Gandalf, Saruman, and the Istari from LotR are really more Clerics than Wizards in d20 terms, and aren't the best example, in fairness.I wonder why its so hard to get this one class right but others are relatively ok some even great, what is so special about the wizard?In fantasy, Merlin, Gandalf, Raistlin, Saruman, Morgana Le Fay, Bayaz, Circe, and the list of fantasy wizards could go on.Not really. They don't do a whole lot of healing or any of that. They are skilled at different types of magic. Gandalf and Saruman being more wizard-like. Radagast you could probably make a druid since he could talk to animals.
They were definitely known as wizards and practiced magic as a wizard learning spells like when Gandalf was searching his mind for opening spells.
Obviously, they were also likely Maia sent from up on high and that learned magic over their long lives.
It's not about their healing, it's the source of their magic. Really, they likely aren't any class, but NPCs with their own rules, and probably had been sent as the Five Guardians to protect the Elves before they were the Heren Istarion.
They were each direct servants of a Valar, which is where they got most of their powers - Gandalf Manwë and Varda, Saruman Aulë, Radagast Yavanna, and the Blue Wizards Oromë - which is why they aren't d20 Wizards to me, but Clerics if they needed to be mapped to a class, but again are probably NPCs since they hit so many boxes. Gandalf, notably, often directly fighting with a sword and staff than using any spell, or Saruman abandoning his way in favor of material craft and industrialization, or Radagast having more care for the natural world, animals, and plants.
They may have studied lore, but their magic was innate - and magic in Arda is very different from Golarion anyway. It was subtle, often unseen, and not very flashy. Tolkien himself also admitted he was probably too casual about the use of the word 'magic', or describing what it is.
(Gandalf does talk about 'spells in the tongues of Men, Elves, and Orcs' in the Fellowship, but Tolkien wrote later in a letter that 'a difference between the use of 'magic' in this story is that it is not to be come by 'lore' or spells; but it is an inherent power not possessed or attainable by Men as such.')
Whatever they might be, they aren't d20 Wizards to me, and trying to emulate any of them with the class is a fool's errand. More to the topic, it's like it was said above that I agree with - Wizard is really broad and unspecific, and difficult to satisfy all parties thoughts of what one is.
Gandalf, Saruman, and the Istari from LotR are really more Clerics than Wizards in d20 terms, and aren't the best example, in fairness.I wonder why its so hard to get this one class right but others are relatively ok some even great, what is so special about the wizard?In fantasy, Merlin, Gandalf, Raistlin, Saruman, Morgana Le Fay, Bayaz, Circe, and the list of fantasy wizards could go on.Not really. They don't do a whole lot of healing or any of that. They are skilled at different types of magic. Gandalf and Saruman being more wizard-like. Radagast you could probably make a druid since he could talk to animals.
They were definitely known as wizards and practiced magic as a wizard learning spells like when Gandalf was searching his mind for opening spells.
Obviously, they were also likely Maia sent from up on high and that learned magic over their long lives.
It's not about their healing, it's the source of their magic. Really, they likely aren't any class, but NPCs with their own rules, and probably had been sent as the Five Guardians to protect the Elves before they were the Heren Istarion.
They were each direct servants of a Valar, which is where they got most of their powers - Gandalf Manwë and Varda, Saruman Aulë, Radagast Yavanna, and the Blue Wizards Oromë - which is why they aren't d20 Wizards to me, but Clerics if they needed to be mapped to a class, but again are probably NPCs since they hit so many boxes. Gandalf, notably, often directly fighting with a sword and staff than using any spell, or Saruman abandoning his way in favor of material craft and industrialization, or Radagast having more care for the natural world, animals, and plants.
They may have studied lore, but their magic was innate - and magic in Arda is very different from Golarion anyway. It was subtle, often unseen, and not very flashy. Tolkien himself also admitted he was...
In the Tolkien world they were wizards and known to be enormously learned. His backstory for them is what you're talking about. But they practiced magic.
Merlin is the archetype of the wizard. Gandalf was Tolkien's take on Merlin.
World-based spins are irrelevant. For Tolkien's world, the Istari were wizards. You are wrong about where their power comes from. They learned magic in Middle Earth and practiced it learning it from various ancient traditions. That is why Gandalf is known to use spells he learned. Saruman also learned how to weave magic and send it against others. It was something learned, not something automatic.
Gandalf also drew power from the Ring of Fire made by Celembrimbor.
D&D wizards are drawn from various archetypes and given a D&D spin. They are still based on fantasy archetypes.
Clerics are based on priestly myth and legend, not wizardry.
Wizards stills stand at the top of the casting hierarchy in D&D just as they do in fantasy literature. This is the first edition of a D&D like game where wizards were a lower tier caster.
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I do think the point stands. In Tolkien's works, the five wizards are all servants of great angelic figures and their magic comes from their own divine nature, as well as their training. In the world of Earthsea, wizards are born with magical ability that they then train later, and similarly the wizard Merlin derives his own powers from his demon father. What counts as a wizard varies immensely from fiction to fiction, to the point where the similarities are often entirely aesthetic (i.e. pointy hat, magic, and a staff). Thus, there will inevitably be at least some players who won't find the exact Wizard they want, and that shouldn't be an obstacle to dig into the identity Paizo chose for their class, which is that of an arcane spellcaster whose magic derives entirely from study. That in and of itself is a rich identity to draw from, and part of the issue the Wizard has right now isn't so much that their core identity is lacking, but that their options only draw from an extremely limited facet of their identity, as opposed to a greater totality.
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If anything, Gandalf is closer to Odin than Merlin. Look at depictions of Odin and you'll see Gandalf is pretty much a 1:1. There's also a ton of norse-inspired things in LoTR so the paralalles to Odin are even more obvious. But regardless of that, I don't think Gandalf or the Istari are wizards, clerics, or any members of a particular class. They are closer to being pure divine beings like angels or azata. AKA they use monster creation rules.
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World-based spins are irrelevant. For Tolkien's world, the Istari were wizards. You are wrong about where their power comes from. They learned magic in Middle Earth and practiced it learning it from various ancient traditions. That is why Gandalf is known to use spells he learned. Saruman also learned how to weave magic and send it against others. It was something learned, not something automatic.
No, I'm not. I quoted the man himself. They are Ainur, and they have innate magic. Doubly so when they were the Five Guardians, and Morgoth and Sauron (also Ainur) had innate magic.
Men believed that they acquired it through study, but that was something that they permitted them to believe - Elrond, Círdan, and Galadriel were the only ones who knew the truth of their origin. There wasn't anyone to teach them magic, because the Ainur were the ones who taught the Elves much of their magic when they dwelt in Aman, and Men cannot weave magic in the same way. (Letter 155 puts forth that something like knowing the language of an animal would not be magic, but knowledgeable.)
