Wild Mage Casting Level

Glidderdust

I noticed some people don't like the wild mage class because of the random castings that might kill charname. Other people seem to love it.

The issue I had was the random casting levels. For instance, many years ago I played a wild mage with Jan as the backup caster through the underdark. I found that Jan was doing more damage with fireball than the wild mage was doing with skull trap even though fireball caps at 10d6 damage. The wild mage would be level 12 or 13 and it always seemed like I was getting a message that the mage was receiving a 5 level penalty more than a 5 level bonus.

It was also frustrating with spells like dispel and remove magic. In the end I stopped the game because the lack of consistency was frustrating.

Why are people saying Wild Mages are more powerful than conjurers or sorcerers?

elminster

Its likely because Reckless Dweomer lets you attempt to cast spells that you've learned even if you can't normally cast them. Plus while using it you ignore the normal restriction that limits you to one spell/round (which you otherwise can't avoid unless Improved Alacrity is active). It also takes up only a level 1 spell slot.

You are also a specialist mage (meaning +1 spell/level compared to a general mage) with no penalty towards learning other schools of magic (normally specialist mages get a 15% penalty towards trying to learn spells outside of their school, and a 15% benefit when trying to learn their schools spells).

So to use your conjurer example its benefit over a conjurer is that it can use Divination spells (like Wizard Eye and True Sight) and it has a much better chance of learning non-conjuration spells (which is only really relevant if you aren't willing to reduce the difficulty level when you want to learn spells).

The downsides of course are (as you know) that your caster level is going to vary up to -5/+5 every time you cast a spell and you have a 5% chance of causing a wild surge.

Its upside against a sorcerer is that you get a greater variety of spells and it gets new spell levels sooner, but that comes at the cost of reliability (plus the sorcerer gets more spells).

Edit: My earlier statement was not accurate. Technically, due to a bug, any specialist mage gets a 15% worse chance of learning spells outside of their school. That includes wild mages (who don't have any spells to learn since they automatically have theirs).