Banning Divination

[mootoall]

Is there any particular reason that WotC gave for not allowing Divination to be one of a specialist Wizard's banned schools? Did they underestimate Divination's power as a school, or was there another reason?

[Victoria]

I'd go with the "underestimating its power" theory personally. I thought it was a pretty dumb school of magic for the first few years I played/DMed then I finally encountered a player who knew how to use it effectively. If they thought it was the weakest, then they might have thought specialist wizards could be a bit overpowered if they allowed it to be a prohibited school.

On the other hand, they probably thought that there was no point in banning it as a specialty school either since if they thought it was weak then they probably assumed players who shared the same opinion would consider a specialist diviner to have no point.

[Machinekng]

I think it's because that Read Magic is a divination spell,and what wizard can't read magic?

[Rogue Shadows]

I think it's because that Read Magic is a divination spell,and what wizard can't read magic?

That seems like a problem that could have easily been solved by making read magic a Universal spell. No, I think Victoria's on the ball with this one.

[Jeraa]

Maybe something of a sacred cow - only 1 specialist wizard (conjurers) had divination as an opposition school in 2e, and even then, it only banned the upper level divination spells.

Also, of all spell schools, Divination contains the fewest number of spells. (Unless you count Universal as a school).

But in 3.0, some specialists could give up Divination. (You weren't usually given free choice of what schools to drop - you had to pick from a list for each specialty.


That seems like a problem that could have easily been solved by making read magic a Universal spell. No, I think Victoria's on the ball with this one.

Spells were only put in the Universal "school" if they didn't fit in any other school, and Read Magic fits in Divination.

[sonofzeal]

I've always assumed it was balance.

"Divination
Spells that reveal information. A divination specialist is called a diviner. Unlike the other specialists, a diviner must give up only one other school."

^ Seems like pretty good evidence they thought the Divination school was weak.

[Godskook]

Find me a stand-alone core divination spell that'd allow a Wizard to be more effective in a combat situation. As in, one that'd enable him to solo a Warrior 20(no magical gear). No, True-Strike doesn't count.

Core divination, while powerful when combo'ed with another source of power, is often times as useless as beating a Bengal Tiger with a white flag of surrender by itself. Given that designers lacked the foresight to realize that heal-bot cleric and blaster arcanist were poor options, I suspect the simple approach given above is why they thought Divination was underpowered and required special banned-school priveleges.

As to why its unbannable, likely that WotC simply decided that Divination just was the job of arcanists, and if you look at the spell levels of various core spells(Scrying in particular), this bears out.

[dextercorvia]

Find me a stand-alone core divination spell that'd allow a Wizard to be more effective in a combat situation.

Foresight -- maybe it doesn't solo the fighter by itself, but not being surprised, or flatfooted, means that he doesn't get the charge off before your first spell. That is definitely increasing your combat effectiveness.

[Leon]

Problem solved by moving Read magic and Identify to the Universal school and ignoring the waffle in the PHB.

Playing in a game where every wizard is a Specialist of some type and Divination is a school that you can choose to ban. It works, there are no problems with it.

[Calanon]

Problem solved by moving Read magic and Identify to the Universal school and ignoring the waffle in the PHB.

Playing in a game where every wizard is a Specialist of some type and Divination is a school that you can choose to ban. It works, there are no problems with it.

Played a game like that and the player who specialized in Divination was oddly more successful then all of us (Just because you specialize in a school of magic doesn't mean you can't cast other spells :smallwink:)

[deuxhero]

Find me a stand-alone core divination spell that'd allow a Wizard to be more effective in a combat situation. As in, one that'd enable him to solo a Warrior 20(no magical gear). No, True-Strike doesn't count.

Core divination, while powerful when combo'ed with another source of power, is often times as useless as beating a Bengal Tiger with a white flag of surrender by itself. Given that designers lacked the foresight to realize that heal-bot cleric and blaster arcanist were poor options, I suspect the simple approach given above is why they thought Divination was underpowered and required special banned-school priveleges.

As to why its unbannable, likely that WotC simply decided that Divination just was the job of arcanists, and if you look at the spell levels of various core spells(Scrying in particular), this bears out.


You are looking at it wrong. The bonus slot lets you free a slot for combat spells that would otherwise be devoted to standard utility divination.

[Steward]

I think the idea behind it is that Divination would easily become a 'dump' school, one that all or nearly all builds would drop automatically. It has the fewest number of spells, I believe. That's not to say it's a bad school, but the designers must have thought that it didn't offer enough to giving it up a sacrifice the way giving up conjuration or transmutation would be.

[deuxhero]

Replace the two with "evocation" :p

[Godskook]

Foresight -- maybe it doesn't solo the fighter by itself, but not being surprised, or flatfooted, means that he doesn't get the charge off before your first spell. That is definitely increasing your combat effectiveness.