Narya had the power to subtly allow people to resist tyranny, and the usual concealment by all except the One, and resistance against time - but anyone in Pathfinder can wear a magic ring, that's not the domain of any one class.
They are not Wizards as would be found in Pathfinder, and again, they would be more akin to NPCs with their own rules than any real class. I have long held that magic in Arda is a poor example for mainstay d20 magic systems because it functions fundamentally different and is a subtle thing, not as we know magic in these games.
If anything, Gandalf is closer to Odin than Merlin. Look at depictions of Odin and you'll see Gandalf is pretty much a 1:1. There's also a ton of norse-inspired things in LoTR so the paralalles to Odin are even more obvious. But regardless of that, I don't think Gandalf or the Istari are wizards, clerics, or any members of a particular class. They are closer to being pure divine beings like angels or azata. AKA they use monster creation rules.
Absolutely, yeah. I think it was a 1946 letter that Tolkien made the same point, calling him an 'Odinic wanderer' and his name comes from the Völuspá of the Elder Edda, where he took the names of the dwarves in The Hobbit from.
World-based spins are irrelevant. For Tolkien's world, the Istari were wizards. You are wrong about where their power comes from. They learned magic in Middle Earth and practiced it learning it from various ancient traditions. That is why Gandalf is known to use spells he learned. Saruman also learned how to weave magic and send it against others. It was something learned, not something automatic.No, I'm not. I quoted the man himself. They are Ainur, and they have innate magic. Doubly so when they were the Five Guardians, and Morgoth and Sauron (also Ainur) had innate magic.
Men believed that they acquired it through study, but that was something that they permitted them to believe - Elrond, Círdan, and Galadriel were the only ones who knew the truth of their origin. There wasn't anyone to teach them magic, because the Ainur were the ones who taught the Elves much of their magic when they dwelt in Aman, and Men cannot weave magic in the same way. (Letter 155 puts forth that something like knowing the language of an animal would not be magic, but knowledgeable.)
Narya had the power to subtly allow people to resist tyranny, and the usual concealment by all except the One, and resistance against time - but anyone in Pathfinder can wear a magic ring, that's not the domain of any one class.
They are not Wizards as would be found in Pathfinder, and again, they would be more akin to NPCs with their own rules than any real class. I have long held that magic in Arda is a poor example for mainstay d20 magic systems because it functions fundamentally different and is a subtle thing, not as we know magic in these games.
If anything, Gandalf is closer to Odin than Merlin. Look at depictions of Odin and you'll see Gandalf is pretty much a 1:1. There's also a ton of norse-inspired things in LoTR so the paralalles to Odin are even more obvious. But regardless of that, I don't think Gandalf or the Istari are wizards, clerics, or any members of...
The stuff you are quoting is not from the books. It's not even from the appendices. You are quoting material Tolkien wrote likely in his letters or the Histories of Middle Earth assembled from his notes by his son.
Gandalf was called a wizard in the The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings Books. So is Saruman.
And Tolkien changed his view of magic after he was told by a religious friend that sorcery was the work of The Devil. That's why you don't see the quotes you're using in Tolkien's base work because he later changed his mind of the reasoning behind the characters due to his religious beliefs.
Gandalf is and was a wizard, named so from The Hobbit.
Gandalf the Wizard.
He served exactly the same purpose a wizard serves in a story.
Once again, you're arguing different world building ideas rather than what was used in the story. How the magic works is less relevant than that it does work.
If you read Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring, Gandalf clearly talks about learning spells of opening. He also used Narya, The Ring of Fire, to do magic. He was highly learned and went often to the libraries of Minas Tirith to research the Elder Days.
I know you're pulling information in Tolkien's letters now which he changed at his whim if it did not suit his religious values. He contradicts part of his original creations on the material in his letters for reasons other than a consistent and good story.
We could go back and forth all day.
But I'm not going to spend my time on it.
Gandalf was a wizard. Named so in the books Gandalf the Wizard from his creation in The Hobbit.
If anything, Gandalf is closer to Odin than Merlin. Look at depictions of Odin and you'll see Gandalf is pretty much a 1:1. There's also a ton of norse-inspired things in LoTR so the paralalles to Odin are even more obvious. But regardless of that, I don't think Gandalf or the Istari are wizards, clerics, or any members of a particular class. They are closer to being pure divine beings like angels or azata. AKA they use monster creation rules.
Tolkien pulled from a lot of different past works and mythology. The Ring of Power was inspired by a poem about a great ring in the Elder Edda poem. He pulled names from the Elder Edda for dwarves to name many folks.
But it's also easy to see Welsh and Celtic myth like King Arthur was an influence given Aragorn and his sword reforged. A variation on pulling it from the stone and becoming worthy.
Tolkien liked to read a lot of stuff. He wanted to do a great story.
Lord of the Rings set the archetype for a lot of what we see in D&D and influenced Gary Gygax including The Wizard.
You also had influences from Jack Vance's Dying Earth series.
And the Elric series.
Gygax pulled from a lot of sources, Lord of the Rings being but one.
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Wait you mean all this time he wasn't just a angel pretending to be a wizard but a real wizard, I guess I have misjudged him he is back to being one of my favorite wizards.
No, he is an angel, effectively. Nothing Deriven said changes the fact that he is a Maia, a messenger of the Valar sent to aid the peoples of Middle-earth, with innate powers as an Ainur. You can't talk about Wizards in Arda and then not consider what magic is and what it means, and how it differs from what we view it in d20 games.
(In the 5E version of The One Ring, the only 'magic' you can do is maybe little things related to your culture - like Elves with lights - but its not spells, and in some cases is actually more 'knowledge' than anything magical. Arda's magic is fundamentally different, and you can't discount it when talking about Wizards.)
He was sent once before, to protect the Elves at Cuiviénen, and he wasn't in the guise of an old man then, and likely used his actual name - Olórin.
The Pathfinder Wizard has little to do with Gandalf at all - or any of the Istari - barring an aesthetic similarity, and even then, only if you make certain choices.
Like, there are times when Jedi are called 'Wizards' in Star Wars, but they aren't at all like Wizards in Pathfinder, either. Many others have already stated that the word itself is broad and that it has little identity on its own, and that Pathfinder's Wizard has its own identity that should be used to make the class unique.
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GameDesignerDM you just illustrated the reason explaining magic ruins it.
Wait you mean all this time he wasn't just a angel pretending to be a wizard but a real wizard, I guess I have misjudged him he is back to being one of my favorite wizards.The stuff you are quoting is not from the books. It's not even from the appendices. You are quoting material Tolkien wrote likely in his letters or the Histories of Middle Earth assembled from his notes by his son.
Gandalf was called a wizard in the The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings Books. So is Saruman.
And Tolkien changed his view of magic after he was told by a religious friend that sorcery was the work of The Devil. That's why you don't see the quotes you're using in Tolkien's base work because he later changed his mind of the reasoning behind the characters due to his religious beliefs.
