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View Full Version : [3.5] Beguiler, Dread Necro, Warmage



Thurbane
2009-09-21, 09:40 PM
Hey, just wondering how you'd rank these classes in terms of power and playability? To me, they are 3 classes all trying to achieve the same overall concept (spontaneous caster who specializes in one area of magic, and gets access to all spells on his list per level), but the Beguiler just seems to be flat out better than Dread Necro or Warmage. It's huge pool of skillpoints, plus the fact it casts off Int while the other two cast off Cha seems hard to beat.

Any thoughts? Obviously, each is better at it's particular "thing" than the others, but is the Beguiler just a plain all-round better class?

tyckspoon
2009-09-21, 09:51 PM
I'd say Beguiler and Dread Necro are roughly even, with the Beguiler having an edge in the general case thanks to its skills. Dread Necro is less generally applicable, but when you want to be a necromancer there are few to no better options. Warmage is far behind both of them, both because its specialty school tends to be pretty weak and because the class features it gets suck- Warmage Edge becomes irrelevent damage pretty quickly, and Sudden Metamagics are nice to have, but the 1/day limit means you can't count on them as any sort of normal component of a Warmage's effectiveness.

ex cathedra
2009-09-21, 09:53 PM
The first two are both fairly okay. The third is either mediocre or excellent, depending on what you think of rainbow savants.

lsfreak
2009-09-21, 10:00 PM
Dread necros suffer compared to beguilers a little, but when making a necro there's very little better (especially if you don't shy away from DN9/Ur-priest2/MT9). Warmages, on the other hand, suffer heavily from poor class features (woo, mostly-useless bonus feats...) and a horrible spell selection (they get non of the buffs that would make sense for an offensive caster, and even their blasting spells are pretty poor, not to mention they ping-pong across the schools at random).

Kelpstrand
2009-09-21, 10:03 PM
Additionally, the problem with Warmage is that it's many spells on the list are really the same spell.

"Hey guys! I have Orb of Fire, and Orb of Cold, and Orb of Acid, and Orb of Sonic, and Orb of Electricity, and Orb of Force, what other spells should a Warmage have at level 4?" "Doesn't he have enough? Give him a couple more, but not any good ones."

Of course, a Psion just has "Energy Ray" that does each element, and the Psion isn't even that great a model.

If the Warmage had a cool list of spells for each level, like for example:

Level 3: "Caustic Mire, Caustic Smoke, Deep Slumber, Dispel Magic, Flame Arrow, Fly, Horrid Sickness, Invisibility Sphere, Lightning Bolt, Major Image, Mass Resist Energy, Faithful Hound, Nondetection, Protection From Energy, Rage, Sleet Storm, Stinking Cloud, Wall of Fire, Water Breathing, Wind Wall"

Which are all spells that a warmage might have, instead of just "A bunch of spells that do damage" it would be a better class.

Also, it's class features are bad, it should have better ones.

FMArthur
2009-09-21, 10:10 PM
Yes, the problem with warmage isn't that blasting is suboptimal casting, it's that they are also pretty bad at it. This isn't even a corollary of wizards and sorcerors just being too awesome - almost everyone who blasts, blasts better than the warmage, which does nothing but blast. :smallconfused:

awa
2009-09-22, 12:02 AM
i would mention that at very low level the war mage isnt terrible its just its powers don't increase enough

DragoonWraith
2009-09-22, 12:19 AM
Very low levels being 1-3? A lot of things don't suck at that level. Or do suck, depending on how you look at it. The d20 tends to be more important than almost anything else at those levels, no one's been able to rack up meaningful bonuses to be significant compared to the big d20 (usually, un-optimized). So that's not saying a whole lot. Still, yes, Warmage Edge is pretty sweet very early.

Anyway, as has been said - Beguiler's best, Dread Necro's not that far behind, and both are massively better balanced than Wizard or Sorcerer. Warmage sucks, play a Warlock if you want blasting - you'll be a lot better at it.