Care and Feeding of Wild Mage

FinnTheHuman

I recently took Neera on as a serious addition to my party. I thought these wild card level 1 spells could be exceptionally awesome. Potentially. The problem is, even with a chaos shield the bad always seems to outweigh the good; from destroying a significant portion of my gold, to firebombing my party, to summoning a demon. On the plus side, sometimes her spells do what is intended.

I really like the concept of a wild mage, but at the early levels at least, it just seems like such a liability. So does anybody have any advice on how they are best used?

Heindrich

lol it sounds like u had some fun times with Neera

I like to play with personal min-reload rules, so having Neera around in BG1 made things rather... exciting. However I managed to suffer only one Neera-related reload by trying to mitigate the risk her spells pose as much as reasonably possible.

Aside from using Chaos Shield, I loaded her spell book with things that are used against the enemy. Fireballs, Magic Missile, Sleep, etc... I never used Neera for any spells you have to cast on party members like Haste. Also although this isn't always feasible, I try not to blob up around Neera encase she miscasts "fireball centred on self", which was what caused my only enforced reload with her.

lunar

At bg1 and low levels you should try to avoid wild surges via NRD. Since caster level is added to the roll, the higher level the better results. The lower level, the worse results.

Although even the most catastrophic results could be wildly entertaining beyond imagination, like opening a demon portal to the bandit camp, or your sleep spell turning into a spell cast twice fireball against a group of gnolls, etc. I once even got a roll twice more:and released an area effect and no save disintegrate to the battlefield. That was the single most powerful and dreadful spell I have seen, anihilating all irrevorcably. No save wail of the banshee was sweet, too.

It is a d100 roll. The best result is 100, which is simply, spell cast succesfully. Although there are better results, like 'spell cast and I feel refreshed' an absolute joy when it happens in a long battle, when spells are exhausted and bang, you are good as new.

Thus, with improved chaos shield, you get +25 bonus, with a lvl 25 wild mage you get another +25. They stack for a +50 bonus to roll. You have %50 chance to roll 100 or higher, which makes the spell to be cast normally. With spell casting speed increasing items, it is fun. NRD ignores alacrity, so you can, with autopause, try NRD, pick comet spell and cast it instantly, then cast NRD and try comet again and again in the blink. Each casting has %50 chance of actually releasing comet, but can do other...interesting things. In 2-3 seconds 2-3 comets will strike the earth and reality will warp and twist into interesting angles. You will spread pure chaos and destruction across the battlefield in the blink of an eye, and it will be glorious.

I also highly suggest wild mage additions mod, new wild magic spells are very fun and quite powerful, after a fashion.

Oh yes wild mage is my favourite class. I can not play any other. And I try to take Neera with me but she always gets perma killed in battles and since I play minimal reload, I can not see to the end of his romance in bg2. Maybe next time.

FinnTheHuman

Thanks @lunar, I needed it spelled out. The best result I've gotten from Neera and NRD happened when I was assaulted by the Flaming Fist (Amn Soldiers?) south of Beregost. She tried to cast sleep, but it came out as color spray instead. "Damn it, Neera." I thought as I saw Charname:Unconcious scroll by. She got everybody in the party except Imoen. Surprisingly, the soldiers failed their saves too, and my party woke first.

FinnTheHuman

Also, with NRD, does the level the attempted spell matter? Does the mage have the same chance of, for instance, successfully casting Lvl 1 sleep as they do a Lvl 5 cloud kill?

Ygramul

[This is from my No-reload Guide, regarding Wild Mage management]

....
7. Wild Mages [theoretical] -- DO. NOT. CAST. IN. PUBLIC. Really,
what are you gonna do if you get a Gate in Beregost, or a
Fireball:self amid Flaming Fist headcourters. Cast only at the enemies
(and do not ever buff the charname with a wild mage!)

This is just with Neera, by the way. I doubt anyone ever finished a
no-reload run with a Wild Mage charname:
Here are the odds:
there are about ~10/100 wild surges that act as "kill the caster" at
low levels (even at high levels, "Petrify:self" will usually kill you,
even if you might survive a fireball to the face then)
If you cast 1000 spells through a no-reload run, you will have about
50 surges and your survival chance throughout the run comes to about
0.5% -- yep, just half a percent, even if you play an otherwise
perfect game.
(0.1 chance of death per surge -> 0.9^50 = 0.0052 chance of surviving 50 surges)

Gotural

I think you have a lot more chance to survive a no-reload run than that, especially in a party where you won't need to cast more than a few spells per fights.

Soon enough, no wild surges will be able to kill you after you pick up some levels and items.

The level of the spell you try to cast through NRD doesn't matter so you should go for the big ones.
Also, as said above, NRD ignores aura, so try to use it after you casted another spell to gain more time.

Finally note that your caster level is not added to random wild surges, be careful!

semiticgoddess

Also, wild surges can be managed. Another party member can cast Free Action or Chaotic Commands to block the hold effect, Protection from Petrification can block the petrification effect, and Protection from Evil can mitigate a demon summoning, and virtually all of the negative effects offer saving throws. It is simply not true that 10% of wild surges mean death.