Gandalf is and was a wizard, named so from The Hobbit.
Gandalf the Wizard.
He served exactly the same purpose a wizard serves in a story.
Once again, you're arguing different world building ideas rather than what was used in the story. How the magic works is less relevant than that it does work.
If you read Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring, Gandalf clearly talks about learning spells of opening. He also used Narya, The Ring of Fire, to do magic. He was highly learned and went often to the libraries of Minas Tirith to research the Elder Days.
I know you're pulling information in Tolkien's letters now which he changed at his whim if it did not suit his religious values. He contradicts part of his original creations on the material in his letters for reasons other than a consistent and good story.
We could go back and forth all day.
But I'm not going to spend my time on it.
Gandalf was a wizard. Named so in the books Gandalf the Wizard from his creation in The Hobbit.
Tolkien in his later years was highly influenced by his Catholic faith. This caused him to retcon some of his work after it was in print.
The original Gandalf was a wizard as told in The Hobbit. When The Hobbit was successful, Tolkien was asked to write another story. So he started to work on it developing ideas he had started in The Hobbit. He did a whole lot of world building and development over many years.
A lot of the information being used by GameMasterDM is pulled from his letters and likely The History of Middle Earth, a compendium of works edited by Christopher Tolkien after his father's passing because there was a demand for it.
Tolkien is the most influential fantasy writer in history. You can become a scholar of his work there is so much material. Most of this material did not make it into the final book.
In the books, Gandalf was a wizard. A learned wizard who knew magic, spells, and had traveled the world studying much of its lore. He learned elf magic, studied the magic of the Dark Lord, knew the magic of the Maia, and knew magic items when he saw them. He is the classic learned wizard wielding a wizard's staff along with his other magic items.
Tolkien's letters were him interacting with friends and fans musing on his work and providing insight or just saying, "I like that interpretation, go with that."
In the base work, Gandalf is a wizard. Probably the most influential wizard in fantasy history.
You can see multiple examples in the original works of Gandalf learning or speaking of learning magic.
1. At the gates of Moria, he talks of knowing man spells of opening. He just doesn't go to the doors, pray to Illuvatar, and the doors opened. He tried a bunch of what we would probably see as knock spells. Then figured out how the elf magic worked on the doors.
2. In The Hobbit he used almost illusion type of magic or invisibility to trick the trolls into staying in place until sunlight came and turned them to stone.
3. On the hilltop before Moria when fighting the warg pack, he called upon Narya, the Ring of Fire, to use fire magic to burn the wargs and drive them off.
4. Gandalf could speak to animals including insects when he sent the moth to tell Radagast to send word to help him at Orthanc.
5. Saruman of Many Colors used magic to seal him on top of the tower of Orthanc.
There were many examples of magic.
Gandalf was the classic example of the immortal wizard learned and powerful wielding his powerful staff.
No. He wasn't an angel pretending to be a wizard. He was a learned wizard who happened to also be an angel. Even in the book when Gandalf returns from the dead, he states he forgot who he was and was reminded after he died and was returned. That was more Tolkien integrating some of his Catholic faith into the story with a surprise resurrection.
It made for a great story.
First and foremost, Tolkien was telling a story. In that story Gandalf was a wizard. One of the greatest. The ancient learned wizard.
Suffice it to say nothing GamemasterDM has stated changes that Gandalf is the iconic fantasy wizard that highly influenced fantasy writers coming after and that D&D wizards are highly influenced by Gandalf including the classic staff and magic rings.
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Right there, with all these people arguing around Tolkien lore, is why the wizard image is probably embedded in so many players imagination. In most media, wizards - or those who wield supernatural powers, however you want to call them - are a cut above the rest. Be it Gandalf or Saruman, or Force users in Star Wars, or the Witch in Narnia, or - like someone said - Elric of Melnibone, it's the sorcery that sets them apart (well, that and Stormbringer but still, Elric is a potent alchemist and sorcerer in his own right). In DnD's own lore, Raistlin Majere comes to mind. And let's not talk about Harry Potter ^^
The first iterations of DnD tried to do the wizard figure justice, by making them incredibly weak at the beginning and unbearably powerful at the end - so that the other members of the group ended as mere sidekicks or guardians (like Raistlin's brother). But in the interest of balance and fairness, it got nerfed a lot, up to DnD 4th edition where all classes were deemed equal. People hated it and said it was too MMO to their liking, but still some sort of balance had been achieved.
The Pathfinder Wizard didn't come from DD4 but DD3.5, hence the power he still wielded in PF1. In PF2, he didn't get a nerf but more of a rehaul. He got significantly stronger at lower levels, a bit weaker at higher levels, and both DD5 and PF2 stopped the ludicrous buff-stacking that plagued DD3.5 and PF1. DD5 did this with the concentration mechanism, while PF2 simply removed most buffs or nerfed their duration or efficiency.
The wizard in PF1 was not especially more interesting than in PF2. It was actually very bland, with less features and feats, but people didn't complain about it because it was POWERFUL. And a lot of people like powerful characters, either because it fulfills their power fantasies, or because they want to be effective in their group (like the famous GodWizard from Treantmonk).
Now that the wizard is nowhere near as powerful as he used to be, designers have to replace this lack of power with flavor. Take the remastered witch, for instance. Except for resentment (and even so), it's still pretty weak - but it oozes flavor, and has very unique mechanisms that make it attractive. In the opposite direction, we have the oracle, who got hugely buffed (apart from Battle - press F to pay respect - and life/ancestors), but lost a lot of its flavor.
So I guess that's why there are so many threads and discussions about the wizard: it's lacking both in power - in comparison to other casters - and in flavor.
Compare to the sorcerer (I know, I know, I keep doing that ^^). It's mechanically more powerful, but also has more flavor and more specific mechanism. When you cast some spells, your own blood thrums and gives you bonuses that range from mostly useless to borderline broken. If you're a dragon sorcerer, you can breathe fire and fly; if you're a genie sorcerer, you can create illusions and warp wishes; if you're a nymph sorcerer, you can blind people with your beauty or use nature to punish them; if you're a hag sorcerer, you can frighten or even control them. If you're an aberrant sorcerer, you can grow tentacles and move your heart around in your body.
That's the kind of flavor that makes people smile. I know people who play hag sorcerers or aberrant sorcerers despite them having crappy spell lists, just because it's fun and a fresh experience.
Compare that to the current wizard, where you can choose a thesis (two out or five are good and actually give you a specific mechanism) and a school (that gives you basically nothing - the focus spells are mostly bad and bland).
- Hey, I'll be playing a Harrow Sorcerer, I'll be able to rewrite possibilities and destroy a target's future ! What about you ?
- Oh, err, I'll be playing a Battle wizard, I'll blend my slots so I have more of them and I can cast Force Bolt, go me.
