Building a defensive spellcaster

[Kaiwen]

I'm trying to build a character styled on the Tales of Maj'Eyal Archmage. If you don't know what that is, the Archmage is good at 1 thing, and that is staying alive via creating massive buffers of temp hp and removing debuffs, and waiting for enemies to die to their mediocre damage over time area spells.

How would you make something like that in D&D? I'm thinking of some sort of Sorcerer/Initiate of the Sevenfold Veil build, but there's probably better ways of doing it and I want to see what other people think.

[RNightstalker]

The Archmage is a great idea, but it has a high feat tax, and you have to sacrifice even more spell slots to gain the abilities it offers.

[magic9mushroom]

I'm trying to build a character styled on the Tales of Maj'Eyal Archmage. If you don't know what that is, the Archmage is good at 1 thing, and that is staying alive via creating massive buffers of temp hp and removing debuffs, and waiting for enemies to die to their mediocre damage over time area spells.

How would you make something like that in D&D? I'm thinking of some sort of Sorcerer/Initiate of the Sevenfold Veil build, but there's probably better ways of doing it and I want to see what other people think.

D&D 3.5 doesn't really work on DoT and mild debuffs; there are plenty of debuffs that you can't recover from easily by yourself. Self-defence thus typically involves immunities and counterspells. That said, you can remove debuffs on others quite easily.

Fixing up other people (and giving them immunities) tends to revolve around the Cleric spell list.

Battlemagic Perception (a spell) and Divine Defiance (a feat) are good tools for counterspelling, and Archmage's Mastery of Counterspelling is of course very nice as well.

IotSV is decent, but one thing I would suggest doing before taking levels in it is reading the DMG entry for the magic item Cube of Force. Master Abjurer is another very good defensive class (+7 to dispel checks, mettle/evasion, ability to mega-troll enemy spellcasters by setting an AMF to emanate from them with no save), and also happens to give you the prereqs for IotSV, so if you do want to go IotSV I'd suggest Master Abjurer first.

[Asmotherion]

I'm trying to build a character styled on the Tales of Maj'Eyal Archmage. If you don't know what that is, the Archmage is good at 1 thing, and that is staying alive via creating massive buffers of temp hp and removing debuffs, and waiting for enemies to die to their mediocre damage over time area spells.

How would you make something like that in D&D? I'm thinking of some sort of Sorcerer/Initiate of the Sevenfold Veil build, but there's probably better ways of doing it and I want to see what other people think.

Please specify optimisation level; Any high OP Wizard or Sorcerer would probably fit the trope (buffstacks are prety much the default for a high OP game).

[Anthrowhale]

For immunity via spells, consider an Archivist/Hathran with Initiate of Mystra casting Persistent Ghostform and Selective[you] Antimagic Field making you immune to all magical attacks and all nonmagical attacks. Add in Persistent Ray Deflection for immunity to orb of force, and Starmantle for immunity to Serrenwood weapons.