Wild surges are most dangerous simply because they have a high chance of disrupting a given spell that you might need, not because they have a low chance of disabling or killing a party member. Wild surges increase the randomness of a fight and make things more complicated and likely to fail, but it hardly means death.

It's my understanding a Wild Mage no-reload has already been done once or twice.

Grond0

I've done a wild mage solo no-reload.  That took lots of attempts to refine tactics, but with the right tactics it's not actually that hard - at least using BGT.  In brief tactics were:
- for BG1 and early BG2 cast no spells (no need to do this as mage items are more than enough).
- later in BG2, once saving throws ensured survival against things like petrifying yourself, spells were cast to buff or disable enemies from out of sight.  However, spells were still hardly used directly in combat.
- for the end of SoA and ToB I was stacking chaos shield through contingencies to ensure that all NRD spells were successfully cast at high levels.  Use of wish rests and the improved alacrity effect of NRD then makes the wild mage more vicious even than a normal mage.  

Note though that I haven't played a wild mage in EE, so don't know if they've changed the behaviour of chaos shields to prevent stacking.

FinnTheHuman

Grond0 said:

I've done a wild mage solo no-reload.  That took lots of attempts to refine tactics, but with the right tactics it's not actually that hard - at least using BGT.  In brief tactics were:
- for BG1 and early BG2 cast no spells (no need to do this as mage items are more than enough).
- later in BG2, once saving throws ensured survival against things like petrifying yourself, spells were cast to buff or disable enemies from out of sight.  However, spells were still hardly used directly in combat.
- for the end of SoA and ToB I was stacking chaos shield through contingencies to ensure that all NRD spells were successfully cast at high levels.  Use of wish rests and the improved alacrity effect of NRD then makes the wild mage more vicious even than a normal mage.  

Note though that I haven't played a wild mage in EE, so don't know if they've changed the behaviour of chaos shields to prevent stacking.

Interesting. This is one of the more rare no reload builds, i gather. Using to buff and not combat is opposite of what others have said. Very interesting... Yes, peculiar, even? No reload, you claim... And you have witnesses to this "No reload" achievement? JK. Congratulations, btw.

matrice

Ygramul said:
Really, I doubt anyone ever finished a no-reload run with a Wild Mage charname:

It's so easy to make a solo run no reload as wild mage. you earn xp way too fast, there's also so many wand (i actually finished the solo no reload run as wild mage without wand).


You don't need to cast a single spell for your first 4-5 lvl anyway. And when you do, you just cast a shield, and then only throw fireball (good on us there's so many fireprotection / item/scroll/potion)
By the time you are in bg2, you don't need to worry about anything anymore.

Elendar

How to use Neera:   EEKeeper her into a Sorceress..       :P 

BelgarathMTH

@Elendar , I seriously thought about doing that once - until I found out it will break her questline in BG2. I've never played it, but I heard she has to cast NRD at one point or it breaks.

Elendar

BelgarathMTH said:

@Elendar , I seriously thought about doing that once - until I found out it will break her questline in BG2. I've never played it, but I heard she has to cast NRD at one point or it breaks.

Oh..  you could probably just EE Keeper that as one of her known spells, though..  and just never use it except for that one point.   I've never played that far with her in BG2 either.

@BelgarathMTH  Just played around with EE-Keeper and you can add NRD to a sorcerer's known spells as a workaround for that issue.

Grond0

FinnTheHuman said:

Interesting. This is one of the more rare no reload builds, i gather. Using to buff and not combat is opposite of what others have said. Very interesting... Yes, peculiar, even? No reload, you claim... And you have witnesses to this "No reload" achievement? JK. Congratulations, btw. 

As mentioned in my original post the point about buffing is not to do it until saving throws are good enough to survive instant death effects, while using spells in combat is safe if there's zero chance of spell failure ...

If you're really interested in progress you could follow the run from the links at http://forum.bioware.com/topic/124277-baldurs-gate-2-no-reload-challenge/page-1
By that stage I'd probably had at least 60 attempts to help work out tactics with the vast majority of those attempts also documented in those forums.  If you're really, really, really interested you could look for those - though at around 600 pages each for the BG1 and BG2 no-reload threads it might take you a while to find them

FinnTheHuman

Thanks @Grond0,

I see that you cast your first spell (other than find familiar) at level 9. Did you continue to cast spells after that point? Your terse presentation must be optimal for other seasoned experts, but I'm afraid much of the detail of your playthrough is lost on me.

Grond0

Huge numbers of spells were used after that point and dozens of surges experienced as a result - the Horn of Kazgaroth and ring of air control gave +6 to saving throws to protect against things like petrification until Hale was high enough level to not need those. However, the vast majority of spells were still cast out of combat (area effects, summons and buffs) where surges were not a problem. Casting in combat is risky for a wild mage even with very low saves - the no-save hold effect for instance is likely to be a death sentence if that occurs while enemies are attacking.