The first iterations of DnD tried to do the wizard figure justice, by making them incredibly weak at the beginning and unbearably powerful at the end - so that the other members of the group ended as mere sidekicks or guardians (like Raistlin's brother). But in the interest of balance and fairness, it got nerfed a lot, up to DnD 4th edition where all classes were deemed equal. People hated it and said it was too MMO to their liking, but still some sort of balance had been achieved.
This isn't quite accurate IMO; D&D 1e and AD&D's Magic-User/Wizard were not only extremely limited -- once you cast a spell in 1e, that spell was gone forever -- the editions' other classes could do amazing stuff of their own like hold fortresses and raise armies. Your spells were terrifyingly powerful, but you could be cut down at any moment and your allies were formidable in their own right. It's only with the advent of D&D 3e, and specifically Monte Cook's ivory tower design and personal brand of spellcaster supremacism, that casters started to leave non-casters entirely in the dust, a problem every system descended from that edition struggles with to this day. A lot of the arguments for what a spellcaster feels like or should feel like, especially relative to the rest of the party, come from D&D 3.5e and Pathfinder 1e in online tabletop discussion, and in most other kinds of games, including video games, that kind of caster supremacism isn't really present in that same way.
My problem lies in what the wizard can do, regardless of their relative power level compared to on-level monsters and other players. By that, I mean the following: a Pathfinder 1e (PF1) wizard could use magic jar to possess a king and impersonate him. A Pathfinder 2e (PF2) wizard cannot do this because not only has the spell been removed, but even the duration of possession effects has been severely reduced.
Counter point:
In PF2, if a GM wants to play this way, they can have players use rituals to do things like possess a king, or they can even just have a kingdom where the king is 8 levels lower than the PCs and then the players can probably dominate/impersonate/imprison/etc. the local leader and accomplish pretty much the same thing narratively. What won't happen in PF2 is a Wizard player essentially dominating a higher level or on level King essentially forever, because of one low save roll.As a player of a wizard that possessed way more powerful creatures than I regularly in PF1, I recognize that that trivialized encounters way too often to be fun for everyone at the table to be a regular, 3-4 times a day tactic that I could use and very few enemies had a chance to save against because my DCs were absurd.
I think the decision to get away from that style of casting was very intentional and not something that a lot of players want to see come back/be a part of the narrative of "wizard." That is why I think fighter is a bad example to look at for what the wizard could be, and why I would strongly advocate against adding elements to it that bring those kind of options back.
EDIT: Specificially, I mean that "possess a king and take over their kingdom" is an NPC or solo player game. Not a party working together thing, especially not to be something that happens with daily rechargeable resources.
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Right there, with all these people arguing around Tolkien lore, is why the wizard image is probably embedded in so many players imagination. In most media, wizards - or those who wield supernatural powers, however you want to call them - are a cut above the rest. Be it Gandalf or Saruman, or Force users in Star Wars, or the Witch in Narnia, or - like someone said - Elric of Melnibone, it's the sorcery that sets them apart (well, that and Stormbringer but still, Elric is a potent alchemist and sorcerer in his own right). In DnD's own lore, Raistlin Majere comes to mind. And let's not talk about Harry Potter ^^
The first iterations of DnD tried to do the wizard figure justice, by making them incredibly weak at the beginning and unbearably powerful at the end - so that the other members of the group ended as mere sidekicks or guardians (like Raistlin's brother). But in the interest of balance and fairness, it got nerfed a lot, up to DnD 4th edition where all classes were deemed equal. People hated it and said it was too MMO to their liking, but still some sort of balance had been achieved.
The Pathfinder Wizard didn't come from DD4 but DD3.5, hence the power he still wielded in PF1. In PF2, he didn't get a nerf but more of a rehaul. He got significantly stronger at lower levels, a bit weaker at higher levels, and both DD5 and PF2 stopped the ludicrous buff-stacking that plagued DD3.5 and PF1. DD5 did this with the concentration mechanism, while PF2 simply removed most buffs or nerfed their duration or efficiency.
The wizard in PF1 was not especially more interesting than in PF2. It was actually very bland, with less features and feats, but people didn't complain about it because it was POWERFUL. And a lot of people like powerful characters, either because it fulfills their power fantasies, or because they want to be effective in their group (like the famous GodWizard from Treantmonk).
Now that the wizard is nowhere near as powerful as he used to be, designers have to replace this lack of power with...
I'm one of the old players that read Lord of the Rings, King Arthur, and the like before D&D existed. My father bought me the D&D box because of my love of fantasy fiction rather than me starting to love fantasy fiction because of D&D.
I know Tolkien well. He is my favorite author and those are my favorite books. I've read The Hobbit, The Simarilion, and The Lord of the Rings as well as some of the histories and his letters.
It's why when someone is pulling random, disjointed material not in the source material because he's doing online searches or maybe read some of Tolkien's letter collections, it makes me roll my eyes because the books are the books and most readers won't have any knowledge of the information GameMasterGM posted. For all they can tell Gandalf is a wizard as that is how he is portrayed in Middle Earth along with all the magical creatures like dragons.
It was obvious from the beginning of D&D that Gygax and the other creators were heavily influenced by Tolkien's work when creating D&D. His wasn't the only work, but definitely one of the strongest influences in the game's creation.
What do you mean by the wizard was bland?
1. Wizard schools provided a 1st level ability, 8th level, and usually a powerful 20th level ability.
2. They received bonus feats with metamagic and crafting when those feats were powerful.
3. Feats like Spell Specialization and Spell Perfection allowed for very well developed spell strategies.
I felt like building a wizard in PF1 was an involved process that was a lot of fun. I rarely saw Universalists played because the schools were compelling and fun with abilities that felt appropriate, had progression, and enhanced the school specialization.
That's more what I'm looking for. A PF2 wizard where the school feels impactful and is fun to build and play.
Why did you find the PF1 wizard so boring?
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I do think the point stands. In Tolkien's works, the five wizards are all servants of great angelic figures and their magic comes from their own divine nature, as well as their training. In the world of Earthsea, wizards are born with magical ability that they then train later, and similarly the wizard Merlin derives his own powers from his demon father. What counts as a wizard varies immensely from fiction to fiction, to the point where the similarities are often entirely aesthetic (i.e. pointy hat, magic, and a staff). Thus, there will inevitably be at least some players who won't find the exact Wizard they want, and that shouldn't be an obstacle to dig into the identity Paizo chose for their class, which is that of an arcane spellcaster whose magic derives entirely from study. That in and of itself is a rich identity to draw from, and part of the issue the Wizard has right now isn't so much that their core identity is lacking, but that their options only draw from an extremely limited facet of their identity, as opposed to a greater totality.
and more to the point sorcery is almost always associated with learned magic in fantasy media EXCEPT d20 fantasy. Which really just consists of two games. Dark Souls sorcerers are intelligence based studious practitioners of magic, Diablo same deal, Rune Quest has editions where sorcery is the learned magic and so on. It's extremely rare that the word "sorcery" refers to innate magic
I appreciate that for you, R3st8, possession/magic jar was a defining style of play for a wizard, but mechanically it was absolutely terrible for the game, so the "possessing the King" vs. Dominating or even entrapping and disguising oneself as the King feels pretty identical to me from a narrative perspective.
