The Wizard Rewrite

[Kel]

Our current Wizard is wacky, random, and completely all over the place. It's not really a bad thing, but I don't actually like it. I have come here today with an idea that came to me in a dream... or more specifically, right when I woke up one day.
For this idea to even work the Wizard would need alot of unthematic fat trimmed and replaced with much more solidly themed magic, along with generally just new spells.

First, the Wizard is now based on "classes", rather than just having a random jumble of spells thrown in a big book 'o' magic. Spells are all put under a school. For example, the School of the Arcane would have arcane barrage, magic missile, wands, recharge, along with the magical armors and weapons. While the School of Necromancy would have spells like lichdom, flesh to stone, nercomatic stone, and so on. I think you get the picture. Every spell could be divvied up and uncategorized ones could be rethemed, with lacking or incomplete schools getting more spells added later down the line by individuals with coding talent.
Next, the Wizard would have to "buy in" to the various schools of magic to be able to buy the individual spells. In compensation, the Wizard is given extra points, and the first school of magic is free. This means the Wizard is far more powerful if he decides to specialize in a certain flavor of spells, while at the same time nerfing the jack-of-all-trades mobility monsters we have currently.

This would just be phase one of the rewrite, just a reorganization of the book effectively, later down the line would come phase two.
Depending on how extreme we wanted to take this concept, we could completely and utterly destroy most of the wizard spells as we know it to make the Schools of Magic have an actual meta-theme to them along with a design theme.
For example, the School of Arcane could have low cooldown, low impact spells for high octane spellcasting action. Along with this all their spells could revolve around purple magic shit, while the School of the Elements could have their high cooldown, usually explosive sometimes instant death buttons they currently have in the form of disentigrate or fireball (although fireball breaks the whole high cooldown thing).
This part of the idea can be boiled down to a complete and utter spell replacement, however barring the required new sprites and coding effort, I don't think its actually bad thing.

The following part are just my meta ideas for the various Schools of Magic that don't need to pertain the idea as a whole but would be cool either way.
School of the Arcane - Spells that are equipped to your hand, next to no cooldown, low crowd control, could have a "parry" spell that makes them unable to cast anything but invulnerable for half a second for their defensive option.
School of Nature - Obstructive spells, medium cooldowns, everything is wood or flowers, self-healing capabilities, toxin damage spells?
School of Necromancy - Minions, minions, minions, Oxyloss damage at a range, heart attacks up close? Defensive options are your immortality and legion of deds.
School of the Elements - Explosions, AoE, Hella crowd control, Big ass cooldowns, make lightning bolt actually cool, also needs meteors and shit, oh and an ice spell, No defensives for this one. Kill everyone before they kill you or multiclass.

I could probably create a whole design doc based around this idea but I don't have the writing passion to do so, so what we get is effectively a summary. Also I don't want to put so much effort into writing something that could probably be shitty but I can't actually tell.

[Steelpoint]

Interesting idea but great care would need to be taken to avoid creating a "meta" school that everyone picks.

[Kel]

Unfortunately meta exists and will always exist. The worse off the spells are the more concrete metas will be, so our best option to keep wizard spicy is to make sure most spells are up to par with eachother in usefulness, so atleast when we get owned by that wizard with that overpowered spell, its different every time.

[Bombadil]

Flesh to stone is not necromancy it is fucking transmutation reeeeee

Learn your wizard schools.

Just use the 3.5 specialist wizard rules it would work well imo... extra spell of your chosen school and you have to ban a school.


I would love to play an illusion based wizard