Specialist Mages - Wtf!?
MrGoodkat
Member Posts: 167
Just took a closer look at specialist mages in IWD:EE. As far as I remembered it every school was supposed to have one opposite school, not two.
But that's not the only problem. In some cases it's just blatantly stupid. Diviners for example have 'Conjuration' as their opposite school whereas Invokers have 'Conjuration' *and* Divination as opposite schools while having no additional benefits.
Also, isn't 'Invocation' supposed to the same as 'Evocation'? Cause I'm pretty sure Edwin was able to cast magic missiles in BG2 - an evocation spell.
Which specialist mage is the best in your opinion *excluding* Wild Mages?
But that's not the only problem. In some cases it's just blatantly stupid. Diviners for example have 'Conjuration' as their opposite school whereas Invokers have 'Conjuration' *and* Divination as opposite schools while having no additional benefits.
Also, isn't 'Invocation' supposed to the same as 'Evocation'? Cause I'm pretty sure Edwin was able to cast magic missiles in BG2 - an evocation spell.
Which specialist mage is the best in your opinion *excluding* Wild Mages?
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Its how Icewind Dale Heart of Winter handled it. PnP is even stricter (illusionists for instance have 3 opposition schools).
no need for scrolls and can cast from all schools oh and extra spell per level
If you play as a fighter/mage, you can very much go as a fighter/illusionist because Necromancy and Abjuration spells are not essential for a tank - but instead you'll get +1 spell per level that can be another Shield, Mirror Image, Ghost Armour and Stoneskin.
Diviner, Conjurer and Enchanter are the ones with only one forbidden school if I'm not mistaken.
Conjurer and Enchanter both can't use Invocation spells and I think they fixed the Evocation/Invocation thing from BG2 so they are correctly treated as the same school. That being said, Evocation is too good to pass imho.
Guess I'll go for a Diviner. Not having Conjuration hurts too, but it's not as crucial as Evocation I think.
Divination = Conjuration
Conjuration = Evocation / Divination, Greater (5th+)
Evocation = Enchantment / Conjuration
Necromancy = Illusion / Enchantment
Alteration = Abjuration / Necromancy
Abjuration = Alteration / Illusion
Enchantment = Evocation / Necromancy
Illusion = Abjuration /Evocation/ Necromancy
The wild mage kit infuses themselves with wild magic, losing some control but are also able to wield more power as a result (though as with specialists, the extra slot is only supposed to be used for wild magic spells, which are......interesting...in their effects.).
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Diviner and Conjurer had the most lenient restrictions because their specialist bonuses were HIGHLY situational or had very little impact on a direct adventure (divination would typically be done between adventures in order to find where they needed to go next but was rarely used in said adventure beyond a few minor spells). And Conjurers only got their +1/-1 bonus on a tiny handful of spells (mostly the elemental summoning and Gate variants during the attempt to force them to carry out an order).
The rest were reasonably useful all the time in one form or another so they lost 2 schools.
Illusion though was simply outright brokenly powerful as the illusions, unlike other spells, didn't have clearly defined effects and were limited only by the player's own creativity in their use, not to mention, most illusions don't have a saving throw, it's a simple intelligence check, so they scale ridiculously well and it's only vs some extra planar creatures that illusions start to lose their luster (but by then you have access to the shadow magic spells which are semi-real and simply have a reduced effect if disbelieved). And they got to double dip. The specialist bonus not only applied to the intelligence check to disbelieve the illusion), it applied on any secondary effects the spell may have (like Phantasmal killer's save vs death if they believed the illusion).
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As for specialists.....probably the diviner.
I'd normally say Illusionist, but Illusion is still missing all it's best spells, so it's relegated to once again only providing stealth or the rare debuff here or there.
One thing about IWD. In the vanilla pre-HoW the schools were identical to those from BG1. With HoW this changed, because designers realized that people would always go for a conjurer, because they were bared from using divination spells. There were no useful divination spells (Identify, Infravision, Know Alignment, Detect Evil). With HoW Contact Other Plane was added, but it was still not an useful school and the conjurers would basically get all the useful school. Thus the modification for making them unable to cast Evocation spells.
I never found specializing in any DnD game to be worth it. Even in PnP many times.
When you pick a mage, you want the variety of spells. If you ban 1-2 schools, what's the point? Might as well go Sorcerer.
There's also the headache of searching for scrolls and trying not to fail at memorizing them.
The Sorcerer is just so convenient.
Higher intelligence characters got access to more powerful spells and could learn all spells more easily, so it was generally better to be a generalist unless you were just REALLY set on focusing on a particular type of spells (such as going for the Red Wizard kit, which loses another school but gains an extra spell per day and doubles the bonus for specialization).
Though as with BG, not all the specialist benefits have been implemented, nor are certain schools being given enough of their good spells to be worthwhile to focus on.
And the lack of multi-school spells being properly implemented also hits some specialists harder then it should. A fairly large list of spells actually have multiple schools, typically two but 3 and very rarely 4 are possible, and as long as you can cast spells from at least one of the schools you can cast the spell.
Take Chromatic Orb for instance. It's supposed to an Evocation/Enchantment spell, and since no specialist loses both schools, it's available to any specialist (of course the in-game version is MUCH weaker and less versatile then the spell should be, so it's kind of moot either way).