Mechanically, possession was terrible because it was just taking on powerful battle forms that you could abuse into the ground and then just reappear afterwards at full health. It is just not compatible with PF2 mechanics.
PF2 is full of opportunities to plan heists and infiltrations by using a carefully curated spell list. Many APs include exactly such scenarios and "dungeons" in them. Spells don't solve the entire thing by themselves nearly as often, by design, and skills have been improved to give other classes better opportunities to participate in them.
I played the PF1 wizard who spied out the entire dungeon in advance and then invisibly and silently (as in using silent spell metamagic to cast my dimensional door spell on the party that was already prebuffed with the silence spell to shut down enemy casters) teleported the entire party right in on top of the dungeon boss, possessing any obvious brute creature that would have a bad will save, and often be as good at fighting as the paladin in the party. It was fun for a little while, but it absolutely ruined the game for the GM and the rest of the party just pretty much sat around waiting for me to come up with the plan to push the adventure win button every time. I strongly believe that is a bad model for what players should expect a PC wizard to do in the game.
You keep saying it is about the fantasy of being able to be a caster who can possess enemies, but that spell is even still in the game and with a high level difference it is pretty likely to get the critical failure result. It just has an incredibly short range and duration, so it is not going to be used to completely bypass entire dungeons, and it is going to be too difficult to use to grab a combat body that becomes problematic in play. It is also not house-ruling anything to have the players decide this is really important to them and the adventure that they are in, and letting them find and plan out how to cast a wish ritual to cast a specific spell, but with an extended duration. It is just not going to be something that the players can reliably count on doing over and over again in a campaign, which is why the possession and greater possession spells in PF1 were so problematic.
I appreciate that for you, R3st8, possession/magic jar was a defining style of play for a wizard, but mechanically it was absolutely terrible for the game, so the "possessing the King" vs. Dominating or even entrapping and disguising oneself as the King feels pretty identical to me from a narrative perspective.
Mechanically, possession was terrible because it was just taking on powerful battle forms that you could abuse into the ground and then just reappear afterwards at full health. It is just not compatible with PF2 mechanics.
PF2 is full of opportunities to plan heists and infiltrations by using a carefully curated spell list. Many APs include exactly such scenarios and "dungeons" in them. Spells don't solve the entire thing by themselves nearly as often, by design, and skills have been improved to give other classes better opportunities to participate in them.
I played the PF1 wizard who spied out the entire dungeon in advance and then invisibly and silently (as in using silent spell metamagic to cast my dimensional door spell on the party that was already prebuffed with the silence spell to shut down enemy casters) teleported the entire party right in on top of the dungeon boss, possessing any obvious brute creature that would have a bad will save, and often be as good at fighting as the paladin in the party. It was fun for a little while, but it absolutely ruined the game for the GM and the rest of the party just pretty much sat around waiting for me to come up with the plan to push the adventure win button every time. I strongly believe that is a bad model for what players should expect a PC wizard to do in the game.
You keep saying it is about the fantasy of being able to be a caster who can possess enemies, but that spell is even still in the game and with a high level difference it is pretty likely to get the critical failure result. It just has an incredibly short range and duration, so it is not going to be used to completely bypass entire dungeons, and it is going to be too...
Domination, charm, and summoning were way too powerful in PF1.
Summoning is too weak in PF2.
Domination and charm seem mostly fine in this edition. The PF1/3E dominating super powerful monsters and such was not balanced at all.
(OK you could ground up build a TTRPG with, IDK, mental HP and stuff and where dying or not possessing your body doesn't prevent you from acting such that getting possessed is bad in the way getting stuck in acid fog is bad currently, but as anyone who's ever played Book 5 of Extinction Curse knows it really doesn't work that way)
I mean, you might be onto something. It doesn't wholly solve the issue, but if you make it so a possession spell does some small to moderate amount of mental damage, and then only has a chance of possessing the enemy if you would reduce their HP to zero with nonlethal damage, it would mean possessing a creature would require whole team contribution—a huge step up.
If you then limit it to no more than a minute or ten afterwards, and bring the enemy back up with a low amount of HP, it would probably still feel alright for the wizard without the wizard outdoing the party too terribly.
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The Pathfinder Wizard has little to do with Gandalf at all
TBH one of the weird quirks of the PF/D&D wizard is that it has little to do with anything other than its own history.
There's no wizard in fiction (ironically sometimes even true of explicitly D&D/PF fiction) that resembles the D&D wizard in any way. Even spellcasters from Vance's books, the namesake of Vancian magic, don't actually really resemble the modern D&D/PF wizard in any meaningful way (fwiw the ranger and druid are also kind of in this same space).
The class is just kind of a tangled knot of self-referentialisms that leave it in this very weird and always problematic design space.
There's nothing wrong with something being wholly its own thing disconnected from other references but it is sort of weird that the Wizard spends so much time masquerading as a cornerstone archetype when in reality any attempts to connect it to anything outside its own legacy is an exercise in frustration.
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I do think that the question of what a Wizard is or should be could become much easier to answer in a game system where thematic casters were much more common, or even the norm. PF2e isn't a game that accommodates thematic casters super-well for the most part, and when people expect one, many will turn to the Wizard despite the Wizard being arguably the least specialized caster in the game. Part of that I think comes from the Wizard in past editions being able to spec into a specific school of magic, and part of it I think is that the Wizard is such a nebulous term outside of the TTRPG space that most fictional mages get lumped in as Wizards. In a game that had a dedicated illusionist, a dedicated necromancer (which we're getting!), and perhaps a few more casters that broach a theme normally covered by the Wizard, the Wizard could stand out specifically as the kind of class that can cover multiple basis at some tradeoff. I don't think this necessarily means making a brand-new class for every OGL school of magic, as I don't personally think there's that much narrative meat to a dedicated evoker or abjurer class besides a runelord, but it could certainly help the Wizard if they didn't try to carve lots of niches at once, nor were expected to satisfy a playerbase's desire for both extreme specialization and extreme versatility.
The Pathfinder Wizard has little to do with Gandalf at allTBH one of the weird quirks of the PF/D&D wizard is that it has little to do with anything other than its own history.
There's no wizard in fiction (ironically sometimes even true of explicitly D&D/PF fiction) that resembles the D&D wizard in any way. Even spellcasters from Vance's books, the namesake of Vancian magic, don't actually really resemble the modern D&D/PF wizard in any meaningful way (fwiw the ranger and druid are also kind of in this same space).
The class is just kind of a tangled knot of self-referentialisms that leave it in this very weird and always problematic design space.
