" and more subjectively i feel like wizard is THE prepared caster and giving them baseline access to spontaneous casting feels like it goes against their identity.
So back to the drawing board I go, to try to find a change that gives wizards an injection of interesting while keeping and ideally enhancing their identity. Which is when I was hit with the thought that wizards are usually portrayed as surrounded by parchment, tomes and scrolls, and was hit with inspiration; prepared scrolls.
Essentially wizards loose their school slots entirely, becoming baseline 3 slot casters. HOWEVER when a wizard is doing daily prep they can choose to prepare a spell in their mind, or in the form of temporary daily scrolls. Any wizard from a school with a curriculum can use a spell slot to prepare two temp scrolls of that slots rank, inscribing them with spells from their curriculum. The unified magical theory school can only prepare a single scroll from a spell slot but it can be of any spell they know, rather than being curriculum locked.
Further more wizards gain access to the "rescribe" activity, which allows a wizard to spend ten min "correcting" one of their daily scrolls and changing the spell to any other valid option (of the same level of course)
This has a few benefits, first and foremost hauling half a library's worth of parchment around every day feels very wizard and as such i like it. Furthermore it provides interesting trade offs. Scrolls have an innate loss of action economy due to having to be drawn curriculum wizards can choose how much of their vast spell access to trade away for staying power, potentially getting 50% more spells than a sorcerer if they go all in, in exchange for half the "repertoire" and worse action economy. Umt wizards who only go 1 to 1 on scrolls are only trading away their action economy in exchange for spell flexibility making them the defacto best users of the more niche spells in the game that would rarely find their way into a repertoire or prepared list.
I am under no illusions that this is perfect or even that great out the gate but I wanted to get other peoples thoughts and input before I move to try testing it out.