Seeing your death coming doesn't really strike me as qualifying for the challenge given.


You are looking at it wrong. The bonus slot lets you free a slot for combat spells that would otherwise be devoted to standard utility divination.

No, I'm not. When the Evoker can utilize both his general slots and his school slots for combat but the Diviner can't, saying "lets you free a slot for combat spells" is a misstatement. That's the way the designers looked at it.

[deuxhero]

See invisible and the like ARE combat, plus you are only droping one school, that's the appeal.

[dextercorvia]

Seeing your death coming doesn't really strike me as qualifying for the challenge given.

That is rather disingenuous. Don't pretend like a specialist must only prepare spells from that one school. Out of core, it might be okay for a Transmuter or Conjurerer, but in core, there just aren't enough spells in any one school. Having Foresight up means that the wizard is more likely to go first which means laying down BFC before his allies close with the enemies, or that he can end it all with a Save or Die.

Specialist slots take up a third or less of your available daily spells -- as a diviner your other slots (the same number a generalist would have altogether) are the to deal with the combat situations that your divination have told you about.

Don't forget that spells like Greater Prying Eyes make a scout unnecessary.

[Fax Celestis]

I'd go with the "underestimating its power" theory personally. I thought it was a pretty dumb school of magic for the first few years I played/DMed then I finally encountered a player who knew how to use it effectively. If they thought it was the weakest, then they might have thought specialist wizards could be a bit overpowered if they allowed it to be a prohibited school.

On the other hand, they probably thought that there was no point in banning it as a specialty school either since if they thought it was weak then they probably assumed players who shared the same opinion would consider a specialist diviner to have no point.

I'm in agreement here, and I think the designers thought this all the way up to the end of 3.5, considering the Spontaneous Divinations ACF in CCham.

[Gullintanni]

No, I'm not. When the Evoker can utilize both his general slots and his school slots for combat but the Diviner can't, saying "lets you free a slot for combat spells" is a misstatement. That's the way the designers looked at it.

Eh, the designers also saw Evocation as being the iconic super powered school of awesome that it so clearly is, so their judgement is flawless...:smallannoyed:

But yeah if you're going to be preparing one Divination spell per spell level, then there's no reason not to be a Diviner except that the ACFs for other specialist types are so much better...and that Divination only really reaches maximum utility when you're playing with a DM who is prepared for it. Lots of DMs, even experienced ones, have trouble adjudicating Divination.

Whether you need to prepare that much Divination magic, I leave up to individual taste. I've never had to but YMMV.

[ericgrau]

It is rather weak in core on all but a Schrodinger wizard. Sure it's awesome if you have the right divination spell prepared, but you have to actually know what you're after before you divine it: you almost already need to be psychic without the school to get much use out of it. Divination spells are some of my favorite to put onto scrolls, but rarely do I prepare them. And then once you cast it, it's gone. You don't get 20 questions to figure out precisely what to do, you get 1 question per spell slot and usually you're still somewhat confused. Spontaneous divination, OTOH, is nuts. Even if you ban the school it's a utility thing done on off days so you can always find or hire someone else to scry for you between adventures.

Then there's the power of plot: If you really need to know something you'll find out anyway and if you cannot know something it'll be warded against divination. Similar to the above post, as you can only get much info out of the divination if the DM is ready, a well prepared DM will also know what blocks it (if he doesn't outright make something up) when he's protecting important things.

[FMArthur]

It's also the only school that cannot be used as its own independent power. It tells you what to do with your power and enables you or others to be more powerful doing other things, but it is never the actual tool to win an encounter or solve a problem. It takes combat skill/buddies, a MacGyver toolbox and brainpower to implement most Divination solutions to problems without using some other magic.

If you made a base class that got a Divination-only set of spells at greater-than-full-caster progression, you would still have to give it loads of other abilities to have it pull its weight as an adventurer. Other schools only need supportive abilities to become classes, but the Divination school itself would always be the supportive ability on a class.

[mootoall]

If you made a base class that got a Divination-only set of spells at greater-than-full-caster progression, you would still have to give it loads of other abilities to have it pull its weight as an adventurer. Other schools only need supportive abilities to become classes, but the Divination school itself would always be the supportive ability on a class.