There's nothing wrong with something being wholly its own thing disconnected from other references but it is sort of weird that the Wizard spends so much time masquerading as a cornerstone archetype when in reality any attempts to connect it to anything outside its own legacy is an exercise in frustration.
This I can agree with. There are elements of various wizards/magic users in the idea of the wizard, but they vary greatly.
Classic learned wizard with staff is very Gandalf.
Vancian Magic is Dying Earth Jack Vance.
Elemental Planes and Chaos and Law is very Elric of Melnibone.
Then put the D&D spin on it for balance and game mechanics, you get a D&D/PF1 wizard.
That's why in the early D&D books there are a bunch of references to source material listed in the back. Great list for reading if you love to read fantasy. Gygax obviously loved the fantasy genre in all its forms and loved mythology.
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'sustain" effect should be the equivalent of a martial's MAP attackAnd is a summon's attack equivalent to a martial's MAP attack?
It would likely be lower for a creature that many CR behind.
They staggered the CR. So a level 2 summon can summon a level 1 creature. You can cast the level 2 summon at level 3. So the creature is a few levels behind at level 3.
By the time you're level 18, you can summon a level 13 creature with a level 9 spell. A level 13 creature is 5 levels behind the party. The gap between what can be summoned grows wider as you level and the lower CR creatures become a joke to the stuff you're fighting.
I think they set the level gap too wide in a game where level is everything to game balance. You're in essence summoning a creature that would be trivial and no experience for your party to defeat to fight creatures that are built to be hard to defeat for an entire party.
A CR-2 enemy may be easy to beat for a party, but the monster is still a challenge that provides xp for a high level group of PCs. So its AC, defenses, hit points and the like are set high enough to threaten. But when you summon a creature, you're getting 3 to 5 or more levels difference depending on if you're fighting a CR-2 or a CR+2 or higher boss type.
The level gap is set too high. It makes the summons become progressively less helpful even as they appear to become stronger. But saving throws for their abilities are trivial and their attack rolls are so low as to not be a threat to what you're fighting. Then couple that with defenses so low that every aura or attack is a crit fail or crit hit. This makes summons progressively weaker and less useful while requiring a higher resource spell slot for level equivalent summons.
Summons missed the mark on the underpowered side of balance.
At the highest levels the "summoning spells" are the incarnate spells. Heightening any summon 4 or 5 ranks is going to be about as effective as heightening any other spell that many ranks.
At the highest levels the "summoning spells" are the incarnate spells. Heightening any summon 4 or 5 ranks is going to be about as effective as heightening any other spell that many ranks.
Incarnate spells a real mixed bag. I don't think I've used one.
I don't think heightening a summon spell is as effective as heightening any other spell. Summon spells in particular grow specifically weaker if used for battle as you get higher level.
That's why divine summons are the best because they have the most access to summons that can cast useful spells when combat summons to attack enemies become pretty useless. A summon to access a bunch of spells like heals or haste or some other useful effect is still useful even if the attacks do nearly nothing.
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This isn't quite accurate IMO; D&D 1e and AD&D's Magic-User/Wizard were not only extremely limited -- once you cast a spell in 1e, that spell was gone forever -- the editions' other classes could do amazing stuff of their own like hold fortresses and raise armies. Your spells were terrifyingly powerful, but you could be cut down at any moment and your allies were formidable in their own right. It's only with the advent of D&D 3e, and specifically Monte Cook's ivory tower design and personal brand of spellcaster supremacism, that casters started to leave non-casters entirely in the dust, a problem every system descended from that edition struggles with to this day. A lot of the arguments for what a spellcaster feels like or should feel like, especially relative to the rest of the party, come from D&D 3.5e and Pathfinder 1e in online tabletop discussion, and in most other kinds of games, including video games, that kind of caster supremacism isn't really present in that same way.
I admit I'm not familiar with D&D1, so I'll take your word for it.
I started with ADD where the wizard already had the power fantasy of being incredibly fragile, incredibly weak at low levels, and incredibly powerful at higher levels with spells like wish, time stop, imprisonment and the like. These rulesets have been known to a lot of players thanks to BG and BG2, where wizards (and especially sorcerers - already - since a lot of spells were taken out of the game) ruled supreme.
At the same time, a lot of other TTRPGs of the 80s leaned into this fantasy of the wizard starting weak and ending up incredibly strong. Take Warhammer 2nd edition, for instance, where a wizard apprentice cannot do much except protect himself from the rain (that was a true spell) but could end up burning enemies to a crisp with fireballs or creating entire armies out of thin air through illusion. Take Rolemaster, aka the Needlessly Complicated Nerdy System, where magic was so powerful at higher levels it could derail an entire game. Take Stormbringer, the game based on Moorcock's books, where sorcerers could annihilate opponents through gory rituals. Take Runequest, Dragonquest (though it could backfire quite often). There were even games built around being an all-powerful wizard, like Ars Magica or (with a twist) Mage from WoD.
Actually, the only game I played where wizards weren't the top dog was Shadowrun (and even so, they were pretty competitive ^^).
So this idea of the wizard starting weak then trivializing games and fights didn't originate from 3.5 and PF1 but was already in the DNA of TTRPGs right from the start.
What do you mean by the wizard was bland?
1. Wizard schools provided a 1st level ability, 8th level, and usually a powerful 20th level ability.
2. They received bonus feats with metamagic and crafting when those feats were powerful.
3. Feats like Spell Specialization and Spell Perfection allowed for very well developed spell strategies.
I felt like building a wizard in PF1 was an involved process that was a lot of fun. I rarely saw Universalists played because the schools were compelling and fun with abilities that felt appropriate, had progression, and enhanced the school specialization.
Wizard was bland because its schools and feats were bland. When you built a wizard, you usually went with all the DC-augmenting feats like spell focus and greater, spell specialization and metamagic feats, maybe augment conjuration and its feat line, but none of them had any flavor nor allowed you to change what your wizard was doing, it was only numerical.
"I get +1 to my DC."
"I can heighten my spell"
"I can empower my spell".
"My spell's numerical variables are 2 higher than normal"
So if we look at it honestly, nothing was particularly exciting, new or original. What was great was the spells, and the power that came with it. You could specialize hard in some spells, and the game rewarded you for it.
As for universalists, most players I know did indeed choose a school, not because schools were great - but because it gave them 1 more spell of every level, and that's something you couldn't pass up. You gimped yourself pretty hard being an universalist, even if you had no opposition school.
A lot of monsters are on fighter attack bonus progression, not standard martial progression.
A level 20 wizard with a basically runed up staff, and a +4 STR would be making an attack with a staff at about +31 for about 4d8+6 damage.
A level 15 animated colossus (really available at level 19, when the wizard probably wouldn't have a greater striking rune) has a +32 for 3d12+17 damage.
