User talk:ErikOfWiki/Mage (3.5e Alternate Class Feature)

Advice

I suggest to move this article to something like Mage before putting it on the main page, as it's not complete. I promise to look into it though. --The bluez in the dungeon (talk) 21:06, 24 November 2022 (UTC)

- Ah, I didn't know the process. I think I moved it correctly. --ErikOfWiki

Big critique I have received so far is that universal is still just better than specialist. It's really hard to give something that is better than just having all schools, and I don't want to just amp up specialists to be better than bog standard generalists since the idea isn't to make wizards even more powerful. And reducing generalist spells per day doesn't work since it just forces the party to slow down to the wizard's rest schedule. So I may need to just remove the Universalist option entirely.

Same critic complained that illusionist is far and away too good compared to the rest if generalist is off the table. Which is... fair. I am struggling with finding a proper balance to make specialization more appealing than even a modicum of versatility.

So I removed the universal options and limited the benefit of masquerade school to only benefit cantrips for illusionists. --ErikOfWiki

As you no doubt noticed I've tweaked quite a bit of it. The 1st level innate powers are written and uploaded. I have not written the 10th level spells, which are going to be tougher since it's hard to nail the balance point of something that's near a 9th level spell. I'm not actually going to try to make them *stronger* than 9th level spells since just having more options is already a power-up, and with the +1 level restriction for non-school spells I would expect many mages would want to use their 10th level slot to do a 9th level spell from another school anyway. I'm also not sure how the wiki will handle a level of slots that doesn't exist in the game proper.

I have struggled on a more intrinsic level whether dissecting wizards into essentially 8 separate classes is a worthy endeavor or even good game design. I have concern that if you have two specialists of the same school it could be almost as bad as having 2 bards where the overlap is a problem. And some schools have more legs than others for sure.

Diviner and Abjurer have very limited offensive capabilities. I'll probably need to write more spells to bridge that gap, which shouldn't be hard since they both have obvious areas that have been largely neglected (low-level insight combat bonuses for divination, and low-level retributive defenses for abjuration).

I may adjust the class features to include one which will help them qualify for pre-reqs the a core prestige classes (probably will have 4 choices: arcane trickster, eldritch knight, mystic theurge, lore master). Anywho, I want to see how it works, so I'm still invested in this plan. --ErikOfWiki