What would the tier of a pure 'blaster' caster be?

[The Walrus]

The evocation school is often thought to be one of the least useful schools of magic, but nevertheless the concept of the sorcerer as lightning bolt throwing, fire ball blasting avatar of arcane destruction is very appealing. So my question is this: What would be the tier of a sorcerer which could only use spells that dealt direct damage (i.e. magic missile, burning hands, lightning bolt, etc.)? If they were further limited to only using spells that immediately did damage (so no explosive runes or fire trap), would this have any major effect on the tier or general usefulness?

[Hiro Protagonest]

Anywhere from 2 to 5.

[Feint's End]

The evocation school is often thought to be one of the least useful schools of magic, but nevertheless the concept of the sorcerer as lightning bolt throwing, fire ball blasting avatar of arcane destruction is very appealing. So my question is this: What would be the tier of a sorcerer which could only use spells that dealt direct damage (i.e. magic missile, burning hands, lightning bolt, etc.)? If they were further limited to only using spells that immediately did damage (so no explosive runes or fire trap), would this have any major effect on the tier or general usefulness?

Tier 4 like the Warmage. Being good at one thing and only that thing qualifies you for that tier.

[Kennisiou]

Tier 4 like the Warmage. Being good at one thing and only that thing qualifies you for that tier.

I disagree. The best dedicated blasters in the game are things like the mailman or the blastificer, outputting thousands of unstoppable damage a turn. They're literally gamebreakingly good at dealing damage. Any obstacle that can possibly be overcome by HP damage, the mailman can and will overcome with its massive instantaneous damage. Even if you only select spells/make choices that lead to dealing damage, the fact of the matter is your damage is not easily preventable like an ubercharger's and even outdoes theirs completely. Being good enough at just one thing to entirely derail campaigns is tier 2 (chicken infested commoners represent!) and the best blasters in the game are exactly that.

[molten_dragon]

I disagree. The best dedicated blasters in the game are things like the mailman or the blastificer, outputting thousands of unstoppable damage a turn. They're literally gamebreakingly good at dealing damage. Any obstacle that can possibly be overcome by HP damage, the mailman can and will overcome with its massive instantaneous damage. Even if you only select spells/make choices that lead to dealing damage, the fact of the matter is your damage is not easily preventable like an ubercharger's and even outdoes theirs completely. Being good enough at just one thing to entirely derail campaigns is tier 2 (chicken infested commoners represent!) and the best blasters in the game are exactly that.

Tiers are about versatility and options though. Being amazingly good at one thing doesn't justify being high tier.

And specific builds don't really have tiers anyway.

To answer the OP's question, a dedicated blaster would probably be tier 4 with the warmage. Maybe if they were exceptionally good at it tier 3.

[eggynack]

I disagree. The best dedicated blasters in the game are things like the mailman or the blastificer, outputting thousands of unstoppable damage a turn. They're literally gamebreakingly good at dealing damage. Any obstacle that can possibly be overcome by HP damage, the mailman can and will overcome with its massive instantaneous damage. Even if you only select spells/make choices that lead to dealing damage, the fact of the matter is your damage is not easily preventable like an ubercharger's and even outdoes theirs completely. Being good enough at just one thing to entirely derail campaigns is tier 2 (chicken infested commoners represent!) and the best blasters in the game are exactly that.
Being incredibly good at one thing isn't really enough to justify tier 2. What do you do when damage isn't enough? What if you need to find someone or something, or what if you want to infiltrate an enemy army, or actually, what if you want to destroy a town? Most blasting isn't going to do that last thing as well as a blizzard will, after all. You're just somewhat limited in what you can accomplish, far more than a sorcerer.

Also, the class posited in the OP wasn't presupposed to come optimized out of the box. You can build your blastomancer to mailman the hell out of everything, or you can build it to just toss around fireballs. You have to take both possibilities into account, and the level of mailman occurs pretty high up there on the optimization totem pole.

[Seerow]

Tiers are about versatility and options though. Being amazingly good at one thing doesn't justify being high tier.

And specific builds don't really have tiers anyway.

To answer the OP's question, a dedicated blaster would probably be tier 4 with the warmage. Maybe if they were exceptionally good at it tier 3.

Nope, they'd cap out at tier 4, for the same reason an ubercharger who deals thousands of damage per round at will is sitting at tier 4. Raw damage per round is never going to progress you out of the tier 4 category. Not when that is literally all you are capable of. (And even the Warmage is capable of some things beyond dealing damage).

[BrokenChord]

You're mistaken. Dealing large amounts of damage is not gamebreaking in the grand scheme of things no matter how much you do. Even if the damage can't be prevented, it's still just damage, and there are a million and a half ways to invalidate damage as a campaign ender. Plus, a pure blaster likely lacks some of those ways of overcoming damage.

Pure blaster I'd put at T4. Pure evocation I'd technically put at T3.

[Vedhin]

I'd say Tier 4, though they might break into Tier 3 with damage+secondary effect spells.

Pure blasting will never take you out of Tier 4, as the one thing it does is damage.

Secondary effect blasting can make you a passable debuffer and battlefield controller. This proabably brings you up to high Tier 4, and might bring you up to Tier 3 if you have a wide enough variety of effects.

[eggynack]

Pure blaster I'd put at T4. Pure evocation I'd technically put at T3.
Seems plausible. Evocation is kinda awesome on occasion. Also, incidentally, a searing spell orb of fire is very difficult to stop, yes, but that doesn't make it impossible to stop. The distance between those two things is the difference between your character awesomely overcoming all challenges in a blaze of fire, and your character awesomely overcoming most challenges in a blaze of fire, and then coming up against the BBEG that knows your tactics (because why wouldn't he?), who then tosses out a friendly fire or fireward, turning your entire character into a stack o' crap. Hell, even miss chance is something that I think can do really well against the single-targeted nature of most mailman blasting, while it's also a thing that can be circumvented by a good number of standard wizard tactics.

[Aharon]

That basically sounds like Frank Trollmann's Fire Mage:
http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=40226#40226
High tier 3ish, in this specific case?

[Vedhin]

That basically sounds like Frank Trollmann's Fire Mage:
http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=40226#40226
High tier 3ish, in this specific case?

I have to laugh at Rain of Fire. Climb a mountain, and immolate the countryside.

[The Insaniac]

I would argue that it will never make tier 3. It would be either tier 4 or tier 2. The tier system mentions that tier 3s are often more versatile than tier 2s, it's just that a 2 can break the game in ways that a 3 can't. Something like the mailman would be a 2. It can only really do one thing but that one thing allows him to bypass anything that the DM puts in place that can be blown up.

The reason that the ubercharger can't do the same thing is that he's too easy to stop. Levitate will cause serious problems for him, for example. The mailman doesn't have that problem. Half of the point of the build was to get the damage to bypass all resistances or immunities.