So a max rank summon construct can give a caster a creature probably 1 to 6 or maybe even 7 points of attack better than their own weapon attack would be, and is probably 3 points of attack behind a standard martial of that level.
Is that worth a top rank spell? It probably won't do as much damage as a rank 9 summon draconic legion, but it is a pretty bulky battlefield ally with a significant attack.
This isn't quite accurate IMO; D&D 1e and AD&D's Magic-User/Wizard were not only extremely limited -- once you cast a spell in 1e, that spell was gone forever -- the editions' other classes could do amazing stuff of their own like hold fortresses and raise armies. Your spells were terrifyingly powerful, but you could be cut down at any moment and your allies were formidable in their own right. It's only with the advent of D&D 3e, and specifically Monte Cook's ivory tower design and personal brand of spellcaster supremacism, that casters started to leave non-casters entirely in the dust, a problem every system descended from that edition struggles with to this day. A lot of the arguments for what a spellcaster feels like or should feel like, especially relative to the rest of the party, come from D&D 3.5e and Pathfinder 1e in online tabletop discussion, and in most other kinds of games, including video games, that kind of caster supremacism isn't really present in that same way.I admit I'm not familiar with D&D1, so I'll take your word for it.
I started with ADD where the wizard already had the power fantasy of being incredibly fragile, incredibly weak at low levels, and incredibly powerful at higher levels with spells like wish, time stop, imprisonment and the like. These rulesets have been known to a lot of players thanks to BG and BG2, where wizards (and especially sorcerers - already - since a lot of spells were taken out of the game) ruled supreme.
At the same time, a lot of other TTRPGs of the 80s leaned into this fantasy of the wizard starting weak and ending up incredibly strong. Take Warhammer 2nd edition, for instance, where a wizard apprentice cannot do much except protect himself from the rain (that was a true spell) but could end up burning enemies to a crisp with fireballs or creating entire armies out of thin air through illusion. Take Rolemaster, aka the Needlessly Complicated Nerdy System, where magic was so powerful at higher levels it could...
I thought the schools how powerful powers myself.
You pretty much described all casters. All martials were the same as well pursuing the number feats first.
Metamagic feats made some pretty interesting builds.
I didn't find PF1 wizards boring myself. I thought the schools were good, metamagic good, and the feat selections felt impactful.
Every class was trying to drive their numbers up. I liked that there was power attack for martials and empower and maximize or intensify for casters.
I did all kinds of interesting builds with wizards. The conjuration school felt powerful, evocation, enchantment, heck, nearly every school felt powerful and interesting, especially compared to PF2.
Though if you wanted to be a pure magic damage dealer, hard to beat the orc bloodline sorcerer mixed with some crossblood damage booster. Just brutal damage.
Wizard truly was far more versatile than the sorcerer in PF1 and it wasn't even close.
A lot of monsters are on fighter attack bonus progression, not standard martial progression.
A level 20 wizard with a basically runed up staff, and a +4 STR would be making an attack with a staff at about +31 for about 4d8+6 damage.
A level 15 animated colossus (really available at level 19, when the wizard probably wouldn't have a greater striking rune) has a +32 for 3d12+17 damage.
So a max rank summon construct can give a caster a creature probably 1 to 6 or maybe even 7 points of attack better than their own weapon attack would be, and is probably 3 points of attack behind a standard martial of that level.
Is that worth a top rank spell? It probably won't do as much damage as a rank 9 summon draconic legion, but it is a pretty bulky battlefield ally with a significant attack.
Rank 9 draconic legion. Try a rank 9 phantom orchestra for continued sustain damage. It won't equal that at all.
+32 to hit is insufficient for melee attacks.
The entire reason people complain about spell attack rolls is the +33 you get to hit is insufficient for CR equal to CR+4.
Then the fact that a summon has such weak defenses they get absolutely destroyed by any AOE, physical attack, aura, gaze, or the like.
They're just bad. I don't know why you defend them. They're a bad use of resources because the summons are insufficient to be useful. Even lower CR creatures would rip through them if they stood in the way.
I'd rather have templated creatures than the current system.
Why on Golarion would I be trying to use a summon spell offensively against a CR+4 creature? Of course I wouldn't. People were asking about how effective the attack from a summon could be at the extreme ends of the game. The answer is "better than your own weapon attacks and probably better than a standard martial's second attack." So probably not as bad as people tend to make it out to be.
I don't personally tend to use summons at the highest levels of the game except in situations where the party is facing an army of lower level monsters and the extra big body will usefully help control the battlefield, but I have had players use them a lot and in parties that do lots of area of effect buffing, they have been decently effective. At lower levels, summons tend to be excellent. A level -1 Flash beetle has a +8 to attack and a one action DC 17 dazzle for a minute effect.
I tend to prioritize up front damage over sustained damage. Draconic Legion can be pretty devastating against creatures with bad reflex saves or exploitable energy weaknesses. So I would probably have prepared it instead of a summon, even given the kind of situation where the summon would have been useful. Higher rank spells tend to be better than heightened lower ones, except in very specific circumstances. I'd definitely rather have Draconic Legion memorized than heightening Phantom Orchestra on most of my wizards, but would be even more likely to have phantasmagoria memorized if I was walking into an enemy fort or base where we were going to be pulling multiple lower threat encounters into one big encounter.
However, with the threat of a CR+4 boss monster in the area, I have probably already cast that rank 9 spell slot on Foresight, and then the only other rank 9 spell I am casting in that boss fight is power word kill as a third action auto damage option.
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You pretty much described all casters. All martials were the same as well pursuing the number feats first.
Metamagic feats made some pretty interesting builds.
I didn't find PF1 wizards boring myself. I thought the schools were good, metamagic good, and the feat selections felt impactful.
Yeah, that's my point: all casters had bland features, BECAUSE it was offset by incredible spells that could be combined into awesome things. You felt useful, you felt powerful, and everybody was looking at you for answers when things were rough.
I remember a game where my wizard was all out of spells when a friend fell from a cliff to a certain death. I jumped after him, reached him and shouted "strangle me !". He did, and the contingency I set on "whenever I'm grappled, cast dimension door" put us to safety. Ten years later, we still talk about this epic moment.
In PF2E, spells have been seriously toned down (although they got an effect on a successful save as a trade-off), buffs have been butchered and save DCs are pretty much the same for everyone (which is why ancestral memories is so powerful).
So, in PF1 spells were awesome and features were bland. Now that spells are bland, features need to be awesome.
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I do think spells in PF2e are still awesome enough that having lots of them crowds out access to impactful features, and that's a problem with most casters. The Wizard just happens to be one of those worst affected, because a huge part of their power was put into their spell list at the start of the game's development, rather than the class itself. Had the arcane list been made much narrower, and the Wizard been given much meatier class features that gave them access to more spells, they probably wouldn't feel as milquetoast as they do now, and this could've benefited other arcane casters too by affording them even stronger mechanics.