Challenge accepted :smallwink:

[FMArthur]

Challenge accepted :smallwink:

I was pretty tempted myself after writing that. :smallbiggrin:

[ericgrau]

Eh, the designers also saw Evocation as being the iconic super powered school of awesome that it so clearly is, so their judgement is flawless...:smallannoyed:
I've never seen anyone say this except players (especially former 2e players) and forum users critical of it. The WotC website encouraged branching out and the use of batman spells 2-3 years before logicninja did. Logicninja even stole a couple of the WotC examples (and butchered them IMO). The DMG likewise notes sleep is perhaps the best 1st level spell, and they nerfed it a little going from 3.0 to 3.5. If anything players loved evocation and WotC tried to spread out the spell selection a bit. I think the widespread love of evocation and tendency of forum users to exaggerate just to make a point in a counter-argument led to the widespread over-hate of evocation. If there wasn't anything incredible to argue against as with, say, abjuration or enchantment, it would not have gotten nearly so much attention.

[Gullintanni]

-snip-

It's entirely possible. To be fair though, back in the TSR days, saving throws against SoD type spells were pretty easy for higher level monsters to make, and it was pretty hard to arbitrarily stack elemental resistances. Evocation was actually a pretty potent school of magic way back then. The systemic changes of 3.5, including multiple methods for optimizing BAB and damage and higher HP in general made Melee better at dealing damage than Blasters, and made dealing HP damage much more inefficient...

[Tokuhara]

On Evocation: I like this school as a back-up strategy for Conjuration. Yes, Orb Spells make life nice, but sometimes the dice plain hate you. It's happened that I face a creature with a reasonable Touch AC and cannot hit the bugger, so I resort to Evocation to save the day. I more often ban NNecromancy and Enchantment, since I can rarely find use for them. And a man far wiser than I (namely my DM) once said, "If at first you don't succeed, Fireball it again"

[Godskook]

That is rather disingenuous. Don't pretend like a specialist must only prepare spells from that one school. Out of core, it might be okay for a Transmuter or Conjurerer, but in core, there just aren't enough spells in any one school. Having Foresight up means that the wizard is more likely to go first which means laying down BFC before his allies close with the enemies, or that he can end it all with a Save or Die.

I'm not being disingenuous. Quite the opposite, in that I'm being quite candid about both the original challenge and what I'm arguing. My point was simple: (A)Divination can't handle combat situations by itself. (B)WotC has always seemed to take things at surface value. The challenge was in support of point (A), and let's be honest, Foresight just doesn't cut it. Pretending otherwise is when one starts actually being disingenuous to the discussion you and I are having.


Don't forget that spells like Greater Prying Eyes make a scout unnecessary.

Yeah, cause having a hide check modifier that's only 4 above max rank, an AC that went out of usefulness 3 levels ago, and don't report the most important details like "why I was destroyed" is a spell that's going to completely destroy a Rogue's usefulness to the party(with his far better skill check, AC, and greater ability to not die when caught).

Greater Prying Eyes is useful, but it does not obviate the need for a rogue, nor can it compete with one.

[mootoall]

Eh, just pair the eyes up- one watches the scouting eye, and sees how it's killed. Redundancy is a good thing.

[ericgrau]

They fly at a 30 foot speed though, not that impressive at level 15. "Quick, sir, there's another eye and it's getting away!"

[mootoall]

So? Their point is scouting, not survivability. That's the idea; they're expendable scouts, whereas the rogue is taking a share of the treasure that could be going towards something else, for a job the wizard could be doing.

[Godskook]

So? Their point is scouting, not survivability. That's the idea; they're expendable scouts, whereas the rogue is taking a share of the treasure that could be going towards something else, for a job the wizard could be doing.

But they can't scout anything worth scouting, for the reasons outlined above. Either you blow a spell to tell yourself you need a rogue(which you kinda already knew, if you blew this spell) or you blow it to tell you that the area isn't a danger to you.

And...I just realized I accidentally read the lower level one, not the 8th level spell, which is actually worse, since its rocking the same exact AC and hide modifier. By level 15, a +16 hide check is laughable, as is 18 AC.

And the biggest issue, the one you're not really acknowledging, is that if/when they die, you get nothing for the trouble. A spell that provides minions that can't survive scouting and don't tell you anything unless they survive is actually a worthless spell.

[jiriku]

Prying eyes is a marvelous candidate for Invisible Spell.

[Calanon]

Prying eyes is a marvelous candidate for Invisible Spell.

I lol'd :smallamused:

[BobVosh]

I think the fluff from 2nd ed was the first years of training to become a wizard was learning read magic so they can read the spell book to start preparing other spells. Not that it mattered for 3.X as 3.0 didn't have it, and there isn't that much fluff for wizard in 3.5.

It is kinda a weak school that has most of it's combat spells at low level within potion range, and most of the higher spells good scroll spells. So if you have someone with UMD it would be pretty attractive to give up. Given how WotC "tested" 3.X it doesn't surprise me that testing decided that giving up divinations in favor of more evocation is the common consensus.

[molten_dragon]

I always figured it was because there are a lot fewer divination spells than the other categories in core.