How to fix the Universalist Wizard

[Wartex1]

Everyone who has built a Wizard in Pathfinder knows that for some reason, Universalist Wizards don't really have any benefits over Specialists. A Specialist, unless they prepare more than one spell from an opposed school per spell slot per day, always has the same amount of slots, if not more. In addition, Specialists get more powers from their school and those powers tend to be better than the Universalist Wizard's, especially with the Divination and Conjuration schools.

Simply put, the benefits of being a Specialist more than outweigh the penalties and the separate benefits of being a Universalist to the point that the primary benefit of being a Universalist is thematic.

And while this is somewhat rectified by the Amulet of Magecraft, Universalists are still behind by a large margin.

How would you adjust Universalists to encourage players to not always specialize?

[Zanos]

Make the universalist arcane school powers more attractive, since they're lackluster compared to other schools and they lose out on the easy bonus slot.

Alternatively, take an archetype that replaces Arcane School. Exploiter Wizard is pretty good. That's pretty close to a universalist.

[Wartex1]

One thing I thought of which would be easiest to implement was just letting Universalists have both Arcane Bonds. It makes sense, given that Amulets of Magecraft only work for Bonded Item Universalists, so without it, Familiar Universalists are even further screwed.

[Zezzy]

Maybe you could take some of the old features from the beta playtest? Universalist wizards were ridiculously powerful, but instead of dropping just a few of the abilities down, Paizo instead went overboard with the nerfs.

1. Hand of the Apprentice could be used as much as you liked, and used Intelligence for both attack and damage. This was a big problem at lower levels, since it meant a wizard could still deal really good damage at lower levels when out of spell slots.

Maybe adding the 3 + Int restriction on this version of it would be better, or maybe it doesn't even need a limit, considering how powerful some of the other 1st-level wizard powers are now, like Shift.


Hand of the Apprentice (Su): As a standard action, you can summon a ghostly hand to do your bidding. This functions like mage hand, with the following changes. When summoned, the hand can draw a weapon (including a magic weapon) on your person as a free action, so long as you are proficient in it. The hand can be directed to make a single attack against a foe within 30 feet, using your base attack bonus, plus your Intelligence modifier on both attack and damage rolls. The hand does not threaten foes and does not make attacks of opportunity. You must concentrate on the hand each round or it winks out, returning any item held to you before it disappears.



2. Metamagic Mastery didn't have the limit on spell level, and you could use it a number of times per day equal to half your caster level. This meant that a 20th level wizard could potentially cast a 19th level spell once a day. Keep in mind that almost all domain and school powers used caster level instead of class level to determine their power, so this should probably be changed with the rest.

I think it would be better if you could cast modified spells above your highest level spell slot, but maybe with a maximum level cap.



3. There was a capstone for universalist. It was very good, but then again, taking 20 on initiative and having a permanent summon spells are also really good.


Mastery of All Schools (Su): All of your spell DCs increase by +2 and you gain a +4 insight bonus on caster level checks made to overcome spell resistance.

[Zanos]

2. Metamagic Mastery didn't have the limit on spell level, and you could use it a number of times per day equal to half your caster level. This meant that a 20th level wizard could potentially cast a 19th level spell once a day. Keep in mind that almost all domain and school powers used caster level instead of class level to determine their power, so this should probably be changed with the rest.

I think it would be better if you could cast modified spells above your highest level spell slot, but maybe with a maximum level cap.
You could just limit this to only one application per spell, so you can't stack up a bunch of metamagic feats on a single spell.

[Wartex1]

What about letting them pinch a few spells (maybe one per spell level?) from other spell lists to represent general mastery of magic?