The way I see it, every spell is basically a feat you only get to use once per day. If you're a spontaneous caster, you get to use it and other feats more than once per day, but still a limited number of times and by drawing from the same pool, and if you're a prepared caster, you need to take that "feat" additional times to use it more than once, but then also get to retrain that feat to something else the next day. Not only that, but you get many more of these "feats" than actual class feats, so in this context, spells represent quite a lot of power. In the case of the Wizard or any prepared arcane caster, you get to choose a pool out of hundreds of these pseudo-feats, which despite the limitations of a spellbook still represents a lot of versatility... but also means that whenever the time comes to designing an actual feat, it's going to be difficult to design one that isn't basically just a spell, i.e. a more rigid version of something you can already select and wouldn't be able to retrain as easily. Part of the problem is that because feats and spells are separate, and players treat these as entirely different things while expecting feats to be substantial in their own right, treating every potentially interesting feat you could have as a spell means you end up with only a limited number of feats you can work with, for the most part. Because most of these feats tend to operate on a meta level for the Wizard, i.e. by giving you more spell slots or occasionally giving you a spellshape, it's difficult to carve out an identity through feats, rather than through spell selection.
This is more a thing for 3e, but I think that in a world where spells and feats were the same thing, like with the Kineticist, this kind of distinction would vanish, and casters would have a much easier time defining their identity and feeling like they're making impactful build choices, even if they wouldn't necessarily resemble the casters we have in 2e. You could even still have spell slots in that framework, as it's fairly easy to turn a feat-based magic-user into a slot-based caster, and certainly easier to do than the reverse. In a framework where every magic-user is a little bit narrower by default, the Wizard could truly shine as an exceptionally versatile character, as opposed to right now where their versatile access to the arcane list isn't dramatically different from that of a Witch, or any other prepared arcane caster.
Actually, the only game I played where wizards weren't the top dog was Shadowrun (and even so, they were pretty competitive ^^).
That depends on which version of the Shadowrun rules you were playing. A Shadowrun first edition hermetic mage or shaman could be a powerhouse that would run roughshod over most non-magical encounters. Especially with the expanded rules in The Grimoire.
They got hit with the nerf bat in later editions.
You pretty much described all casters. All martials were the same as well pursuing the number feats first.
Metamagic feats made some pretty interesting builds.
I didn't find PF1 wizards boring myself. I thought the schools were good, metamagic good, and the feat selections felt impactful.
Yeah, that's my point: all casters had bland features, BECAUSE it was offset by incredible spells that could be combined into awesome things. You felt useful, you felt powerful, and everybody was looking at you for answers when things were rough.
I remember a game where my wizard was all out of spells when a friend fell from a cliff to a certain death. I jumped after him, reached him and shouted "strangle me !". He did, and the contingency I set on "whenever I'm grappled, cast dimension door" put us to safety. Ten years later, we still talk about this epic moment.
In PF2E, spells have been seriously toned down (although they got an effect on a successful save as a trade-off), buffs have been butchered and save DCs are pretty much the same for everyone (which is why ancestral memories is so powerful).
So, in PF1 spells were awesome and features were bland. Now that spells are bland, features need to be awesome.
The spells were great. That was definitely part of the fun of playing a wizard or caster was sifting the spellbooks for great combinations.
I did like metamagic allowed me to customize spells further unlike now.
I liked the school powers. Divination was considered vastly overpowered due to the initiative bonus, but it did make you feel like you had real insight into future acting so quickly.
I thought little boosts like that made schools feel like they provided real, impactful bonuses associated with the type of magic they studied. They don't feel that way much at all now.
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I do think that the question of what a Wizard is or should be could become much easier to answer in a game system where thematic casters were much more common, or even the norm. PF2e isn't a game that accommodates thematic casters super-well for the most part, and when people expect one, many will turn to the Wizard despite the Wizard being arguably the least specialized caster in the game. Part of that I think comes from the Wizard in past editions being able to spec into a specific school of magic, and part of it I think is that the Wizard is such a nebulous term outside of the TTRPG space that most fictional mages get lumped in as Wizards. In a game that had a dedicated illusionist, a dedicated necromancer (which we're getting!), and perhaps a few more casters that broach a theme normally covered by the Wizard, the Wizard could stand out specifically as the kind of class that can cover multiple basis at some tradeoff. I don't think this necessarily means making a brand-new class for every OGL school of magic, as I don't personally think there's that much narrative meat to a dedicated evoker or abjurer class besides a runelord, but it could certainly help the Wizard if they didn't try to carve lots of niches at once, nor were expected to satisfy a playerbase's desire for both extreme specialization and extreme versatility.
My ideal solution is that we get classes like Necromancer, Illusionist/Mesmer, Warmage whatever, and those are all specific classes with bespoke feats, but they are all under a "super class" of "wizard" which would be a list of feats across all of these thematic specialized wizards. Wizard itself would not be a class, and you couldn't take multiclass dedications of other wizard classes except by variant rule. These classes can have different baseline abilities, not have to reprint feats such as quicken spell and effortless concentration in a book saving space, and they could use different tradition's spell lists if that makes sense for them
My ideal solution is that we get classes like Necromancer, Illusionist/Mesmer, Warmage whatever, and those are all specific classes with bespoke feats, but they are all under a "super class" of "wizard" which would be a list of feats across all of these thematic specialized wizards. Wizard itself would not be a class, and you couldn't take multiclass dedications of other wizard classes except by variant rule. These classes can have different baseline abilities, not have to reprint feats such as quicken spell and effortless concentration in a book saving space, and they could use different tradition's spell lists if that makes sense for them
I like that! That reminds me a bit of the Wizard in AD&D, where you had dedicated classes and the Mage as a generalist. I'm all for having many more shared feats; there's plenty of feats for one kind of caster that would work very well for another, and it if means giving those classes access to more options, all the better.
With regards to the Wizard we have now, what surprises me is how there isn't any feat that lets you opt into a different arcane school: it's not just that this leaves a clear mechanical gap where you can't get more than 2 focus spells without an archetype, you'd think that being an exchange student or the like would be just about the most obvious narrative justification for having a second school-based subclass. Obviously, opting into another school shouldn't give you an extra spell slot or more uses of Drain Bonded Item, but it could certainly shake things up by letting Wizards branch into different school spells, and perhaps add another school's curriculum to their own in order to broaden the use of their fourth slot via an additional feat.
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I Have more experience with higher level games. Summons are ok to around level 10 for combat. Divine summons can be good to higher level due to the extra spellpower it provides. Summon Fey and Undead can too.
Summoning a Meladaemon to cast 2 action 5th level magic missile for 6d6+6 guaranteed every round is well worth the sustain action, especially if you have effortless concentration. Is it what you want to be able to do with a summon? Maybe not. Is it highly effective? Yep.
Yet only divine can cast summon fiend.
Wizard could cast summon undead and summon a ghost mage or maybe a lich.